The Tap version of Bone Skewer is much faster and deals additional damage.
A lot of your agressive spells are also your escapes. Make sure you always have a plan to get out of the fight.
Hitting an enemy with the Hold version of Bone Skewer will always pull them the same distance. Use it in melee range to throw targets behind you.
Pyke is very fragile so don't be afraid to temporarily run from a fight. You can regenerate a significant amount of health from Gift of the Drowned Ones when enemies can't see you.
The cooldown on Maokai's self healing is heavily gated on how many time you hit him with spells. Careful about wasting abilities on him.
Maokai will avoid taking damage while he's using Twisted Advance, so don't waste your spells.
Saplings will chase the first enemy that gets too close, but detonate after a few seconds or if they collide with other enemies. Be especially careful around brush sapling, as they are much more dangerous.
The stats shown on this page show some valuable Pyke against Maokai matchup stats that can help us appreciate the differences between the two. Pyke’s KDA ratio ([kills + assists] / deaths) of NaN is better than Maokai’s ratio of NaN, showing that Pyke may be more central to his team's team fighting capability than Maokai. This observation is largely a result of the difference in kills.
Pyke normally has a much larger longest killing spree than his enemy does. Commonly, he takes less damage than Maokai. This often reflects differing health capacities, yet it can also show that the champion with more health has less mobility and thus is not able to kite away from additional harm when poked or engaged.
Both LoL champs are great champions. Both champs have their strengths, weaknesses, and counters. In League's current meta, Pyke usually loses when trying to fight Maokai, with a 46.2% win rate. As a result, Pyke makes a poor counter to Maokai.
While Pyke does have a lower winrate than Maokai, when they face off with one another, Pyke also has a much greater level of difficulty that makes him a more challenging champ to pick up and master. You should expect to face a difficult match when picking Pyke into Maokaias his relative depth means you may not be able to reach his full potential without a significant amount of practice beforehand.
Additionally, Pyke has some amount of utility and CC, a similar amount to Maokai. This makes her just as valuable during team fights, especially when facing champions with a lot of burst damage.
While there isn't a single best champion overall in League of Legends, in Pyke vs Maokai matchups, Maokai is the better champ with a much lower win rate, more champion depth, and a similar amount of utility to help out your allies during team fights.
Pyke is a terribly counter for Maokai. You will do well by focussing your actions on increasing your gold income and clearing objectives. If you are able to do that, you should do very well as Pyke against Maokai.
If you would like to truly master Pyke to counter Maokai during both the laning and mid / late game phases of League of Legends, you should keep reading to learn a few extra lessons on this matchup. If you listen to the build and stats shown here, you will increase your win rate by a lot and be that much closer to League of Legends pro players.
Pyke usually gets a similar amount of CS relative to Maokai. Champs who typically don't take much CS usualy don't require much CS to be effective, such as sup champs. These kinds of champions are capable of scaling well off of their abilities and first items alone. Yet, champs with large amounts of CS, such as hyper-carries, often require a lot of items to be effective. In either situation, try to exceed the numbers shown on this page to do well.
The best items to prioritize in your Pyke versus Maokai build consist of Umbral Glaive, Axiom Arc, and Voltaic Cyclosword. When Pyke included at least these three items in his build, he did a lot better when facing Maokai than with most other commonly used item sets. In fact, Pyke had an average winrate of 46.2% when playing against Maokai with these items in his kit.
To have the best chance of annihilating Maokai as Pyke, you should equip the Hail of Blades, Sudden Impact, Zombie Ward, Ingenious Hunter, Cosmic Insight, and Magical Footwear runes from the Domination and Inspiration rune sets. Out of all the rune combinations players picked for Pyke vs Maokai counterpicks, this mix of runes yielded the highest win rate. Moreover, these runes provided a 46.2% winrate overall.
By default, tips, stats, and builds on how to beat Maokai as Pyke are displayed for every ranked division. To scope the stats and builds to a particular skill level, you can use the selection menu earlier on the page.