[2021] Out of the 10 most played champions on Mid right now, 7 are assassins, 3 are Vlad, Yasuo and Yone

I'm a little late here, but I'll add some insight from our end. I can ramble on this topic, so I'll try to keep this as succinct as possible.

• The top champions played mid actually are not that different than previous seasons. People like playing these champions, and we do not punish champions solely for being popular.
• That said, we do believe standard Mages as a class are a bit weaker, and we are investigating the best solution here. There are a few mages that do well in the current environment (those that do better into melees like Annie, Anivia, Viktor), but we understand that Mages feel unsatisfying.

While new items are definitely a factor here, this has been a trend that extends beyond S11. As others have mentioned, Mages require wave manipulation, team coordination, conservative early play to succeed. These are things that are both difficult to know when you've done it correctly and often have factors that are out of your control (say you have a good wave state, but your team forces a fight you have to go to). In the current state where there's a lot of early scraps and tension, this definitely makes scaling classes that require items/resources such as Mages feel underwhelming. We generally like drawing gameplay towards combat, so this is a complex problem we want to solve correctly.