Picking your champion and counterpicking the enemy!
Top lane is the lane that has highest counter-picking potential. You see top laners picked up as the later picks in tournament for a good reason – almost all top laners can get counter picked.
So what makes champion a good top laner? Escape mechanics, sustain and natural tankiness. These are the three most important capabilities a top laner should have. These are also three of the main reasons why the meta-game shifted from ability power champion top. After Riot Games started releasing more and more bruisers, ability power carries would just get out laned by majority of bruisers.
Bruisers generally have more sustain, escape mechanisms and gap closers. Gap closer is one of the best ways to counter an AP champion. You just deal more constant damage as a bruiser to an AP champion if you actually come into melee range with him, and a gap closer does just what you need.
First of all, you need to know what you want to do in your lane and what you are good at. If you are generally good at last hitting and you like causing chaos late game, bruisers you should like are Nasus, Olaf and Cho’Gath. These champions really require some farm to be monsters late game. You are not going to have much presence early game if you pick late game champions obviously, but if you actually get to late game you’ll be far stronger than early game bruisers like Garen, Renekton or Pantheon.
If you prefer having lane dominance over your enemy in returns for weaker late game, you will probably like bruisers like Lee Sin, Renekton, Pantheon and Yorick. If your enemy is a late game champion and you get double the CS he gets, can he really reach the late game? Things like this happen pretty often, if your enemy has twice times less CS than you, he will indeed be weaker late game than you even if he’s considered a late game bruiser.
AP champions top, this is one of the things that people preferred to pick a year back, the meta has shifted a lot since then. One of the last teams to use an AP champion with no real escape top successfully was EU fnatic , by doing that they actually won Dreamhack 2010. Malzahar, who doesn’t have any escape, was one of the most popular picks in top lane for Fnatic.
Even if we have a different meta-game now, there are still some AP champions who can hold their ground in top lane. Vladimir, Nidalee, Kennen are still popular picks even in competitive scene. Having an AP carry usually benefits you late game a lot. Can you see something in common that Nidalee, Kennen and Vlad have? Yes, an escape mechanic and some sustain. Nidalee has her amazing passive that increases movement speed whenever you step into a brush. Kennen has his Lightning Rush, which increases your base movement speed by 230, making enemies unable to catch him. Vladimir has his famous troll pool, not only is it a great escape ability, but also annoys the heck out of the enemy laner and the jungler.
Taken from skgaming,com
