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Competition Theme: Lost In The Shuffle

Time to get up and do the shuffle!

• You must design a card with the word 'shuffle' in its text.

Some cards got a bit lost in the deck and Me0203 wants us to help them find those cards.

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 30 17:00 EST (GMT -0500). Runs until Sat, Feb 4 17:00 EST (GMT -0500)
• Voting Phase: Starts on Sat, Feb 4 17:00 EST (GMT -0500). Runs until Sun, Feb 5 16:00 EST (GMT -0500)
• Finalist Phase: Starts on Sun, Feb 5 17:00 EST (GMT -0500). Runs until Mon, Feb 6 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.

I haven´t seen it mentioned anywhere, and I´d miss it too, if I didn´t casually check the in-game shop, so I thought I might post about it. If it was, I´m sorry. They´re the 4 Hero skins from the Lunar New Year event from 2 years ago and you can buy the skins for 1000 gold, except for Valeera, she is for 1500 with cardback.

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.

Many diamond card animated images are missing from 2022 and later. Only cards up to Alterac Valley have diamond images.

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: Mini-Set Madness

The sets may be miniature in size, but there's an enormous past for them to cover.

• You must make a card for a theoretical mini-set of an old expansion that has not received one.
  • Work under the assumption that the mini-set comes out next Hearthstone Year (rather than back then).
    • That means you can use mechanics that did not exist at the time (Rush, spell schools, etc.).

What would happen if Hearthstone's mini-sets covered more of its not-so-mini past? Nobudy and Wailor are both asking that question this week.

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 23 17:00 EST (GMT -0500). Runs until Sat, Jan 28 17:00 EST (GMT -0500)
• Voting Phase: Starts on Sat, Jan 28 17:00 EST (GMT -0500). Runs until Sun, Jan 29 16:00 EST (GMT -0500)
• Finalist Phase: Starts on Sun, Jan 29 17:00 EST (GMT -0500). Runs until Mon, Jan 30 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/

Keeping the (very flawed) wording of Snap cards in mind:

Will Shadow King even work on Lanes that are buffed by Aura cards such as Patriot or Cap. America?
Rationally I would say no - you cant negate an Ongoing buff without negating the Ongoing effect itself. But thet state of Snaps flawed wording and ruling tells me otherwise and I can imagine  it will really debuff entire lanes regardless of any Ongoing effect that is still working?

Anyone?

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.

Shouldn't be time for an announcement of the announcement?

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/

There are quite a lot of changes this season between the changes of hosts, prizes, and finals. I figure people will probably have a lot to say. Here's your place to do so.

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

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.

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. 

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: 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.

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 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.