In light of the recent Demon Hunter and Priest revamp news in Hearthstone, and the fact that MTG has never introduced a sixth color to its wheel, I've been thinking about whether or not LoR's regions have clear enough identities. Ultimately, I think the answer is no, they don't have enough identity.
The stated Riot philosophy is that every card should be playable in at least one deck, and I think you see a lot of that reflected in the ways that certain region pairs combine to form themes. Some examples:
- The Shadow Isles and Noxus pair has access to a Spiders deck
- The Freljord and P&Z pair has access to a Poro and/or Elnuk Cloning deck
- The Demacia and P&Z pair has access to a Big Spells deck
- The Freljord and Noxus pair has access to a Crimson Self-harm deck
The result is that a lot of the theming seems to have been done primarily at the "region pair" level, and it makes less obvious combinations of those same regions clumsier. Yes, regions have their some of their own dedicated mechanics (e.g. Demacia has Tough Elites, Freljord has Frostbite, Ionia has hand buffs etc.), but those mechanics don't generally pair in interesting ways across regions. Because so much of the work of theming has been done at the "region pair" level, many of the decisions on how to pair a region feel forced and ultimately deck-building is less interesting and more paint-by-numbers.
By contrast, when you look at a game like MTG (which is probably the best comparison, because you can mix/match colors there like you can regions), you see primary and secondary themes for colors, and players are left to mix and match those colors to get to useful synergies. I can very easily build a Black/White deck that emphasizes token creatures for a more go-wide aggressive strategy, and I can create a Black/White deck that uses hard removal and AoE to control the game. Yes, there are multi-color cards that tend to emphasize shared themes, but even in those you see variety. Taking Blue/White as an example, you see cards that emphasize the shared enchantments and artifact subtheme of those colors, but you also see cards that emphasize the smaller fliers theme that they share. This leaves players with a lot of freedom to decide which colors to run, and how much of any primary or shared themes they want to emphasize in their deck.
Ultimately, I think this problem will only get more muddled in LoR as they introduce more regions. The reason other major CCGs have been so reticent to add new classes, colors, etc., is because you have to divide up the game mechanics pie into smaller pieces, which ultimately makes the archetypes more prescriptive and hinders creative deck-building. LoR seems to have started at a place of fairly prescriptive deck-building already, so cutting that pie up could do a lot of damage.
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