That's the issue with that list. Run down it and all you'll see is a couple of very expensive AoE removals - which walk right into Deny - and a lot of single-target removal spells which are fundamentally inefficient in and of themselves.
Not going into detail on Elusive because I've already done so like twice in other threads, but to summarise:
- Elusive is a problem in the immediate due to a lack of tools to counter them for non-Ionian decks
- Them existing in the same region as Deny is a further aggravating factor
- The Magic comparison is a poor one because of the breadth and depth of tools available in that game and the different cadence of Magic over LoR
- The point most people don't consider when looking at Elusives is the design space. Is playing against Elusives fun, whether you have the tools to fight them or not? Is playing with them fun, relative to other decks? Probably not, in my view. The theory of Elusive (and more to the point, Flying in Magic) never actually played out, and the design purpose was never actually reached. It has instead become a checkbox, 'do you have answer for this y/n', and it's a poorly placed checkbox in LoR because those answers don't exist in bulk
Welcome to my world, in which even my tl;dr is long-winded -.-;
Slammin' the downvote (which I actually rarely use, props to the thread for reminding me it existed).
This thread feels like the epitome of entitlement to me, really. Frontloading XP rewards into quests and FWOD bonuses is optimal both for players - who don't feel forced to grind and aren't punished for having other commitments - and also optimal for the developers because it encourages people to play daily but for a short enough time to not get burned out.
If the only reason you're playing the game is for rewards, you kinda need to reevaluate how you approach... well, games. To suggest that playing games beyond your three FWOD bonuses is pointless is to suggest you don't actually enjoy playing the game. If you do enjoy it, well then, there's the reason to keep playing. And if you don't, why are you even here? Stop playing it already.
Alternate take - just ignore the actual numbers that come up on the screen and imagine all the XP is spread over your first twenty games instead. It works out the same.
Yeah, I really love the way Riot communicates with players. League has had consistent patches for so long so it is a very welcome return for Legends of Runeterra. Hearthstone and Blizzard are such a joke when it comes to regular game updates... minus Heroes of the Storm but they killed that game so it doesn't really count.
While true that League's patch system shows consistency, as a long-time player I'd say it's more a different flavour of irritation than a direct improvement. Rito's communication on patch notes was great a couple years ago, but has been getting steadily worse since then. There hasn't been a single patch note released in the past year that hasn't had at least one example of a change explanation being irrelevant to, or directly contradicting, the change itself - e.g. 'we want to take some power out of this champion's early game and focus on giving them a strong late game'; actual change just takes 10 damage off each rank of Q.
That's aside from their general pattern of buffing and nerfing semi-randomly, leading to something of a carousel effect where the meta changes much more because Rito decided to buff/nerf something rather than through a natural system of finding counters to established play patterns. Oh, and occasional manifest refusal to identify the real problem, such as massively overbuffing Conqueror and then deciding to blanket-nerf a bunch of champions that used it instead of, y'know, reverting the buff.
Hah, you'd be amazed. If I'm particularly interested in an expansion, I will theorycraft a huge number of decks (I think last time I did this I had ~14) and I will make damn sure I have all the necessary cards on release day. As a side effect, I spend a huge amount of packs on release day when that happens.
The decks I come up with are rarely, if ever, good (I don't bother posting them because why post something that has a 90+% chance of being garbage?) and it costs me a lot of money... but it's fun, so I do it. The bright side of having a decent job, I suppose.
I think to really get the flavour you need to make it dependent on killing rather than striking. I'm also sceptical about giving him challenger, though I accept that your reasoning was probably that he would kinda suck without it :P
I would say make him a 1/6 with regen - specifically choosing 6 health due to a large number of 5-attack units in the game - and give him only +1 attack each time he kills an enemy. Level up would only require 2 'stacks', would cause him to gain +2 health (no attack), and would give him Challenger in addition to his other effects (because in League his ult grants bonus range on his Q, and you'd assume after getting enough stacks to teamfight he's probably high enough level to drop a few points into Wither).
I think you could actually broaden this question a little to allow for a more engaging conversation. What should champions be?
KANSAS above is entirely correct - what champions are, at present, are simply more powerful followers. They have some limited immunity to effects (since some of the more powerful effects target followers only), but otherwise they're just mana efficient or have powerful effects on them.
Is this enough? The vast majority of current decks run at least one champion in them, but typically that champion isn't particularly thematically associated with the deck - most Elusive decks run Braum, for example, not for any particular association with Freljord (they're mostly Ionian), or Poros (lel), but because he's a strong unit.
The question would then be further expanded by asking that if this isn't enough, then what would be done to change it? Hypothetically, my immediate response would be to impose restrictions on what decks can have champions in them - for example, Braum might require a minimum number of Poro cards and/or Freljord cards before he can be included. And, as an incentive, buff all champions, so as to reward the player for restricting themselves.
To be absolutely clear - I'm not saying this is a good idea. Just that it's an interesting question to think about.
I'm actually not wholly against the idea of increasing its mana cost, personally. To be clear - I don't think the spell itself is problematic in a vacuum, but by its very nature, it doesn't exist in that vacuum; in its current state it's going to have a permanent game-warping effect on every expansion they subsequently release.
Making it more expensive would throw off the cost-benefit analysis a little, since at a baseline level countering a 4 mana spell with a 3 mana one is a 'win'. But I don't know that that's necessarily a bad thing - the most impactful cards are at 6+ mana for the most part, and regardless, is it unreasonable to expect a player to pay a premium for a global disrupt to their opponent's strategy?
Without delving into rebuttals of individual posts:
- I agree that rewards being semi-random is rather off-message for the goal they were apparently going for with the game's reward system, but personally don't have an issue with it
- I would also like to voice a little support for 40D here because goddamn, dude was very clear he was looking for consistency rather than whining about a lack of drops - and people jumped on him worse than most of the actual whine-threads we get around here ¬.¬
They are whimsical animated stickers, for crying out loud. They aren't even voiced!
There is no etiquette, and there never will be.
Anyone who has a problem with the way another player is emoting can mute them. Problem solved.
I don't know that I agree with that. Even in the initial closed betas there was a clear etiquette emerging - in the vast majority of games (that I experienced, at least) the Shen emote was used as a 'Well played' salute, usually at the end of the game. So far it's been a polite pleasantry from what I've seen - in much the same way that people will offer 'gg' at the end of a game in other areas, wherein it's less a comment on the quality of the game and more a polite statement equivalent to saying 'good morning' to someone.
I've not seen any emergent etiquette around the other emotes, but if I make the assumption that my experience is representative (which is, admittedly, a difficult leap to make without empirical evidence) then there's precedent... meaning it's wholly possible further etiquette may emerge.
To be fair, it's not 100% intuitive; there are some interactions with buffs and bounces that don't make a lot of sense. As an example: if you've played a Poro-Snax with a Lonely Poro in hand, it'll get buffed to 2/2. When played, the newly generated Poro also receives the +1/+1 despite not existing before the buff was played. And yet when Lonely Poro is returned to hand it reverts to a 1/1, losing the buffs that even generated cards receive. It's consistent with previous mechanics, but in no way intuitive.
That's weird I would assume the Poro Snax is an aura effect like Warmother's Call if any poro is on board it gets +X/+X (X being the number of Poro Snax played).
Yeah, that's exactly how I'd have assumed it would work too. I know from experience, however, that it does not. Just one of those interactions you have to learn to accept I suppose... it's been years and I'm still not 100% happy that you can't use Silence to remove Polymorph in HS ¬.¬.
- There's some validity to your point on deck size - decks are substantially larger (proportionally) than similar card games for the relative health totals. Magic is a poor comparator given its continued reliance on the Lands mechanic. However, simply drawing 2 cards per turn is a short-sighted and unsustainable way of resolving it. I suspect the issue will slowly resolve itself as more cards are released - the problem is really around reliability, and that becomes less of an issue when there are more cards around which can fit into a given situation more comfortably.
- Spells really aren't particularly overpowered, particularly as they tend towards being 'all in' plays to have any significant impact - using up all your mana for the turn to have a short-term impact. Removal, meanwhile, is removal - the point you make here could be made for pretty much every other card game in existence. That's kind of their point - minions are for longer-term benefit-over-time, while spells are for a short-term swing.
- Nexus health - that's something that's been batted around a few times in different places. I felt the same way when I first started playing, but I'm less sold on it now. That said, I can't honestly say whether that's a change in my viewpoint over time or simply me getting used to it.
- Card draw - already covered above.
- Deny - Giving access to a single card to all regions would be creating a massive exception to the entire game design for the sake of a single effect. There is potential to give similar effects to other regions, but I'm sceptical that they'd do that as a blanket move. What's more likely is they'll nerf Deny, which is something they've already said is under consideration. While I heavily disagree with the idea of spreading Deny around more widely, I also do feel that it's a game-warping effect; Deny existing heavily disincentivizes any deck from running high-cost spells, while also contributing to the ridiculous presence Ionia has in the upper tiers right now (though I will note that Elusive is far more a culprit in that regard).
The thing about a digital card game is that regardless of what the card says, it can be programmed to do whatever the programmer wants.
I agree with this. However, this doesn't absolve the developer from having to make sure the text on the cards is accurate - otherwise, things gets unintuitive and confusing, which will inevitably alienate players.
But what you're not taking into account with that statement is that the developer has competing priorities. They're not just required to make the text accurate, they're also required to make it approachable, consistent with all other instances of similar effects, easily readable from both a grammar and a colloquial standpoint...
The former is, of course, the main point, and the reason (I assume) this entire thread could exist in the first place. When you have to choose between making something clear and easily understood to a new player, and writing text that covers as many possible interactions as possible, you do the former. Both to avoid scaring away new players and because anyone who's going to keep playing only needs to see an interaction like this once to learn how it works. The cost-benefit is heavily in favour of simplified text.
Admittedly, it wouldn't take much to clarify the interaction (simply adding the words 'to me' to Barrier's text would do it), but I'm sure there's plenty of factors in play to get to this point.
Haven't played HSBG in quite some time, but looking at it purely from a design perspective:
Tirion is definitely overtuned in a vacuum. Sure, he's fixed as requiring primarily minions with no type, but equally, that's not all that big of a problem when the reward is 1 gold for a global +1/+1. Amalgams are gone, Murlocs have been nerfed, so you've got a lot less in the way of Poisonous to deal with the problem of persistent stat inflation. However, that's wholly fixable in theory with some basic numbers manipulation.
The problem outside that vacuum is that Tirion's design doesn't mesh with the rest of the current Hero offering, making balancing solely by numbers impossible. What I mean is that Tirion not only has access to an entire tribe of his own (if you want to define 'tribeless' as a tribe), but he also has access to other tribes too - both Demons and Beasts have typeless force-multipliers which are balanced solely by their own vulnerability. He effectively gets to pick and choose from several different Tribes, with one as a fallback that no other hero in the game will try to collect if the other game-plans aren't looking optimal.
That's a problem you can't fix with numbers outside of just nerfing him out of viability altogether. The only real solution is to introduce more heroes that are going to compete for the same resources, or more powerful cards for the Tribes (which is a whole other problem altogether).
I would add that this is a problem you're inevitably going to run into when designing for a game as simplistic as HSBG. They really didn't leave themselves much room to work with, and outside of major additions - like more tribes - you're very quickly going to run out of interesting things to do that don't cause some crack in the functionality somewhere.
To be fair, it's not 100% intuitive; there are some interactions with buffs and bounces that don't make a lot of sense. As an example: if you've played a Poro-Snax with a Lonely Poro in hand, it'll get buffed to 2/2. When played, the newly generated Poro also receives the +1/+1 despite not existing before the buff was played. And yet when Lonely Poro is returned to hand it reverts to a 1/1, losing the buffs that even generated cards receive. It's consistent with previous mechanics, but in no way intuitive.
Frankly, Wild Growth wasn't a problem card at all. The problem was they wanted to print Breath of Dreams, and similar cards, but there was no real point because Wild Growth already existed. The only solutions to that problem are a) don't print Breath of Dreams, meaning come up with another card, b) print something more powerful than pre-nerf Wild Growth, which didn't go down well when they did it with Jade Blossom (because people either played both or picked the preferable option), or c) nerf Wild Growth then print a very similar card in the new design space opened up.
Option c) is the easiest one, provides them with the most long-term benefit, and they can always keep printing similar cards if they want to retain that part of Druid's identity.
I've had a similar issue, noted on another thread. showing three Vladimir purchases for Wild Cards which I don't remember making; Vlad isn't in my collection and the refund button throws an error when clicked. Safe to assume there's some bugs there.
'I am bad at card games and would rather assert that cards are busted than understand how I could or should have played around them: the thread'. Less snappy title, but I feel it's more descriptive.
As an aside, dear OP:
There you go, a bunch of blank space on the house. Please feel free to use it to separate out paragraphs in any future posts so that they're a little more readable.
Possibly weird, but I'll be wanting to get the token as a minimum every week - not for the rewards, but simply because I enjoy Expedition more than constructed right now and want to get it to be 'free-to-play' ASAP each week.
Regrettably the images aren't loading for me so I can't comment on the cards themselves.
@Oldmansanns - If I were designing Kog he'd probably be a low-cost, low-stats champion (I'm thinking 3 mana 3/1 right now, with the 1 health symbolising the typical League strategy of dogpiling the Kog every fight), with Last Breath: I strike anything (symbolising his passive). He'd have a secondary effect which embodies the Living Artillery - specifically something which triggers while he's on the bench, to symbolise the range advantage. Maybe whenever an ally strikes an enemy follower, I deal 1 damage to it. The level up effect would make him a 4/2 and give him +1 damage on the Living Artillery effect. Having written that and reflected, however, I suspect I'm cramming too much into that package...
@GerritDeMan - If Veigar doesn't have infinite scaling, he's not Veigar :P I think he'd get +1 spell damage each time you kill an enemy minion with a spell? Also, if Bandle City is going to be a region (and it should be), Teemo's going to need re-badging... Also, I don't think Jhin would care much about deaths since that's not a major aspect of his character (he's more about the deaths he causes than deaths in general like someone like Thresh is) - you'd be more likely to see a lot of effects themed around the number 4.
Personally, I'd like to see some of the weirder champion designs become cards because I'm curious how the devs would actually create them. Singed, for one, Aphelios for another, Aurelion Sol, Yuumi, Tahm Kench... Oh, and I'd like to see Kindred as well, because I adore their flavour even if I don't care for them in-game.
Haven't noticed directly, but I also haven't been paying particularly close attention. There are quite a few UI bugs I'm noticing though. Most notably, my store refund page says I bought 3 copies of Vladimir with Champion Wildcards. Possibly I did - I certainly was considering it, but I don't remember whether I did so or not - but I don't have the cards, nor does the refund option actually do anything beyond trigger an error.
That's the issue with that list. Run down it and all you'll see is a couple of very expensive AoE removals - which walk right into Deny - and a lot of single-target removal spells which are fundamentally inefficient in and of themselves.
Not going into detail on Elusive because I've already done so like twice in other threads, but to summarise:
- Elusive is a problem in the immediate due to a lack of tools to counter them for non-Ionian decks
- Them existing in the same region as Deny is a further aggravating factor
- The Magic comparison is a poor one because of the breadth and depth of tools available in that game and the different cadence of Magic over LoR
- The point most people don't consider when looking at Elusives is the design space. Is playing against Elusives fun, whether you have the tools to fight them or not? Is playing with them fun, relative to other decks? Probably not, in my view. The theory of Elusive (and more to the point, Flying in Magic) never actually played out, and the design purpose was never actually reached. It has instead become a checkbox, 'do you have answer for this y/n', and it's a poorly placed checkbox in LoR because those answers don't exist in bulk
Welcome to my world, in which even my tl;dr is long-winded -.-;
Slammin' the downvote (which I actually rarely use, props to the thread for reminding me it existed).
This thread feels like the epitome of entitlement to me, really. Frontloading XP rewards into quests and FWOD bonuses is optimal both for players - who don't feel forced to grind and aren't punished for having other commitments - and also optimal for the developers because it encourages people to play daily but for a short enough time to not get burned out.
If the only reason you're playing the game is for rewards, you kinda need to reevaluate how you approach... well, games. To suggest that playing games beyond your three FWOD bonuses is pointless is to suggest you don't actually enjoy playing the game. If you do enjoy it, well then, there's the reason to keep playing. And if you don't, why are you even here? Stop playing it already.
Alternate take - just ignore the actual numbers that come up on the screen and imagine all the XP is spread over your first twenty games instead. It works out the same.
While true that League's patch system shows consistency, as a long-time player I'd say it's more a different flavour of irritation than a direct improvement. Rito's communication on patch notes was great a couple years ago, but has been getting steadily worse since then. There hasn't been a single patch note released in the past year that hasn't had at least one example of a change explanation being irrelevant to, or directly contradicting, the change itself - e.g. 'we want to take some power out of this champion's early game and focus on giving them a strong late game'; actual change just takes 10 damage off each rank of Q.
That's aside from their general pattern of buffing and nerfing semi-randomly, leading to something of a carousel effect where the meta changes much more because Rito decided to buff/nerf something rather than through a natural system of finding counters to established play patterns. Oh, and occasional manifest refusal to identify the real problem, such as massively overbuffing Conqueror and then deciding to blanket-nerf a bunch of champions that used it instead of, y'know, reverting the buff.
So yeah, it's not all sunshine and roses :P
Hah, you'd be amazed. If I'm particularly interested in an expansion, I will theorycraft a huge number of decks (I think last time I did this I had ~14) and I will make damn sure I have all the necessary cards on release day. As a side effect, I spend a huge amount of packs on release day when that happens.
The decks I come up with are rarely, if ever, good (I don't bother posting them because why post something that has a 90+% chance of being garbage?) and it costs me a lot of money... but it's fun, so I do it. The bright side of having a decent job, I suppose.
I think to really get the flavour you need to make it dependent on killing rather than striking. I'm also sceptical about giving him challenger, though I accept that your reasoning was probably that he would kinda suck without it :P
I would say make him a 1/6 with regen - specifically choosing 6 health due to a large number of 5-attack units in the game - and give him only +1 attack each time he kills an enemy. Level up would only require 2 'stacks', would cause him to gain +2 health (no attack), and would give him Challenger in addition to his other effects (because in League his ult grants bonus range on his Q, and you'd assume after getting enough stacks to teamfight he's probably high enough level to drop a few points into Wither).
I think you could actually broaden this question a little to allow for a more engaging conversation. What should champions be?
KANSAS above is entirely correct - what champions are, at present, are simply more powerful followers. They have some limited immunity to effects (since some of the more powerful effects target followers only), but otherwise they're just mana efficient or have powerful effects on them.
Is this enough? The vast majority of current decks run at least one champion in them, but typically that champion isn't particularly thematically associated with the deck - most Elusive decks run Braum, for example, not for any particular association with Freljord (they're mostly Ionian), or Poros (lel), but because he's a strong unit.
The question would then be further expanded by asking that if this isn't enough, then what would be done to change it? Hypothetically, my immediate response would be to impose restrictions on what decks can have champions in them - for example, Braum might require a minimum number of Poro cards and/or Freljord cards before he can be included. And, as an incentive, buff all champions, so as to reward the player for restricting themselves.
To be absolutely clear - I'm not saying this is a good idea. Just that it's an interesting question to think about.
I'm actually not wholly against the idea of increasing its mana cost, personally. To be clear - I don't think the spell itself is problematic in a vacuum, but by its very nature, it doesn't exist in that vacuum; in its current state it's going to have a permanent game-warping effect on every expansion they subsequently release.
Making it more expensive would throw off the cost-benefit analysis a little, since at a baseline level countering a 4 mana spell with a 3 mana one is a 'win'. But I don't know that that's necessarily a bad thing - the most impactful cards are at 6+ mana for the most part, and regardless, is it unreasonable to expect a player to pay a premium for a global disrupt to their opponent's strategy?
Without delving into rebuttals of individual posts:
- I agree that rewards being semi-random is rather off-message for the goal they were apparently going for with the game's reward system, but personally don't have an issue with it
- I would also like to voice a little support for 40D here because goddamn, dude was very clear he was looking for consistency rather than whining about a lack of drops - and people jumped on him worse than most of the actual whine-threads we get around here ¬.¬
I don't know that I agree with that. Even in the initial closed betas there was a clear etiquette emerging - in the vast majority of games (that I experienced, at least) the Shen emote was used as a 'Well played' salute, usually at the end of the game. So far it's been a polite pleasantry from what I've seen - in much the same way that people will offer 'gg' at the end of a game in other areas, wherein it's less a comment on the quality of the game and more a polite statement equivalent to saying 'good morning' to someone.
I've not seen any emergent etiquette around the other emotes, but if I make the assumption that my experience is representative (which is, admittedly, a difficult leap to make without empirical evidence) then there's precedent... meaning it's wholly possible further etiquette may emerge.
Yeah, that's exactly how I'd have assumed it would work too. I know from experience, however, that it does not. Just one of those interactions you have to learn to accept I suppose... it's been years and I'm still not 100% happy that you can't use Silence to remove Polymorph in HS ¬.¬.
- There's some validity to your point on deck size - decks are substantially larger (proportionally) than similar card games for the relative health totals. Magic is a poor comparator given its continued reliance on the Lands mechanic. However, simply drawing 2 cards per turn is a short-sighted and unsustainable way of resolving it. I suspect the issue will slowly resolve itself as more cards are released - the problem is really around reliability, and that becomes less of an issue when there are more cards around which can fit into a given situation more comfortably.
- Spells really aren't particularly overpowered, particularly as they tend towards being 'all in' plays to have any significant impact - using up all your mana for the turn to have a short-term impact. Removal, meanwhile, is removal - the point you make here could be made for pretty much every other card game in existence. That's kind of their point - minions are for longer-term benefit-over-time, while spells are for a short-term swing.
- Nexus health - that's something that's been batted around a few times in different places. I felt the same way when I first started playing, but I'm less sold on it now. That said, I can't honestly say whether that's a change in my viewpoint over time or simply me getting used to it.
- Card draw - already covered above.
- Deny - Giving access to a single card to all regions would be creating a massive exception to the entire game design for the sake of a single effect. There is potential to give similar effects to other regions, but I'm sceptical that they'd do that as a blanket move. What's more likely is they'll nerf Deny, which is something they've already said is under consideration. While I heavily disagree with the idea of spreading Deny around more widely, I also do feel that it's a game-warping effect; Deny existing heavily disincentivizes any deck from running high-cost spells, while also contributing to the ridiculous presence Ionia has in the upper tiers right now (though I will note that Elusive is far more a culprit in that regard).
But what you're not taking into account with that statement is that the developer has competing priorities. They're not just required to make the text accurate, they're also required to make it approachable, consistent with all other instances of similar effects, easily readable from both a grammar and a colloquial standpoint...
The former is, of course, the main point, and the reason (I assume) this entire thread could exist in the first place. When you have to choose between making something clear and easily understood to a new player, and writing text that covers as many possible interactions as possible, you do the former. Both to avoid scaring away new players and because anyone who's going to keep playing only needs to see an interaction like this once to learn how it works. The cost-benefit is heavily in favour of simplified text.
Admittedly, it wouldn't take much to clarify the interaction (simply adding the words 'to me' to Barrier's text would do it), but I'm sure there's plenty of factors in play to get to this point.
Haven't played HSBG in quite some time, but looking at it purely from a design perspective:
Tirion is definitely overtuned in a vacuum. Sure, he's fixed as requiring primarily minions with no type, but equally, that's not all that big of a problem when the reward is 1 gold for a global +1/+1. Amalgams are gone, Murlocs have been nerfed, so you've got a lot less in the way of Poisonous to deal with the problem of persistent stat inflation. However, that's wholly fixable in theory with some basic numbers manipulation.
The problem outside that vacuum is that Tirion's design doesn't mesh with the rest of the current Hero offering, making balancing solely by numbers impossible. What I mean is that Tirion not only has access to an entire tribe of his own (if you want to define 'tribeless' as a tribe), but he also has access to other tribes too - both Demons and Beasts have typeless force-multipliers which are balanced solely by their own vulnerability. He effectively gets to pick and choose from several different Tribes, with one as a fallback that no other hero in the game will try to collect if the other game-plans aren't looking optimal.
That's a problem you can't fix with numbers outside of just nerfing him out of viability altogether. The only real solution is to introduce more heroes that are going to compete for the same resources, or more powerful cards for the Tribes (which is a whole other problem altogether).
I would add that this is a problem you're inevitably going to run into when designing for a game as simplistic as HSBG. They really didn't leave themselves much room to work with, and outside of major additions - like more tribes - you're very quickly going to run out of interesting things to do that don't cause some crack in the functionality somewhere.
To be fair, it's not 100% intuitive; there are some interactions with buffs and bounces that don't make a lot of sense. As an example: if you've played a Poro-Snax with a Lonely Poro in hand, it'll get buffed to 2/2. When played, the newly generated Poro also receives the +1/+1 despite not existing before the buff was played. And yet when Lonely Poro is returned to hand it reverts to a 1/1, losing the buffs that even generated cards receive. It's consistent with previous mechanics, but in no way intuitive.
Frankly, Wild Growth wasn't a problem card at all. The problem was they wanted to print Breath of Dreams, and similar cards, but there was no real point because Wild Growth already existed. The only solutions to that problem are a) don't print Breath of Dreams, meaning come up with another card, b) print something more powerful than pre-nerf Wild Growth, which didn't go down well when they did it with Jade Blossom (because people either played both or picked the preferable option), or c) nerf Wild Growth then print a very similar card in the new design space opened up.
Option c) is the easiest one, provides them with the most long-term benefit, and they can always keep printing similar cards if they want to retain that part of Druid's identity.
I've had a similar issue, noted on another thread. showing three Vladimir purchases for Wild Cards which I don't remember making; Vlad isn't in my collection and the refund button throws an error when clicked. Safe to assume there's some bugs there.
'I am bad at card games and would rather assert that cards are busted than understand how I could or should have played around them: the thread'. Less snappy title, but I feel it's more descriptive.
As an aside, dear OP:
There you go, a bunch of blank space on the house. Please feel free to use it to separate out paragraphs in any future posts so that they're a little more readable.
Possibly weird, but I'll be wanting to get the token as a minimum every week - not for the rewards, but simply because I enjoy Expedition more than constructed right now and want to get it to be 'free-to-play' ASAP each week.
Regrettably the images aren't loading for me so I can't comment on the cards themselves.
@Oldmansanns - If I were designing Kog he'd probably be a low-cost, low-stats champion (I'm thinking 3 mana 3/1 right now, with the 1 health symbolising the typical League strategy of dogpiling the Kog every fight), with Last Breath: I strike anything (symbolising his passive). He'd have a secondary effect which embodies the Living Artillery - specifically something which triggers while he's on the bench, to symbolise the range advantage. Maybe whenever an ally strikes an enemy follower, I deal 1 damage to it. The level up effect would make him a 4/2 and give him +1 damage on the Living Artillery effect. Having written that and reflected, however, I suspect I'm cramming too much into that package...
@GerritDeMan - If Veigar doesn't have infinite scaling, he's not Veigar :P I think he'd get +1 spell damage each time you kill an enemy minion with a spell? Also, if Bandle City is going to be a region (and it should be), Teemo's going to need re-badging... Also, I don't think Jhin would care much about deaths since that's not a major aspect of his character (he's more about the deaths he causes than deaths in general like someone like Thresh is) - you'd be more likely to see a lot of effects themed around the number 4.
Personally, I'd like to see some of the weirder champion designs become cards because I'm curious how the devs would actually create them. Singed, for one, Aphelios for another, Aurelion Sol, Yuumi, Tahm Kench... Oh, and I'd like to see Kindred as well, because I adore their flavour even if I don't care for them in-game.
Haven't noticed directly, but I also haven't been paying particularly close attention. There are quite a few UI bugs I'm noticing though. Most notably, my store refund page says I bought 3 copies of Vladimir with Champion Wildcards. Possibly I did - I certainly was considering it, but I don't remember whether I did so or not - but I don't have the cards, nor does the refund option actually do anything beyond trigger an error.
Eh. Beta.