The Good And Bad Of Lor - A Post Mortem

The good is that there is a massive number of unique decks and archetypes that achieve unique goals.

The bad, there's 100ds of non unique decks that essentially just jam easy agressive high value cards that don't actually do anything.

Why is hallowed one of the highest played archetypes in the history of LOR?

It's idiot proof and it goes in everything.

Why is Freijord the least played region?

It requires you to do the most bs to be playable and win games. (Although wild mysticism is a great buff)

So why did people leave?

Well the cool decks are generally worse then the dumb decks.

Ryse releases and requires a ton of bs to play well thats 40% instantly

Ionia gets a nerf and stops being a powerhouse? Well nobody is gonna play it.

Meanwhile hallowed decks will exist in the game forever as a ubiquitous and easy form of high value aggro.

So while I will always enjoy the core LOR experience of smart deck vs smart deck playing for unique wincons.

I'll also hate the game for its lingering hearthstone elements, who curves the hardest while denying easy value for the opponent.

Its funny how the topic of this thread makes it look like LoR is dead, like artifact, when in reality its probably second only to hearthstone as an online card game.

I dont play LoR but I watched some of the games. So I did a quick search and would you believe it, there's always at least one article calling the game dead every year. So I read the 2022 article of that and all I can surmise is that LoR's PvE is unpopular but was the focus for Epicgames at one point, but now they are backtracking back to PvP , probably because they just realised that most people dont play card games for a casual, PvE experience.

There was also some kind of controversy with LoR worlds, but I didn't notice it nor have I followed through the story deep enough. I can't say watching LoR is an easy experience because as a casual who's trying to watch for fun, there are times I cant follow the game at all. Someone would be at 15 then suddenly die out of nowhere, its like watching pre-nerf stormwind quest mage.

I will say though. The LoR reddit is so minute it almost looks like the game came out yesterday. Cant even go there for a laugh.

As for what I can make out of your comments, there will always be more 'bad' or netdecks that are efficient, and there are those 'cool' decks that dont work as well, aren't consistent, or just plain garbage. Happens in all card games. This does not make a game good, bad, or dead. Ironically I feel LoR can take a page off hearthstone and make their games more approachable or, for lack of a better word, 'easy'. Artifact wasn't necessarily doomed by its pricing structure, its more likely everyone couldn't follow the game well enough to want to play it. LoR to me is just an easier artifact, but its a 10 turn convoluted mess compared to hearthstone, a game where even a 10 year old can figure out whats happening within 2 minutes.

Like it or hate it, if it takes a galaxy brain to play a game where people supposedly play for fun, then that's just narrowing down the playerbase, something both gwent and artifact attempted and took to the grave with them.

I would be interested to read the perspective of actual LoR players on the pros and cons of the game, in comparison to hearthstone or any other TCGs.

As of November 2021, LoR had 180 million monthly players. Let's just suppose that its numbers have been cut in half since a year ago. That would still be 90 million monthly players.

Let's further suppose that only 10% of those players play on a daily basis.

That's still 9 million daily players. Extremely far from a dead game, even with extremely non-generous estimates.

Bottom line- You have GOT to get over the Twitch fixation. Just because major streamers made major mistakes and jumped ship to Snap (a fundamentally flawed game that is only going to force them to switch jump ship again to yet something else) - that doesn't say anything about LoR. It says much more about them.

The most recent LoR championship was so good that my CHILDREN (who are 8 and 10) were begging to watch it.