About OldMeta
OldMeta is a reference archive for the classic era of League of Legends: tiered runes, 21/9 masteries, item builds, skill orders and how each champion is actually played. It is free, has no paywall and carries no login.
What this site covers
Every champion in the classic rotation gets a guide page: the rune page by slot, the mastery allocation node by node on the old Offense / Defense / Utility trees, the skill leveling order, summoner spells, the starting items, the core path and the situational picks, plus a written note on how the champion is played and which matchups hurt.
Around those guides sit the reference sections: the item compendium with build trees and gold efficiency, the full rune and mastery tables, a tier list and per-lane hubs, off-meta builds such as AP Master Yi or top-lane Alistar, the Mayhem Classic mode, and a short history of how the old systems worked.
This is not a match-history or news site. There is one live feature, an opt-in summoner search, and everything else is static and written ahead of time.
Where the data comes from
Champion, item, rune, mastery and skill assets are served from Riot’s Data Dragon at patch 3.13.1 — the real Season 3 patch. That is why the icons, the tiered runes and the 21/9 mastery trees on this site are the originals rather than modern stand-ins.
Builds are not a guess at what 2013 looked like. They are measured from the live Classic mode on patch 26.19: the lane, the tier, the rune page, the mastery allocation, the max order, the summoner spells and the item path are collected from public statistics pages and written into the guide data, with the collection date shown on every page that uses them.
Mayhem Classic builds — items, augments, summoner spells and skill order — are collected the same way from public statistics for that mode. That mode has no rune or mastery statistics, so those sections are simply not shown there instead of being filled with plausible-looking numbers.
A handful of items that live Classic brought back exist in no Data Dragon patch. Those are pinned by hand with their names in all four languages, and when no icon exists the site renders a name chip rather than a broken image.
How it is kept current
Collection runs weekly, the day after the game patches. Every collected value is checked against the 3.13.1 item, rune and mastery tables before it is written: if a single id does not resolve, the whole update is rejected and the previous data stays. Empty results never overwrite good data.
Hand-written prose and off-meta builds are never touched by the automated refresh. A champion whose statistics failed to collect keeps the numbers it had, and the page still says when they were collected.
Editorial principles
Measured and reconstructed are labelled differently and never mixed. Pages built from live data say which patch they were measured on and when. Off-meta builds say plainly that they are reasoned from ratios rather than measured, because no statistics exist for them.
The written sections — how a champion is played, what to do in a matchup — are written by a person, not generated. Where a translation does not exist yet the section is hidden rather than shown in the wrong language.
Numbers that cannot be verified are left out. When the underlying data is thin, the page says so.
What we do not do
We do not compute an alternative skill, MMR or ELO rating, do not rank players against each other and do not report or rate players. The summoner search shows what Riot returns for the account you looked up and nothing more.
We keep no accounts and no user database. A Riot ID entered in search is used for that one request and discarded — the privacy policy describes this in detail.
Nothing here is behind a paywall, and the guide data is not sold or licensed onward.
Advertising
This site is paid for by display advertising. Ad placements are labelled and kept out of the middle of a guide, so an ad is never mistaken for a build recommendation.
Advertisers have no influence on tiers, builds or which champions are covered. Nothing on this site is a paid placement.
Who runs it
OldMeta is built and maintained by a single independent developer. It is not affiliated with Riot Games, and its product registration on the Riot Developer Portal covers the summoner search feature only.
Corrections and contact
If a build, a translation or a number here is wrong, tell us and it gets fixed in the next refresh. Corrections are the fastest way to improve this archive.