Legends of Runeterra - Card game by Riot Games

Ravishing said:

I threw this together before the reveal and slotted in 3x irelia and 3x lead and follow.
I feel like it'll capture the majority of cards that people are going to use.
I'm sure some things will be different, like I'm not sure about the Elusive plan / kinkou , but this is what I settled on for now

https://lor.mobalytics.gg/decks/c28lb6is6kh5kfiu9upg

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Your deck is private, can’t see it.

She looks fun, the type of champion I like. I’ll try her for sure.

Ok, here's my opinion on the cards from the last 2 reveals.

First let's start with Blade Dance keyword. It has a lot of potential implications. Getting Free Attack can be significant as some card do something when you attack, which means you can get these bonuses multiple times a round, not only that but you can get it while on defense which could be really important. The down side I see with it though, is that you're attacking with 1/1 which could be pretty bad against Slay decks, or even maybe Dragon/Fury decks as you'd be providing them with easy targets so in some meta this could potentially be pretty bad.

Ribbon Dancer: A 2/1 for 2 mana is terrible, getting Blade Dance 1 makes it ok because you're going to be using this in a deck where you want that Free Attack, cheap cost makes it a good target for Recall and playing it again for another Free Attack. Basically the card will only see play in decks that take advantage of Blade Dance. So terrible most of the time, probably pretty good in Blade Dance decks.

Syncopation: 2 mana burst that swap 2 allies. Awesome card, will most likely see a lot of play. Great way to protect a target, or get damage through by swapping a big damage unit that is being blocked with a unit that isn't being blocked. Just a great card period.

Coastal Defender: More expansive version of cards like Sparring Student and Gleenglade Duo basically a unit that grows in power each time you summon a unit. This has interesting staline at 2/6 for 4 making it very resilient and hard to remove, and getting +2/0 when you summon a unit could make it grow pretty quickly. I'm sure he'll find a home in some decks that summon a lot of unit.

Blossoming Blade: Basically a bigger version of Ribbon Dancer, low stat for the cost but Blade Dance so total stats is pretty good. Similar to Ribbon Dancer it will only see play in Blade Dance decks, While it's technically slightly better on it's own than Ribbon Dancer, I feel Ribbon Dance might be better since it lower cost opens it more to Recall synergies to get Blade Dance more than once out of it.

Zinneia, Steel Crescendo: It's probably going to be bad, it's just too slow at 8 mana. The concept of it attacking with blades is very cool though. Might be a 1 off in some decks but I feel it's going to be pretty bad.

Lead and Follow: Pretty good card, cheap recall that works only on allies and gives you a Flawless Duet which is a 1 mana fleeting slow spell Blade Dance 2. Not much else to say about, it's just good. Will only see play in Blade Dance decks though.

Vanguard's Egde: This is also Irelia's signature spell, and I think it's pretty bad. 7 mana slow spell is just to costly. There's definitely some really good play with it, but most of the time I feel it will just be a bad card. Even as Irelia's spell it's not great, like drawing multiple Irelia isn't going to be great in my opinion.

Flawless Duet: Token created by Irelia and Lead and Follow. Overall good for what it is.

Bladesurge: Token created by Irelia when she's leveled up and allies attack. Zero mana swap Irelia with an ally, what's not to like. It's awesome.

Irelia: I think she's very interesting. I'm sorta disappointed by her in a way, 3 mana 3/2 with quick attack. We've seen this before with Zed and Katarina...wishes she was not this generic. That said, he abilities with the Flawless Duet and Bladesurge when leveled up makes her very interesting. I really her design and the Blade Dance mechanic that comes with her and her follower.

Looking forward to the expansion, overall I feel it's pretty solid and interesting.

Tried a few things, but settled on Mogwai’s Swain/Zilean deck because I wanted to play Zilean, and I happen to love Swain so that ended up being the perfect deck for me.

I only play normal, and been having tons of fun with this. It’s a Swain deck at the core, not a Zilean deck, he’s just there to support Swain and does a pretty good job at it too. The Time Bombs if you can draw them do a great job of advancing Swain. They also have multiple synergies in the deck...activate Ravenous Flock and Scorched Earth, since they hit the Nexus they also trigger Swain‘s level up ability and they also make Aurok Glinthorn extremely dangerous since he will stun all damaged enemies when attacking.

Lots of fun with it and fairly successful too.

A few observation, still way too much Tresh/Nessus. Irelia isn’t as good as I first thought she would, saw tons of her in the beginning and barely see her anymore as a lot of stuff just counters her extremely hard, when not countered she can be really strong...so she’ll be extremely meta dependent. Malphite can be annoying bordering on toxic when leveled up, the saving grace so far for me is that the deck I’ve encountered so far don’t seem that great but that might change.

Overall I think the meta will remain somewhat unchanged from before the expansion, there will be a few new deck but it feels like the top Decks will remain the same, so this might end up being a very unimpactful expansion. I hope I’m wrong though.

LOL, this deck is awesome.

Patch Notes 2.8 are up, no balance change but...

A new event which is always cool and wait for it...Champion Skins(Zed, Yasuo, Shyvana and Riven) some with new level up animations(Zed and Yasuo).

Lots of new cosmetics.

Pretty cool stuff overall.

Ravishing said:

Skins are nice but only champion that is viable right now is shyvana.. at least her skin is awesome looking.

Guess we'll see a lot of yasuo and zed decks day 1 lol

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New meta defined by Champion Skins.

Springbok said:

Any good beginner guides out there for this - booted it up last night and it seems slightly overwhelming for a n00b like myself who never really got into Hearthstone, etc.

Have to say the animations and game itself are terrific.

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Depending on how new you are to CCG, you might want to check the challenges too. They are basically tutorials that introduce you to the game mechanics and keywords. They also give pretty decent XP for their length. They add new ones every time they add new keywords.

Patch Notes 2.9 are out and do basically nothing to actually fix the meta.

Riot started so well with regular and significant balance every 4 weeks that had major impact on the meta. Since about the same time they switched to the Expansion model of smaller but more frequent expansion, they have significantly reduced the quality of their balance patches.

I think because new cards are in more often, they want to wait a bit more to see their impact before making big changes. The end results though is that bad oppressive meta last much longer than before.

These patch notes are a perfect example of this. There's a few(a lot actually) of streamers and content creator that seem to be reevaluating their commitment to LoR which is kinda sad.

I still believe that the fundamentals of LoR make for one of the most fun CCG, but I struggle to play these days since if you don't play a counter to Azir/Arelia you will get destroyed often since the deck is so prevalent, and if you do run a counter, you will often still be destroyed because the deck still has a good winrate against a few of it's counters.

If the deck goes away, then Lissandra/Trundle with Spectal Matron into Watcher will come back and be the oppressive deck since it's a control deck that basically makes all other control deck obsolete as if you don't win by turn 8, you lose.

That's not speaking of Thresh/Nassus which has been a dominant deck for a long time. Although personally I prefer playing against it than Azir/Arelia or Lissandra/Trundle with Matron. I don't find it as oppressive, just a really good and consistent deck.

I guess we were spoiled early on. I hope Riot reacts to the backlash they are getting from patch 2.9 and go back to their old ways of doing balance patch...in frequency, quantity and quality.

I've always wondered if a hybrid ranked mode where basically you need to have 3 decks made of 6 different regions to queue into ranked with 1 ban.

It wouldn't be a tournament, just regular ranked. Face someone, choose 1 deck to ban out of 3 and then play and that's it.

Would it work? Would it be fun? Would it solve the meta issues? I honestly don't know.

If one game could do it, it's LoR since their business model isn't based on selling cards and they are so generous with cards. A new player could easily pick like 3 different pre-made decks out of a large pool of pre-made decks.

LOL. Not sure if I should be mad or not but they broke LoR on IPads. Seems to be only the iPad pros though. I know it’s not working on mine right now. I get a black screen.