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The biggest change of the patch, by far!
This is pretty huge. It might have flown under the radar for some of you, especially those new to card games in general. However, I think it's such a big change that we should get everyone's feedback, ASAP.
That's right, what champions are in your deck will now be available to each player from the start of the match. Certainly matches the flavor of this being a league of legends card game!
This is genuinely the most important change they made, other then giving access to the new mode. Those of you who have played other card games know what I'm talking about. This is usually considered "hidden information." Most card games let your opponent's hand and deck be information that you don't get to know until it is revealed to you.
Strategy in card games often requires you to have a good general knowledge of the game, and specific knowledge of your match-up, all while balancing what you believe your enemy has in their hand or can get off the top of their deck. How many deny have they played? Are they holding cards that are useless against me, or are they banking spell mana to blow me out next turn? What are their options against my next move? What are my options against their possible reaction?
This all may seem pretty basic. But those simple questions are changed dramatically by knowing, up front, what the core of the opponent's deck is. That is not to say this is an inherently bad change. In fact, I believe this to be an exciting, healthy change for this particular flavor of card game. But it changes SO MUCH about how you assess your opponent on a turn by turn bases, even more then knowing their region choices. So I want to here what beginners and advanced players alike think about this change. Do you like the idea of less hidden information? Is this going too far, or not far enough? Will you be changing how you build your decks, now that you can't have any surprise champion choices up your sleeve?
Looking at a few recent examples *cough* Artifact *cough* this could be very divisive in the community. I certainly think Valve went too far at first, deciding there would be no hidden information except for what order the opponent drew their deck in. No surprise tech for you!
TL;DR We are going to be allowed to look at the enemy's champion choices during a match, is this bad? Let me know!
riotstrokke
In the future this will be more obvious as we add in more pre-game communication of the champions (like on the VS screen), so I think it's understandable that this will fly under the radar for now. I'm glad you're calling it out though!
It definitely does. You're right on. Even though we would have liked to deliver a full package including the VS screen, we went partial to get early feedback from you all about how this feels. So let us know! We'll be watching closely.
Personally, I'll admit to being skeptical initially. I was worried that it would remove a lot of skill in knowing the current meta, and lose some strategy of being able to surprise opponents with Champions. I was definitely anchored from a lot of games like MTG where you can make a splash and not reveal it until late in the game.
But then I played this version myself and quickly realized how much better I liked it! I think this thread has hit a lot of the tradeoffs already, but I want to add some one more benefits:
We still could be wrong about this, but hopefully the game will be better because of the change!