Each of Aphelios' weapons have different strengths, so try to find the right situation for your current weapons.
You can crush Bard's healing shrines just by walking over them. Don't let his allies take them without a fight.
Bard's ultimate, Tempered Fate, affects allies, enemies, monsters, and turrets alike. Sometimes it can be to your advantage to jump into it!
Bard's opponents can also travel through his Magical Journey doorways. You can follow him, if you think it's safe.
The stat comparisons provided here feature several important Aphelios vs. Bard matchup statistics that may help you interpret the distinctions between the two. Aphelios’s KDA ratio ([kills + assists] / deaths) of NaN is better than Bard’s KDA ratio of NaN, indicating that Aphelios may be more central to his team's team fighting capability than Bard. This observation is in large part fueled by the difference in kills.
Aphelios often has a much larger longest kill spree than his foe does. Typically, he receives a similar amount of damage to Bard. This is usually reflective of differing health capacities, but it can also show that the one champion has less mobility and thus is not able to escape additional damage when engaged or poked.
Both League champions are great. Both have their strengths, weaknesses, and counters. In the game's current meta, Aphelios usually fairs equally well when taking on Bard, with a 49.3% win rate. As a result, Aphelios makes an ok counter to Bard.
While Aphelios does have a lower win rate compared to Bard, when facing one another, Aphelios also has a greater level of difficulty that makes him a more complex character to pick up and master. You should be careful when picking Aphelios into Bardas his relative depth means that you may not be able to reach his full potential without a lot of practice beforehand.
Additionally, Aphelios also has almost no amount of utility and CC, a similar amount to Bard. This makes her just as valuable during teamfights, especially when facing champions with a lot of burst damage.
While there isn't a single best champion for every situation in League of Legends, in Aphelios vs Bard matchups, Bard is the better champ with a similar win rate, more champion depth, and a similar amount of utility to help out your allied champions during teamfights.
Aphelios is a somewhat poor counter to Bard. Focus your gameplay on maximizing your gold and cs and clearing objectives. If you are able to do that, you should do very well as Aphelios against Bard.
To truly master Aphelios in order to counter Bard during both the lane and mid / late game phases of League of Legends, you should continue reading to learn a few extra tricks and insights into this matchup. If you listen to the build and suggestions shown above, you will increase your win rate by a lot and be that much closer to League of Legends pro players.
Aphelios typically racks up much more CS as Bard. Champs who typically don't take many minion kills usualy don't have to have much CS to be effective, such as supports. They are capable of scaling properly off of their abilities and first items alone. Yet, champs with large amounts of CS, such as hyper-carries, often have to have many items to be effective. In either situation, try to do better than the values reported here to do well.
The top items to have in your Aphelios versus Bard build consist of Galeforce, Infinity Edge, and The Collector. When Aphelios combined at least these three items in his build, he performed much better countering Bard than with many other commonly used builds. In fact, Aphelios had an average win rate of 49.3% battling Bard with this counter build.
To have the greatest chance of annihilating Bard as Aphelios, you should equip the Fleet Footwork, Overheal, Legend: Bloodline, Cut Down, Taste of Blood, and Ingenious Hunter runes from the Precision and Domination rune sets. Out of all the rune sets we have analyed for Aphelios vs Bard battles, this order of runes yielded the highest win rate. In fact, these runes provided a 49.3% win rate overall.
By default, tips, stats, and builds on how to beat Bard as Aphelios are displayed for all ranked divisions. If you want to narrow the stats and builds to a distinct player tier, you can use the selection menu above.