I did some digging on this right before the holidays. Zed, Yasuo, Katarina, Yone, Sylas, Akali are all top tier popularity champions in mid lane and there've been patches where at least one of them is in something like 30-40% of all games as a mid (it varies - but not as much by win rate as you might think, the patches where these go down tend to be when there's a new mage midscope, or Viktor got a huge and permanent playrate spike from Arcane, that sort of thing, not necessarily the patches where they're relatively weaker or stronger).
The thing that makes this hard is that they all have weaknesses to a specific profile - durable stat checkers with a reliable CC. It's pretty hard to get reliable data on true toplane bruisers midlane because they're so unpopular there, but aggregating the data from patches 12.17 through 12.21, we were able to get a decent dataset on Renekton, Riven, and Sett. I looked at Pantheon as well because even though he's played mid lane, he fits the...
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