Ten open-field starting configurations, with the posture and the conditional branches.
Meta snapshot · August 2026. Dated starting configurations from the source guide, not live, not auto-updated, and not immutable plans.
vs Master Yi
Your role · Lane-breaking tempoKennen, Storm of Shuriken
14shuffled units after boarding✓ Stable
1013 floor18
14 shuffled units after boarding · at or above the 13-unit floor.
＋ Bring in
1×spell / gear
1×spell / gear
1×spell / gear
− Take out
1×spell / gear
1×spell / gear
1×spell / gear
They ask one defender to hold a battlefield behind protection. Your bodies are one and two Might, so out-sizing it is not on the table.
plus is the actual plan: shrink the lone defender, then swap whose Might is whose.
answers Zhonya’s Hourglass, which is what otherwise makes their defender uninteractive.
Preserve · · · Rebuke has no Might cap, which is the only clean answer to a defender that has grown past Gust.
Avoid · into anything they have buffed. Three Might is a low ceiling in this matchup.
Avoid · Leaving your own unit defending alone at the Waste.
Sideboard philosophy in §14 · role assignment in §5.
Memory aids
Structural problem → the card that answers it. Each sideboard slot exists for a specific structural reason, not a general one.
71.12%→At least one interaction spell in the opening four
66.68%→At least one outside-hand enabler
50.25%→At least one two-Energy body
50.25%→At least one Lightning Rush or Stacked Deck
28.38%→At least one Rhasa the Sunderer
28.38%→At least one Seal of Discord
22.26%→Two or more outside-hand enablers
10.45%→Two or more two-Energy bodies
10.26%→Baron Nashor, which is usually the wrong card to see early
From the guide . §15 Matchup Map
Ten matchups, covering the archetypes the current field is actually made of. Master Yi and the other decks lead it, with Irelia, Draven, Ezreal, Rek’Sai, Kai’Sa, Azir, Rengar and LeBlanc forming most of the rest.
⚠ WarningThese are strategically informed starting configurations, not measured matchup percentages. Published matchup samples for this archetype are too small to support win-rate claims, and none are made here.
Adjust against the exact list in front of you rather than the archetype name. The Gear-heavy and unit-heavy versions of several of these decks want genuinely different plans, and the conditional branches say so where it matters.
Pilot noteThe error that recurs across all ten is boarding into a value deck. Every plan here keeps a way to score; none of them try to win by having more cards than the opponent.