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Thanks for the feedback sinti.

It could open for me, but I wonder if anything to do with permissions. I can no longer Edit the post - I wonder if because it was moved (just shows the prefix, not the post content)

Here goes the image link from another provider: Card Structure

And extra a new link giving a better idea on one of the key points published about the game; how we solve the traditional TCG Mana issues!

LoF Card Tales: Mana

Looking forward to all feedback and some critics after you try it out. Ask for an online Demo - it's Free!

Seems really broken with Miss Fortune  but then you have to be in Ionia so.. maybe it's fine I guess..

seems interesting  the swap spell looks really good utility, the Shen spell is really fun but expensive now you can do it with spell mana.

Oh so that's why there's a poker face for most hearthstone professionals, makes sense now 

1) I wouldn't call any established Hearthstone competitor a robot by any stretch; at the very least, they react when they do a mistake or get pushed back by an unlikely outcome. Just think of Viper, Hunterace, Muzzy, etc.

2) There's a reason top competitors (whether in video games, poker, or Olympic sports) don't tend to be effusive: it's a trait that can be exploited by your opponents to cloud your judgment and cause you to make mistakes. If Gaby's parents or team sponsor are smart, they'll get him some coaching to control his outbursts and develop healthy mental habits. Otherwise, he might flame out -- even become depressed or worse -- once his winning streak is over.

I just managed to get three Battleground achievements at once, the last of which I NEVER even hoped for achieving:

1) Wrath of the Windlord (Win with Al'Akir)

2) Little Fish in a Big Tavern (Win Tier 4 or lower)

3) Spicy Pretzel Mustard (Win while winning every round)

PS: Poisonous Murlocs with Divine Shield and Windfury are your friend :)

For Malphite you forgot Garen as a possible Partner because if you are an unstopable force... why wouldn't you want to be unstopable on both turns?

fair enough

Quote From Almaniarra

Quote From tnrg

Quote From Almaniarra

The thing is, Draft mode of Runeterra sucks, i just wanted to say that because you said that you like to play Arena in HS. The game is great but draft is meh.

I started this thread but I'm already playing LOR for 2 months now. I'm really loving the game so far. But the draft mode Expeditions is actually by far my favorite game mode! If it didn't cost so many of my precious shards I would be playing it even more. ;)

What do you not like about it?

Don't worry, You will be swimming in those shards after a couple of months also, after 3 runs, it is free to play expeditions.

What I don't like most is how they changed experience reward firstly. Rewards for 7 win was giving champion card and they moved it to weekly chests which is fair and ok for me but Free runs now gives almost no experience which is a big con for me. I'm mostly a draft player in CCGs and in Runeterra, playing draft for a week doesn't reward. it is just a 3-times-run mode like aa Asian MMORPG dungeon which has limits to play weekly (Hello Lost Ark), lol.

Best draft mode is MTG:A's for sure but no mainstream CCG has come close to it unfortunately. Eternal and HEX was like it but well both games are dead now. I don't know about Mythgard's Draft mode tho because i didn't even try the game. Look at how is the MTG:A's draft mode and you will understand what i meant.

in MTG:A you are openning packs to make your deck with other players. You choose those cards which you also collect them. I mean you really collect your draft deck for your collection, so you can decide to collect most rare cards while winning lesser games or make a better deck to win more and get more rewards from your wins. It is all your choice and rewards are really decent which might keeps you playing draft mode and/or buying Battle Passes to save them.

I really thought that with first reveal of Runeterra, their draft mode migh tbe like MTG but no, it was even worse than HS-Arena and they killed even more with deleting free run experiences.

Also, I don't really like its card choosing system. 3-card choosing is so bad implemented draft system in my opinion. It forces players to those archetypes that I spoke about in my above post. Riot approaches its card game as an e-sport candidate more than a CCG which really hurts the potential of the game.

And Also, because of no free Run reward system, there is no draft mode ratings because playerbase rarely plays draft mode. I knew some people who holds their expedition tokens because they are waiting some overhaul to Draft mode. I am even sitting on 40+ tokens + 150k shards because I already collected almost all cards and expeditions after 3 run doesn't give anything even I call myself more of a draft player.

Riot is generous with its card game, I don't have any word for it but with this way, it loses the magic of the collecting counterpart of CCGs and it becomes an e-sport instead of a deckbuilding card game. Draft mode means nothing in Runeterra right now for players who started the game with its release.

The draft mode you described of MTG:A sounds like a lot of fun too! Too bad I don't have enough time to get really into another CCG. I have never tried Eternal and Hex so my only experience is Hearthstone and I think LOR does it a lot better at the moment.

I can understand that having too many shards and wildcards maybe gets boring after a while. A part of the fun in playing LOR at the moment is that I know that each day I get a reward of the region reward track. But as a new player I'm very happy with how generous they are. I like making my own homebrew decks and in Hearthstone there were so much times I didn't craft a bad epic or legendary because it would be a waste if my new deck idea would not work out good enough. I look forward to trying all possible LOR cards in the future and not need to throw away a nice deck idea if i have to craft some general bad expensive cards.

I actually want to see Malphite be viable with Counterfeit Copies on his Unstoppable Force. It can lead to enemy boards being pretty much perma stunned, akin to Teemo Sejuani.

Quote From YourPrivateNightmare

I don't really see the point in buffing Akama Prime. If he was actually playable he would just be insanely frustrating to deal with and be yet another instance of "you queued up with the wrong class buckarooo".

I fully appreciate he would be frustrating if commonly played because some classes have no real options for dealing with him (although neutral options do exist). However, that's a bit of a non-issue because all the classes that struggle to remove him can easily win games before he is drawn, and even more easily win after their opponent spends 6 mana on a minion that does nothing immediately, and not very much the turn(s) afterwards. So he's balanced for those match-ups by how long it takes to get up and running.

A good comparison is Rattlegore. He's another card that many classes just cannot deal with without playing a weak neutral tech card. And he's much easier to play at a relevant time than Akama Prime, especially with Commencement around. But does anyone complain about Rattlegore? No. So I just don't buy that making AP a 6/7 would cause any problems.

He's a balanced card as is purely because of the fact that he isn't good enough to just be run without justification.

Here's the problem: the best justification for it atm is that you want the normal 3 mana 3/4. You don't even want to draw the prime version a lot of the time because he's genuinely weaker than most other cards in the deck. Whether that's healthy or not, it flies in the face of what the prime cards were meant to be, and certainly leaves space for a health buff without him causing trouble.

Akama feels good to drop most of the times, especially on curve. His prime, however, is often awkward to play because at later turns you want more immediate impact for 6 mana. The few times I made him stick he's extremely helpful, but that's not very often. 

At a first glance both seem too slow ... we will see

Hard to watch all these Mage games. Literally RNG clown fiesta. Deck of Lunacy needs to just be deleted from the game, even if just for the sake of tournaments.

I don't really see the point in buffing Akama Prime. If he was actually playable he would just be insanely frustrating to deal with and be yet another instance of "you queued up with the wrong class buckarooo".

Akama was intentionally designed in such a way that most (if not all) classes have a limited ability to deal with him. As such he couuld be viewed as sort of a tech choice if you need to get an edge against a specific deck that can't deal with him.

Right now you could, if you wanted, try to use him in Secret Rogue to have a guaranteed win condition against Paladin. Paladin has no way of killing stealthed minions (unless they start running Equality Consecreate). In this Scenario managing to get out Akama Prime wouuld allow you to spend all your stuff on removing minions while you keep beating their face in with a minion they can never remove. Same applies to Rush Warrior.

At the same time he'll be much weaker in a Mage, Priest or Warlock matchup.

He's a balanced card as is purely because of the fact that he isn't good enough to just be run without justification.

Quite interesting (not to mention entertaining) seeing all the expressions and reactions from Gaby, in contrast to all the robots participating in MT

Akama - and more to the point Akama Prime (AP) - is a card that I have wanted to find interesting for the last year, but it has always been underwhelming. I'm hoping that by writing all my thoughts down I can begin to understand why, and then better understand card design too.

As a 3 mana 3/4 stealth, the first body is a solid card by all accounts, and certainly in the same league as the first bodies of the other prime cards. If anything it is better than most of the primes' first bodies because stealth denies the opponent the ability to remove the minion before it accomplishes something, and isn't situational like rush or spell damage.

The problem arises with the prime version of Akama. All the prime cards were designed to be bonkers strong, and something you couldn't print as a normal minion. Where the other prime cards achieve this with a hefty block of text detailing a fancy effect, Akama takes a more succinct and elegant approach by simply switching out 'stealth' for 'permanently stealthed', which we know from adventures can be very powerful. I have no doubt that if AP was a collectible card, it would indeed be bonkers strong.

So where's the problem? I think it is that the odds of drawing Akama twice by turn 6 are tiny, even in rogue. Statistics tell us you need to be ~75% of the way through your deck on average to draw AP, by which point you're probably long past turn 6. If you're against aggro or playing aggro yourself, the game is probably over before you see AP, so it is only worth evaluating against slow decks, and therein lies the issue: most slow decks have a way to deal with a 5 health stealthed minion.

Even when they cannot remove it immediately, AP still takes a whole turn before it can attack and show off the permanence of its stealth, and it probably has to attack at least twice before people it becomes interesting, making AP really, really slow. Compare that to the other primes, all of whom have much faster effects except Reliquary Prime, but at least that has a set of stats and abilities that make it more likely to achieve something significant right away.

The end result is that AP is in practice only marginally better than a 6 mana 6/5 stealth, a stat-line that can conveniently be compared to two cards that have been around in the Classic set since 2014: Stranglethorn Tiger and Ravenholdt Assassin. I think the tiger did see a tiny bit of play in druid at one point, but that's about all these two ever did in constructed. So AP sitting between them makes it seem like AP is actually just a bad card on its own. I'd say he's weaker than MSoG's attempt at this sort of effect (Lotus Assassin), and you can run 2 of those without any worries about shuffling them first.

Am I contradicting myself? First I say I think AP is a bonkers card, then a bad one? Again, timing is everything. If you could play AP on turn 6 and have him be part of a wider plan to pressure the opponent, then he's great. But if you have him on turn 14, when your opponent has stabilised or you are playing a deck that doesn't put on much pressure, then he doesn't do very much.

The (flawed) logic behind the design

It's quite easy to see how AP was made the way he was. Not only does it look cool and powerful at first glance (the community rated Akama quite highly), but we've seen first hand how powerful permanent stealth can be in adventures.

It's also notable that the prime mechanics (deathrattle and shuffle) are both things rogue had synergies for, and it stands to reason that rogue would have an easier time abusing primes than other classes. Stowaway in particular seems to alleviate the slow draw of AP. The trouble with the Stowaway solution is that you still need to have drawn both Akama and a Stowaway, and you have to be playing a fairly slow deck to justify him when you don't see Akama.

The fix

Fixing AP is simple: give him more health. I'd lean towards 7 to put him just out of range of modern Flamestrike +1 spell damage (which is so common and cheap in mage today that it's pretty much always going to be there). That way it makes 1 more class have to work to remove him, but makes almost no difference to classes that couldn't kill him to begin with, or who have un-targeted hard removal. It also gives him the opportunity to trade into a taunt minion without being reduced to piddly health that can be removed by small AoE.

The design lessons

We already know a card's power depends strongly on when it is drawn and played. This is doubly true for uncollectible cards that are shuffled into your deck. So the lesson is to ensure such a card is a good late game card at bare minimum. It doesn't matter how good it is as an early-to-mid game card if it's almost never going to be drawn then.