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The point wasn't that one opinion is better than an other, but that fan feedback is bad for strategy card games.

I opened with the Gwent example for a reason, fan feedback killed that game.

So here we see the case where Riot is balancing based on fan complaints.

Burn had a higher winrate with rearguard turn 1 so it gets deleted, even if that makes a lot of other noxious decks worse.

Badger bear is over tuned so it gets nerfed even if it makes midrange unplayable.

Zed lists were upsetting to pro players so they get deleted.

This is a bad way to balance a game historically, and your vs my opinion is irrelevant in the face of that.

Just release new sets, and let the balance adjust in the face of new mechanics minus tiny tweaks don't kill entire archetypes.

Interesting take on Disco.  I agree that you should bring in Loatheb.  And as much as I like Kanrethad Ebonlocke, getting a good set up with Disco and him is not exactly easy.  I'd go another Frozen Shadoweaver.

Amazing news! 

(and that music <3) 

Quote From Nifty129

I'm just coming at this as a guy with nearly 20 years of competitive card game experience.

Thats very nice.

I do think everyone's opinion on this forum is just as important, yours included. 
Veteran or a relatively new player, we are all experiencing the same game.
By exploring different views on the same subject, we improve, and sometimes even learn about ourselves. 

I don't like to share because it looks like a brag, but since experience seems important for you, this is mine resume:

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MTG player since 1998 (Ursa Saga), around 22 years worth of experience between many other card games, including: Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon, Hearthstone, Marvel, Gwent, Shadowverse… and more, on top of being a sucefull professional Poker player over 10 years.

Here is the best results i achieved on Legends Of Runeterra so far:

Show Spoiler

I was using burn as the example of unintended effects. Which granted you seemed to have missed.

They wanted to nerf burn and only hit 1 of it's trademark tools. Boomcrew

Then they nerfed rearguard which hurt Noxious's region identity.

You have to understand that only 20 percent of a card game operates based on tier lists.

mtg understands this that's why prices are impacted by commander not standard.

There was a better way to nerf burn without harming low tier noxious champions like Katarina and Darius

So is the cosmetic stuff going to be like the card skins in undercards or is it going to be more card backs and arenas?

Oh wow what a great news! And now i'm running out of free time maintaining both account on HS and LoR. Maybe i should just focus on one, which one though..

Wow that’s some aggressive competition right there!

This makes me think once again that I have to give LoR a chance.

Unfortunately I did not get hooked yet. Something about HS keeps me in the tavern and my spare time doesn’t allow to be involved in 2 games at a level I would like. 

Their approach to TCG content is just premium. I guess I’m simply overwhelmed lol

IIRC Yu-gi-oh! has constant updates to its cardpool (boosters, tins, special decks,  promo cards, etc..) and not only every 3 months. i don't play LoR anymore (played a lot in the beta) but is good to see some changes and new features because this help HS and other games to grow too.

The thing is, Burn Aggro is still a viable deck. Just because players can't achieve a 60+% winrate with it doesn't mean that it isn't a good option for newer players who want to play fast games. I've played a few games with it since the patch (replacing Legion rearguard with Teemo) and it seems weaker but still very viable, especially against all the weird decks players throw together. 

Amazing news! As long as they don't go the route of Hearthstone and just do tons of repeats of rulesets people don't like, Labs and Gauntlet will be great! Also, I hope that at one point they add some cosmetics that are rewards for winning a certain number of games in each mode. Like a board that can be unlocked by getting 30 7-win expeditions or something. 

The thing is, there are not that many regions left in Runeterra for them to add. The ones they have to add are Mt. Targon, Shurima, and Ixtal, with the Void likely being mixed into the other regions and Bandle City definitely not becoming a region, given that its Champions are being given to other regions. This means it will take them from 1.5 to 2 years to release all the regions, which is a fairly long time but definitely not as long as Hearthstone has been around. After those 2 years I'm sure they'll change how they do expansions to just include cards from every existing region. 

This will mean somewhere between 9 and 11 regions, depending on how enthusiastic they are about combining regions, which is around the number of classes Hearthstone has. 

Frequent small batches of cards are a great idea, HS tried that out at the end of last year and it was great. 

A new region every 6 months seems completely unsustainable. Introducing one new region/class/color/etc has proven notoriously difficult for other games, both in introduction and in upkeep. By the time LoR is as old as HS is now, it will have 15+ regions, each of which needs to be balanced in tandem with every other region. Good luck, Riot

I'm just coming at this as a guy with nearly 20 years of competitive card game experience.

Its fine if you dislike the predictions it doesn't make them any less correct.

There is also the budget player considerations that again make up the majority of your player base.

Nerfing things that aren't top tier doesn't make sense, unless you are fostering a very particular play style that only appeals to a very small but cash rich player base.

Please share where your 17 mana was spent so we can help you.

Gauntlets and Labs sound like different aspects of Hearthstone's Tavern Brawls, which is cool. Glad we're getting those sooner than later. Also, yay to "single-player experiences"!

New cards every two months sounds insane, on top of new cards + a new region every six months. How sustainable is that?

Well, Zephrys the Great fits the Aggro archetype (mainly with lethals), although Aggro and Highlander don't fit very well together, because Highlander kills Consistency, even in Wild.

But Sir Finley of the Sands is an additional card that goes in the same direction of sheer versatility (instead of just Highlander = Midgame Swing/Value): Paladin might be the only class with a viable (just viable) Highlander Aggro archetype (we could argue about Secret Mage, but a deck with just 2x 1-drops doesn't really classify as Aggro, so far).

I mean, Sir Finley of the Sands was/is exactly the card that can make Highlander Paladin a peculiar deck in its own (despite being still a worse Aggro deck compared with, say, Murloc, Mech, Odd Paladin). The fact it actually is peculiar, but clearly unoptimized for curve purposes is really baffling.

And Aggro needs less extra support, as opposed to some Self-Shuffling archetype (we see it in Warlock just because shuffling goes on par with draw, and I argue no buff to Takk would ever make it into a working archetype, you'd need several Shuffle cards buffed together, and probably new small ones costing little mana, as you can't really afford to waste turns shuffling stuff in the Midgame, when big swing turns happen).

Tbh, I'm actually sure we'll see Finley buffed to (1) 1/3 before the next Rotation kicks in. Because it's just too reasonable, and such a small innocent buff would feed many people (not just for homebrew junkies like me) with new deckbuildings in the same way the buff to Libram Paladin did (I mean, it's not like the buff renewed the deck in any significant way other than a better curve, but look at all the deckbuilding attempts made after the buff), without seriously altering the meta. It would be a terrible mistake otherwise, since the card is already there, especially if it's not a (1) probably just because of past Odd/Even reactions from the playerbase.

Surely I'd take a Secret-based Highlander Paladin in future.

1- Stand Alone is not a ionia card. If you trully think Zed interaction with it is that good, another reason to nerf it.
2- Elise will see exact as much play as before the buff on Brood Awakening
3- That's how patch works: some nerfs make some champions worse, some buff/new cards make them better. While what you said is true (just very slightly but still), some new cards previously released also helped Darius. Adapt.
4- It was a consensus Grizzled Ranger and Loyal Badgerbear had too many stats for their cost.
5- Fiora was not the nerf target, and personally, i think Unyielding Spirit works better on Lux, Heimerdinger and Lucian.
6- Yeah.
7- He is weaker then before, but still strong. Deal 3 damage, Scout and Last Breath that summons a 3/4 is very good value for only 4 mana. But he probably won't see play in every Demacia deck now.

Its too early to make any hasty conclusions about the state of the meta. Players are still experimenting and usually takes at least one week until it settles down a bit. 

Happy birthday! Thanks for the great website!

My point with all the C'thun stuff was that it wasn't a full neutral set: the class C'thun cards made a huge difference. Ultimately those decks were a balance of making the deck weaker with C'thun buffing cards and having a few pay-off cards in C'thun himself, Twin Emperor Vek'lor, and a few class C'thun synergy cards (the ones with 'if your C'thun has 10 or more attack...' battlecries). That is essentially identical to how highlander decks work, with decks being made weaker by having no duplicates, and a few pay-off cards in Zephrys, Alex, and a few class highlander cards (plus extras in Wild of course).

So in my mind any argument about C'thun decks being fine to be weak for some classes applies just the same with highlander decks, and vice versa. You can be OK with both or neither, but saying one is fine while the other isn't sounds inconsistent to me.

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For clarity regarding Finley's power-level, I personally never said anything about thinking he would be dangerous like Baku or Raza+Shadowreaper, so I am on the same page as you there. Nor would I complain if Blizz did buff him to a 1 mana 1/3.

My issue has always been that I think Finley is fair (if not outstanding like some of his colleagues) already, and his real problems lie in the class he is in rather than in himself. So since I am OK with weak C'thun classes and believe the same logic applies here, I don't see any need to buff him and I would rather see weak cards that should be the centrepiece of more unique decks buffed first. This is presumably why 2 libram cards have been buffed despite them also being 'fine' to begin with: libram paladin is something was supposed to special to paladin whereas highlander paladin is just 1 class' version of a neutral archetype.

This is largely why I brought up Tak before. No other class can do the sort of extreme shuffling and minion multiplication like rogue can, but at the moment that entire group of cards is being squandered because the centrepiece of the deck is also the worst card in there. The end result is that no one does lots of deck shuffling.

I guess if highlander paladin was particularly unique then I would absolutely argue for buffing Finley, but the no-duplicate constraint always hinders a deck's uniqueness and I'm not sure paladin has enough to take the deck off of the normal spectrum between aggro and slow-midrange. Maybe a secret highlander deck in Wild would be janky enough to interest me...

There has always been pros and cons of live card balancing in games when compared to the hands off approach of mtg.

For one, you can unintentionally ruin what has made you game fun by listening to your fans, Gwent being a great example with it's gold update.

Similarly, with it's limited card pool and emphasis on champions,  Legends of Runterra has to be cautious not to make too many archetypes unplayable.

So what changes did we see and what are the meta implications...

1. Stand alone no longer works with Zed, this list want never top tier so why did Riot want to kill this champion

2. Elise is worse because she can't flood the board with brood swarm - again not on the tier list so this nerf doesn't make sense

3. Legion rearguard was an aggro card not a burn card per say, so now Darius and Katarina are worse

4. Badger bear was showing up in control decks, but they nerfed the damage not the toughness, so they made it worse at aggro but still good in control

5. Unyielding spirit still exists so Fiora is fine, even though she was the nerf target

6. Boomcrew nerf was needed and well implemented

7. Grizzles ranger got double nerfed and is now unplayable

Unintended meta consequences

control variants are the only archetypes worth playing mid range and aggro are dead

So no bannerman, no noxious anything that isn't swain

Region diversity will appear healthy, but deck archetypes will all be very slow

Fun for some, absolutely awful for the majority of players 2/3

Quote From drfelip

Before the changes I got over my losing streak and climbed back to Diamond 4, and yesterday I reached Diamond 3 with the new deck. Today the grind continues! Wish me luck and good decisions!

Good luck mate - we're with you whatever the outcome!