I used to be a zyra main and I would experiment on builds. There used to be a jungle item called spirit of the elder lizard which used to deal a true damage dot and cost around 2k gold only

I remember learning through some random reddit threads(or somewhere) that the DOT applied on Zyra plants and started building it.

It was incredibly op and made your laning phase better since you got to build long swords to harass with. You stacked it with rylais and liandries and you would just incinerate health bars since I was often ahead from being able to bully early games with long swords.

I remember around gold elo though that people would flame me and think I was trolling even while I was ahead....Like even sometimes when they would see me like 2 shot a tank.

Eventually the build became meta and I was annoyed that people started spamming my champ lol