Over the past few years, League of Legends went through a massive overhaul to keep the millions playing the game hooked with new features, some of which like blue and orange essence replaced the old ones, as well as emotes and mastery levels for champions to show off your skill.

Mastery is a level system, which was designed to measure and recognise a summoner’s experience and skill level with a particular LOL champion.

Whenever a player wins the game, the champion they were playing with is awarded CP (champion points), which helps in increasing the mastery levels.

Your champion needs to be at least mastery level 4 to show their mastery in-game.

Levelling up any champion from mastery level 1 to five roughly takes 15-30 games, depending on your win-loss ratio as well as how your team performs.

Once you’ve reached level 4 mastery level with a champion, you’ll unlock a mastery badge emote, which can be shown via the guide below, a loading screen border as well as an announcement banner.

The loading screen border will appear when the game is loading and the announcement banner appears in case of multi-kill announcements — if you’ve taken multiple kills with a mastery level 4+ champion.

If you’ve mastery level 4 or above champion and would like to show off your skills in a game, here is how you can show your mastery in LOL, followed by a guide that answers how you can increase your champion mastery level.

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Showing Mastery in League of Legends

Login to the League of Legends game client on your PC and start the game with a champion you have with mastery level 5, 6 or 7 — the bigger the number, better the flex.

To show your League of Legends champion mastery level at any point in the game, hold Ctrl and tap on 6 button (above qwerty). Alternatively, you can also use the /masterybadge command in the chat window.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the champion mastery level will appear above your champion as well as on the left-side of the screen.

If you want, you can also change the key binding for showing your champion mastery via the in-game menu.

You show the mastery multiple times after which the flexing sort of goes on a cool down for some time. If you can’t show the mastery after having shown it simultaneously several times in one go, don’t worry, that’s normal. Wait for a few seconds and your mastery flex tool will be activated again and you can show your mastery again.

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How to increase the mastery level of your champion?

As mentioned above, the champion points accrued at the end of a game that you’ve won are essential towards increasing the mastery level of a champion. The number of champion points awarded also heavily depends on how your team performs — the better you do collectively, the more champion points a win gets you. This includes your personal performance, the team’s performance, game length, win-loss ratio, and some other factors.

It’s elementary that you play League of Legends the way it’s supposed to be played — as a team. Team quarrels and fighting are normal, even more so if you’re playing with strangers, but it’s important to maintain your cool for the greater good. While good individual players can have a game-changing impact, it certainly takes a team’s effort to win a 5v5 game.

Premade teams also get bonus CP, depending on the number of members. A party of two premades get 2% bonus CP, a party of three gets bonus 4% CP, a party of four gets 6% bonus CP and a party of five get 10% bonus CP.

While you can increase your champion up to mastery level 5 or any of the game types including ARAM and other rotating game modes, to increase your champion’s mastery level to 6 or 7 would require you to play Summoner’s Rift normal or ranked games.

How to achieve mastery level 6 or 7?

Once you’ve reached mastery level 5, the normal progression of your champion’s mastery level based upon the wins and team performance will end.

To go beyond level 5, you’ll need to earn an S-, S or S+ grade, which will get you a mastery token, which will appear in your Loot page. You’ll need to combine these mastery tokens alongwith some other stuff to upgrade to level 6 and 7, as explained below.

• To get Mastery Level 6, combine two mastery 6 tokens with either the champion shard or 2450 blue essence.
• To get Mastery Level 7, combine three mastery 7 tokens with either the champion shard or 2950 blue essence.

Mastery tokens are unique for each champion. So, if you want a particular champion’s mastery level to increase, you’ll need to earn an S-, S or S+ grade with them and earn the champion-specific mastery level. Even the champion shards should be for the same champion you’re looking to upgrade.

Also read: What is Lethality and Adaptive Force in League of Legends?