Laning Phase

Hey! I'm going to tell you some tips, advices and interesting stuff about Bard in the laning phase.

Laning phase, or better said, the early game in general, is the best part of the game for bard and is his moment of powerspike, the main reason is that if you're good at him you can be really bully and make good plays that put your team ahead.

The main tool that you will use to bully the enemy and get him behind the minions is your passive, the meeps deal a lot more damage than what people usually think, and that gives to your autoattacks a lot of poke power. My advice is to poke constantly with your meeps and your ability power support item, so you can let the enemy carry low, and keep him far from your minions or behind his ones.

You should put some heals in the bush or under your tower so you can get away from engages and they will be quiet usefull for your poke job, I say that because if you don't get really exposed to enemy engages or ganks, you can be over the enemy carry even if you get poked back, don't worry, if you have some heals in the bush  it will be worth because you will create a lot of pressure. If you repeat that you will create a big push or at least end with enemy's push, that's the moment to go for the chimes, tell your carry not to push so you don't lose too much experience and with the chimes you will charge your passive so your poke gets better, and you will fill your mana bar to continue with the poke-heal cicle.

Now we will talk about the "big plays", I will not explain a lot about that just now, because I will talk about it in a specific post later, anyways I feel like I have to mention it.

The poke that I talked about before will probably make the carry get between or behind his/her minions, and that's your opportunity, you can easily stunn the adc with his/her own minions and with the thunderlord's and the meeps deal a lot of damage, if your adc knows it or reacts quickly you can even kill their one. When you hit level 6 you become a really good gank receptor, because you can leave an enemy stuck for a lot, and they will probably not react in time, so your jungler can enter and easily kill them. You can also use it to save an ally stopping the enemy from chasing, or you can use it in the tower if the enemy is low and you have a teleport in your team to dive them without much danger.

There are some matchups that can deny your effectivity without much effort, basically bot lanes with a hard engage like Leona, Alistar... Or some sick combos like Kalista/Alistar or Lucian/Braum.
Anyways you can still poke them to death if you can dodge the engage abilities or keep the range under control, but the aggresive plays will be so much harder. Even if you lose lane you can still be really usefull in teamfights, but we will talk about it at other moment.

I hope this post helped you in some way or it was interesting for you!