Two bard decks, two aphelios decks, 3 Annie decks.

And then a healthy handful of diverse and interesting archetypes sprinkled throughout the tiers most of which have been around a while.

The real question is how do you nerf these archetypes in a healthy way:

1. Ravebloom shouldn't buff creatures, being able to house spider into housespider into draw creature into draw creature and represent something like 16 dmg is dumb.

2. Bard needs to place chimes after turn 1, having sick turn 1 bard draws is what makes these decks so high rolly, and generally also dumb.

3. Aphelios, don't nerf these decks they are literally just card piles and aphelios has undergone too many changes as is 

There ya go there's my meta analysis, and overall the game is far more enjoyable and balanced then pre patch good job Riot.

Competition Theme: That's So Random

What's the most out there competition we could come up with? Something absolutely nobody would see coming, just truly... unexpected?

• You must create a card which has the word 'random' in its card text
  • We'll also be accepting the word 'randomly', for those interested in choosing targets as such

ChickyChick is after some truly random cards this week, so make sure you put your most creative foot forward for this one!

As always, I can be reached through Discord or here on the site via PM if you have any issues to report.

Competition Phases

Here are the phases of this card design competition

• Submission Phase: Starts on Mon, Jun 27 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400). Runs until Sat, Jul 2 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400)
• Voting Phase: Starts on Sat, Jul 2 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400). Runs until Sun, Jul 3 16:00 EDT (GMT -0400)
• Finalist Phase: Starts on Sun, Jul 3 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400). Runs until Mon, Jul 4 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400)
• Winner Selected: After finalist voting concludes and we validate votes.

Discussion Thread Rules

No thread rules were added to this season. Please populate and manually edit this thread with them.

This is the place where you can leave your thoughts about how the competitions are proceeding and how you suggest things should be changed if necessary.

Historically, when we've tried to do this before, it has resulted in asking for how things can be changed which gets us some nice feedback, and then we end up not having any time to discuss implementation because the down-time is often occupied by an expansion reveal season which eats up a LOT of time and focus. It has therefore come to me that it would be better to ask how satisfied you are with the system during the season as opposed to after it.

If you have ideas, then please let us know. We'll have more time to actively be able to discuss it.

can a location be silenced?

None of the existing tags really fit for events (like the current Yogg event): I considered "farming" or "achievement hunting", but neither really applies. It would be nice if a party could be tagged as designed for an event. Ideally the event + task could be selected, similar to how Tavern Brawls are handled, but just a single "event" tag would already be an improvement.

In the Mercenaries deck builder, if I add Kazakus, Golem Shaper to the party, I get to choose from 6 pieces of equipment instead of 3. It looks like 3 of them actually belong to Kazakus, while the other 3 belong to Valeera. For the other five mercs in the party I was offered the right 3 pieces of equipment, so I'm assuming that the builder itself is working fine but there is some incorrect data in the DB used to populate it.

I stand by my argument that the buffs are exceptionally low impact.

But the nerfs that occurred essentially made the game playable again.

1. Disintegrate is now a 2 of

2. Barrier bro is lower impact.

3. Challenger rock bird is a formidable card

4. Buff drakes can't get overwhelm

5. Legion whatever was a dumb card

This means that while burst tricks still suck, you literally run 0 right now, unless you really need them for synergy

You can build decks fairly easily that follow the play scary things, removal, card advantage template and not get punished.

Or play aggro, or high synergy, or control, or midrange or whatever you want.

Brewing is viable again, vanilla stuff playable, and overall you can have fun.

Thank God.

Here's 3 decks for you to try that perform well:

I watched the Grandmaster for well more than 4 hours while logged / linked.

But no packs :(

Have you received yours?

Gotta say comming off two of the best patches in Lor history that had massive gameplay ramifications to the extent of creating a new viable archetype - sundisc.

The most recent patch essentially does nothing...vaporize is still the most cost effective piece of removal in the game by a factor of 3 fast speed mana.

And the majority of cards that have been changed have a net 0 impact on the game with Shen being the only successfully tweaked champ for the better.

Gotta say Riot sure is scared of making the pro players sad these days but surely spinning your wheels with 40 plus card changes with a net 0 impact is essentially a giant waste of your staffs talented time and effort.

Find your balls again Riot take risks shake up the meta you did it before do it again.

‐-----------side note--------

1. Most of the changes are unintentional buffs for meta decks. Sunlight blade nerfs hits Targon when buff dragon decks were already in decline.

2. Rock drake lost challenger so now the only decent counter to Annie got deleted, lolz

3. They successfully nerffed Thralls and Legion deserter recent cancers essentially created as a result of this horrible expansion

4. They tried buffing Azir Irelia and midrange freijord but it won't be enough.

5. There's still no reason not to run Annie card piles, she essentially gives any control deck the ability to set your opponent to 14-16 draw you a creature that 2 for ones, and increase your removal by 1 point, and gives you an overwhelm creature.

Talk about missing the point Riot

why out of cards didnt post the patch notes for runeterra? is the staff that does it sick or something?

A new Common Bilgewater Spell, Warning Shot, has been revealed!

Discuss this card below or head on over to the card page to give it a rating!

Learn more about Rising Tides

Head on over to our dedicated guide for Rising Tides!

These 3 things are never mentioned in the patch notes nor properly documented anywhere else

Also, the last patch added a lot of Mercenaries and Solo Adventures achievements..

Would it be possible to make an article whenever new skins, card backs and achievements get added?

As the title suggests the champion shard-system in path of champions needs a change.

The main issue is that you get shards from chest at random which gives you no control over what champions you progress (which is already not so fun) but it gets WORSE with the fact that you can get shards for champions you already have on 3 stars which means that all additional shards just vanish with no compensation and it get's INCREDIBLY BAD by the fact that progressing in the campaign requires you to play champions from certain regions to progress.

I my case: I made all quests, all champion challenges and I am completely stuck now. Why? Because in all the shards that went nowhere I didn't manage to hit 40 shards for eighter bard or jhin leaving me with 0 champions from runeterra and unable to progress in the campaign.

Riot is known for creating rather fair mechanics and do a good job at pve gamemodes. It's unbelievable how such a bad game mechanic (that in a way breaks the gamemode) got into path of champions and riot better fixes it or the gamemode is dead for me

Oh and as we are already on it REMOVE the chance on relicts that make no sense in multiples (such like lost chapter) to drop once you have them. Cause all that does is delaying progress a lot for no reason at all

Hey hey :)

is there any way to sync my runeterra collection here as I do with HS via HSreplay?

Competition Theme: A Comp Of Frost And Flame

Winterveil is coming! Well, not really at all actually, but I don't know enough to make any better references than that.

• You must create a Frost spell that cannot Freeze or interact with Frozen minions, or a Fire spell that cannot deal damage or destroy minions
• Your spell cannot be a Mage or Shaman spell
  • We want to see how other classes might utilise these spell types in interesting ways!

It's time to delve into a world of frigid winds and burning breath - though linkblade91 is making sure we won't be too damaged in the end!

As always, I can be reached through Discord or here on the site via PM if you have any issues to report.

Competition Phases

Here are the phases of this card design competition

• Submission Phase: Starts on Mon, Jun 20 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400). Runs until Sat, Jun 25 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400)
• Voting Phase: Starts on Sat, Jun 25 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400). Runs until Sun, Jun 26 16:00 EDT (GMT -0400)
• Finalist Phase: Starts on Sun, Jun 26 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400). Runs until Mon, Jun 27 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400)
• Winner Selected: After finalist voting concludes and we validate votes.

Discussion Thread Rules

No thread rules were added to this season. Please populate and manually edit this thread with them.

Ok, so Iksar himself said on his last Q&A recap that they know extra coins on Mercenaries are a porblem and that they are "actively looking at solutions". So, here's my idea: converting them to regular gold (you know, the one you buy packs with).

Now, here's the biggest issue with the idea: what's the right conversion so that HS's economy doesn't completely break down? Well, that's not an easy answer, considering a lot of the resources for the game mode are either through packs, tasks or bounties. 

• Tasks give a total of 1640 coins (for himself + randoms) + 3 packs (when task 7 = equipment, the new mercs give let's say 100 extra coins, rounding up);
• Packs give mercs, skins and coins. Now, it's not easy to round up an exact number without opening a butload of packs (and I'm not gonna spend money just to know that number), but by looking at the image from the HS wiki and my own experience, you can conclude that no pack gives out more than 5*50 (so 250) coins, unless you have all the skins and open a "duplicate skin", which will be converted to 50/75/100 coins (depending on merc rarity);
• Bounties give an assortment of coins, depending on the dungeon, but they give out at most... honestly, I couldn't find how much they give and I'm not in the mood to do a Heroic run on Alterac Valley just to check how many coins we get (especially since I don't have that many maxed mercs). So, for the sake of rounding up, I'll say they also give out up to 250 coins.

So, how much gold should we get for the extra coins? I'd say, not that much, just some extra change so your time isn't completely wasted while not being so much you'd run a bot on early game bounties for insane amounts of gold. Which brings me to my proposition: For every 200 extra coins you have of a certain merc, you can redeem X gold, depending on rarity. More specifically, 5G for rare mercs, 10G for epic ones and 20G for legendary mercs.

This way, even if you were to get 250 coins of a certain legendary merc on a Merc Pack, that would be worth the equivalent of 25G: 25% the base cost of a Merc pack, i. e., the same disenchanting to enchanting rate dust has. And also, this change helps with another small inconvenience: ever since the change to the reward track, we've always received gold in multiples of 50, which means you'll always be left with up to 45 "useless" gold leftovers if you don't play arena or duels.

Seeing how we always get Word Search Puzzles, which tends to be a bit boring by now. How about a different kind of puzzle like:

1. Crossword Puzzle. More challenging for the brain to find the exact word to put into.

2. Card Memorize. Do a bit of flipping cards and try to find the same exact pictures (2 for easy, 3 medium) and try to be the fastest. (marking the ranks just like how the score on opening pack works.

And a bit of upgrade to the Word Search Puzzle, maybe the ability to rotate the Puzzle board to make a fresh search point?

Been a while since we've posted a set of update notes, though we haven't done anything super crazy for a while so it hasn't really been needed. I figured there may be some questions also I'm looking for targeted feedback so this thread will hopefully help with that.

Additions & Changes

General

• New Out of Cards Logo!
• Removed some advertisement slots.
  • I needed to test some new slots recently to see performance and have ultimately decided to remove our left side rail. The site felt a little too "boxed in" with it and overall, it wasn't a major change in revenue.
  • Mobile users will no longer see the static header advertisement.
  • The homepage no longer displays an advertisement at the top of the sidebar. (This has effectively been replaced by the right siderail.
    
    • There is a chance that the top sidebar ad gets removed across the site, I'll be paying attention to performance metrics over the coming weeks to make an informed decision.
• Video ads are now served by a new provider.
  • If you notice anything funky compared to before, please let us know.
• The homepage no longer displays deck lists.
  • This is one of the first steps we're taking to clean up the homepage.
  • I know this is going to be controversial, but the homepage is not the primary way our community members are clicking into decks.
    • The game portal pages are more relevant for deck lists.
  • Not all our users care about all the games we have coverage for and because of this, decks takes up a lot of scrolling space on the homepage.
  • Our homepage should be more of a portal into our different titles that are covered, and this will become more apparent in future site updates.
• Portal links have been removed site-wide.
  • This may sound counter-productive to our overall goal with sending people towards portals, which they are already going, but the next site update will be bringing back a portal switcher. It will instead be found in a new menu at the very top of the site, and not be a part of our navigation.

Hearthstone

• Deckbuilder Changes
  • How we load and organize card data in the deckbuilder has changed.
    • Please report any issues you find with the deckbuilder so they can be investigated.
  • Everything should be much quicker and subsequent uses of the deckbuilder are much faster.
• Collection Manager Changes
  • How we load and organize card data in the collection manager has changed.
    • Please report any issues you find with the collection manager so they can be investigated.

Bug Fixes

General

• RSS feeds have been fixed for all games.

Hearthstone

• All collectible cards now properly appear in the deckbuilder.
  • There was an issue during the Throne of the Tides mini-set update that prevented us from showing certain cards.
  • Our redeveloped internals make this a non-issue going forward.

Known Issues

General

• If you have ads disabled on the site due to having a Premium membership, the top of the site looks a little out of place with its wider header.
  • A solution will be implemented, however, if you are using ad-block you will be stuck with the wide header. Surprise, we don't support blocking our ads, which feed our content creators =)

Hearthstone

• Deckbuilder shows all Duels heroes, powers, and treasures regardless of class.
  • This will be "fixed" in a larger deckbuilder update.
  • Our intention is to allow Duels players to correctly create decks that are not tied to a single class.
  • We've still got some UI work to do before this will be finalized, but this is temporary measure to let it work.
  • We still need to flag Duels Heroes so we know which powers and treasures they work with, which is why we just dump them all out at you instead of filtering.
• Some Duels content is not appearing in the deckbuilder.
  • We're a little behind on flagged data. This won't require a new site update to fix, we just need to go through and get our data up to date.

Should the reveal start today? It seems very early compared to the usual 4 month schedule ... when new expansion is supposed to be launched?

A new card, Uncle Ben, has been revealed for MARVEL SNAP!

When this card is destroyed, add Spider-Man to your hand.

Discuss this card below or head on over to the card page!

The news just dropped, and once again I am curious as how players (especially those who migrated to FF14) will take this from the last few expansions, which is honestly, quite bad in a lot of things. I would already list some of them, but the comment section already did that.

https://www.polygon.com/23177186/world-of-warcraft-dragonflight-release-date-pre-order

What do you guys think? Any of you still believe this will turn everything good again?

Me personally doubting that. Especially later when facing the first obstacle which has always been massive bugs.

https://app.mobalytics.gg/lor/stats/regions

Final meta stats for the expansion by play rate.

There isn't a single list being played right now above 53% because "decks" are bad right now.

Card piles are great, lists that don't try to do anything or have any sort of win con are excelling.

Now why is this problematic that every single deck that tries to do anything only wins 53% or less in a card game about synergies and deck building?

Probably don't have to explain it to you but nobody will want to brew anymore or play specific archetypes or role play as specific Champs.

Its sad really that we went from patches that had the highest deck diversity in LOR with healthy winrates across the board 

To everything essentially being bad because they cancel each other out, or are too wincon specific to be flexible enough to win in a meta where trying to win a specific way is bad.

Would of said I told you so but these numbers by play rate quantifiable prove I was right.

A new card, War Machine, has been revealed for MARVEL SNAP!

Ongoing: Your 1-Cost cards have +1 Power.

Discuss this card below or head on over to the card page!