Cursed Blade Gunslingers For Ranked Domination

Cursed Blade Gunslingers BUSTED in 9.14

Generally speaking Cursed Blade was awful when it came to most team compositions, but on the latest Patch 9.14, not only is it good, it's downright broken. If you can get it onto a Tristana with Gunslingers and/or Blademaster, enemy teams are going to be in for a treat.

While it looks like Gunslingers were nerfed since they now hit less units, Riot also buffed them by adjusting the way the animation procs. Now it's instant. Originally they wanted to nerf this before it was released from PBE, but it looks like they didn't get around to it. Abuse it before they patch it next week!

How It Works

Stacked Tristana
As far as Gunslingers go, Tristana has the longest range of all of them.  As a result, you'll want to stack her up in order to maximize how many shots are fired. Here's an ideal build setup:

• Cursed Blade [Negatron Cloak + Recurve Bow]
• Hurricane [Negatron Clock + Spatula]
• Rapid Fire Cannon [Recurve Bow + Recurve Bow]
• or Blade of the Ruined King [Recurve Bow + Spatula] if you're running Blademasters

Insane Number of Attacks
When it comes to RNG, maximizing the number of tries you have at proccing Cursed Blade allows you to optimize your spells. Gunslinger Blademaster Tristana attacks the absolute most and most often of all champions in the game, reducing RNG and maximizing the amount of procs from Cursed Blade.

Economy Reduction
Cursed Blade is incredibly strong right now as a result of the amount of Economy difference it makes with a single proc. Because of the way units are stacked from 1 to 2 to 3 stars, by reducing a single star level you effectively take off a massive chunk of the "gold value" of an enemy team. Against compositions that rely heavily on hyper-rolling 1-stars to level 3, this is incredibly potent.

Flexible Strategies
Cursed Blade is valuable in this strategy, but the change to Gunslingers makes them quite strong even if you roll different items. If you end up with something like Statikk Shiv [Tear + Recurve] and Titanic Hydra [Recurve + Giant's Belt], you can still quite a massive amount of damage.

You could also swap or add Sword Breaker [Chain Vest + Negatron Cloak] for funsies. There's no recurve bow included though, which will slow down your autos.

Countering Cursed Blade Gunslinger

Countering this strategy is generally going to comprise of picking up Phantom Dancer and Thornmail to avoid getting your team shredded. Frozen Heart is also a good option if you're running assassins that can get to the back line.

Meanwhile, during the carousel try and deny Recurve Bows and failing that, Spatula. If they manage to get both Gunslinger and Blademaster on Tristana it's good night. 

Conclusions

This strategy is incredibly potent and is almost certainly getting nerfed next week. In the meantime, be sure to use it in your own games until then!