Maybe they're going to do a year-long story like the League of Evil. Except this time it'll be the Horde versus the Alliance, with the first expansion focusing on the Horde, the second focusing on the alliance, and the last expansion being a conflict between the two.
I see how Elusive is a mechanic that can be uninteractive, as it bypasses normal unit combat, but I don't think that can be fixed by changing the elusive keyword to only work on one strike/round. Instead, I think it would make more sense to change the most powerful elusive cards to have interesting conditions (making elusive a keyword that is rarely permanently put on a unit). For example:
1. Zap Sprayfin and Wiggly Burblefish elusive changed to "when you cast a spell, give me elusive this round" or maybe "when you Attune, give me elusive this round"
2. Sparklefly changed to "when you play a Celestial, give me Elusive this round."
Although I do think that these specific changes would be good for the game (the elusives I listed above are a bit too good and boring to play), I think that elusive sort of has to stay the way it is in order for a lot of champions to make sense. Off of the top of my head, all of these cards would need to be reworked if Elusive were changed:
1. Sumpworks Map
2. Teemo
3. Zoe
4. Ezreal
5. Young Witch
6. Lounging Lizard
7. Fae Guide
8. Sumpsnipe Scavenger
9. Subpurrsible
10. Nyandriod
11. Abyssal Eye
All of these cards rely on have permanent elusive to either get consistent Nexus Strikes or act as a win condition for the deck. One great example of this is Nyandriod. Without permanent elusive, it doesn't work as a win condition to try to slow buff up your Nyandriod over time. Although this strategy isn't very interactive, it still adds something new to the game that is different to play and play against. Against a devoted elusive deck, you know that you won't be able to stop them from damaging you by playing units without Challenger, so you play differently. Ultimately, what makes card games replayable is the vast variety of different-feeling games that you can play depending on the cards drawn and the decks that you face. By removing the elusive strategy, the game would lose one of these unique play patterns. It is because of this reason that I don't hate the idea of archetypes like Burn Aggro or TF Go Hard, because even though they can feel annoying to play against, as long as they keep a low playrate they ultimately add more to the game than they take away. Because of this, although I think that certain elusives are too good and deserve nerfs, I don't think that elusive as a mechanic should be reworked or removed from the game.
To be fair about Zoe, she would actually be fairly bad if the meta has lots of decks that run tons of pings (like TF Go Hard and Bilgewater when Make It Rain was 2 Mana). Still though, she almost always generates at least 1 star chart, so she’ll never be awful.
The thing is, some elusive cards only work if they are permanently elusive. For example, Young Witch uses the keyword for its support effect and not for Nexus damage. Also, cards like Sparklefly don’t work as win conditions or good buff targets without permanent elusive. I agree that some elusive cards could use with a a nerf or removal of elusive after the round, but I don’t think the mechanic as a whole needs a change.
I think that combos like this are fun at first and shake up the meta, but if they don’t get nerfed soon it becomes problematic. Although I know this isn’t the best example, when Lee Sin first got buffed it was pretty fun for the first two weeks or so. However, after that it got really annoying and the nerf didn’t come soon enough (and debatably wasn’t a big enough nerf).
Maybe they are planning to release more Fury cards in the future, and this is meant to be a point of synergy for it? Even then, they should change it to "if it has Fury or is a Dragon" so that it's better in Dragon decks.
Given that it's likely that Riot updates Lab of Legends with new Bosses every once in a while, I wanted to create a few Boss ideas (including the two fights that lead up to it) that I think would be interesting to play against. I'm not sure on the balance, but after some playtesting I think Riot could make the decks and passives feel fair to play against. The way I think my Bosses could be incorporated is that they would become a part of a rotating pool of Bosses, and at the beginning of each run you see which Bosses you'll face (so you can build your deck to beat them). I made decks for each enemy of 40 cards, but if the Boss is the 1st or 2nd encounter, the deck would be trimmed a bit to make it around the size of your deck.
Boss Idea 1: Gangplank (Power Level: 1st or 2nd Boss)
This deck is meant to be fairly weak, just using the Attune cards and low-cost spells with a passive that makes it hard for them to run out of resources.
This deck has guaranteed plunder every round, which allows the monkey dream to come true! I essentially just put in every Plunder card and every Monkey card. This should make this deck quite powerful, which is part of why Gangplank could be a second level Boss.
This is an all-in Keg deck that can accumulate kegs to deal lots of damage, with a few Noxus burn cards to make the kegs more likely to actually matter. I'm unsure of how powerful this deck is, but if it turns out to be too good, it can easily be nerfed by removing the Noxus cards (Noxian Fervor and Death's hand).
Boss Idea 2: Shyvana (Power Level: 1st or 2nd Boss)
Passive: Allies have Fury. You always Behold a Dragon.
This deck is built around using Fury with the Grand Plaza and other challengers. I think this deck is a bit weak, so if this were a second tier Boss, I would buff the passive to also give allies +0|+1, which would make them better at triggering Fury.
This deck uses the Demacia and Targon Dragon cards with a passive that makes them able to get out early enough to actually be impactful. This passive is very good for a Tier 1 champion, so if it had to be nerfed, I would change it to "Dragon allies have +1|+0."
Passive: Start with the Monastery of Hirana. When you recall a unit, double its Power and it keeps any buffs it had.
This deck is based around using Monastery of Hirana, recall cards, and handbuff cards to generate huge elusive units that can deal lots of Nexus. Because buffs are kept when recalling, the stats of a unit can snowball hard, such as going from a 2/1 to a 4/1 to an 8/1 to a 16/1. However, the only spell the deck has to save its units at fast speed is Homecoming, so it should be somewhat easy to prevent big units by killing the unit. Also, the passive doesn't buff Health, so the deck is vulnerable to Challenger or removal spells.
Passive: When you play a unit, summon an exact Ephemeral copy of it.
This deck utilizes the powerful Ionian "when I'm summoned" units alongside Sparring Student and Greenglade Duo to buff up the board and get lots of elusive damage.
This deck is comprised of all the expensive Ionia and Freljord units as well as the "Enlightened" cards. By starting each player at 10 Mana, Karma starts leveled and can cast powerful spells or play units like She Who Wanders to try to overwhelm the opponent. This passive might be kind of weak due to the number of player passives and items that draw cards, but I think that with an early She Who Wanders or a Turn 2 Warmother's call, it might be possible for Karma to win. Alternatively, it could end up being insanely powerful, in which can Karma can easily be nerfed by lowering the curve and cutting out some of the more powerful late-game cards.
So what do y'all think of my ideas? Would these be fun bosses to play against? Do you have any cool ideas for other Bosses and Passives?
It was removed because people abused the fact that there is no turn timer to hold people hostage without letting either player win to try to force a surrender. Riot said that once they add a time limit for the entire turn, they will revert Zephyr Sage.
I agree that a yearly tournament isn't really necessary because we already have the bimonthly ones, which I think are better because they show the best decks and players for each meta. I also think that because of the smaller tournaments, pros already have a reason to want to switch to LoR. However, I do think it might be cool to host a tournament every 2 years where the winning player from each bimonthly tournament of the past 2 years compete against each other. That way the tournament would feature people who are at least somewhat known by the community.
I'm excited to see if Targon Yasuo can finally become a deck now. They've kept printing Targon stun cards but they've been so weak that the archetype never makes sense (Sleepy Trouble Bubble, Paddle Star, and Sneaky Zeebles are all awful compared to Noxus Stun cards). In fact, even the Theorycraft Yasuo deck featured only uses 3 of Targon's Stun cards. If Aphelios isn't enough to make Targon stun at least Tier 2/3, then I think the other Targon stun cards really need a buff.
I don’t think it was oppressively viable, but I think there used to be a Deathspeaker + Knife Juggler + Dreadsteead + Defile combo. In general, giving Immune as opposed to divine shield can lead to unintended combos.
I wonder which card they'll nerf. If I were them, I would change Deathspeaker because Immune is a keyword that leads to a lot of problematic combos and unintended interactions. If they don't nerf Deathspeaker, they'll have to keep it in mind whenever they make new cards.
Theremon means that they used the word "card" instead of "spell." It could just be a typo, but it might imply that the writers don't understand how Spellburst works.
Honestly Dual-class would be an amazing idea for a mode, and I honestly think that LoR's dual-region mechanic is one of its strongest features. In terms of balance, I think that they could either just ban neutrals in dual-class (that would remove most of the OP combos) or they could have a ban list of cards that can't be played in dual-class. For example, sorceror's apprentice is balanceable in normal HS (even though it's very strong) but in Dual-class it might need to be banned. I think this would be that best solution because it allows them to print cards that don't work in dual-class while keeping the dual-class mode fair.
Thanks for the tip! As for the nerf, I think that it’s a fair nerf and should make it much less OP when used in the early rounds and much easier to play around. I would probably still prefer reducing the cost and damage to 4, but I think the change is good as it is.
Thank God this card was nerfed, hopefully all the TF/Go Hard players switch decks and the playrate goes down. Now the only major issues are Grand Plaza and Lee Sin (Lee Sin might not statistically be a problem, but I find him so annoying that I want the playrate to be near zero).
Hi Takadama, welcome to LoR! On your criticisms of balance, I would agree that a lot of them are valid, but as you play more games and in more metas, you’ll see that there are other strategies that are often better than SI or Elusives. For example, there have been metas where Ashe Noxus using Frostbites and Yetis were Tier 1, and in another meta PnZ/Noxus burn was overturned and killed players super early with tons of direct Nexus damage. However, there is no denying that SI has some very powerful cards that have allowed them to take over a lot of metas and basically cements them as an always somewhat viable region due to their amazing control cards and Aggro cards. However, I trust that the LoR development team will continue to Nerf SI cards whenever they become too problematic (if you look at LoR’s history, SI has gotten a huge number of nerfs, and used to be way better than it is now). Sorry if this was a bit rambly, I just wanted to explain that SI has a history of being troublesome but that the LoR devs have consistently nerfed it when it has overtaken the meta. Patch notes will actually release tomorrow which should address some of these issues (people are expecting Go Hard and Grand Plaza to be nerfed).
As for Elusives, I would say that they are actually in a pretty healthy spot today, especially in comparison to LoR early days. Back in beta, only Ionia had good Elusives (outside of Heimerdinger’s bots), so Ionia Elusives decks couldn’t be contested by any other region. However, Bilgewater and Targon have been released and both feature lots of Elusives, giving the concept more counterplay. Additionally, Sharpsight has given Demacia a way to block Elusives. Currently, I don’t think that there’s really any full Elusives deck other than Fiora Sparklefly (and having more Elusives wouldn’t even be that great against it), so I don’t think that elusive decks are a huge problem. I do think that Elusive is a very dangerous keyword, but I think that as long as it properly balanced, it can add another interesting way to play the game. If you want more ways to counter Elusives, you could als try playing decks with more removal options, such as Ezreal Draven.
There are actually a lot of differences between him and Riven that I think might make him better:
1. You get 1 Moon Weapon every round, instead of every other round.
2. You have control over which moon Weapons to get
3. The Moon Weapons are more powerful than collectible 2 Mana spells, whereas Fragments are weaker than 1 Mana Spells
4. Moon Weapons give you stuns, removal, healing, Nexus damage, and board presence, whereas the Fragments can only give you better attacks and are counterable by removal.
5. At least 1 Moon Weapon is good on literally any boardstate, whereas Fragments are only good if you have specific units
6. Aphelios decks are in Targon, which has more support for Token generating than Noxus and more Tools to protect units.
7. Aphelios is actually more similar to Zoe than Riven because he generates 2 Mana spells and demands an answer before he gets too much value and levels up.
Sorry of this sounded dismissive or critical, I just wanted to write out what I’ve been thinking about Aphelios because I’ve slowly been realizing that he’s better than he might seem. Of course, if there’s no deck to fit him, then he’ll be bad even if he is hypothetically powerful in a vacuum.
Best case scenario, this means that they are putting Classic into Wild and making a rotating "Core Set" whose cards are able to everyone for free while those cards are part of the Core Set (like how the Halloween event that added Wild cards to standard gave everyone a temporary free copy). Worst case, they're rotating all of classic and making a new classic set (and maybe giving players packs to compensate).
Maybe they're going to do a year-long story like the League of Evil. Except this time it'll be the Horde versus the Alliance, with the first expansion focusing on the Horde, the second focusing on the alliance, and the last expansion being a conflict between the two.
@Shenryujin
I see how Elusive is a mechanic that can be uninteractive, as it bypasses normal unit combat, but I don't think that can be fixed by changing the elusive keyword to only work on one strike/round. Instead, I think it would make more sense to change the most powerful elusive cards to have interesting conditions (making elusive a keyword that is rarely permanently put on a unit). For example:
1. Zap Sprayfin and Wiggly Burblefish elusive changed to "when you cast a spell, give me elusive this round" or maybe "when you Attune, give me elusive this round"
2. Sparklefly changed to "when you play a Celestial, give me Elusive this round."
Although I do think that these specific changes would be good for the game (the elusives I listed above are a bit too good and boring to play), I think that elusive sort of has to stay the way it is in order for a lot of champions to make sense. Off of the top of my head, all of these cards would need to be reworked if Elusive were changed:
1. Sumpworks Map
2. Teemo
3. Zoe
4. Ezreal
5. Young Witch
6. Lounging Lizard
7. Fae Guide
8. Sumpsnipe Scavenger
9. Subpurrsible
10. Nyandriod
11. Abyssal Eye
All of these cards rely on have permanent elusive to either get consistent Nexus Strikes or act as a win condition for the deck. One great example of this is Nyandriod. Without permanent elusive, it doesn't work as a win condition to try to slow buff up your Nyandriod over time. Although this strategy isn't very interactive, it still adds something new to the game that is different to play and play against. Against a devoted elusive deck, you know that you won't be able to stop them from damaging you by playing units without Challenger, so you play differently. Ultimately, what makes card games replayable is the vast variety of different-feeling games that you can play depending on the cards drawn and the decks that you face. By removing the elusive strategy, the game would lose one of these unique play patterns. It is because of this reason that I don't hate the idea of archetypes like Burn Aggro or TF Go Hard, because even though they can feel annoying to play against, as long as they keep a low playrate they ultimately add more to the game than they take away. Because of this, although I think that certain elusives are too good and deserve nerfs, I don't think that elusive as a mechanic should be reworked or removed from the game.
To be fair about Zoe, she would actually be fairly bad if the meta has lots of decks that run tons of pings (like TF Go Hard and Bilgewater when Make It Rain was 2 Mana). Still though, she almost always generates at least 1 star chart, so she’ll never be awful.
The thing is, some elusive cards only work if they are permanently elusive. For example, Young Witch uses the keyword for its support effect and not for Nexus damage. Also, cards like Sparklefly don’t work as win conditions or good buff targets without permanent elusive. I agree that some elusive cards could use with a a nerf or removal of elusive after the round, but I don’t think the mechanic as a whole needs a change.
I think that combos like this are fun at first and shake up the meta, but if they don’t get nerfed soon it becomes problematic. Although I know this isn’t the best example, when Lee Sin first got buffed it was pretty fun for the first two weeks or so. However, after that it got really annoying and the nerf didn’t come soon enough (and debatably wasn’t a big enough nerf).
Maybe they are planning to release more Fury cards in the future, and this is meant to be a point of synergy for it? Even then, they should change it to "if it has Fury or is a Dragon" so that it's better in Dragon decks.
Given that it's likely that Riot updates Lab of Legends with new Bosses every once in a while, I wanted to create a few Boss ideas (including the two fights that lead up to it) that I think would be interesting to play against. I'm not sure on the balance, but after some playtesting I think Riot could make the decks and passives feel fair to play against. The way I think my Bosses could be incorporated is that they would become a part of a rotating pool of Bosses, and at the beginning of each run you see which Bosses you'll face (so you can build your deck to beat them). I made decks for each enemy of 40 cards, but if the Boss is the 1st or 2nd encounter, the deck would be trimmed a bit to make it around the size of your deck.
Boss Idea 1: Gangplank (Power Level: 1st or 2nd Boss)
First Deck: Coral Creatures
Passive: When you cast a spell, draw 1.
This deck is meant to be fairly weak, just using the Attune cards and low-cost spells with a passive that makes it hard for them to run out of resources.
Second Deck: Monkeys
Passive: Round Start: Deal 1 to the enemy Nexus.
This deck has guaranteed plunder every round, which allows the monkey dream to come true! I essentially just put in every Plunder card and every Monkey card. This should make this deck quite powerful, which is part of why Gangplank could be a second level Boss.
Gangplank:
Passive: Summon a Powder Keg
This is an all-in Keg deck that can accumulate kegs to deal lots of damage, with a few Noxus burn cards to make the kegs more likely to actually matter. I'm unsure of how powerful this deck is, but if it turns out to be too good, it can easily be nerfed by removing the Noxus cards (Noxian Fervor and Death's hand).
Boss Idea 2: Shyvana (Power Level: 1st or 2nd Boss)
First Deck: The Vanguard
Passive: Round Start: Rally.
This deck is meant to be a Midrange Demacia deck with the "Domination" Passive, which makes it powerful but hopefully not OP.
Second Deck: The Dragonguard
Passive: Allies have Fury. You always Behold a Dragon.
This deck is built around using Fury with the Grand Plaza and other challengers. I think this deck is a bit weak, so if this were a second tier Boss, I would buff the passive to also give allies +0|+1, which would make them better at triggering Fury.
Shyvana:
Passive: Your Dragons cost 1 less
This deck uses the Demacia and Targon Dragon cards with a passive that makes them able to get out early enough to actually be impactful. This passive is very good for a Tier 1 champion, so if it had to be nerfed, I would change it to "Dragon allies have +1|+0."
Boss Idea 3: Karma (Power Level: 2nd or 3rd Boss)
First Deck: Disciples of Hirana
Passive: Start with the Monastery of Hirana. When you recall a unit, double its Power and it keeps any buffs it had.
This deck is based around using Monastery of Hirana, recall cards, and handbuff cards to generate huge elusive units that can deal lots of Nexus. Because buffs are kept when recalling, the stats of a unit can snowball hard, such as going from a 2/1 to a 4/1 to an 8/1 to a 16/1. However, the only spell the deck has to save its units at fast speed is Homecoming, so it should be somewhat easy to prevent big units by killing the unit. Also, the passive doesn't buff Health, so the deck is vulnerable to Challenger or removal spells.
Second Deck: The Order of Shadow
Passive: When you play a unit, summon an exact Ephemeral copy of it.
This deck utilizes the powerful Ionian "when I'm summoned" units alongside Sparring Student and Greenglade Duo to buff up the board and get lots of elusive damage.
Karma:
Passive: All players start at 10 Mana.
This deck is comprised of all the expensive Ionia and Freljord units as well as the "Enlightened" cards. By starting each player at 10 Mana, Karma starts leveled and can cast powerful spells or play units like She Who Wanders to try to overwhelm the opponent. This passive might be kind of weak due to the number of player passives and items that draw cards, but I think that with an early She Who Wanders or a Turn 2 Warmother's call, it might be possible for Karma to win. Alternatively, it could end up being insanely powerful, in which can Karma can easily be nerfed by lowering the curve and cutting out some of the more powerful late-game cards.
So what do y'all think of my ideas? Would these be fun bosses to play against? Do you have any cool ideas for other Bosses and Passives?
It was removed because people abused the fact that there is no turn timer to hold people hostage without letting either player win to try to force a surrender. Riot said that once they add a time limit for the entire turn, they will revert Zephyr Sage.
After 3 Plunder activations this is a better Aftershock. The main issue I see is that there aren't that many great Plunder cards.
I agree that a yearly tournament isn't really necessary because we already have the bimonthly ones, which I think are better because they show the best decks and players for each meta. I also think that because of the smaller tournaments, pros already have a reason to want to switch to LoR. However, I do think it might be cool to host a tournament every 2 years where the winning player from each bimonthly tournament of the past 2 years compete against each other. That way the tournament would feature people who are at least somewhat known by the community.
I'm excited to see if Targon Yasuo can finally become a deck now. They've kept printing Targon stun cards but they've been so weak that the archetype never makes sense (Sleepy Trouble Bubble, Paddle Star, and Sneaky Zeebles are all awful compared to Noxus Stun cards). In fact, even the Theorycraft Yasuo deck featured only uses 3 of Targon's Stun cards. If Aphelios isn't enough to make Targon stun at least Tier 2/3, then I think the other Targon stun cards really need a buff.
I don’t think it was oppressively viable, but I think there used to be a Deathspeaker + Knife Juggler + Dreadsteead + Defile combo. In general, giving Immune as opposed to divine shield can lead to unintended combos.
I wonder which card they'll nerf. If I were them, I would change Deathspeaker because Immune is a keyword that leads to a lot of problematic combos and unintended interactions. If they don't nerf Deathspeaker, they'll have to keep it in mind whenever they make new cards.
Theremon means that they used the word "card" instead of "spell." It could just be a typo, but it might imply that the writers don't understand how Spellburst works.
Honestly Dual-class would be an amazing idea for a mode, and I honestly think that LoR's dual-region mechanic is one of its strongest features. In terms of balance, I think that they could either just ban neutrals in dual-class (that would remove most of the OP combos) or they could have a ban list of cards that can't be played in dual-class. For example, sorceror's apprentice is balanceable in normal HS (even though it's very strong) but in Dual-class it might need to be banned. I think this would be that best solution because it allows them to print cards that don't work in dual-class while keeping the dual-class mode fair.
Thanks for the tip! As for the nerf, I think that it’s a fair nerf and should make it much less OP when used in the early rounds and much easier to play around. I would probably still prefer reducing the cost and damage to 4, but I think the change is good as it is.
Thank God this card was nerfed, hopefully all the TF/Go Hard players switch decks and the playrate goes down. Now the only major issues are Grand Plaza and Lee Sin (Lee Sin might not statistically be a problem, but I find him so annoying that I want the playrate to be near zero).
Hi Takadama, welcome to LoR! On your criticisms of balance, I would agree that a lot of them are valid, but as you play more games and in more metas, you’ll see that there are other strategies that are often better than SI or Elusives. For example, there have been metas where Ashe Noxus using Frostbites and Yetis were Tier 1, and in another meta PnZ/Noxus burn was overturned and killed players super early with tons of direct Nexus damage. However, there is no denying that SI has some very powerful cards that have allowed them to take over a lot of metas and basically cements them as an always somewhat viable region due to their amazing control cards and Aggro cards. However, I trust that the LoR development team will continue to Nerf SI cards whenever they become too problematic (if you look at LoR’s history, SI has gotten a huge number of nerfs, and used to be way better than it is now). Sorry if this was a bit rambly, I just wanted to explain that SI has a history of being troublesome but that the LoR devs have consistently nerfed it when it has overtaken the meta. Patch notes will actually release tomorrow which should address some of these issues (people are expecting Go Hard and Grand Plaza to be nerfed).
As for Elusives, I would say that they are actually in a pretty healthy spot today, especially in comparison to LoR early days. Back in beta, only Ionia had good Elusives (outside of Heimerdinger’s bots), so Ionia Elusives decks couldn’t be contested by any other region. However, Bilgewater and Targon have been released and both feature lots of Elusives, giving the concept more counterplay. Additionally, Sharpsight has given Demacia a way to block Elusives. Currently, I don’t think that there’s really any full Elusives deck other than Fiora Sparklefly (and having more Elusives wouldn’t even be that great against it), so I don’t think that elusive decks are a huge problem. I do think that Elusive is a very dangerous keyword, but I think that as long as it properly balanced, it can add another interesting way to play the game. If you want more ways to counter Elusives, you could als try playing decks with more removal options, such as Ezreal Draven.
There are actually a lot of differences between him and Riven that I think might make him better:
1. You get 1 Moon Weapon every round, instead of every other round.
2. You have control over which moon Weapons to get
3. The Moon Weapons are more powerful than collectible 2 Mana spells, whereas Fragments are weaker than 1 Mana Spells
4. Moon Weapons give you stuns, removal, healing, Nexus damage, and board presence, whereas the Fragments can only give you better attacks and are counterable by removal.
5. At least 1 Moon Weapon is good on literally any boardstate, whereas Fragments are only good if you have specific units
6. Aphelios decks are in Targon, which has more support for Token generating than Noxus and more Tools to protect units.
7. Aphelios is actually more similar to Zoe than Riven because he generates 2 Mana spells and demands an answer before he gets too much value and levels up.
Sorry of this sounded dismissive or critical, I just wanted to write out what I’ve been thinking about Aphelios because I’ve slowly been realizing that he’s better than he might seem. Of course, if there’s no deck to fit him, then he’ll be bad even if he is hypothetically powerful in a vacuum.
Best case scenario, this means that they are putting Classic into Wild and making a rotating "Core Set" whose cards are able to everyone for free while those cards are part of the Core Set (like how the Halloween event that added Wild cards to standard gave everyone a temporary free copy). Worst case, they're rotating all of classic and making a new classic set (and maybe giving players packs to compensate).