As someone who climbed on his main account high enough i thought it would be a good idea to create a new account in LoR and try some unranked to master within 14 days starting from no collection challenge and what did i experience? Players in iron 4 ALREADY play 80% streamer decks in ranked.
While i still do fine with the spider starter deck I can only imagine how actually new players got to feel when they come to runeterra and run into the same netdecks over and over that they don't stand a cahnce against if they are as clueless as their opponent.
I expected a lot of the starter decks, being played or some suboptimal jank that actual new players come around with. But 80% uninspired copypaste from "pros"? That is really shocking to me and it makes me really sad to see.
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As someone who climbed on his main account high enough i thought it would be a good idea to create a new account in LoR and try some unranked to master within 14 days starting from no collection challenge and what did i experience? Players in iron 4 ALREADY play 80% streamer decks in ranked.
While i still do fine with the spider starter deck I can only imagine how actually new players got to feel when they come to runeterra and run into the same netdecks over and over that they don't stand a cahnce against if they are as clueless as their opponent.
I expected a lot of the starter decks, being played or some suboptimal jank that actual new players come around with. But 80% uninspired copypaste from "pros"? That is really shocking to me and it makes me really sad to see.
Well as someone who never plays Ranked, I can definitely assure you that not every Iron player is a new player. Just because a player is an Iron does not mean they are not a good player, of course, it also doesn't mean that they aren't a bad player either. I've just never taken a liking to playing Ranked because there wasn't really a good incentive to do so. Ranking up doesn't do much except just giving you an icon or the sense of achievement from ranking up.
If I want to fight "better" opponents, then I can also just play Normal because I occasionally fight Master players there with tier 1 or tier 2 decks. There isn't really a huge difference and I would argue that most Iron players in LoR aren't actually Iron but more around Gold semi-casual players.
Also LOR being quite generous with the reward system, it is not hard to quickly amass cards to make a least one meta deck quickly.
Like Sinti said you can craft a meta deck pretty fast thanks to the region rewards, also people who don't have meta decks and are actually new players will have a hard time going up the ladder so maybe lab or expeditions are more appealing to them.
I can't say what the actual new player experience is like, but I would probably suggest any new player to first stick to normal, labs, and expeditions so that they can build up their collection. Like FenrirWulf said, a lot of players at low ranks (myself included) are just players that aren't interested in ranking up. The reason they do occasionally want to try out a deck in ranked is probably to see if a certain deck holds up or because they want to see how different the ranked experience is from normal.
Well it's like old hs rank 20, it's the beggining of the ladder many gold players can find themselves in iron if they didn't play..
I am also in iron cause I never put enough time to go higher than silver.. just didn't feel like it.. so basically I am iron 4 with an almost full collection.
A little update about my unranked to master project:
I made it to bronce 2 so far (i know thats very impressive you can congratualte me later ;) )
I see first issues running my semi optimal lists since the netdeck rate is now a stable 90% and i dont expect that to change until diamond. Also players slowly learn the game and i can't go for obvious plays anymore :(
for the assembling of resources i currently run expeditions.
My first run was a solid double 7 win run (for the exp ofc)
the second was meh
the third looks like it will go well
gotta see how much resources ill get from max level vault i hope ill cash in a Katarina soon to build my main deck from rising tides (no its not a yasuo list)
Whoever spend the time to read that semi boring report: have a nice day:)