People are playing jungle Ezreal, and it isn’t too bad

A few weeks ago, when Riot released patch 7.17, Ezreal got a buff to Mystic Shot, his most commonly used ability. The change was supposed to help him more effectively trade in lane giving his poke a little more punch and letting him go toe to toe with other AD Carries. That’s not how people used it. Instead, people have started playing Ezreal jungle.

Apparently a trend that originated in Korean solo queue, Ezreal jungle plays about the same as any high damage jungler. Rack up enough items to jump into the lane and burst your opponent. Ezreal may not make for the best version of a damage jungler, but it works pretty well.

While out-of-the-box junglers aren’t too strange to see in solo queue, where champions like Twitch and Kindred still pop up from time to time, Ezreal crossed a strange line when he showed up in the Finals of the LPL’s Worlds qualification tournament. In game two of the series, Team WE — the eventual winners of the tournament — locked in Ezreal for their jungler Xiang “Condi” Ren Jie.

While the pick didn’t quite work on the competitive stage thanks to Ezreal’s low utility and long ramp up time, it is already making its way into other region’s solo queue games with a few prominent streamers like William “Meteos” Hartman even picking it up in North America.