Weird Picks #1: Support Cassiopeia

Howdy ya'll and welcome to Weird Pick Wednesday, where we round up some awkwardly placed champions that can potentially against all odds, actually do surprisingly well!

Today's weird pick is one that was actually mentioned on the solo queue tier list this week:

Cassiopeia naturally has very high base damage and scales well into late game. Additionally, her level 2 all-in is one of the strongest in the game, and works very well with champions like Lucian, who has the second best level 2 power spike on the rift.

She also functions well as a classical "poke" type champion, similar to Vel'koz.

Lastly, her passive reads as follows, and allows her to benefit in a lane with two enemy champions:

Cassiopeia builds a stack of Aspect of the Serpent once every 6 seconds (10 times per minute) and for every second that an enemy champion is poisoned, up to a max of 500 stacks.

With twice as many targets, this allows her a higher chance to keep them poisoned. As a support, she also has the ability to hide in the side bush and concentrate on only harassing.

Cons

Support Cassiopeia has no sustain, limited CC, and is quite squishy. She also tends to "steal" kills from your marksmen. Note that I put "steal" in quotes, as I believe you should never reduce your damage output to try and "give" anybody a kill. Saving burst damage until the very end is one thing, but Cassiopeia doesn't really have that option as a sustained caster.

Build Path

Classically, I like to build the blue gold item followed by either Tear + Rylai or Rod of Ages depending on the amount of gold you have. Classically, Cassiopeia is always better played tanky since she does have to get somewhat up close and personal to deal damage. Later on, Liandries works very well to scale her into late game once you have the gold for it.

She also does suffer from some mana issues, hence the tear or rod of ages suggestion.