Mel has been live on the League of Legends servers for a while now, and, as expected, has become one of the more popular champions in the game. She has a very unique kit, that has come with some controversy given she can repel projectiles, completely turning a fight and making some lanes unplayable.  Although her popularity is at an all-time high following the conclusion of Arcane Season 2, how is she actually performing on the rift? Let's take a look.

How many games of Mel has been played?

To the surprise of no one, Mel is the most-played champion in League of Legends this patch for her intended role which is the mid-lane. According to U.gg, the champion has been played over 150,000 times in the mid-lane, 158,521 to be exact. This is considerably more than the next champion on this list with Viktor, another controversial League of Legends champion at the minute with 110,974 games played.

Mel is dominating in every stretch of the imagination, and this it to be expected. Whenever a new champion comes out, they are often overpowered. There are only a few times in League of Legends history has a champion been released and it has been simply underwhelming.

Most recently, Aurora was a champion that Riot struggled to balance in the early days of the champion's life cycle. Aurora needed multiple hotfixes in order to get to a balanced stage. And to some degree, the same has occurred with Mel as Riot has recently released a hotfix nerf, reducing her power considerably while still being a prominent champion on the rift. Despite the nerfs coming in Mel is still the most banned champion on the current patch with a ban rate of 51.2%, which is the highest of any mid-laner by a large margin across all ranks. This to be expected, because some players will simply ban her for the sake of not having players completely ruin their games because they don't know how to play the champion.

It'll be interesting to see if Mel makes her way to professional play sooner rather than later, as all of the professional Leagues will eventually be moving over to the patch that she is available in.