Hello everyone, my name is Azzapp and I am a Challenger player on 4 different servers EUW, EUNE, KR and NA(150ping) and welcome to my Mel guide.

I have been very excited about Mel's launch and I've done a ton of testing, maths and preparation for her release and even had a chat with her designer Emizery.

Mel is a control mage with 3 main key features to remember and master: controlling, reflecting, executing.

Controlling
A lot of Mel's mastery will come from how good you are at controlling the wave states and enemy positions. This applies to both in lane and in team fighting. You want to be able to shove the wave, poke and zone the enemy, push your advantage through either tower play or roaming and all of that while keeping your mana. As soon as you run out of mana you are as good as useless. True mastery will be knowing minion execute thresholds, using auto attacks to save mana, splashing both enemy and the minions etc.

Reflecting
Mel's W is the latest unique feature to join league of legends and it will reshape how enemies will play against you. You need to be able to maximize the value of this spell and sometimes that means not even using it at all. Fear factor of you reflecting team fight breaking spells will prevent enemies from even using them causing a lot of broken synergies, especially in solo queue. Enemy Seraphine, Nami, Renata etc. won't risk losing the team fight solo by having their main AoE ability used against their own team. In these cases patience is key. Use W only when in grave danger.
This ability will make certain matchups completely trivial as long as you have solid reflexes. Ahri should never be able to all in due to key ability(Charm), posing no real threat. Veigar full combo only works if you get stunned, he can basically never get an execute. Zed ult goes from one of the scariest abilities to low threat. Anivia can never initiate with a stun unless she wants to get absolutely one shot and have her own ultimate canceled. These are just a few match ups out of dozens I've looked at. You will not know them all and will always find new potential awesome plays.

My recommendation is to utilise your time in champion select and loading by counting how many abilities you can reflect and order them by threat level. This will be of TREMENDOUS help and will make you develop this knowledge so much faster than just playing the game. Bonus is if you can project how the match up/fight will transpire in your head. For example Fizz before ulting will almost always use Q on the minion to close the gap then use his ultimate. By being aware of this patter you are much more likely to expect it and react accordingly. Again you can do this same exact process for every pairing in the game. Nami will never use her ultimate versus Mel, she will be looking to land the bubble first to deny the reflection. Knowing this we can bait her to bubble herself and basically one shot combo her.

Executing
Everything about her kit revolves around hitting the mark on execution, whether it's minions, neutral monsters or enemy champions. First thing to learn is that minions have different versions of glow based on how many stacks they have. If minions glow faintly it means that they have more than 0 stacks which enables the passive flat amount. If they glow a bit more brighter with a symbol underneath that means they are fully ready to be executed and just waiting for a damage source to touch them and they will be instantly executed.

Execution of neutral monsters like jungle camps and even epic monsters will be insanely useful. The numbers don't seem that high per stack but they don't need to be. In any given game many of jungle camps and epic monsters are contested. In every single engagement of this sort you have a slight edge, even if you just engage your flat portion of the passive(without having big amount of stacks). Key thing to remember is to apply a damage source right before an objective will die and as long as nobody has perfect amount of damage to execute you will win. For example many smites in duel on baron/dragon are missed just because one jungler is trying to up the other. It's a duel of speed and wits where by trying to outdo one another they will very often smite on 1250/1300/1350/1400 instead of the max smite amount of 1200. They will be predicting other damage sources or other jungler's setup. If they ever leave just a tiny bit of hp remaining you will win. Make sure to place your E on top of the objective right before it's about to die and use Q to push it over the edge.

Lastly execution of enemy champions is how we get ahead on Mel. Every Mel player has an execute but only the rare great ones will be able to manipulate the threshold to a high degree. Preserving stacks with auto attack while waiting for another rotation, knowing your damage numbers better than the enemy, stacking bonuses for your ultimate for extra surprise(Malignance, Axiom Arcanist, Cut down or Coup de Grace, Shadowflame, waiting for Comet to come back up, waiting for Ludens if you build it etc).

Enemies who are within the execute threshold of your ultimate ability will display the Medarda Sigil above their heads. One incredible trick to remember is that it won't calculate outside sources of damage like Comet/Axiom arcanist etc. So depending on what outside factors you have operating you can have a bit of leaway either ulting before the sigil displays(based on a feeling) or ulting after enemies Sigil dissapears if they got healed or regenerated their HP a bit. Axiom aranist will compensate for about 1second of leaway, if the sigil goes away you have around 1 second to press ult to still get the execution.
Now if you have Scorch, Axiom arcanist, Comet, Shadowflate, Coup de grace ALL up at the same time your ultimate can execute WAY after. You can have basically full duration of your passive(6 seconds) of regeneration after the execute threshold and you will still one shot. This is how you min-max and push your advantage.

These are the things to master if you want to excel on Mel and believe me, few months from release you will see incredible plays. Initially just knowing when to execute and having basic knowledge will be enough. After few people master her the combos will be done by feeling alone, they will never even see the execute sigil, full combos will be done within 10 hp margin to execute while enemies are not aware.

I myself will be starting a new account within the hour of Mel's release to attemp an Unranked to Challenger with educational purposes and mastering her kit. If you have any extra questions about Mel I will be there responding to all of them every day on my channel!

Hope you enjoyed reading the guide and it helped broaden the horizon a little bit. Good luck and have fun with Mel on the Rift!