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![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/e46ve6g.png)
Legends of Runeterra is a free-to-play CCG currently in development by Riot Games and announced during their 10th anniversary stream. I would personally describe it as a mix of M:tG and Hearthstone.
Key features
- Combat phase where each player gets a chance to attack and defend.
- Champions with powerful effects that can level up to unlock their full potential.
- 6 available regions with distinct play styles, with more on the way. You can mix up to 2 regions in a single deck.
- No card pack purchases in this game. For F2P players, play games and complete daily quests to level up your selected region's "battle pass", which rewards you with:
○ Cards of that specific region
○ Wildcards, which can be transformed into any card of the same rarity
- Riot is committed to balance the cards regularly, if need be.
Resources
Transition Guide for Hearthstone players
Transition Guide for MtG players
These guides should help you get up to speed according to your previous CCG/TCG background. Still, the best way to understand the game and its unique flow is to play it.
Deck Builder
https://lor.mobalytics.gg/deck-builder/new
The Mobalytics Deck Builder allows you to easily import or export decks to the game client. The UI experience is better than the current in-game deck creation menu and I highly recommend it for building your decks and theorycrafting in general.
Getting access
Great news! Everyone will get to play in the Open Beta of the game starting Friday, Jan 24 7:00pm GMT (GMT+00:00). If you were already granted access to the game in the past preview patches OR signed up to the beta before January 19th, you will be able to play a day earlier! You can check out the info on the Open Beta here: https://playruneterra.com/en-us/news/open-beta-faq/
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Figured I would start a thread for this. Anyone else managed to play the game?
Since my CCG background is limited to Shadowverse and a bit of Hearthstone, I enjoyed learning the more M:tG-like mechanics of the game (combat phase, multiple turns in a round, etc.) and how that gives you more ability to react to your opponent. Definitely need to spam more PvP games before the beta ends and experiment with decks. Also looking forward to the full release, if Riot can keep their promise to not have an egregious card unlock system and allow you to have fun even as a F2P player; it's the main reason I ditched Hearthstone very quickly after trying to play it without spending money.
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ive seen some streams of it. doesnt look like its anything too innovative for the genre but i would love to hear others' opinions on it since the game seems to be really hyped atm. i don't think it'll be another artifact at the very least.
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Based on the games streamed, it looks like the combat system resembles MTG, the mana system resembles HS, and the hero evolution is similar to Shadowverse. They borrowed the fun elements from many oither CCGs, I think it might be fun to try. The win conditions of each deck is very different, and it looks like there are fun OTK combos available.
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I've played it a bit, and while I like the mechanics from a gameplay perspective, playing feels kind of clunky and slow, and it makes it hard for me to keep playing. Hearthstone always kept me playing, which I think represents doing something right.
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Last day to try out the Preview Patch, the complete card set has been unlocked so you can build any deck. The access ends at 02:00 GMT (+00:00) so this is your last 11 hour or so to play the game until the next beta in November.
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United States23731 Posts
It's pacing pushes me away... though streamers I respect say they love it.
It's unfortunate... I have trouble seeing it doing well as a streamed game. So I am not sure how it will do even if it's fantastic.
I have high hopes, though.
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Got in on the last day, animation seems sluggish and some effects take a long time to play out, hopefully they will work that out by next phase. I appreciate the game mechanic more than HS, being able to respond to your opponent's moves adds a lot more depth to the game. The reserve mana system is also quite interesting, although I wish you get to choose if you want to spend the reserve first or not when a spell is played.
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On October 21 2019 23:16 Glacierz wrote:
Got in on the last day, animation seems sluggish and some effects take a long time to play out, hopefully they will work that out by next phase. I appreciate the game mechanic more than HS, being able to respond to your opponent's moves adds a lot more depth to the game. The reserve mana system is also quite interesting, although I wish you get to choose if you want to spend the reserve first or not when a spell is played.
Hope they add an option to disable animations, they are pretty cool looking but if your turn timer continues ticking down while the animations are playing, it's going to be frustrating when you are roping.
The reserve mana is actually called "Spell Mana" and can only be used to cast spells so I don't see the point of giving you the choice of using your unspent spell mana when casting spells. I like the inclusion of the spell mana because it helps tremendously when you have bad draws and can't play on curve and you can also deliberately choose to not play cards in some rounds in order to cast a big spell earlier than usual in later rounds. This in turn opens up your mulligan possibilities since it is not necessarily doomed if you don't get a 2-mana follower to play in your first 2 turns.
On October 21 2019 22:04 travis wrote:
It's pacing pushes me away... though streamers I respect say they love it.
It's unfortunate... I have trouble seeing it doing well as a streamed game. So I am not sure how it will do even if it's fantastic.
I have high hopes, though.
The constant back-and-forth is confusing and feels sluggish if you are used to Hearthstone-like CCGs but as others mentioned, it's also what adds depth to the gameplay. It takes a couple of hours of play to figure it out but once you do, you will get used to it and everything will feel smoother.
They already reached 100K+ viewers during the closed beta, although you can argue that this is mostly due to the stream giveaways + viewers wanting to see what the hype is all about and that could die down in the future. However, I'm more than confident that it won't go the way of Artifact: LoR will be F2P on release and they should continue to have a good progression system to unlock cards without spending money, which in turn should give them a much larger player base. It's more complicated than HS but it has none of the convoluted triple-lane system of Artifact that is hard to follow for viewers and since it's free, people can try it out easily, get used to the game flow and see if they like the game or not.
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On October 23 2019 01:31 Torchise wrote:Hope they add an option to disable animations, they are pretty cool looking but if your turn timer continues ticking down while the animations are playing, it's going to be frustrating when you are roping.
I hope not. Disabling would give you a notable gameplay advantage (longer effective turn time). Systems that require you to remove aspects of the game in order to optimise them are poor design.
Dealing with spell animations is a core part of digital CCGs. Their existence rewards players who plan their turns efficiently.
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On October 23 2019 01:31 Torchise wrote:
I like the inclusion of the spell mana because it helps tremendously when you have bad draws and can't play on curve and you can also deliberately choose to not play cards in some rounds in order to cast a big spell earlier than usual in later rounds. This in turn opens up your mulligan possibilities since it is not necessarily doomed if you don't get a 2-mana follower to play in your first 2 turns.
You are right, I misunderstood how it worked before. Control decks seem to benefit from this the most, as they are often not able to utilize the mana base fully in the early turns.
There are interesting decision points around when to attack if you already have minions on board when the turn starts. Putting up more minions before attacking means the opponent has a chance to respond. Reading the opponent's hand becomes quite important and I feel this is where this game adds the most complexity compared to the likes of HS.
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The next Preview Patch is releasing tomorrow November 14th at 16:00 GMT (+00:00) and will last till November 19th. This preview build will add the Expeditions mode, which is Riot's take on an Arena mode but with seemingly less RNG. You can check out this video for an overview: + Show Spoiler +
More details can be found in their FAQ.
If you didn't get the opportunity to play the game previously, now's your chance: Riot will send out more invite this time around. If you already got an invite for the previous Preview Patch in October, you will not need to get a new invite; once you have an invite, you will also get access to all subsequent betas until release.
I've also updated the OP with a resources section, details on the game's progression system and a roadmap to the release date.
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Seems like they took things from HS Arena and HS Adventure mode and then added improvements. At least I am quite optimistic that they improved on it. So far they seem to have analyzed their competitors games well and identified the problems.
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Anyone else got a chance to play? I am currently experimenting with a Shadow Isles/Freljord control deck but centered around the Atrocity spell and They Who Endure. Dream scenario is a OTK (which I haven't got yet) but it still does decently well so far. Haven't tried playing Expeditions so far.
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Just try the expeditions.
I think its pretty amazing. Not just put big stats on the board like HS arena, but very much about synergistic cards and adapting your deck. Even stuff like Fiora can work.
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On November 16 2019 15:36 Redox wrote:
Just try the expeditions.
I think its pretty amazing. Not just put big stats on the board like HS arena, but very much about synergistic cards and adapting your deck. Even stuff like Fiora can work.
It's definitely part of the plan, I want to spam some Expeditions during the Preview Patch to check it out. I always preferred constructed play to the draft-based mode in HS/Shadowverse, mainly because I suck at drafting cards on the spot to create a good deck when I don't know what is going to come up next and I always end up with average decks at best. The fact that Expeditions has less RNG makes it much more appealing to me.
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The 2nd preview patch is over and I only managed to get in 1.5 Expeditions run; wish I got the time to play some more. Here's a couple thoughts about my Expeditions experience:
- I like that you have Synergy picks which guide your deckbuilding and makes more decks and champions viable. I also like that you have the opportunity to trade a card after some games in order to further improve your deck during a run.
- Meta: There seems to be a rampant usage of decks using Frostbite spams, felt like 30%+ of my games were using that. There is 1 memorable game where I tried to kill an Ashe for 8+ rounds but my opponent kept her safe by freezing my challenging unit every single time I wanted to kill her which was extremely annoying. My current trial run (which was in progress before the server shutdown) was making good use of Noxus/Ionia units with Elusive and I just went aggro, which seemed pretty effective. Too bad I can't continue playing right now to see how far I could take it. 
- Time: I spent an evening playing Expeditions and I could only complete 1.5 Expeditions runs, or 3 trial runs. I'm sure that aggro decks can get by much faster though. The longest Expeditions run I can think of would be winning 6 games in your 1st trial and then being able to improve that to 7 in your 2nd trial. Worst case scenario is to lose every other game until the 7th win, which would mean 13 games played on 1st run + 13 more games on 2nd run which is a total of 26 games for a single Expedition. Obviously, this would not be your typical scenario and you could retire and claim your rewards at any time if you did not want to play anymore, although I don't really see the point of doing this since the run costs a lot and you get good card and XP rewards.
- Cost: Speaking of costs, an Expeditions run is very expensive (4000 shards). For reference, 4k shards is what I earned during the 2 test periods by completing the prologue + getting 3 regions' reward pass to level 8 + 3 level ~9 weekly chests. I'm guessing they want to encourage people to spend real money to buy the 3 weekly Expeditions run. They also prevent you from doing free plays of Expeditions (with no rewards) by locking this feature behind completing the first 3 weekly runs and it resets weekly. So it seems like you basically have to be a god at Expeditions and go infinite in order to get your full Expeditions rewards without paying money and you can't even play this game mode casually (without rewards) if you don't do so.
- Balance: Riot seems to prioritize Expeditions balance over constructed play. For instance, they completely changed Assembly Bot this patch, citing that it was broken in Expeditions for their reasoning behind this change. I don't like that balance philosophy since it might ruin cards/builds that are perfectly fine in constructed. I'd prefer if they did another approach that would leave constructed play untouched, e.g. removing problematic cards from the Expeditions pool.
Might seem like I am very critical of the game but overall, I enjoyed my experience and I just want them to improve it (mainly, the cost to access Expeditions). It's been a while since I got this excited by playing a game and I'm optimistic about its future.
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3 days till beta! any hype on TL forums?
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I would if I could get access...
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This is weird because we do have the liquid legends side site. Which in itself was started humbly by a thread probably overproduced out of hope and love to be the thread that people gather for.
I'll give it a fair shot. Riot's existence is based on learning how to do things better then other games at the thing they're doing.
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TeamLiquid StarLeague 5 in 
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