I'm not gonna sit here and say ramp good, Gwen good, attrox good, plunder good.

Because I have a high confidence in everyone that plays LOR will have a decent understanding that "archetypes" > "card piles" right now and that the deck stats are quite even.

Also midrange good, when everything else is balanced...duh.

Instead I'm gonna talks about the sneaky decks nobody knows about and why they are significant and possitive indicator of the overall balance of LOR right now.

1. Ekko - somebody once said that if Ekko was ever a good card LOR would be unplayable. Turns out that's stupid because when a high synergy, champ dependent deck is swinging a 53% winrate when he used to be F tier that is very good for the overall health of your game.

2. Elites - often viewed as the absolute worst deck in the game but if you can climb and win with Garen granted at 51% that's a healthy meta. You can take the absolute worst champion in the game right now to masters if you grind enough...that's amazing!

3. The unknown - when you see every single deck in the game performing at 54% and lower with key powerhouses like pirate aggro only hitting 51% that means pro players have no idea what the hell they should be playing.

Graplr - my man

Majin - no Ionia sir

Mogwai - abandoned

Sunny - his lists are just for fun

The point is that if you can build your own list that performs up to a 51% winrate standard according to mastering runeterra you are essentially as good as pirate aggro.

I can do that **** in my sleep and so can you. Death to card piles, long live archetypes.

I feel bad for the players, but could we please get the original Jaina portret back now?

will there be a round of nerf today? If not, when?

what about miniset announcement ?

Competition Theme: Keyword Katastrophe

Bold flavors. Fortune favors the bold. To boldly go where no one has gone before. Do you see what we're gettin' at?

• You must create a card that contains only keywords in its text box.
  • You can use periods and commas, of course, but no other words!

It's a catastrophe! R's kitchen is covered in cards crafted to contain a concoction of keywords. Somebody ought to clean this up!

As always, we 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, Jan 16 17:00 EST (GMT -0500). Runs until Sat, Jan 21 17:00 EST (GMT -0500)
• Voting Phase: Starts on Sat, Jan 21 17:00 EST (GMT -0500). Runs until Sun, Jan 22 16:00 EST (GMT -0500)
• Finalist Phase: Starts on Sun, Jan 22 17:00 EST (GMT -0500). Runs until Mon, Jan 23 17:00 EST (GMT -0500)
• 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.

Just posting the link for Leer's weekly meta report. 

https://masteringruneterra.com/monday-lor-meta-report-jan-23/

So, in general HS takes most headlines in this website, but what is the ACTUAL most popular game among this website users? 

Has the partnership with HSReplay.net ended perhaps? The reason why I ask is because I no longer see the plugin above frequently played HS decks any more.

From Reddit:

Hey everyone! I'm Aleco, the Final Design Lead on Hearthstone.

I know a lot of you have been asking about Standard balance changes. We're putting together a pretty big patch for ~1 week from now. In all honesty, I wish we could have shipped this patch a little sooner. The holiday break pushed our patch schedule, but the meta doesn't take a holiday, so I empathize with players who feel like this patch is coming late. Though I can't promise anything right now, we're chatting as a team about if we can adjust our patch cadence next holiday break. Hope you all enjoy the upcoming patch!

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/10fnmvh/standard_balance_patch_timing/

Hot off the presses, here's the current 23 best decks in LoR.

Aatrox is all over the place, but there are still a variety of good options out there.

Edit - I'm personally trying out a Bandle City Poro brew. So far, it's feeling quite a bit stronger than I expected.

Competition Theme: Prepare for Tribal, Make it Double

There are two types of people in this world. Err, well actually there's quite a bit more than two, but we're going to focus specifically on getting two of them together.

• You must make a card that synergizes with dual-type minions.
  • This can be in the form of something like "Do something with [minion type A] or [minion type B]" or "Do something with a minion that has two minion types".
  • Your card must synergize with exactly two minion types. No more, no less.

This week marks the first week of season 6, and Moondreamer has asked us to kick it off with a competition of two tribes!

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, Jan 9 17:00 EST (GMT -0500). Runs until Sat, Jan 14 17:00 EST (GMT -0500)
• Voting Phase: Starts on Sat, Jan 14 17:00 EST (GMT -0500). Runs until Sun, Jan 15 16:00 EST (GMT -0500)
• Finalist Phase: Starts on Sun, Jan 15 17:00 EST (GMT -0500). Runs until Mon, Jan 16 17:00 EST (GMT -0500)
• 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.

FYI, the Amazon coins page is broken (404, not found) which is located in the footer of every OoC page.

Very interesting breakdown of the current LoR meta here.

Small bug. I just noticed that the up- and downvote buttons plus counter appear after editing a direct message. Refreshing the page will make them go away again which suggests to me that this voting control is not supposed to appear there at all. 

So like many of you I swap cards games now and then.

Hearthstone -> gwent -> shadowverse ->mtg arena -> lor -> snap

Early impressions were good in pool 1 and 2.

I got to vibranium with an equal card pool and equal footing with opponents.

Just maximizing the gambling mechanic by knowing exactly every card the opponent could have because they had the same cards as me.

Then I got to pool 3 and the game changed. Instantly it just became about mashing as much math into the opponents face in the 6 turns alloted and nothing else mattered.

So very quickly I started to miss things like instant speed interactions, fast speed interactions, removal, board cleares, like actual "counter play" beyond location locking, movement and killmonger/chang chi which are the exception not the rule.

So for the first time ever I'm regressing back a game, I'm back maining LOR because I disagree with Mogwai I think Snap kinda sucks.

When Ben Brode took out everything in card games that was "anti fun" he also took everything out of card games that was "pro smart" and that kinda sucks.

So yeah Snap you have a lot of growing up to do in my mind to match the perfection of LOR 

Just my 5 cents feel free to fight me in the comments.

Hi all,

This is a self plugin for my channel ^^.

TouTTo NaRouTTo

I m doing a for fun decks and my biggest playlist is on "one champ per deck" matches.

I put the deck in the description if you like to try it.

I'm open to any suggestion for both the channel and decks.

I will love if you dislike something to be frank and say it.

I'm still growing as a content creator so Newer videos will have a "slight" improvement and off course

subscibe and like and comment all the good stuff.

Just a quick brag thread here (but also encouragement for my fellow Merc players). Yesterday I maxxed out Murloc Holmes, completing my collection of maxxed out mercenaries. I spent very little money on this mode (2 bundles early on, both in the $15 range), and just a lot of grinding. When the excess coin exchange arrived, I traded in for around 30,000 Renown. I now have about 1,000. Also have 73 packs saved up for future content drops. 

There is hope my friends! Yes, there are major problems with this game mode (bots in the pit, diminishing returns on coins, no pity timer on legendaries, etc.). But if you have fun playing it, keep going! The grind may be a slog, but at one PvP win per day and daily tasking, you can obtain a full set of maxxed out mercenaries. And there are lots of fun, competitive squads to play. I regularly encounter comps I haven't seen before, and sometimes I try them out myself!

Here's hoping for more content coming soon!

https://app.mobalytics.gg/lor/meta-tier-list

Okay so now that the hot fix has landed and we can safely say we've moved past the stupid card pile phase, which happens every now and then, and pro players are like man this 3 champion split deck is 100% the best deck in the game, we can talk about what people are actually playing.

S tier:

1. Lulu Jinx - that right now the game is more or less balanced you can just play sneezy bigger dust and win fun deck that has stood the test of time in S tier

2. Pirate aggro - nerfed into the ground and still S tier its never going anywhere

A tier:

1  hallowed - yep another deck that has stood the test of time with the competitive use of the "recently" reworked Katarina showing that any low tier can become top tier.

2.hemier shadow - there's always some version of heimer control that is playable this does not change its universal

3. Ramp - ramp is probably the strongest its been in a long time in the latest expansion, I would call it almost unfair and all the best decks are.

4. Attrox decks - I'm just gonna lump these together cheap value equipment plus a big boy, sometimes you play for value and you go Kayne sometimes you play for thr extra attacks with Vayne, good flexible champ.

5. Swain Tf - one of the oldest viable control decks in LOR revitalized by the buffs to Swain and boat. Once again any low tier deck can be A tier.

6.plunder - even the nerf to gangplank can't keep this powerhouse midrange deck down.

7. Annie Jhin - kinda the worse version of aggro right now mainly because Jhins champ spell is the worst in the game. Change that and this aggro deck might hit S tier one day.

8. Seraphine Ezreal - still a good combo deck due to the spell priority change where spell procs happen instantly and you can just stack 10 spells for lethal, the nerd to barkeep didn't change a ton

9. Rumble - kinda just a scary card and obviously vayne let's him attack extra but I don't think she's necessary

Personal addition:

10. Shurima - I don't care if it's mono shurima or ziggs thaliyah landmarks this deck did not go from S tier to D tier with a 1 mana nerf.

B tier: 

Lurk & deep - I'm gonna lump these together as the good bilgewater tribal decks I think they are both very playable

Yassao - yep if you're not brain deck this deck can put in the work

Zed Heckarim - got a very strong tribal card eith the latest expansion which makes it quite playable but not without weakness

So there you have it, actual archetypes and actual decks. I wouldn't be surprised if there's eay more thats viable that people just aren't playing.

The card pool is massive at this point and I kinda like that.

I'm gonna hate rotation, and I kinda hate these one hit wonder Champs Lor keeps releasing when Swain and Sejuani have been A tier for like the entirety of the lifespan of the game.

Competition Theme: The Dead of Knight

The Death Knights have arisen, and now we serve them... in our job to make them new cards. Your card must be a Death Knight card, but you've got up to three different routes to go for a valid entry!

• Rotten to the Corpse
  • Design a card with Corpse synergy.
    • The most straightforward way to do is to just make a card that spends Corpses, but there are a number of other ways you can go about this.
• Triple Threat
  • Create a triple-Rune card.
    • Hint: Look at the existing triple-Rune cards that Death Knight has to get a better understand of what constitutes as a triple-Rune card.
• House of the (Un)Dead
  • Design a card with Undead synergy/interaction.
    • Your card (if it's a minion) doesn't need to be an Undead, but merely just being an Undead will not count. Otherwise, you're free to go whatever route you want as long as it uses direct interaction with Undeads.

While you're more than welcome to try to make a card that fulfills all 3 prompts, this is fully optional and will likely prove to be a challenge.

We're kicking off Season 6 with a fun competition all about Death Knights. There's no prize for winning this one, but it'll be a sign of things to come.

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, Jan 2 17:00 EST (GMT -0500). Runs until Sat, Jan 7 17:00 EST (GMT -0500)
• Voting Phase: Starts on Sat, Jan 7 17:00 EST (GMT -0500). Runs until Sun, Jan 8 16:00 EST (GMT -0500)
• Finalist Phase: Starts on Sun, Jan 8 17:00 EST (GMT -0500). Runs until Mon, Jan 9 17:00 EST (GMT -0500)
• Winner Selected: After finalist voting concludes and we validate votes.

Discussion Thread Rules

Please note: This is a special competition and not in a normal season.

A new Legendary Neutral Minion, Brann Bronzebeard, has been revealed!

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

Learn more about Core 2022

Head on over to our dedicated guide for Core 2022!

Get Cheaper Card Packs

This section contains affiliate links.

If you want to save money when buying Hearthstone packs, you should check out Amazon Coins! It's an easy way to save up to 25% off Hearthstone packs so you can get into the new expansion without worrying about your wallet too much. We've got a detailed guide on how to Get Started with Amazon Coins, but if you've already dealt with them in the past, you can buy some more by clicking right here.

LOR is a card game that is increasingly not only having superficial similarities with magic the gathering, but is also running into similar problems.

Namely, there are too many "set mechanics" being introduced into the game.

Culminating into perhaps what has been one of the biggest failures of an expansion to date, housing the first instance of dead champions.

Both Exodia (Rhyze) and empower (Kayle) don't really work or make sense in LOR as a game.

Like you could say we'll Bard exists and he can hard hand buff all your empower cards. Deck buff exists in freijord and a worse version of handcuff exists in Ionia, and now Targon has buff cards too.

So you should say that Kayle is amazing, she has more cross region support then any other champion in the game, but there in lies the problem.

If none of the synergies are worth pursuing then none of them will be played.

Similarly Rhyze isn't the first exodia card introduced into lor, fiora exists, healing fountain, and bandle tree.

So many of the most exciting cards in the expansion aren't actually the new champions but the pre-existing archetype support.

More ramp, more hallow (eww but yes good), more elite, more spawn for Illois, more self dmg and yes the list goes on.

For the first time in LOR history I'm more interested in crafting epic cards then champions as a free to play player because honestly who cares about this new garbage when you can play better designed decks with more support?

So what is the fix here longterm for LOR? For the first time ever I want to see more in archetype champion support. I want a 3 mana vlad enabler, I want a scout, I want a elite, I want a deep champion, a lurk champion, a daybreak nightfall champion.

In short take that massive league of legends roster you want to feed down our throat and just slam them in as an additional option for an already good deck.

Boom now everyone is a consideration and nothing is dead. While LOR believes the solution to its longterm health is just to delete old champions, I belive the opposite supplement them and stop churning out these one hit wonders.

Just my 2 cents feel free to hit me up in the comments.

Here's my source for the hotfix info - https://www.reddit.com/r/LoRCompetitive/comments/104dtgp/hotfix_later_today/

Here are the changes:

Back Alley Bar: c6 > c7

Darkin Aegis: 1|1 > 0|1

World Ender: c13 > c16

Fallen Reckoner: 4|3 > 3|2

Risen Reckoner: 6|3 > 5|2

Vayne: 3|4 > 3|3

Vayne (Level 2): 4|5 > 4|4

A new Legendary Neutral Minion, Astalor Bloodsworn, has been revealed!

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

Learn more about March of the Lich King

Head on over to our dedicated guide for March of the Lich King!

Get Cheaper Card Packs

This section contains affiliate links.

If you want to save money when buying Hearthstone packs, you should check out Amazon Coins! It's an easy way to save up to 25% off Hearthstone packs so you can get into the new expansion without worrying about your wallet too much. We've got a detailed guide on how to Get Started with Amazon Coins, but if you've already dealt with them in the past, you can buy some more by clicking right here.

A new card, Shanna the She-Devil, has been revealed for Marvel Snap!

On Reveal: Add a random 1-Cost card to each location.

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

This is a weekly article that puts up the current winrates and playrates of the top decks in LoR.

Feel free to argue with the commentary if you like, but the winrates and playrates are not open to debate.

After playing mainly Control Blood DK in Standard since the expansion came out I want to play a faster deck for a change.

I consider to craft Pure Paladin for Standard. Here I am missing Kotori Lightblade. After playing against some Pure Paladins I can`t remember to see Kotori in action at all. I wonder how important this card is for the deck.

So: How relevant is this minion in the deck?

Is it important, nice to have or even redundant?