I hear everyone and their mother saying things like “just buy midas lol”, “Midas is a good item, just buy it bro. Don’t think about it it’s a good item”. It is absolutely not.

When you use midas, you gain 160 gold. But you don’t gain the original bounty. If you make a broad assumption and say you midas 50% big creeps (Centaurs, Satyrs, Hellbears, Wildwings), 40% range creeps, and 10% catapults, then each unit has an average bounty of about 57 gold.

Which means, that every time you use midas, you get a net gain of around 103 gold. And since midas has 100s CD, that means midas gives you 61.8 GPM, and since midas costs 2200 gold, it means it takes 35 minutes for the active component of midas to pay for itself. And you absolutely have to consider the opportunity cost of not having a better item instead, imagine the farm you could have gotten if you instead had a maelstrom, or a mask of madness. Or the team fights you could have won if you had a blink dagger.

If you say deranged things like “I need to buy a Midas to hit earlier item timings” you need to think about what you are doing with your life.

“But everyone at TI is buying midas”, yeah but did they win? Did the teams that stacked up on the most midases make it to the final? The pros buy midas because they know what they are doing, you don’t. They can buy midas because they are confident they can stall the game for 60 minutes because they know how to use glyph correctly and not throw the game by getting caught randomly on the map like an idiot. Do you trust your team to do that? Do you? Really?

Here is why you should really buy midas

• It gives you a lot of XP, which valuable if you have important level timings like 18,20 or 25. Especially if you are behind in level because you lost you lost your lane or you are a support, and catching up on XP by getting kills is not looking realistic.

• It saves you the time to kill the creep. If you are slow att killing creeps, especially big creeps, it does increase your farm speed quite a bit.

• It gives you attack speed. 35 attack speed is the equivalent of a Blitz Knuckle which is worth 1000 gold, but is also significantly worse than a knuckle because it doesn’t upgrade into anything. If your hero really benefits from attack speed, midas becomes a lot more valuable.

…and on top of that it also gives you gold. Which is nice, but it isn’t, and should never be, the only reason.

Stop buying Midas mindlessly. Think twice before you pay the price.