01 By hand, in the client
Open the runes tab in champ select, pick a page, and set the keystone and each row yourself. It always works and it costs you most of the timer, which is fine on a champion you play constantly and painful on one you first-timed because someone hovered your pick.
The one thing worth doing here regardless: make a page you're happy to have overwritten and name it something obvious. The number of people who have lost a carefully built page to a tool that wasn't careful about which pages it touched is not small.
02 Copy-paste from a site
Most build sites will hand you a rune page you can paste into the client. It's quicker than setting nine choices by hand, and it's where most people end up.
It's also the method that fails in the least helpful way. The paste only works while the client is in a state that accepts it, so a page copied during the loading screen, or after the client has moved on from champ select, does nothing at all and doesn't tell you why. Then you're in the game on last game's runes and you find out at the first trade.
Patch timing is the other one. A page written for an older patch can reference a rune that has since been reworked, and the import will either drop it silently or refuse the whole page.
03 Let the client tell an app what you picked
The League client already knows your champion, your role and your queue the moment you lock in. An app connected to it can read that and prepare the page without you copying anything, which removes both failure modes above: nothing to paste at the wrong moment, and nothing pulled from a stale page.
Every companion app on the market does some version of this. What differs is what comes with it. Most carry ads, two of the big ones install the Overwolf platform alongside the app, and Blitz keeps its Masters+ builds behind Premium at $4.99 a month. We wrote the whole comparison up in the roundup.
Warden does this part and stops there. It reads champ select, prepares runes, items, summoner spells and augments for the mode you're actually in, and imports them in one click into pages it creates and names as its own. Nothing you made by hand is touched. It's free, 26 MB, native Windows, no ads and no account.
04 Why the import silently does nothing
If a rune import isn't taking, it's almost always one of four things, roughly in order of how often we see it:
- Champ select already ended. The client only accepts a new page during champ select. After that the import has nowhere to go.
- Rune pages are full. The client caps how many pages you can hold. A tool that refuses to delete pages it didn't create, which is the behaviour you want, has nowhere to put a new one until you free a slot.
- The client was restarted underneath the app. The connection is to a running client, so a restart drops it. Restarting the companion reconnects it.
- The page is from an older patch. A reworked or removed rune will break the import, and older copied pages go stale quietly.
The honest take
Doing it by hand is the only method with no failure modes, and it's the one that eats your champ select. Copy-paste is faster and fails silently at exactly the wrong moment.
Letting the client hand your pick straight to an app is the only version that's both quick and hard to get wrong, which is why every companion does it. Warden does it without an ad, an account, or a platform installed alongside it.