User blog comment:KaiserLos24/Champions for Pre-30 Summoners/@comment-4022742-20140313131058

Generally speaking, populair smurf picks are champions that scale for infinity and beyong with just buying items. These are champions like, , and the like. Just because they can focus on farm early and still be their Hyper Carry self in late game.

Knowing this, Runes and Masteries as they are right now are just early game stats that set you up for a stronger mid/late game except for maybe the Defense and lower (or higher depending on how you look at it) Offense tree.

But do not fret, change is coming. The runes update they are working on will make hyper carries even more hyper due to scaling runes and correct defense/utility allocation that makes sense... (even though this only actually affects you if you have runes >_< )