So I got it 2 or 3 months ago. I quite enjoyed the pace of growing your collection, you don't get handed everything asap, but you also grow at a very steady pace. You can cast things at different spell speeds to have windows of interaction like MTG, but the pace of the game didn't suffer for it. Game aesthetics are on point, it feels well made and well polished.
But the immediate issue I ran into was 95% of my opponents were playing basically the same thing every game: Aggro.
- Elise + Fearsome
- Noxus free damage vomit
- Elusive + Autofill
- Aggro Champion with Quick Attack + Autofill
- Usually some fusion of two of the above
This meant I could literally only ever play Shadow Isles + Stuff myself, because Black Spear was a painful necessity against all the constant aggro swarms, Shadow Isles also has some of the only good card draw to dig with, and even Grasp of the Undying (which is overcosted) was also kind of necessary.
Doesn't help that, on top of this, the "control" deck's cheese of choice with Heimdinger and Karma also pretty much required a cheap 3 damage spell so you could cast 2 removals in a turn, or just get overrun by their endless value. And "answer me or basically lose immediately" gameplay is VERY polarizing and not fun. Any delay means too much damage or too many generated cards for the opponent, and you'll lose to THAT even if you find an answer after a short delay.
ALL OF THIS COULD BE ADDRESSED WITH MORE CHEAP CONDITIONAL REMOVAL OPTIONS.
Instead they nerf Black Spear. It was already balanced and difficult to utilize without filling your deck with a bunch of 1-cost garbage which already can't block Fearsome, can't block Elusive, and is too weak to even BE called a roadblock against the Aggro decks.
So now literally only Culling Strike exists to deal with SOME of the overwhelming number of Aggro cards, and it doesn't work on several. Noxian Guillotine is worthless because you can't EVEN do damage in the early game at all to units with Fearsome and Elusive going unblocked or Quick Attack not taking damage on attack. Most games just degenerate into a game of chicken between who can vomit the most Elusive+Fearsome cards or some overpowered Champion like Zed not being immediately answered, starting at "only" 6 damage per turn for 3 and ramping up after.
Legends of Runeterra was already plagued by Aggro being overpowered, Combo being overpowered, and Control pretty much not existing. For an online card game that FINALLY offered some promise of Mutually Interactive Gameplay (without the toxicity of unlimited value Planeswalkers), instead windows of interaction are being closed. Almost every low-cost Champion in this game now cannot be meaningfully interacted with, Elusive and Fearsome based aggression is even more dominating, and decks have even less variety in builds and gameplay than before because CONTROL isn't allowed to exist to balance the meta. (And even on Control's end, I don't want an unlimited value engine like Heimerdinger to exist in his current state either. That's the SAME issue MTG has. The card goes a minimum of 2 or 3 for 1 if he even gets answered or just oppressively wins without an immediate answer.)
There's no decisions or variety in deck-building or gameplay. You play Aggro of some flavor and vomit cards at the opponent and whoever can vomit harder wins. I don't care that there's 4 or 5 flavors of THE SAME EXACT THING WITH THE SAME FUNDAMENTAL GAMEPLAY, it's still the same deck with the same playstyle. Vomit difficult-to-block guys, go aggro. Mostly, it's just whichever aggro deck in the aggro mirror draws more of their unanswerable aggro Champions first and can attack with them first to snowball the game. Some combat tricks can shift this but those are again just standard aggro cards for standard aggro decks.
Do I really care if it's Shadow Isles, Noxus, Ionia, or Demacia? Nope. It's all the same deck doing the same thing.
And that's why I want to put the game down. It has a fun core, it has promise. But it's like the developers only like Aggro and Combo and hate Control, like the usual kids in other card games who whine whenever anything Control based is viable. Instead of playing better, balancing threat output, not overextending, finding ways to increase value generation... these kinds just whine that the other guy's Control cards need nerfs. It's a childish way to play, wanting to treat the game like a singleplayer race and then complaining that you hit a speedbump instead of asking what you could do to play around your opponent. And it's a childish and self-defeating way to build a game.
