Hello all, earlier this week Legends of Runeterra (LoR) revealed eleven cards that will be in their next update, and as someone who plays the game regularly I thought it would be fun to take a crack at ranking all the cards and seeing how accurate my predictions can be. This series aims to be informative for both veterans to LoR and people who have never played the game before but might be curious about it. Therefore the following paragraphs will explain to you the major mechanics that make this game unique from other card games so you have a decent understanding of why these revealed cards might be good or bad. Keywords for cards will be hyperlinked to take you to their wiki page so you can read up what they do if you aren’t in the know.
Lets start with the basics: The cards are divided by regions, and each deck can have cards from only two regions in their deck i.e. Noxus/Freljord or Ionia/Targon. Each deck can have up to three of any card in its deck, and decks consist of forty cards. Chief amongst the cards you’d want to put into the deck are Champion cards. These are units that are typically much more powerful and polarizing than other units, that can level up into even stronger forms permanently when you meet certain conditions, and are often what you build your decks around. You can have up to six champion cards in your deck.
As for the gameplay, each player has twenty life and you can’t heal above that total. Players take turns taking actions, rather than one person taking a turn than the other player taking their turn. So if you summon a follower, your opponent gets to take an action. There are also faster spells you can play in response to certain actions your opponent may take, and burst/focus spells just happen instantly and don’t pass your turn. Each round the attack token swaps between players, and whomever has it can attack with their minions. Units can attack the turn they’re summoned, and defenders can choose to block with their units. The last mechanic that really separates this game is spell mana. Like in Hearthstone players start at one mana and increase it to a max of ten each round, but if you end your turn with leftover mana it gets converted into spell mana. You can have up to three spell mana, and casting spells consumes spell mana first. With this system they can design super powerful spells that cost more than ten mana and require you to set them up more, and it also makes not playing cards early much less punishing and even a legitimate strategy for several decks.
Now that all of that has been explained I can link newcomers in the future to this article going forward! Let’s get on with the card review now! I’ll be ranking them with three metrics, all of them out of 10. First will be the cards strength, second will be how fun the card will be to play with, and third will be my personal excitement/bias for the card.
Captain Indari
Strength – 5/10
Fun – 5/10
Bias – 5/10
This card for me is picture perfect example of just a ‘fine’ card. Plunder is pretty easy to set up, however without an extra card in hand to trigger it you’ll likely need to attack to set this card up, which will make it tougher to get her value right away. Improvise is always useful to have, and Forging your allies in wide decks is always useful. That said these effects all look fairly tame. This card does look like a suitable replacement for Fleet Admiral Shelly for Samira decks that don’t want to include Bilgewater which is always welcome, but in general I have a hard time picturing this card having a big impact on the metagame as things are. Its success will likely hinge on how consistent it is to combo with the Noxus followers that trigger Plunders. We’ll see how future card reveals change this, but as it stands it’s a fine card. Nothing super great or exciting, but definitely a type of card I like being added to the game. Not every card needs to be super exciting or crazy, expansions need solid cards to fill out the roster too!
Beguiling Cobra
Strength – 6/10
Fun – 7/10
Bias – 4/10
Wide Ionia oh boy! I’m a bit torn on this card. On the one hand it has a unique mechanic that can make for some really whacky and crazy combos that will be ripe for compilations on YouTube! And I will likely be theory-crafting fun and obscure combos to try out with this a ton. The problem I have with the card is I’m worried about it ending up being used to promote rather unfun and unhealthy playstyles rather than innovative or unique ones. The main concerns I have with this card are coin duplications and Elusive. It being a 7 mana unit should make it difficult for those playstyles to be unbeatable but you never know what seemingly innocuous addition to the game can make or break a strategy.
Perfidious Promoter
Strength – 7/10
Fun – 7/10
Bias – 1/10
I’m gonna be 100% transparent: I don’t want this card in the game, and I don’t like the implications cards like these have on the design space of LoR. You see one of the things that killed Hearthstone for me was the ludicrous amounts of randomness added to the game, and this is not in any stretch of the imagination an unpopular sentiment. Random followers being generated from regions outside of your opponents chosen ones has the potential for a ton of unfun scenarios where you lose because of something impossible for you to play around. It being a well stated four cost card means it’s something you’ll see consistently in the decks it’s played in as well unlike the Cobra where you might kill your opponent before they get going. I really hope this doesn’t lead to more ‘random’ cards being added, because with Hearthstone it was fairly tame at first but spiraled out of control, and this isn’t the first ‘random card’ instance we’ve seen in LoR.
Innovative Blacksmith
Strength – 6/10
Fun – 5/10
Bias – 6/10
Another card that’s for the most part just fine, which I’m all for us getting more of. It’s well stated, has a clear niche and gives Freljord back a bit of the healing they lost in rotation without being overbearing. I’m all for well balanced healing cards, and this one certainly qualifies with the once per round and not guaranteed trigger. Whilst I don’t enjoy aggro decks I understand their importance to the health of a card game. Improvise is a strong mechanic even outside of Jax decks, and it heals you one on the turn you drop her as well, however it requires consist triggers to be worth it and likely will only see play in weapon oriented decks.
Sacrificial Scholar
Strength – 8/10
Fun – 7/10
Bias – 7/10
Targon really needed some love after rotation, and it is getting it! This card has everything Targon wants right now. It’s a cheap unit with Fated that returns your investment when you buff it. Because you have a bit of control on which spells you get back as well as there being a ton of combo potential, and it’s still a good drop late game too. Since you can play some really powerful buff spells on it and make it immediately a threat and get those potent buffs back even if your opponent removes it. It’s all in all exactly what Targon needs, and a great step towards bringing them back into the meta. I myself really wanna try combining Shadow Isles cards!
Royal Shimmerwing
Strength – ?
Fun – ?
Bias – ?
This is gonna be one of those cards that’s impossible to judge until we see more. Its entire schtick is buffing Birds, and at the moment this is the only bird we know about, so we’ll have to wait and see what they’re cooking first. I’ll return to this card at a later date and give my thoughts then!
Grave Companion
Strength – 7/10
Fun – 7/10
Bias – 7/10
Look at the good boy! And lucky number 777 too! This is similar to the Blacksmith and Captain and that it’s really simply and good card, however this one to me seems to be quite a bit better. Card draw is super important in any card game, consistent card draw even more so. Being a four cost card means you’ll be able to drop this comfortably early and late game without it messing up your curve, Shadow Isles has tons of easy ways to guarantee it triggers its card draw the turn you drop it as well. Husk synergy may be nuts with this card as well. Also who doesn’t want an adorable eternal doggo?
Altar to Unity
Strength – 6/10
Fun – 6/10
Bias – 5/10
On paper this card looks too slow and weak to do anything, which means it’ll probably end up being broken somehow. Drawing a unit and buffing stats of the cards you play could be quite nice, however this card is going to have a deckbuilding dilemma that will likely keep it from seeing much play unless a crazy synergy is found. If you try and build around it, your deck will likely fail to function without drawing this early, and its effect is too specific to work in your average deck. At most this will be giving Demacia units +2/+2, which isn’t nothing, but likely isn’t worth the tempo loss of playing this. My spicy prediction is that this card will be played in a Targon Kayle deck with Mihira.
Pack Attack
Strength – ?
Fun – ?
Bias – ?
Much like with the birdo, it’ll be hard to judge this card until we see what cats look like and their general play styles. This card has massive variance depending on the function of cats. If they have enter the battlefield triggers or attack triggers then this card will likely be nutty, but if they’re just meat sticks this will likely be just okay. That said being a spell makes it much easier to play, and I can see Shadow Isles decks running cards like this for the creature death synergies.
Strength – 7/10
Fun – 7/10
Bias – 3/10
Oh boy I am not excited for Jinx decks to be getting such an efficient tool like this. On its own it’s a neat card that’s flexible in its application with a clear drawback to it. However Jinx decks will likely break this card, and I won’t be surprised if it ends up being the cause of much ire from the community. It’s quite likely that Jinx/Sion decks will become nutty with this cards inclusion. I don’t look forward to my opponent summoning units, killing one of mine, hitting me in the face, leveling up Jinx and buffing his board with one action.
Condense
Strength – 9/10
Fun – 8/10
Bias – 8/10
Last but not least we have Condense, my personal favorite card revealed and one that I can easily see being an absolute powerhouse of a card. There are a ton of followers with useful abilities that don’t care about having a good stat-line, being able to double or triple up on them at minimal cost could have some crazy implications. This card is extremely flexible since it doesn’t have to be an allied follower as well, and I am positive there is going to be a tier one or zero meta deck that takes advantage of this card’s insane combo potential. I can’t wait to test this card out, and in conjunction with Sacrificial Scholar this card might create an infinite value engine.
And… that’s a wrap! Hopefully in the future they release less cards at a time so I can go more in depth on each of them but I didn’t want this to drag on forever with how many entries there are. Let me know what you think, and if nothing else I’m excited to see how my predictions pan out! Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed, and stay healthy!
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