Its shame that missing duplicate rule seems to be disabled, if it would be still on it would guarantee at least 260 dust/pack.
It is not disabled. But it will not work on card you already owned. So if you for example have two Crimson Sigil Runners and you dust them, the game knows, that you owned them and hence they are not missing, ergo they will not be in the next pack.
LOL can you imagine if the game literally couldn't ever give you a duplicate? That would mean after ~15 packs from a particular expansion, you'd have all ~50 commons and then the game would have to resort to giving you only better cards (at which point you'd soon be collecting epics and legendaries exclusively), or you would just be opening packs with a single (if any) card in them.
I like where both your heads are at on this. Specifically, I would recommend:
Changing Avalanche to either 4 damage or to fast speed. I spent a lot of time trying this month to make this card work, and even with a glut of P&Z / Noxus burn decks and Demacia bannerman decks it just stinks. The burn decks will always open attack, the bannerman decks will mostly survive it, and if there's a Crimson Disciple on-board you'll probably lose as much health as you prevent. It's just insane how much better Withering Wail is: for 1 more mana, the damage is fast-speed limited to your opponent's board and you heal.
Either buff Counterfeit Copies to shuffle more copies or make it guaranteed to put one on/near the top. I know what you're thinking--that's a P&Z card, not a Frejlord--but its intended to be part of the Elnuk package. Granted nobody wants a return to pre-nerf Elnuk madness, but it should be possible to build a Frejlord/P&Z deck that can contest a bannerman deck on turn 5 with some consistency.
Remove the "if" clause on Poro Herder--he just always tutors you 2 poros. Maybe also make Poro Snax add a random poro to hand? Basically: poros should be an easily slottable package comparable to spiders in SI, Eye of the Dragon + spells in Ionia, or aggro / Can't Block in Noxus.
Reduce the cost of She Who Wanders--maybe a 8 mana 8/8? She's suppose to be a stabilization tool circa The Ruination, but whereas SI can bank mana and heal/stall until Ruination on 6, its nearly impossible for Frejlord to survive until 10 without already winning board anyways.
I've been playing something very similar to that TF/GP "keg control" deck. It's effective, but so stressful to play! Much more than my other control decks. You really need to put a lot of thought into when you're going to drop your kegs and how exactly you intend to use them, since they are nearly impossible to protect for long.
Thematically, I love SI. They have a feel that is unique and intuitive. It reminds me of M:tG Sultai / Golgari without the clunkiness of dealing with a discard pile. I also really like how it has a glass cannon feel thanks to Ephemeral, Can't Block, and Fearsome tags.
Balance-wise, I would concur with the general consensus that the region is overly popular at-large but I would argue that this is due to other regions being under-tuned moreso than SI being over-tuned. Specifically: there are certain packages (P&Z discard, Frejlord poros, Frejlord battlescars, and P&Z purrsuit to name a few) that are virtually unplayed, and that has big ripple effects in deck construction.
Mao'kaiBADCARDNAME might be my favorite champion in the game right now. I'm not convinced he's any good, but between the saplings and deep bonuses and his deck attack he has so many interesting possibilities.
The Ruination is an especially interesting card. Honestly, it and Corina are the only effective counters to big boards right now, so I like that it is in the game. However it creates this condition that SI is one of the most effective splashes for control as well as aggro, and that just feels odd.
The only card that I earnestly hate is Commander Ledros--I hate losing to him, and I hate winning with him. Specifically: I hate that he has the combination of his Play skill, Fearsome tag, 9 attack, and that damned last whisper that returns him to hand. I'm not even saying that he's overpowered, I'm just saying that that much value and tempo coming from a single card with no other synergies or situational dependencies makes me feel extremely uncomfortable.
On the one hand: any significant new game in the genre is a potential for both developers and players to learn and enjoy, so it is hard to frame this as anything other than good news.
On the other hand: I'm extremely troubled by how Valve has treated Artifact so far--especially how they went radio silent as their play-rate plummeted. It is a lot of effort to create AND MAINTAIN an interesting CCG, and frankly their behavior this past year strikes me more like a business trying to recuperate whatever tail revenue they can off a failing investment than a game company trying to earnestly create the next Big Thing.
As an aside: I have no idea whether its worth the time/effort to do it, but I really liked that format from the https://outof.cards/legends-of-runeterra/1322-twitch-rivals-legends-of-runeterra-showdown-results-and-decklists article. Each decklist was effectively nested within a button, so you could expand and contract and potentially see every deck on the same page as the article--unlike for example this page, where I need to click on a new link for each decklist, or say the decklist report which came out right after this, where every decklist is embedded but also always displayed. It made the article a lot easier to navigate & digest, especially on my phone.
The most popular (only?) constructed Sejuani deck I've seen has been Teemo + Sejuani. If they draw into a puff cap, it will trigger the frost bite. I've seen some interesting Ashe + Sejuani theorycraft decklists as well, but not actually being played.
Really? Granted, I've been playing mostly unranked games, but I'm seeing almost constant Noxus+P&Z burn and Demacia Bannerman--very few control decks in sight.
It's nice to see some of my favorite HS streamers participate; I hope they stick around. Many of them were active during the closed beta, and ironically now that the game is actually released they're barely playing LoR.
Honestly, the only thing about the klepto cards that annoy me is that I really want to build a deckbuff deck around Shared Spoils, Avarosan Hearthguard, and Ursine Spiritwalker, and the very thought of putting in all that effort to an (at best) Tier-3 deck only to have my opponent steal and play my own buffed units against me makes me want cry.
Is riptide so good to be used in several deck? If Nautilus is in play usually you are going to win in any case, otherwise it's just a very expensive STUN ...
Most of the time I've seen Riptide effectively used against me, its been as stall tactic with no Nautilus on board--e.g., as an overpriced Steel Tempest. Nauty and his deep monsters are a long-con; once they go deep they have insane value, but they are still weak to being burned out before they can realize that value.
Recurring Villain. You think you've killed him, but then he comes back, see--like a cartoon villain!
So yeah, wasted many hours building decks around that silly card. There was a slightly viable priest variant back when Arms only cost 2 mana, but pushing it back to 3 pretty much killed it.
I'm not a fan at all of Sump Dredger: sure, 4/3 sounds great on paper but in practice it usually just ends up trading poorly, and that discard requirement can make it super awkward. I'd much rather have Mystic Shot.
Another card you should consider is Transfusion: I know it doesn't look as impressive as Brother's Bond since its only temporary, but in practice you can often save you Draven / Jinx which is huge.
Sounds like you need a new device more than anything.
performance on the 2 seem quite similar, so if you can’t run HS, don’t expect to be able to run LoR.
Personally I pla HS exclusively on mobile devices with zero issues
I too play both games on an Android tablet (Samsung Tab2, I believe) as well as on a laptop sometimes. I have some slight latency issues with HS on tablet--very noticeable when first loading, and sometimes when playing battlegrounds but otherwise tolerable. I have no issue with LoR on either device.
I mean do you even remember HS have an exp system?
Yes--because I still remember fighting with it when I was first starting. In case you weren't being rhetorical: for each class, they lock 5 basic class cards behind progression levels 2-10. Some of them are fairly significant (e.g., Kill Command, Swipe, Shadow Word: Death), so unless you're willing to dump significant cash into this game which you've just started playing not ONLY do you need to build a deck mostly from free cards but you also have this handicap for the first ~week.
But I saw some game play with a lot of mf/Quinn decks.. My question is the following: why Quinn? Seems like she is there just to take a champ slot, why not run gp or garden as better 5 drop.
I mean the Quinn level up is kind of bad... And her stats aren't great either.
Valor is a lot more annoying than you would think. That challenger usually means that Quinn can attack relatively safely on curve, with MF on board she's effectively a 3/1, and worst case you have 2 scout bodies which you can judiciously sacrifice (e.g., only swing with one at a time) to progress MF. And once MF flips, ANY attacks are extremely advantageous.
Eh - that article says the competition was only eight players in NA. I know the LoR community isn't huge as of yet, but eight data points is pretty small, and of those, fewer than half were playing Vi.
That is one way to look at it. Another way would be to say: "8 of the best LoR players in North America participated in tournament each with what they thought was the single best deck, and out of the 35 champions available, those players picked Vi 3 times, Fiora twice, Karma twice, 8 other champions once, and 24 champions weren't picked at all." I agree this data is limited and therefore any conclusions shouldn't be considered definitive, but at the least it should cast some strong doubt that out of all 35 champions Vi is the one most deserving of a buff right now.
Here's the EU article; I didn't link it originally the title wasn't as splashy but 4 of the 8 EU players brought nearly-identical Heimer + Vi decks.
She is almost useless. Even if you run three it is as if you only have one. The power you build up doesn't stay on the others and unless you have her in your opening hand she takes to long to power up. And even if she does level up there are normal none champion cards that could do her job but better with half the resources put into them.
I was pretty unimpressed with Vi too, but apparently she been a terror at the tournaments.
It looks like she's performing extremely well splashed into bannerman and corina archetypes as support / alt win condition, rather than actively trying to level her.
Quick preface: I'm not trying to put Blizzard on a pedestal - they've done a lot wrong over the years, and Hearthstone is clearly less F2P friendly than Legends of Runeterra. Despite that, I think this article is really trash. It's honestly almost impressive how lacking in neutrality this piece is. The aggressively pro-Riot/anti-Blizzard bias in this article is shocking.
I would agree that the title of this article seems overly inflammatory, and I was frankly shocked when I saw that Flux was the author.
As for the rest of the article: I think there was definitely some favoritism but I wouldn't say it was excessively so. This is a 3rd party fan site run on passion; respectfully voicing personal opinions isn't unreasonable. I would say the bigger issue is that it was essentially combining two separate topics: the announcement of LoR's new patch methodology and a comparison of mobile LoR versus mobile HS. That created a weird blend of objective and subjective sentences, so the end result sounded like a partisan hit piece.
It's interesting--you're essentially blending 2 common archetypes. Historically, prankster decks splash either P&Z or Noxus so they can deal direct nexus damage (Mystic Shot, Get Excited!, DevastateBADCARDNAME). SI + Ionia decks tend to be more on the control side, usually looking to win late with L2 Karma.
I would cut the Scaled SnappersBADCARDNAME and Greenglade EldersBADCARDNAME, and I add Zed ASAP. Other strong cards include Darkwater Scourge, Death Mark, Glimpse Beyond, and Deny. I think you also need to eventually decide between Snapvine and Empyrean: they are both good, but their game plans are somewhat antithetical to each other.
To answer your original question: obviously you're winning with this deck, so that's good. I would say its biggest flaw is that the elusives and death-lovers don't inherently synergize with each other, so you'll have higher chances of getting bad draws. Again: I think the Demacia Bannermen net-decks will be very challenging, but I can't really say at what rung they exist on ladder.
LOL can you imagine if the game literally couldn't ever give you a duplicate? That would mean after ~15 packs from a particular expansion, you'd have all ~50 commons and then the game would have to resort to giving you only better cards (at which point you'd soon be collecting epics and legendaries exclusively), or you would just be opening packs with a single (if any) card in them.
I like where both your heads are at on this. Specifically, I would recommend:
I've been playing something very similar to that TF/GP "keg control" deck. It's effective, but so stressful to play! Much more than my other control decks. You really need to put a lot of thought into when you're going to drop your kegs and how exactly you intend to use them, since they are nearly impossible to protect for long.
On the one hand: any significant new game in the genre is a potential for both developers and players to learn and enjoy, so it is hard to frame this as anything other than good news.
On the other hand: I'm extremely troubled by how Valve has treated Artifact so far--especially how they went radio silent as their play-rate plummeted. It is a lot of effort to create AND MAINTAIN an interesting CCG, and frankly their behavior this past year strikes me more like a business trying to recuperate whatever tail revenue they can off a failing investment than a game company trying to earnestly create the next Big Thing.
As an aside: I have no idea whether its worth the time/effort to do it, but I really liked that format from the https://outof.cards/legends-of-runeterra/1322-twitch-rivals-legends-of-runeterra-showdown-results-and-decklists article. Each decklist was effectively nested within a button, so you could expand and contract and potentially see every deck on the same page as the article--unlike for example this page, where I need to click on a new link for each decklist, or say the decklist report which came out right after this, where every decklist is embedded but also always displayed. It made the article a lot easier to navigate & digest, especially on my phone.
The most popular (only?) constructed Sejuani deck I've seen has been Teemo + Sejuani. If they draw into a puff cap, it will trigger the frost bite. I've seen some interesting Ashe + Sejuani theorycraft decklists as well, but not actually being played.
Really? Granted, I've been playing mostly unranked games, but I'm seeing almost constant Noxus+P&Z burn and Demacia Bannerman--very few control decks in sight.
It's nice to see some of my favorite HS streamers participate; I hope they stick around. Many of them were active during the closed beta, and ironically now that the game is actually released they're barely playing LoR.
Honestly, the only thing about the klepto cards that annoy me is that I really want to build a deckbuff deck around Shared Spoils, Avarosan Hearthguard, and Ursine Spiritwalker, and the very thought of putting in all that effort to an (at best) Tier-3 deck only to have my opponent steal and play my own buffed units against me makes me want cry.
Most of the time I've seen Riptide effectively used against me, its been as stall tactic with no Nautilus on board--e.g., as an overpriced Steel Tempest. Nauty and his deep monsters are a long-con; once they go deep they have insane value, but they are still weak to being burned out before they can realize that value.
Recurring Villain. You think you've killed him, but then he comes back, see--like a cartoon villain!
So yeah, wasted many hours building decks around that silly card. There was a slightly viable priest variant back when Arms only cost 2 mana, but pushing it back to 3 pretty much killed it.
I'm not a fan at all of Sump Dredger: sure, 4/3 sounds great on paper but in practice it usually just ends up trading poorly, and that discard requirement can make it super awkward. I'd much rather have Mystic Shot.
Another card you should consider is Transfusion: I know it doesn't look as impressive as Brother's Bond since its only temporary, but in practice you can often save you Draven / Jinx which is huge.
I too play both games on an Android tablet (Samsung Tab2, I believe) as well as on a laptop sometimes. I have some slight latency issues with HS on tablet--very noticeable when first loading, and sometimes when playing battlegrounds but otherwise tolerable. I have no issue with LoR on either device.
Yes--because I still remember fighting with it when I was first starting. In case you weren't being rhetorical: for each class, they lock 5 basic class cards behind progression levels 2-10. Some of them are fairly significant (e.g., Kill Command, Swipe, Shadow Word: Death), so unless you're willing to dump significant cash into this game which you've just started playing not ONLY do you need to build a deck mostly from free cards but you also have this handicap for the first ~week.
Valor is a lot more annoying than you would think. That challenger usually means that Quinn can attack relatively safely on curve, with MF on board she's effectively a 3/1, and worst case you have 2 scout bodies which you can judiciously sacrifice (e.g., only swing with one at a time) to progress MF. And once MF flips, ANY attacks are extremely advantageous.
That is one way to look at it. Another way would be to say: "8 of the best LoR players in North America participated in tournament each with what they thought was the single best deck, and out of the 35 champions available, those players picked Vi 3 times, Fiora twice, Karma twice, 8 other champions once, and 24 champions weren't picked at all." I agree this data is limited and therefore any conclusions shouldn't be considered definitive, but at the least it should cast some strong doubt that out of all 35 champions Vi is the one most deserving of a buff right now.
Here's the EU article; I didn't link it originally the title wasn't as splashy but 4 of the 8 EU players brought nearly-identical Heimer + Vi decks.
https://dotesports.com/lor/news/lux-karma-beats-corina-control-in-legends-of-runeterra-eu-community-invitational
I was pretty unimpressed with Vi too, but apparently she been a terror at the tournaments.
https://dotesports.com/lor/news/demacia-vi-dominates-in-legends-of-runeterra-na-community-invitational
It looks like she's performing extremely well splashed into bannerman and corina archetypes as support / alt win condition, rather than actively trying to level her.
I would agree that the title of this article seems overly inflammatory, and I was frankly shocked when I saw that Flux was the author.
As for the rest of the article: I think there was definitely some favoritism but I wouldn't say it was excessively so. This is a 3rd party fan site run on passion; respectfully voicing personal opinions isn't unreasonable. I would say the bigger issue is that it was essentially combining two separate topics: the announcement of LoR's new patch methodology and a comparison of mobile LoR versus mobile HS. That created a weird blend of objective and subjective sentences, so the end result sounded like a partisan hit piece.
It's interesting--you're essentially blending 2 common archetypes. Historically, prankster decks splash either P&Z or Noxus so they can deal direct nexus damage (Mystic Shot, Get Excited!, DevastateBADCARDNAME). SI + Ionia decks tend to be more on the control side, usually looking to win late with L2 Karma.
I would cut the Scaled SnappersBADCARDNAME and Greenglade EldersBADCARDNAME, and I add Zed ASAP. Other strong cards include Darkwater Scourge, Death Mark, Glimpse Beyond, and Deny. I think you also need to eventually decide between Snapvine and Empyrean: they are both good, but their game plans are somewhat antithetical to each other.
To answer your original question: obviously you're winning with this deck, so that's good. I would say its biggest flaw is that the elusives and death-lovers don't inherently synergize with each other, so you'll have higher chances of getting bad draws. Again: I think the Demacia Bannermen net-decks will be very challenging, but I can't really say at what rung they exist on ladder.