The Book of Aphelios

Braum - 3 out of 5 Aphelios abilities interact with Braum's passive to stack it faster, and Onslaught stacks it pretty much instantly, making their synergy together crazy good. Even Aphelios's ultimate stacks Braum's passive.

He is likely the best support you could have for facing engage supports, but deals quite poorly with ranged matchups as his engage is quite lacking.

Thresh - Thresh synergizes quite well with immobile ADCs as his lantern provides defensive (or offensive) mobility where otherwise none would exist, making up for a huge weakness of theirs. Aphelios is no exception in this regard.

Additionally Thresh is a hook support and can provide engage for Aphelios which is a quality that greatly enhances Aphelios's strength in lane. This engage is quite weak as far as hook supports go however, and not really all that suited for dealing with long range matchups compared to something like Blitz. Instead he functions better against mid-range enchanters, and for providing disengage against melee divers.

Though he provides engage, his greatest function is peel, and ideally you shouldn't he picked in scenarios where engage is essential to your win condition, rather when it can be supplementary to it.

Rakan - Rakan is one of the best peeling supports while also having some great short-range engage post-6. His laning isn't all that good but his peeling is good enough to easily help Aphelios survive, and his engage range can be enough to function against mid-range matchups, while he scales amazingly into the mid-late game.

Rakan functions best at peeling against melee engages/divers, but gets progressively worse the higher range the enemy threats are, as he functions much better at peeling than he does at engaging, especially from long distances, and his CC lockdown duration isn't very long to give Aphelios much time to close the gap and follow up.

Nilah - Even your ability damage is mostly basic attacks, and Nilah W dodges basic attacks. She also has an easy time diving onto you where she out-DPSes you and outbursts you. You'll want to run Ghost and rush Berserker's Greaves to most effectively kite her, and disengage will be the best tool your support can provide you in this matchup.

Seraphine - The extreme range of her abilities makes it incredibly hard to interact with her, while she has an easy time poking and comboing you. Your reward for making it through this lane is that she arguably scales just as well as you do, giving you no light at the end of the tunnel. Engage supports can make this lane manageable, but she's definitely a natural counter to Aphelios.

Varus - Comet/Lethality Varus: 80% of his damage will come from spamming his abilities way outside of your range, leaving you no room for retaliation. Can be manageable if you have a hook support, otherwise he'll be impossible to ignore but impossible to address.

Twitch - Twitch shines against immobile ADCs who make easy pray for his stealth engages, and on top of being immobile, Aphelios also struggles with being outranged, which makes him particularly weak against Spray and Pray engages. His pre-6 laning is his weakest stage and this is where you have to try and snowball if the matchup allows. If you get far enough ahead, you may get too strong for him to bully you later.

Ziggs - Ziggs plays entirely through his spammable Q with far too much range for you to fight back, on top of having insane zone control from his E and insane disengage in his W. There is little chance of winning this lane if you don't have a hook support such as Blitzcrank.

Aphelios - You are your own greatest enemy. Never forget that.