League Classic Champions and Setup: Finish This Before You Queue

Every one of the League Classic champions plays its pre-rework kit. That is the part your muscle memory will fight you on, and it is not the only thing that works differently. Runes lock. Masteries lock. Three separate progression tracks run at once. Sort the following out before your first Draft game rather than during champion select.

The 60-champion launch roster

Riot opened with 60 League Classic champions: the original 40 from the 2009 roster, plus 20 hand-picked releases from 2009 to 2013.

Historical kits across the board. Old stunlock Sion. Pre-cigar Graves. An Urgot who used to show up mid lane. Where a Classic Skin exists, it replaces the modern base look by default, and Riot made those skins free after PBE feedback pushed back on charging for them.

Yasuo launched in December 2013, comfortably inside the window Classic covers, and Riot left him out anyway. “No Yasuos allowed” is a stated design rule. Whether you find that funny or arbitrary probably depends on how many games you lost to him in 2014.

Set your runes and masteries before champion select

Both lock the moment the selection screen opens. Build your pages first.

• Masteries unlock at Classic Level 4 and cost nothing. You allocate 30 points across Offense, Defense and Utility.
• All Tier 3 runes are in the store, the strongest historical tier.
• Three rune pages come with a new Classic account.
• The four rune types (Marks, Seals, Glyphs, Quintessences) unlock across your first few Classic Levels.

Riot softened one edge here. Queue with empty slots and you get partial bonuses instead of nothing, and every account starts with a default page, so a first-timer who skips setup entirely is slightly behind rather than unplayable.

Extra rune pages cost Influence Points. IP comes from playing, so nobody is paying real money for them, but the grind is real and it sits between you and running more than three builds. That is the part of this system I expect complaints about first.

Champion select then uses positional preference. Declare a primary and a secondary role, and matchmaking raises your odds of getting one. It does not promise either.

Unlocking the champions you do not own

Anything you already own transfers automatically if it appears in the Classic pool. For the rest:

• Classic Level progression unlocks champions as you climb
• Influence Points buy them in the Classic shop
• The free champion rotation came back too

Eight more champions are coming, and you get a vote

Confirmed for post-launch waves: Akali, Caitlyn, Fiora, Graves, Irelia, LeBlanc, Mordekaiser and Urgot.

Everything after those eight stays inside the 2009 to 2013 window. Riot then handed the ordering to The Council, a voting system running in the client and on Riot Mobile, where dedicated players decide which champions, items and systems return next. Riot has not published how the voting weights work, so treat the roadmap as genuinely open rather than pre-baked.

Three progression tracks, none of them touching your main account

All three sit in a separate database. Your live rank, Blue Essence and MMR are untouched.

Classic Levels run once, mirroring the original account levelling experience. Rewards include IP, Blue Essence, mastery access, rune page slots and cosmetics, among them the Rustier Blitzcrank skin.

Seasonal Classic Passes work as battle passes with a free and a paid tier. Rewards cover IP, BE, rune pages, emotes, titles and portrait frames.

Summoner’s Journey opens at Classic Level 10. It starts at Salt, climbs through Wood, and tops out at Legend. Riot expects a single-digit percentage of players to reach the top and said so deliberately, so the tier means something when you see it.

The map plays faster than you remember

• Wraiths are back, along with the old camp layout
• Buffs have friends again, and they hit harder than modern buffs, so buy Health Potions unless you are on Warwick
• Camps respawn much faster than in live League
• Lighting, shadows and textures got a readability pass for modern displays

The faster respawns matter more than the nostalgia. Early jungle tempo does not match anything a 2026 player has practised.

Where the mode is thin right now

No ranked queue. Draft, Co-op vs AI and custom games only, with no timeline announced for anything competitive.

No public API either, which means no third-party Classic tier list, no live win rates, no build optimiser. Riot framed that as protecting the pre-analytics culture of early League. If you learn champions by reading a guide before your first game, you are going to find the opening weeks harder than you expect, because the guides do not exist yet and the ones that appear will be somebody’s fifteen games.

Ranked may follow, partly through Council voting and partly on how many people are still queueing after the launch month. Riot’s full system breakdown is in the official /dev blog.