We've got a round of new cards today for the upcoming Beyond the Bandlewood expansion coming to Legends of Runeterra later this month on August 25. Check them all out down below.
Create in hand one of three randomly selected cards.
Robert "Fluxflashor" Veitch is the founder of Out of Games. With over a decade of experience in gaming content, and being done with the exhaustion of corporate nonsense, he wanted to do something different with a focus on the community in this online world that tries so hard to just make everyone just another number. Robert is currently playing Path of Exile and World of Warcraft. He can be contacted via direct messages or on Twitter.
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I have a strong suspicion that the Hungry Owlcat is intended as a cheap unit that can be easy support fodder for a Lulu deck. Aside from that, I'm struggling to find a purpose for such a unit in any existing deck archetype.
Since the card is dual region with Ionia I think your suspicion is correct.
The big reveal today has to be the Manifest keyword. It's a direct copy of the Discover keyword from Hearthstone, which was a big change for the better in that game.
One of the bigger dangers in card games, is having very stale metagames: As the meta gets figured out and decks get refined into more consolidated lists, matchups become increasingly stale- you know your opponent's decklist, he knows yours, you both know what each other's key cards are in the matchup, and you just go through the motions, playing out a well-known matchup where the luck of the draw determines the winner.
Enter discover- or Manifest here in LoR. You'll often be offered bad cards, that are exactly what you need in a specific situation. Maybe you get offered an Avarosan Marksman when you need to pop a Spellshield, or a Soulgorger when playing vs. Azirelia. Other times, you will have plenty of mana crystals but be out of steam, you try to manifest a big threat- and the only big creature you're offered is something like Horns of the Dragon, so you try to win with that.
Manifest is a powerful tool in that you can find answers that your main deck doesn't even contain. It brings much greater variety, because the metagame stops just being about the top 20% of cards showing up over and over, and you can potentially have any card in the game show up in your matches. And it rewards skill, because knowing the value and utility of obscure cards becomes a new form of skill expression. This should be good for LoR.
I don't understand how an RNG based mechanic "reward skill" it's either you high role the card you need or you don't, either way your depending on luck. I mean do you really need to be skilled to pick a card that say "kill a unit" when need something removed from the board for example?
Did you read what he said? It rewards knowledge of available counters. How to utilize that RNG in your favor (even if the perfect card isn't offered in the manifest/discover) and provides variety in matchups that become too uniform with the cards. LoR first saw stuff like this with Targon's "invoke" mechanic. We'll see how manifest differs itself (perhaps manifest is more of a bandle/ionia thing, and Invoke is more of a Targon thing..though I could see them including Invoke into Shurima)
And to answer your question: maybe the perfect counter you need to "discover" is "kill a unit" but you get provided a buff, a debuff, a ping, etc that still lets you leverage your board in an intelligent manner to overcome said unit.
You don't need to be skilled to pick a card that says "kill a unit" (who wouldn't pick that card?). You DO need to be skilled to pick a card that doesn't overtly kill a unit, yet let's you use your board to win the game or kill a unit you couldn't before). And unlike Hearthstone, your opponent still has many ways to play around things that get "discovered" or "manifested".
-If you are offered three cards and told to choose one there no need for you to have a prior knowledge of available counter you just read what each card do and choose the appropriate one that's not skill that just common sense. Assume your looking for some form of removal but the only options you got are protection spells with no unit to use them on. It doesn't matter what you choose because they are all equally useless in this situation.
-As for being able to play round discovered cards, let's suppose that your opponent just played a card that say discover a 2 mana spell. Well that spell can a be a removal card, a buff, a silence etc. How do play around that? Answer : you don't. Unless manifest allow to see exactly what card your opponent generated.
-Discover like effect have their benefits, match up became less polarizing since decks who normally don't run removal, combat tricks, protection etc can generate said cards, and there is some decision making on the player part. But that's all assuming you got some decent card to choose from in the first place and that just a matter luck.
Except that you can play around random generation. What you have to do in this type of situation is to assume the worst of all possibilities. Take hearthstone for example. Your opponent plays Renew at turn 6 and you have a big board. Your opponent doesn't play the generated card. You simply assume that the generated card might be something like Soul Mirror. And if the card is not the same as what you guessed, it means that the situation won't go as bad as it should. Well, either that or you forgot about a certain card and the situation goes a lot worse but that's not unfairness, that's a form of punish.
So far, the random generation in LOR seems a lot more constrained than hearthstone which is really good since you can guess randomly generated card a lot easier from a smaller card pool.
That owlcat art must win the derp 2021 award for sure 😂
This keyword seems kinda redundant we already have invoke that works in a similar way.
Edit: Ok, Manifest is literally Discover while Invoke was specifically Celestial cards. It was super confusing since the exemplar card included a Celestial pick as one of the Manifest options.
I'm actually completely confused as to what the difference is.
My guess is that Invoke is specifically related to celestials/star style cards and will be relegated to Targon only (though I could see Shurima having it, since they have some ties with Targon)
I wonder how they discovered the Idea for the Keyword
Yeah, basically every digital card game has the discover mechanic at this point.
However, as long as we are talking about copying ideas from other card games, that's an interesting Beach Party set of skins that Hearthstone has up for sale right now. Can't imagine where they got the idea and motivation to add so many more skins to their game in the past year - and the most recent set is specifically a water-party theme to boot!