In Praise of Pink Wards

You’re sitting in top lane, happily farming the creep wave. The enemy top laner is still buying and, with your ward, you know you’re safe from the jungler. You last hit the cannon minion and glance at the minimap again and . . . nothing. It’s black. Wait, where’s your ward!? You put it down under a minute ago! How could that happen? The jungler doesn’t have Oracle’s. . . .

As your opponent walks into lane from the river with an empty spot in his inventory it hits you: he just pink warded you! What!? Why would someone do that? Isn’t that a waste of money? Dang, that’s really annoying!

So why would a laner ever buy a pink ward? A green ward gets you vision far cheaper, so what’s the use? Is it just a gimmicky play?

The pink ward is the precursor to every Baron and Dragon fight and annoyance to every counter-warding support in lane. Pink wards are powerful vision tools in LoL, but all too often they’re simply dismissed as a cheaper alternative to an Oracle’s. Pink wards are incredibly powerful in their own right, though, and I think they’re heavily underestimated.

Let’s do some warding math. A regular, green ward (“Sight Ward”) is 75 gold while a pink ward (“Vision Ward”) is 125 gold. Destroying a green or pink ward nets you 30 gold versus only 25 for a Sightstone ward (“Ghost Ward”). The warding game bot lane has been well-examined, and no one doubts the usefulness of pink wards on a support, so let’s expand our view elsewhere.

If you manage to destroy a ward when you place a pink ward, multiple calculations occur. First, that pink ward is now only 20 gold more expensive than a regular one (125 - 75 - 30). Second, you have denied the enemy of the use of an item that is worth 75 gold. And finally, you have removed all vision from your opposing laner (or half of it in mid lane) while preserving your own vision, which you (should) already be paying 75 gold for.

The benefits are already apparent, but here’s the “salesman’s pitch”: if you know where your opponent wards, you can, for less than the cost of just one potion, deny their vision and open them up to ganks. In the process, you still have vision yourself, and might have opened up areas that allow your team to sneakily take an objective or counter-jungle.

Don’t feel like you should buy a pink ward every time you back, though. Save it for a critical time like when an enemy buff is about to respawn. Your jungler can slip in for an easier steal and then assist you with a surprise gank!

As with any item or mechanic, you should ask yourself how to abuse pink wards to their fullest extent. Think about it this way: in DOTA 2, wards are limited and you can’t buy as many as you want. A DOTA player looking at LoL sees this for the huge difference it is, and it’s something they’ll experiment with right away. Why should you see it any differently?

Traditionally, you only really see pink wards on supports, junglers going for dragon and people who have to deal with champions like Evelynn and Akali. But they can do so much more at a far lower net cost than most people realize. If you can make them work for you, your pink wards will catch the enemy completely off guard and be their bane for the entire game.