Gnar

Long before he was anything else, Gnar was sealed in True Ice somewhere in the Freljord, for so many years that the world he recalls has vanished entirely. Once the ice let him go, he stepped into a Freljord that had shifted: a brutal land of feuding tribes, ancient ice magic, and even older gods stirring beneath the snowfields. Rather than dread any of it, he saw a puzzle worth digging into.

Curiosity is only part of his character. Gnar is a yordle at heart, goofy and quick to light up, yet his anger doesn’t flare like a fuse so much as swell like a pressure valve. That tension accumulates through his passive, Rage Gene, until it pushes him into a far bigger and far more furious form. The two versions hardly look like relatives:

• Mini Gnar — quick but brittle, flinging a boomerang that comes back to him with Boomerang Throw, psyching himself up with Hyper for extra damage and speed, and leaping around the map with Hop, ricocheting off whatever he touches.
• Mega Gnar — lumbering yet sturdy, designed for crushing enemies up close, trading the boomerang for a launched Boulder Toss, swapping Hyper for the ground-pounding Wallop, and turning Hop into the quake-inducing landing of Crunch.

He can’t choose when the shift happens, and it doesn’t last. After reverting, Gnar must build his Rage back from zero before he can grow large again. His ultimate, GNAR!, is available only in mega form: it throws everything nearby along a chosen line and stuns any target that gets slammed into a wall.

From the outside, none of this looks calculated, and that’s exactly the appeal. Gnar no more schemes his rampages than a toddler schemes a meltdown; his patience simply snaps at the worst moment for whoever happens to be in front of him. As a Fighter-Tank in the top lane, that unpredictability is what makes him so difficult to plan around.