(Apparently there's no working Quote function. Just opens a page of code.)
"This one is quite bad as it could turn many high cost followers unplayable"
-- Did you miss the word "conditional"?
"Hell, even aggro decks can tech in a few control cards and see their winrate increase if all there is are aggro decks."
-- I don't consider it creative or even substantially varied deckbuilding to toss a combat trick in an aggro deck. Big whoop.
"This game is getting better and better with each patch, Elusives and Fearsome units were impossible to dealt with when the game first launched."
--Culling Strike is the entire list of low-cost removal against low-cost overpowered threats. THE ENTIRE LIST. Black Spear is now a bad Get Excited, and Get Excited is a bad gimmick card for an undersupported unreliable garbage archetype. Discarding stuff is always inherently going to be a trash archetype because an empty hand means you have no ability to interact in the game. And heaven forbid it's Ionia and they play a +1 Attack mentor guy on their 3 Attack card like Zed, or it gets a +1/+1 Hawk buff. And even calling Culling Strike an "answer" is generous. Eating 3 from Zed, Elise spawning a Spiderling, other cards being outright immune to it, or having to burn it on a non-champion... the list goes on and on for what is wrong with this exchange. I have to play an expensive conditional card with no intrinsic value and it doesn't function in many situations and doesn't even answer in others.
What is this long list of mythical answers to this overpowered non-interactive garbage, of which you've provided literally zero examples?
"It's kind of ironic how a game that was built on the idea of constant back and forth and interactive gameplay is plagued by decks that circumvent that exact principle."
-- Indeed. So many early game aggro cards are overpowered to an insane degree and then they have the audacity to nerf one of the few BAD CONDITIONAL ANSWER cards. What's worse is seeing people celebrate that because they're mad at Elise Autofill decks... so let's celebrate nerfing 50% of the early game responses to Elise. Like, really? People who hate Elise Autofill (now with more Kalista) should be frustrated one of the only answers TO Elise got nerfed while she remains overpowered.
Make Avalanche deal 3, Ruination cost 8, revert Rhasa to 7, Black Spear cost 1, Get Excited cost 2, Culling Strike cost 2, Noxian Guillotine cost 2, and you might have a fair patch.
The game is already dominated by Fearsome+Elusive+Quick Attack aggro. Now it's even MORE dominated by the same stagnant playstyle.
One of the only cards you could even use early to address that was Black Spear, and now it's considerably more expensive. I get that some people are really color-focused when they look at a card game and see "EVERYONE IS PLAYING SHADOW ISLES AND I'M HAPPY THEY NERFED A SHADOW ISLES CARD" without thinking in terms of decks and archetypes. It was also one of the only things cheap enough to fit 2 answers in a turn to stop a Karma or Dinger, not that anyone cares about Control because of how painfully hated the archetype clearly is by these devs.
(And for the guy who mentioned Get Excited, it's not my fault that card is under-supported trash. Get Excited should probably cost 1 or they need more discard support, and Black Spear should cost 1 as well.)
Even as someone who hates seeing the same deck, more or less, every game... Shadow Assassin is fine. If you consider 1 mana worth a vanilla 2/2, drawing a card worth another tax of 1, and elusive worth another tax of 1, then that's 3. Like you're fine with a 2/1 Elusive that constantly grows to 3-5 attack as a 2-cost, but you complain about Shadow Assassin? Talk about misaimed.
This game's problem is it lacks a Control archetype, it lacks support for such, and if it did have support for such... it has the lazy problem of thinking Control wincons need to just vomit nigh-unlimited value from single cards, like Karma and Dinger. The devs clearly hate Control, that's why Black Spear and Rhasa got nerfed. They, for some reason, think the gameplay of 2 people vomiting aggro and snowball cards at each other is better than two-sided interaction, despite having a game engine that actually supports interaction.
Aggro is overpowered, Fearsome and Elusive are too available on cheap cards, Aggro Champions are disgustingly overpowered, and answers to all of this basically don't exist.
So I got it 2 or 3 months ago. I quite enjoyed the pace of growing your collection, you don't get handed everything asap, but you also grow at a very steady pace. You can cast things at different spell speeds to have windows of interaction like MTG, but the pace of the game didn't suffer for it. Game aesthetics are on point, it feels well made and well polished.
But the immediate issue I ran into was 95% of my opponents were playing basically the same thing every game: Aggro.
- Elise + Fearsome
- Noxus free damage vomit
- Elusive + Autofill
- Aggro Champion with Quick Attack + Autofill
- Usually some fusion of two of the above
This meant I could literally only ever play Shadow Isles + Stuff myself, because Black Spear was a painful necessity against all the constant aggro swarms, Shadow Isles also has some of the only good card draw to dig with, and even Grasp of the Undying (which is overcosted) was also kind of necessary.
Doesn't help that, on top of this, the "control" deck's cheese of choice with Heimdinger and Karma also pretty much required a cheap 3 damage spell so you could cast 2 removals in a turn, or just get overrun by their endless value. And "answer me or basically lose immediately" gameplay is VERY polarizing and not fun. Any delay means too much damage or too many generated cards for the opponent, and you'll lose to THAT even if you find an answer after a short delay.
ALL OF THIS COULD BE ADDRESSED WITH MORE CHEAP CONDITIONAL REMOVAL OPTIONS.
Instead they nerf Black Spear. It was already balanced and difficult to utilize without filling your deck with a bunch of 1-cost garbage which already can't block Fearsome, can't block Elusive, and is too weak to even BE called a roadblock against the Aggro decks.
So now literally only Culling Strike exists to deal with SOME of the overwhelming number of Aggro cards, and it doesn't work on several. Noxian Guillotine is worthless because you can't EVEN do damage in the early game at all to units with Fearsome and Elusive going unblocked or Quick Attack not taking damage on attack. Most games just degenerate into a game of chicken between who can vomit the most Elusive+Fearsome cards or some overpowered Champion like Zed not being immediately answered, starting at "only" 6 damage per turn for 3 and ramping up after.
Legends of Runeterra was already plagued by Aggro being overpowered, Combo being overpowered, and Control pretty much not existing. For an online card game that FINALLY offered some promise of Mutually InteractiveGameplay (without the toxicity of unlimited value Planeswalkers), instead windows of interaction are being closed. Almost every low-cost Champion in this game now cannot be meaningfully interacted with, Elusive and Fearsome based aggression is even more dominating, and decks have even less variety in builds and gameplay than before because CONTROL isn't allowed to exist to balance the meta. (And even on Control's end, I don't want an unlimited value engine like Heimerdinger to exist in his current state either. That's the SAME issue MTG has. The card goes a minimum of 2 or 3 for 1 if he even gets answered or just oppressively wins without an immediate answer.)
There's no decisions or variety in deck-building or gameplay. You play Aggro of some flavor and vomit cards at the opponent and whoever can vomit harder wins. I don't care that there's 4 or 5 flavors of THE SAME EXACT THING WITH THE SAME FUNDAMENTAL GAMEPLAY, it's still the same deck with the same playstyle. Vomit difficult-to-block guys, go aggro. Mostly, it's just whichever aggro deck in the aggro mirror draws more of their unanswerable aggro Champions first and can attack with them first to snowball the game. Some combat tricks can shift this but those are again just standard aggro cards for standard aggro decks.
Do I really care if it's Shadow Isles, Noxus, Ionia, or Demacia? Nope. It's all the same deck doing the same thing.
And that's why I want to put the game down. It has a fun core, it has promise. But it's like the developers only like Aggro and Combo and hate Control, like the usual kids in other card games who whine whenever anything Control based is viable. Instead of playing better, balancing threat output, not overextending, finding ways to increase value generation... these kinds just whine that the other guy's Control cards need nerfs. It's a childish way to play, wanting to treat the game like a singleplayer race and then complaining that you hit a speedbump instead of asking what you could do to play around your opponent. And it's a childish and self-defeating way to build a game.
(Apparently there's no working Quote function. Just opens a page of code.)
"This one is quite bad as it could turn many high cost followers unplayable"
-- Did you miss the word "conditional"?
"Hell, even aggro decks can tech in a few control cards and see their winrate increase if all there is are aggro decks."
-- I don't consider it creative or even substantially varied deckbuilding to toss a combat trick in an aggro deck. Big whoop.
"This game is getting better and better with each patch, Elusives and Fearsome units were impossible to dealt with when the game first launched."
--Culling Strike is the entire list of low-cost removal against low-cost overpowered threats. THE ENTIRE LIST. Black Spear is now a bad Get Excited, and Get Excited is a bad gimmick card for an undersupported unreliable garbage archetype. Discarding stuff is always inherently going to be a trash archetype because an empty hand means you have no ability to interact in the game. And heaven forbid it's Ionia and they play a +1 Attack mentor guy on their 3 Attack card like Zed, or it gets a +1/+1 Hawk buff.
And even calling Culling Strike an "answer" is generous. Eating 3 from Zed, Elise spawning a Spiderling, other cards being outright immune to it, or having to burn it on a non-champion... the list goes on and on for what is wrong with this exchange. I have to play an expensive conditional card with no intrinsic value and it doesn't function in many situations and doesn't even answer in others.
What is this long list of mythical answers to this overpowered non-interactive garbage, of which you've provided literally zero examples?
"It's kind of ironic how a game that was built on the idea of constant back and forth and interactive gameplay is plagued by decks that circumvent that exact principle."
-- Indeed. So many early game aggro cards are overpowered to an insane degree and then they have the audacity to nerf one of the few BAD CONDITIONAL ANSWER cards. What's worse is seeing people celebrate that because they're mad at Elise Autofill decks... so let's celebrate nerfing 50% of the early game responses to Elise. Like, really? People who hate Elise Autofill (now with more Kalista) should be frustrated one of the only answers TO Elise got nerfed while she remains overpowered.
Make Avalanche deal 3, Ruination cost 8, revert Rhasa to 7, Black Spear cost 1, Get Excited cost 2, Culling Strike cost 2, Noxian Guillotine cost 2, and you might have a fair patch.
This patch feels like game killing garbage.
The game is already dominated by Fearsome+Elusive+Quick Attack aggro. Now it's even MORE dominated by the same stagnant playstyle.
One of the only cards you could even use early to address that was Black Spear, and now it's considerably more expensive. I get that some people are really color-focused when they look at a card game and see "EVERYONE IS PLAYING SHADOW ISLES AND I'M HAPPY THEY NERFED A SHADOW ISLES CARD" without thinking in terms of decks and archetypes. It was also one of the only things cheap enough to fit 2 answers in a turn to stop a Karma or Dinger, not that anyone cares about Control because of how painfully hated the archetype clearly is by these devs.
(And for the guy who mentioned Get Excited, it's not my fault that card is under-supported trash. Get Excited should probably cost 1 or they need more discard support, and Black Spear should cost 1 as well.)
Even as someone who hates seeing the same deck, more or less, every game... Shadow Assassin is fine. If you consider 1 mana worth a vanilla 2/2, drawing a card worth another tax of 1, and elusive worth another tax of 1, then that's 3. Like you're fine with a 2/1 Elusive that constantly grows to 3-5 attack as a 2-cost, but you complain about Shadow Assassin? Talk about misaimed.
This game's problem is it lacks a Control archetype, it lacks support for such, and if it did have support for such... it has the lazy problem of thinking Control wincons need to just vomit nigh-unlimited value from single cards, like Karma and Dinger. The devs clearly hate Control, that's why Black Spear and Rhasa got nerfed. They, for some reason, think the gameplay of 2 people vomiting aggro and snowball cards at each other is better than two-sided interaction, despite having a game engine that actually supports interaction.
Aggro is overpowered, Fearsome and Elusive are too available on cheap cards, Aggro Champions are disgustingly overpowered, and answers to all of this basically don't exist.
So I got it 2 or 3 months ago. I quite enjoyed the pace of growing your collection, you don't get handed everything asap, but you also grow at a very steady pace. You can cast things at different spell speeds to have windows of interaction like MTG, but the pace of the game didn't suffer for it. Game aesthetics are on point, it feels well made and well polished.
But the immediate issue I ran into was 95% of my opponents were playing basically the same thing every game: Aggro.
- Elise + Fearsome
- Noxus free damage vomit
- Elusive + Autofill
- Aggro Champion with Quick Attack + Autofill
- Usually some fusion of two of the above
This meant I could literally only ever play Shadow Isles + Stuff myself, because Black Spear was a painful necessity against all the constant aggro swarms, Shadow Isles also has some of the only good card draw to dig with, and even Grasp of the Undying (which is overcosted) was also kind of necessary.
Doesn't help that, on top of this, the "control" deck's cheese of choice with Heimdinger and Karma also pretty much required a cheap 3 damage spell so you could cast 2 removals in a turn, or just get overrun by their endless value. And "answer me or basically lose immediately" gameplay is VERY polarizing and not fun. Any delay means too much damage or too many generated cards for the opponent, and you'll lose to THAT even if you find an answer after a short delay.
ALL OF THIS COULD BE ADDRESSED WITH MORE CHEAP CONDITIONAL REMOVAL OPTIONS.
Instead they nerf Black Spear. It was already balanced and difficult to utilize without filling your deck with a bunch of 1-cost garbage which already can't block Fearsome, can't block Elusive, and is too weak to even BE called a roadblock against the Aggro decks.
So now literally only Culling Strike exists to deal with SOME of the overwhelming number of Aggro cards, and it doesn't work on several. Noxian Guillotine is worthless because you can't EVEN do damage in the early game at all to units with Fearsome and Elusive going unblocked or Quick Attack not taking damage on attack. Most games just degenerate into a game of chicken between who can vomit the most Elusive+Fearsome cards or some overpowered Champion like Zed not being immediately answered, starting at "only" 6 damage per turn for 3 and ramping up after.
Legends of Runeterra was already plagued by Aggro being overpowered, Combo being overpowered, and Control pretty much not existing. For an online card game that FINALLY offered some promise of Mutually Interactive Gameplay (without the toxicity of unlimited value Planeswalkers), instead windows of interaction are being closed. Almost every low-cost Champion in this game now cannot be meaningfully interacted with, Elusive and Fearsome based aggression is even more dominating, and decks have even less variety in builds and gameplay than before because CONTROL isn't allowed to exist to balance the meta. (And even on Control's end, I don't want an unlimited value engine like Heimerdinger to exist in his current state either. That's the SAME issue MTG has. The card goes a minimum of 2 or 3 for 1 if he even gets answered or just oppressively wins without an immediate answer.)
There's no decisions or variety in deck-building or gameplay. You play Aggro of some flavor and vomit cards at the opponent and whoever can vomit harder wins. I don't care that there's 4 or 5 flavors of THE SAME EXACT THING WITH THE SAME FUNDAMENTAL GAMEPLAY, it's still the same deck with the same playstyle. Vomit difficult-to-block guys, go aggro. Mostly, it's just whichever aggro deck in the aggro mirror draws more of their unanswerable aggro Champions first and can attack with them first to snowball the game. Some combat tricks can shift this but those are again just standard aggro cards for standard aggro decks.
Do I really care if it's Shadow Isles, Noxus, Ionia, or Demacia? Nope. It's all the same deck doing the same thing.
And that's why I want to put the game down. It has a fun core, it has promise. But it's like the developers only like Aggro and Combo and hate Control, like the usual kids in other card games who whine whenever anything Control based is viable. Instead of playing better, balancing threat output, not overextending, finding ways to increase value generation... these kinds just whine that the other guy's Control cards need nerfs. It's a childish way to play, wanting to treat the game like a singleplayer race and then complaining that you hit a speedbump instead of asking what you could do to play around your opponent. And it's a childish and self-defeating way to build a game.