Placing a Living Shadow before using Death Mark can give Zed a safe escape from combat.
Saving energy and spell cooldowns until you use your ultimate will maximize Death Mark's damage.
Quickly double tapping Living Shadow will teleport Zed to his shadow immediately for rapid escapes.
Focused Resolve is a strong disengage tool. Create distance to avoid being rooted and seek to engage afterwards.
Karma's Soulflare erupts for bonus damage in the area in which it's placed. React quickly and escape the circle to avoid taking heavy damage.
Karma's passive lowers her Mantra cooldown when she hits enemy champions with abilities and basic attacks. Deny her from getting free hits on you.
The stat comparisons shown on this page highlight several influential Zed against Karma matchup stats that can help us interpret the distinctions between the two. As an example, Zed’s KDA ratio ([kills + assists] / deaths) of NaN is more than Karma’s KDA ratio of NaN, showing that Zed may be more central to his team's team fighting capability than Karma. This observation is in large part caused by the difference in kills.
Zed often has a much larger longest kill spree than his enemy does. Commonly, he receives more damage than Karma. This often reflects different amounts of tankyness, yet it can also illustrate that the champ with more health has less mobility and thus is unable to kite away from additional harm when engaged or poked.
Both League champions are great. Both have their strengths, weaknesses, and counters. In League's current meta, Zed usually fairs equally well when facing off against Karma, with a 49.1% win rate. As a result, Zed makes an ok counter to Karma.
While Zed does have a lower win rate compared to Karma, when facing one another, Zed also has a greater learning curve that makes him a more time consuming character to pick up and master. You should be careful when picking Zed into Karmaas his relative depth means that you may not be able to unleash his full potential without a significant amount of practice beforehand.
Additionally, Zed has almost no amount of utility and CC, a similar amount to Karma. This often makes her just as valuable during team fights, especially when trying to counter champions with a ton of burst damage.
While there isn't a single best champion overall in League of Legends, in Zed vs Karma matchups, Karma is the better champion with a similar win rate, more champion depth, and a similar amount of utility to help out your team members during teamfights.
Zed is a somewhat poor counter to Karma. Make sure you focus your tactics on maximizing your gold and cs and taking out objectives. If you do that, you should hold your own as Zed against Karma.
If you would like to learn all of the intricacies of Zed to counter Karma during both the early game and mid / late game phases of League of Legends, you should keep reading to gather a few extra lessons on this matchup. If you listen to the build and tips shown here, you will grow your win rate by a lot and be that much closer to League of Legends pro players.
Zed often gets more CS as Karma. Champions who on average don't earn many minion kills typically don't need much CS to be valuable teammates, such as sup champs. They are capable of scaling well off of their skills, stats, and first items alone. Yet, champs with large amounts of CS, such as hyper-carries, often have to have a lot of items to be effective. In either case, try to do better than the numbers reported on this page to do well.
The most important items to use in your Zed versus Karma build consist of Axiom Arc, Hubris, and Voltaic Cyclosword. When Zed bought at least these three pieces in his build, he did significantly better when fighting Karma than with most other typical item sets. In fact, Zed had an average win rate of 49.1% battling Karma with this build.
To have the highest likelihood of beating Karma as Zed, you should equip the Electrocute, Taste of Blood, Eyeball Collection, Ultimate Hunter, Transcendence, and Scorch runes from the Domination and Sorcery rune sets. Out of all the rune combinations players picked for Zed vs Karma counterpicks, this combo of runes resulted in the greatest win rate. Notably, these runes averaged a 49.1% win rate overall.
By default, tips, stats, and builds on how to beat Karma as Zed are displayed for every ranked division. If you want to scope the stats and builds to an individual division, you can use the selection menu earlier in the counter matchup guide.