The game starts. Looks like it’s you and Xin Zhao bottom. Soon enough the minions spawn and you get your first glance at Morgana & Caitlyn on the other side. With a smile, you think “Poor souls, they have no idea what’s about to happen”. You let them push ahead, but just a bit. Soon enough you’ve got them right where you want them. You get a few last hits, then really put the pressure on. You’re only level 2 but you’re poking anyways. This pressure puts them in a bad situation. They realize they can’t afford to lose any health, so they back off. But now they’re missing out on experience and gold. You and Xin Zhao have full control. As the minutes pass, they get restless, sloppy even. Caitlyn makes a move, but little does she know that your jungler is right around the corner. Both Caitlyn and Morgana corner themselves in the trap. The fight starts and ends quickly. First blood but definitely not last.
The early-game turns to mid-game and attention shifts to the objectives. But you realize Morgana and Caitlyn are still level 4 levels behind, each with next to no items. At this point, the game is basically 5 V 3. But this is no surprise to you, you have mastered the art of lane freeze, and used it to climb from bronze to silver, to gold, and now platinum is in sight.
Now that you understand lane freeze, it’s time to learn how to apply it and master it correctly. It’s time to use it to shift the course of every game, so you can climb the ranks at turbo-speed.
Starting the Freeze!
Let’s begin with initiating a freeze. To start a freeze we want to let the enemy minions push slightly towards our side so that the freeze occurs in the sweet spot. As you may remember from part 1, we want them to have more minions than us. As their minions push to our tower, our minions will reach the battle faster. It’s simply a matter of allowing their minion-count to overpower ours, then maintain the perfect balance to freeze the battle.
It won’t always be this simple. An alternative solution is to hold off their minion wave in the sweet spot until yours can approach. To do this we have to grab aggro from the minion wave and tank it until our wave can come.
CAUTION: Tanking can be dangerous and you will want to avoid taking too much damage. The first way to mitigate damage is to avoid harass while tanking the minion wave. This can be done by NOT TANKING when the enemy is around. Another time to avoid tanking is when their minion wave is too big. You typically want to tank no more than 5 minions at a time, especially if it’s early game.
Pro Tip: thin out as many caster minions as you can before tanking, caster minions do more damage than melee minions.
Balancing the Freeze
Once you have initiated a freeze, you need to maintain it. But maintaining the freeze requires the perfect balance between your minions and the enemy’s. Too many minions and they will push into your tower, breaking the freeze and doing tower damage. Too little minions and yours will overpower the battle, breaking the freeze. But the perfect balance will allow you to take advantage and control the lane.
The balance of minions is completely dependent on location. The closer to your tower the more enemy minions are needed to maintain the balance. In general, there should be 2-4 extra enemy minions. This number depends on exactly where the freeze is, and should match up with the diagram below.
Pro Tip: The cannon minions have more health and damage than melee or ranged minions. To maintain the perfect balance in your freeze, value them as equal to 4 melee or ranged minions.
Manipulating the Freeze for Ranking Up
When the freeze is set, the biggest threat to breaking it is the enemy champion. You will have two options here. The first is to match the minion damage of the enemy. To do this effectively, stay closely aware of their items and abilities so that they don’t do too much damage at once. But this can be unpredictable and difficult when facing champions who have insane wave clear.
Instead of battling it out to maintain balance, you can zone them out. Zoning is a complete topic in itself, but you can easily use it with lane freeze to manipulate the course of each game. By putting pressure on the enemy champions, and positioning yourself near the back end of the freeze, behind their minions, you will control the lane. While maintaining the freeze, this positioning will put them in a bad spot, if they try to pressure back they will risk getting ganked. If they play defensively, they will be too far from the battle to receive experience or gold. For you this means an amazing advantage.
By mastering the freeze and zoning the enemy from the battle, you gain an immediate advantage in the lane. If you maintain this long enough the enemy will miss out on so much gold and experience that they become useless. The game will then be 5V4 or even 5V3, if you zone out multiple champions. At this rate, you will be able to shift the course of every game, in favor of your teams victory. Implement this every game and you will win much more, die much less, and rank up much faster!