I'm not beholden to any of you, I offer a free service giving you informative meta updates you can take it or leave it.
The reality is TF Swain is undoubtedly the best deck in the game, and any other list with Sejuani, TF, or Gangplank does just about as well.
Bilgewater is great, and It is absolutely dominating the tier lists of both the pro player variety, and mobalytics.
So all your butt hurt I spent money on this so waaah it has to be good...I just don't have time for it.
Grow up you guys.
The idea that you're providing a "free service" and that anyone who disagrees with you is just "butt hurt" over the "truth" that you're espousing is exactly the kind of vanity I'm talking about.
Thats true I should leave the knee jerk oppinions to you guys, hah lol
This thread, just like the rest of your posts about how the meta is shaping up and how you predicted it, feels like a personal vanity project. This sort of obnoxious comment demonstrates that plainly.
Cosmic Inspiration is clearly a very powerful card, but if you're counting on it as your win condition, you probably ought to be running 3x Starshaping (and maybe even one or two copies of Aurelion Sol), as those are the best way to get it, but still aren't a guarantee of getting it.
I really don't get why they do this kind of skewed release in Expeditions. It was the same way with Rising Tides, where Bilgewater was everywhere and the Deep units were incredibly frustrating to play against because the smaller deck size meant you could very easily reach Deep status. Eventually the probabilities were put back to a normal distribution and things got more reasonable.
Isn't the Rising Tides release in Expedition like completely dominated by Demacia? I remember very well that after my first Trial which I went for GP Sej, which got me 7 wins because Sejuani is nuts as usual. I quickly tried out the Quinn side of things and unsurprisingly it was all Demacia. It was literally pick Bear and you win. The more Bears you had over your opponent, the more you advantage you got. This held true until Bear got nerfed.
Now, I'm not going to lie. I've tried out only one expedition from CotM and it was day 1, so I don't really know if Targon is as dominant as it was but I did get to 6 wins with Targon Allegiance, and about all except 2 of my opponents were running Targon. It wasn't as strong as I thought it was, it was just annoying tbh. I lost with the Targon deck on my last game to a very aggressive Discard heavy Jinx Draven. So at the very least, it's not as oppressive as the release of Rising Tides where Bears was so dominant that you can't afford to not run Demacia. Idk I haven't been doing Expeditions as much this expansion.
Demacia had some of the best tempo units thanks to the Grizzled Ranger and Loyal Badgerbear, and over time were certainly the most dominant force in Expeditions. I'm only referring to the initial release, where the skewed probabilities of finding Bilgewater cards meant that Deep was extremely prevalent and Deep provided massive tempo plays. Demacia was hit in a big way in Patch 1.2, but there were changes made to Bilgewater as well despite the fact that Patch 1.2 also removed the 2x bonus to see them.
I really don't get why they do this kind of skewed release in Expeditions. It was the same way with Rising Tides, where Bilgewater was everywhere and the Deep units were incredibly frustrating to play against because the smaller deck size meant you could very easily reach Deep status. Eventually the probabilities were put back to a normal distribution and things got more reasonable.
I guess they're imaging that some players are basically all-in on Expeditions, and they'll want the high access to new content, but it seems to really just screw with the balance of the format, which probably impacts those "Expedition exclusive" players the most.
For what it's worth, it sounds like you're describing The Skies Descend, which is not actually a celestial card but rather Aurelion Sol's signature spell.
I don't know what list you're referring to, but I assume you mean the collection manager - I'm pretty sure they do show up in the play tracker on the left side of the game, which is why I'm assuming what I am. They can be very hard to find in the collection navigator, but they are in there. The way to view them in game is to go into the card view for the collection manager, open up the filters section, scroll to the bottom of that section, and then click the "Celestials" box in "Special Categories." This will show all the Celestial cards. While several of them obliterate enemies (which can be very frustrating, since most spells can't protect against that), there isn't a ton of damage-based removal - I think Meteor Shower is the only one.
I don't mean to be harsh against Riot, but I think there's a difference between making some cards overpowered, which is inevitable for any CCG team, and creating a system which reinforces short-term thinking. And I think that's what they've done here - they've created a design process that focuses narrowly on the question "who is this new champion, and what cards and mechanics support him or her?" and doesn't seem to pay enough attention to the overall ecosystem of the game. Rather, they kick the can down the road on thinking about the ecosystem of the game because the balance team can always come back in and fix it later.
Honestly, I would probably be more willing to give them the benefit of the doubt if it weren't for the massive amount of anger toward Riot's balance teams from LoL. Prior to playing LoR, I wouldn't have believed those levels of anger were justified, and would have probably told you that League players are just whining because their favorite champions got nerfed or some such thing. But after some time with LoR I really do think Riot has a bad approach to balance. It sort of feels like they're operating with the view every young tech company has - "we're just like Facebook, so let's disrupt the [X] industry by moving fast and breaking things." And the result is not all bad - they have a lot of interesting content in LoR. But this "move fast and break things" mentality means they also consistently treat balance as secondary.
I just gave up Hearthstone for LoR - since childhood HS is the most broken TCG I've ever played. It's dumb, numb and implemented more and more casino flavour. LoR is just right - a good blend of everything I love about a TCG. Where do you get your conclusion from that LoR is not succesfull?
Based on message proximity, I assume that I'm the "you" here (though there is no explicit indication and this was not listed as a response in my alerts). I am not saying that LoR is not successful in any strict sense (although a quick comparison on https://twitchtracker.com/statistics suggests that LoR has about 20% the viewership of Hearthstone - not exactly a roaring success). Rather, my point is that despite LoR being a good game at its core, Riot's approach to balance and region design is a major negative that harms the game. I don't think this means LoR is not enjoying some success today, but rather that the overall health and longevity are at risk due to poor design choices Riot is making today to support short-term freshness.
I like how so many of you "predict" that there will be no more plunder / daybreak / nightfall etc. in future expansions.
Can I have some winning lottery numbers too?
In all seriousness, you have no idea what devs have in mind for future expansions and cards.
I am not predicting that there will be no more cards featuring Plunder, Daybreak, Nightfall, or any other mechanic. I even point to a Plunder card added in Call of the Mountain as an example of one being included in the latest set.
My point is not that the devs will never add one again, but rather that a) new champion packages take up so many cards that there won't be a lot of room in any given expansion to include much else for a given region, and b) if they had included these mechanics in a wider set of regions from the beginning, they wouldn't have to worry about adding lots of future support for an archetype that wants to use those mechanics. The latter point is because having options in a wide array of regions would in turn produce a much richer set of deck-building options for those archetypes that use those mechanics, so any new cards to any of those regions could spur a resurgence of those mechanics.
One more thought that just occurred to me - Hearthstone started as a card game that hewed very closely to WoW lore, but they started creating their own characters, lore, etc., over time to make room to add mechanics that made sense without having to add a WoW character in a way that didn't do justice to the original lore. For example, Raza the Chained was new to WoW lore as a result of Hearthstone. There are lots of alternatives from the base WoW lore Blizzard might have added, that might not have fit the actual mechanics of Raza - it's good they focused on set cohesion, and it's good they added something new rather than half-ass some existing character in the name of cohesion. This is something LoR is going to have to be willing to do. Why is Lulu in this set rather than any other set? I guess because Riot felt like it, because she doesn't have any mechanics that make her feel like a cohesive part of the Targon/Call of the Mountain expansion, because there's vanishingly little that makes the whole set cohesive to begin with, so these secondary regions feel messy/out of sync. Sure, she does support stuff, but that's a mechanic every region has access to.
@Sykomyke, thanks! I think you're exactly right about Riot trying to reinvent the wheel. It's hard to say whether they are doing so because they believe they can actually build a better card game model, or if their design approach just happens to work that way because of how deeply influenced it is by their work in the MOBA space. My guess is the latter, but only because I think several of their "innovations" have made the core LoR game worse, not better.
The short answer I have to your question about the mechanics like Daybreak and Nightfall is no, I don't expect to see them in other expansions (at least no more than a card or two). But, as I'll get into below, I think the problem has less to do with whether the mechanic comes up in future sets and more to do with how narrowly they used the mechanic in this set. Riot seems intent on adding lots of mechanics rather than using a few mechanics in a lot of places, and I think that's a critical issue in the context of their expansions.
With respect to your argument about "gimmick" mechanics that exist for a single expansion, I don't fully agree. I think it's good to see CCGs take some risks with their mechanics, and when those risks don't pay off, it's good to see them drop them. Of course, when they do pay off, it's good to see them revisited. Discover and Rush are two examples in Hearthstone which I think have been pretty positive additions overall (though they're not without their issues), but and there are some other mechanics that I've enjoyed that haven't made comebacks. So I'm with you on that, it's disappointing to see Blizzard take a mechanic that feels like it could become evergreen and just drop it immediately.
But there's value in having mechanics that don't become part of every expansion moving forward, as it helps to focus the over-arching theme of the expansion. Spellburst and Echo are two examples from Hearthstone, but MTG also does a great job with this. One of my favorite recent examples from MTG was the use of 1/1 counters in War of the Spark - the "bad guy" colors got "amass," which let them build up counters on one creature, while the "good guy" colors got "proliferate," which let them do smaller, but widespread counter buffs across creatures and planeswalkers. It was a fun thematic element to the mechanics that I don't expect will be revisited any time soon in any upcoming set, but I also don't mind because of how core it was to the theme of the set - it would just feel out of place elsewhere.
That doesn't mean that they should never revisit these set-specific mechanics. MTG does a great job of bringing old mechanics back in new sets when they make sense (usually when the set "revisits" an old plane - e.g. the upcoming Zendikar set is revisiting the "landfall" mechanic). Hearthstone should probably consider doing the same. Maybe they think the game is still young enough that they should just explore more new content, but I think they're probably old enough to revisit old content. For example, it's easy to imagine a "Return to Un'goro" set in the future that revisits the "adapt" mechanic, and as someone who loved the Un'goro expansion, I'd be 100% in favor of that.
The biggest thing to me is the question of whether or not mechanics are well-distributed. Your examples of Plunder, Daybreak, and Nightfall are all excellent examples of very narrowly applied mechanics. Each exists in two or fewer regions today, typically in service of a single champion, and while Riot will probably add a new card for these mechanics here and there (e.g. Monkey Business), the volume of cards added as support for these mechanics will probably be very low. This is unfortunately a reality of how they're adding sets - each existing region gets about 13 cards, but a "new champion package" typically takes 10, so there's very little room to reinvest in old archetypes, and in every set they have more old archetypes in need of investment.
But if they had, from the start, built out mechanics that were widespread (e.g. adding Daybreak and Nightfall cards to each region), then there would already been a lot of room for experimenting with the mechanic, and lots of room to try different synergies. It wouldn't matter as much whether or not they added new Daybreak/Nightfall cards because there would be enough at the start to push players to think about lots of region pairs as new content was added. Quick hypothetical: we can imagine a world where Freljord got some card named "Season of the Sun" that riffs off the long, sunny summers near the North Pole, and has some cool Daybreak ability. Maybe the Daybreak Targon/Freljord deck is bad today, but later one of those regions gets a couple of new cards that happen to work in that archetype - they don't even have to be Daybreak cards. That can make players revisit the idea of running Leona and a Daybreak package in that pairing, and that's fantastic. But, because of how narrowly defined the synergies are, any "off-synergy pairing" (e.g. running Noxus Self Harm with Demacia) has to be successful on the merits of a single region's synergy cards. This does happen, but mostly just when one region is too powerful in the metagame.
That hypothetical gets at the kind of thing I expect from a healthy card game. We see that in MTG all the time - they plan out how every pair or even triples of colors will interact in each set, and over time the player has the option of revisiting those set/combination mechanics as the overall card pool changes. Hearthstone, by contrast, tends to emphasize archetypes within a class, but then provide neutral cards to bolster lots of different archetypes. The net result of both approaches is the same - each color/class/region has access to a huge number of new cards and archetypes (MTG typically adds about 50 cards per color, Hearthstone typically adds about 10 cards per class plus 30 neutrals). But in LoR, mechanics are narrowly defined in only a couple of sets, and there are no "neutrals" to fill in gaps, so the result is a major reduction in the the level of agency a player has to make deck-building choices.
Flower Child seems like a natural inclusion that you're missing. It gets a permanent buff any time it gets support, and it's a 1-drop for Kinkou Wayfinder. I also generally like Young Witch over Herald of Spring. She's elusive, so she frequently just gets to put in chip damage, and she is more useful than Herald when she gets a buff from Lulu. She also provides a very meaningful combat buff, while the Herald just gives lifesteal. (Ideally you won't need lifesteal, since your deck is aggressive and you should be able to use a lot of life as a resource while chipping away at your opponent.)
I like the basic idea of the deck - it seems fun. But honestly, Nifty, I think the critique being offered here has less to do with how easy it is to get Darius into play and more about how bad Apprehend is. Looking at your examples:
Play him normally: If you've got an Apprehend in hand you might be able to push him to level up on one attack and finish off the enemy on a second attack. Seems good in principle, but the odds of drawing both of these cards in a timely manner is suspect.
Pull him from Thresh: If, as you've described, you're cheating Darius out to attack "in all of his 10/6 overwhelm glory," your opponent is already at 10 health or less. You shouldn't really need Apprehend at this point.
Revive him with The Harrowing: If you've got 11 mana, you can maybe surprise your enemy with an attack, but since you already start the round with the attack token 50% of the time, that seems like a pretty narrow use case.
The reality here is that Riot has designed this card to rally very infrequently. This is plain from the fact that Relentless Pursuit has an unconditional rally effect, but it costs 3. And since rally is worth 3 mana, if this ever became a consistent way to rally, it would be considered too cheap and get nerfed.
Most of the time this is just a much less efficient Guile, suggesting that it's really more of an aggro tech card you'd run 1x of to give Darius decks a little boost against a varied metagame.
Responding briefly to the original post - it's actually fine for a small number of regions to be uniquely effective at card advantage. Taking MTG as an example, Blue is unique in its capacity to generate card advantage, but that doesn't break the game because it has weaknesses too. This kind of gets at what Hellcopter is saying - there's a broader context in which card advantage exists, and that context is important. No region should be great at everything, and maybe there's a case to be made that certain mechanics (Daybreak and Celestials being the most likely in my mind) push Targon to be too good at too much, but having one region be the best at card advantage is not inherently bad.
I don't really disagree with the idea that the design of Call of the Mountain is amateurish (which, as it happens, means exactly the same thing as the adjective form of "dilettante"), but I do take issue with your characterizing it as "for clueless casual mobile players." Nothing about truly bad design supports any group of players - mobile, casual, or pro - and hating on casual players doesn't really help anyone. If you have one or more critiques of the design, please share them. But hating on a player group and calling the expansion "stupid" isn't a very productive way to engage in a discussion.
Do we really think we are in a position to decide in less than a week whether the design of Call of the Mountain was amateurish? Sure, the first 2-3 days were basically a blitz of almost all the same couple of decks. But now (like most other times in the game's history) I'm seeing a remarkable array of different viable decks and strategies. Cards that were laughed off as being unplayable are being played with brutal efficiency (Nocture and Diana, to name two).
I think the set is shaping up to be quite fun, diverse, and well-designed.
I think perhaps you're inflating the extent to which people were laughing off particular cards. Diana, for instance, is featured in at least one deck on the "meta list" on Mobalytics, and while I certainly have my criticisms of that list, her being there means at least some pro players think she's a good champion, and that list does impact the metagame.
But to your main question, I think the answer is still yes, we can determine that this game is being designed in an amateurish way. And I think that claim is reasonable because the core design flaws of the game have been on display for a while, and this expansion only continues that trend. In particular, I'm talking about a few different design goals in the context of what seems like Riot ignoring Goodhart's Law. (Goodhart's law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.) The design goals I'm thinking about are:
Every champion should have enough support to have a deck they fit best in (i.e. to play out the "fantasy" of that Champion)
Champions should reflect their League characters as authentically as possible
No card should be filler - every card should have a chance to be useful in the meta
The first creates a muddled region identity, where very few cards exist to establish what the region is good at because almost all cards exist to be in service of some champion's archetype. Take Noxus for example. In the launch set, they were mostly focused on combat with big, overwhelming units - they had cards that buffed attack, cards with quick attack and overwhelm, cards that benefit from surviving damage, and finally an array of cards that benefited from having high power stuff (5+ power). Even some of the cards that produced non-combat damage (e.g. Legion Saboteur and Legion Grenadier) still emphasize entering combat. In Rising Tides, all of the sudden there's tons of non-combat damage tools in service of leveling up Swain, and the card most in line with the original themes of the region (Armored Tuskrider) never sees any play. Without clear region identities, the reason to pair regions ends up being "because the synergy is baked in." Want to run Self Harm? Better run Noxus/Freljord. Want to run Deep? Better run Bilgewater/Shadow Isles. Etc., etc., etc.
The second creates an over-emphasis on adding new mechanics rather than exploring and mastering the design of existing mechanics. This expansion features six new mechanics, and when the set is done it may feature many more. These mechanics are clearly added in service of a champion rather than good game design. Take Daybreak, for example. It exists to support the fantasy of Leona, but it plays out very strangely: Turn 1 Solari Soldier, turn 2 Solari Shieldbearer, turn 3 Solari Priestess, turn 4 leveled up Leona, turn 5 Rahvun, Daylight's Spear. The package is strange because Leona is clearly a midrange style champion, and the mechanic they added to support her (i.e. play this card as your first card) just rewards the player for playing exactly as they would in any midrange style deck - curve out with units. The result is a mechanic which does two things: makes deck-building a boring exercise (because if I'm playing Leona, I obviously want to include a bunch of Daybreak stuff), and makes playing the deck one-note (because the mechanic doesn't get you to ever push against the linear gameplay pattern the archetype already naturally has). Ultimately, if their patches result in a good opportunity for midrange again (as it did with Sej/Ashe recently), I fully expect Daybreak to become a problem that needs some kind of change because of how it was designed to overemphasize linear midrange play rather than challenge the player to think.
The previous two goals contribute to an environment where balance is very hard to produce, directly impacting that final design goal. And it's the final design goal where we really get into Goodhart's law, because it emphasizes constant tinkering with the metagame in pursuit of "balance metrics" that the overall design approach has made incredibly difficult. This approach has been stated plainly by designer Andrew Yip in a Q&A session: "we’ll lean on more common tools like balance updates and different formats for cards to have a chance to shine." They have a goal of seeing all cards be good at some point, and they plan to achieve that by constantly tweaking cards so that some become relevant and some become irrelevant over time. And I'm sure when they look to see which champions have been good or bad and which cards have been good or bad, their data will tell them they've achieved their goal, because they've got their thumb on the scale. Some might look at this as a good thing, but I think it deeply hampers the fun of strategic deck-building in service of the fun of active decision-making during play. Both are important parts of a CCG, but Riot seems to care a lot less about the former. Again, in that interview, Yip says "my goals are to make sure players feel their skill matters but also that players have a hugely varied experience with lots of novel situations and memorable moments." They approach skill in a CCG as being able to pilot a deck against a wide array of scenarios, but that's not the whole picture.
I mean. I'm not the game designer. And I have nothing against control decks. I like playing them.
But has anyone considered that giving control blockers that replace themselves could be problematic? I would have expected a few of them either would have 0 power, or couldn't block. But getting chumps that can potentially kill on block, and also replace themselves with a good spell is a bit much.
When I looked at the Targon cards. All I saw was a boost to control. I did see the synergy with Noxus, but those decks will be easier to deal with than the control ones. The 4/5 is a pretty good roadblock for something that gives you a card.
And if I ever See a Taric next to a karma. I'll probably just concede.
Well, it's as stupid as it looks. The whole expansion is a joke. Dilettante and amateurish design. A nonsense. ...Intended for numerous clueless casual mobile players.
I don't really disagree with the idea that the design of Call of the Mountain is amateurish (which, as it happens, means exactly the same thing as the adjective form of "dilettante"), but I do take issue with your characterizing it as "for clueless casual mobile players." Nothing about truly bad design supports any group of players - mobile, casual, or pro - and hating on casual players doesn't really help anyone. If you have one or more critiques of the design, please share them. But hating on a player group and calling the expansion "stupid" isn't a very productive way to engage in a discussion.
Yeah, I've found this to be particularly annoying with Stalking Shadows, where the only visual indicator that one of the two cards is Ephemeral is in the tooltip section on hover. Ideally they'd have some way to add the relevant keyword icon to the card in a way that indicates it's added (e.g. by giving it some kind of "aura" visual effect or something). (Maybe worth noting that this problem isn't unique to Ephemeral - it would also be nice for the same type of visuals for Ki Guardian, which grant Barrier.)
One of the odd potential challenges here is the interaction of any new visual element for added keywords with Fleeting. This is more a problem with Fleeting than any potential upgrade to added keywords - the visual effect covers the whole card and creates a wobbly distortion that could make any additional visual elements a mess.
For what it's worth, I think this was a problem at the release of the Rising Tides expansion, first with the Deep Sea Monster decks and then with the Nox/P&Z Championless Aggro decks. Perhaps those examples were less extreme than what you're seeing, but they weren't great in terms of deck diversity.
To the extent that this expansion is resulting in more extreme skew relative to Rising Tides, I expect it is because of the shift away from traditional expansions and towards what Riot is calling "sets." I suspect the shift to releasing expansions in sets was designed to produce exactly this kind of overemphasis on Targon archetypes. Just thinking about the numbers for a second, with Rising Tides (which released 122 new cards) ~50% of the content was Bilgewater and the other ~50% was new content for other regions. When the Call of the Mountain set is done, Targon will have picked up around 72 or 73 cards, which will only be ~42% of the new content in the set. (Assuming they continue a pattern of adding more 13+ cards to each region in each set, the new region will always end up with less than 50% of the new content.)
But, in this first expansion of the Call of the Mountain set, Targon actually makes up ~57% of the new content, and the other major content released (Freljord, Shadow Isles, and Ionia) is specifically designed to pair with that Targon content. That probably won't be the case for every region they release - there are only two more Targon champions, but four more old regions left to reveal. So, the majority of new content pushes players to pick up exactly these few Targon archetypes, and Ramp Aurelion Sol happens to be the early front runner in terms of power level, so it's getting all the attention.
I'm not trying to suggest that Swim is not good at the game, or that he can't possibly make useful predictions. But the suggestion that he can, after a mere eight hours with a single deck, build "the best version" demonstrates a major blind spot in the fundamentals of what a metagame is in a practical sense.
But you've actually inadvertently struck on my biggest gripe with LoR, and I think Swim is tied into it in an interesting way. Specifically, I'm talking about your comment that "by week 4 the meta will be just about set." We know that after week 4, there will be a balance patch. We also know from the preview content in patch 1.8 that 1.10 will feature a major change to Lee Sin, regardless of what other balance changes we might expect to the new cards introduced in 1.8. So, right as a meta starts to reach a stable state, it is thrown back into chaos.
The result is an odd loop. Swim decides which decks he thinks are the best and then proceeds to set the tier list on Mobalytics. Mobalytics presents a veneer of public data, so the tier list seems well-informed and people starting playing those decks. They become the metagame because they are presented as the metagame, so it starts to solidify. In any other card game, this is the point where players would come along and start looking for off-meta decks that can beat the meta. But in LoR, this is the point where a balance patch comes in and resets the whole thing. The result is that Swim can consistently find a sort of "local maxima" in deck-building - that is, a set of decks that are pretty good, even if they're not the best - and just assert that they are the meta, and the meta changes fast enough from Riot's end that he just gets to be right in a de facto way.
And he doesn't always get it right. I can recall at least one time when I saw Kinkou Elusives with a high win rate according to the actual data on Mobalytics, but it was nowhere in sight on Swim's tier list. It took a solid week before he revised that. And when he lost that Twitch Rivals tournament to Dogdog, someone who doesn't play LoR at all, he went on the Progress Day podcast and complained about the random decks that he couldn't predict people playing in the tournament.
I get that you like Swim's content - you regularly reference it in your posts - but while I think he's a good player, I also think he's overrated as a deck-builder, and that the way Riot is handling the game helps to prop him up.
Mind you, my greatest criticism has less to do with Swim and more to do with Riot. They shouldn't tinker as much as they do with the meta, but that tinkering has odd implications for Swim's position as one of the biggest names in LoR streaming.
The idea that you're providing a "free service" and that anyone who disagrees with you is just "butt hurt" over the "truth" that you're espousing is exactly the kind of vanity I'm talking about.
This thread, just like the rest of your posts about how the meta is shaping up and how you predicted it, feels like a personal vanity project. This sort of obnoxious comment demonstrates that plainly.
Cosmic Inspiration is clearly a very powerful card, but if you're counting on it as your win condition, you probably ought to be running 3x Starshaping (and maybe even one or two copies of Aurelion Sol), as those are the best way to get it, but still aren't a guarantee of getting it.
Demacia had some of the best tempo units thanks to the Grizzled Ranger and Loyal Badgerbear, and over time were certainly the most dominant force in Expeditions. I'm only referring to the initial release, where the skewed probabilities of finding Bilgewater cards meant that Deep was extremely prevalent and Deep provided massive tempo plays. Demacia was hit in a big way in Patch 1.2, but there were changes made to Bilgewater as well despite the fact that Patch 1.2 also removed the 2x bonus to see them.
I really don't get why they do this kind of skewed release in Expeditions. It was the same way with Rising Tides, where Bilgewater was everywhere and the Deep units were incredibly frustrating to play against because the smaller deck size meant you could very easily reach Deep status. Eventually the probabilities were put back to a normal distribution and things got more reasonable.
I guess they're imaging that some players are basically all-in on Expeditions, and they'll want the high access to new content, but it seems to really just screw with the balance of the format, which probably impacts those "Expedition exclusive" players the most.
For what it's worth, it sounds like you're describing The Skies Descend, which is not actually a celestial card but rather Aurelion Sol's signature spell.
I don't know what list you're referring to, but I assume you mean the collection manager - I'm pretty sure they do show up in the play tracker on the left side of the game, which is why I'm assuming what I am. They can be very hard to find in the collection navigator, but they are in there. The way to view them in game is to go into the card view for the collection manager, open up the filters section, scroll to the bottom of that section, and then click the "Celestials" box in "Special Categories." This will show all the Celestial cards. While several of them obliterate enemies (which can be very frustrating, since most spells can't protect against that), there isn't a ton of damage-based removal - I think Meteor Shower is the only one.
I don't mean to be harsh against Riot, but I think there's a difference between making some cards overpowered, which is inevitable for any CCG team, and creating a system which reinforces short-term thinking. And I think that's what they've done here - they've created a design process that focuses narrowly on the question "who is this new champion, and what cards and mechanics support him or her?" and doesn't seem to pay enough attention to the overall ecosystem of the game. Rather, they kick the can down the road on thinking about the ecosystem of the game because the balance team can always come back in and fix it later.
Honestly, I would probably be more willing to give them the benefit of the doubt if it weren't for the massive amount of anger toward Riot's balance teams from LoL. Prior to playing LoR, I wouldn't have believed those levels of anger were justified, and would have probably told you that League players are just whining because their favorite champions got nerfed or some such thing. But after some time with LoR I really do think Riot has a bad approach to balance. It sort of feels like they're operating with the view every young tech company has - "we're just like Facebook, so let's disrupt the [X] industry by moving fast and breaking things." And the result is not all bad - they have a lot of interesting content in LoR. But this "move fast and break things" mentality means they also consistently treat balance as secondary.
Based on message proximity, I assume that I'm the "you" here (though there is no explicit indication and this was not listed as a response in my alerts). I am not saying that LoR is not successful in any strict sense (although a quick comparison on https://twitchtracker.com/statistics suggests that LoR has about 20% the viewership of Hearthstone - not exactly a roaring success). Rather, my point is that despite LoR being a good game at its core, Riot's approach to balance and region design is a major negative that harms the game. I don't think this means LoR is not enjoying some success today, but rather that the overall health and longevity are at risk due to poor design choices Riot is making today to support short-term freshness.
I am not predicting that there will be no more cards featuring Plunder, Daybreak, Nightfall, or any other mechanic. I even point to a Plunder card added in Call of the Mountain as an example of one being included in the latest set.
My point is not that the devs will never add one again, but rather that a) new champion packages take up so many cards that there won't be a lot of room in any given expansion to include much else for a given region, and b) if they had included these mechanics in a wider set of regions from the beginning, they wouldn't have to worry about adding lots of future support for an archetype that wants to use those mechanics. The latter point is because having options in a wide array of regions would in turn produce a much richer set of deck-building options for those archetypes that use those mechanics, so any new cards to any of those regions could spur a resurgence of those mechanics.
One more thought that just occurred to me - Hearthstone started as a card game that hewed very closely to WoW lore, but they started creating their own characters, lore, etc., over time to make room to add mechanics that made sense without having to add a WoW character in a way that didn't do justice to the original lore. For example, Raza the Chained was new to WoW lore as a result of Hearthstone. There are lots of alternatives from the base WoW lore Blizzard might have added, that might not have fit the actual mechanics of Raza - it's good they focused on set cohesion, and it's good they added something new rather than half-ass some existing character in the name of cohesion. This is something LoR is going to have to be willing to do. Why is Lulu in this set rather than any other set? I guess because Riot felt like it, because she doesn't have any mechanics that make her feel like a cohesive part of the Targon/Call of the Mountain expansion, because there's vanishingly little that makes the whole set cohesive to begin with, so these secondary regions feel messy/out of sync. Sure, she does support stuff, but that's a mechanic every region has access to.
@Sykomyke, thanks! I think you're exactly right about Riot trying to reinvent the wheel. It's hard to say whether they are doing so because they believe they can actually build a better card game model, or if their design approach just happens to work that way because of how deeply influenced it is by their work in the MOBA space. My guess is the latter, but only because I think several of their "innovations" have made the core LoR game worse, not better.
The short answer I have to your question about the mechanics like Daybreak and Nightfall is no, I don't expect to see them in other expansions (at least no more than a card or two). But, as I'll get into below, I think the problem has less to do with whether the mechanic comes up in future sets and more to do with how narrowly they used the mechanic in this set. Riot seems intent on adding lots of mechanics rather than using a few mechanics in a lot of places, and I think that's a critical issue in the context of their expansions.
With respect to your argument about "gimmick" mechanics that exist for a single expansion, I don't fully agree. I think it's good to see CCGs take some risks with their mechanics, and when those risks don't pay off, it's good to see them drop them. Of course, when they do pay off, it's good to see them revisited. Discover and Rush are two examples in Hearthstone which I think have been pretty positive additions overall (though they're not without their issues), but and there are some other mechanics that I've enjoyed that haven't made comebacks. So I'm with you on that, it's disappointing to see Blizzard take a mechanic that feels like it could become evergreen and just drop it immediately.
But there's value in having mechanics that don't become part of every expansion moving forward, as it helps to focus the over-arching theme of the expansion. Spellburst and Echo are two examples from Hearthstone, but MTG also does a great job with this. One of my favorite recent examples from MTG was the use of 1/1 counters in War of the Spark - the "bad guy" colors got "amass," which let them build up counters on one creature, while the "good guy" colors got "proliferate," which let them do smaller, but widespread counter buffs across creatures and planeswalkers. It was a fun thematic element to the mechanics that I don't expect will be revisited any time soon in any upcoming set, but I also don't mind because of how core it was to the theme of the set - it would just feel out of place elsewhere.
That doesn't mean that they should never revisit these set-specific mechanics. MTG does a great job of bringing old mechanics back in new sets when they make sense (usually when the set "revisits" an old plane - e.g. the upcoming Zendikar set is revisiting the "landfall" mechanic). Hearthstone should probably consider doing the same. Maybe they think the game is still young enough that they should just explore more new content, but I think they're probably old enough to revisit old content. For example, it's easy to imagine a "Return to Un'goro" set in the future that revisits the "adapt" mechanic, and as someone who loved the Un'goro expansion, I'd be 100% in favor of that.
The biggest thing to me is the question of whether or not mechanics are well-distributed. Your examples of Plunder, Daybreak, and Nightfall are all excellent examples of very narrowly applied mechanics. Each exists in two or fewer regions today, typically in service of a single champion, and while Riot will probably add a new card for these mechanics here and there (e.g. Monkey Business), the volume of cards added as support for these mechanics will probably be very low. This is unfortunately a reality of how they're adding sets - each existing region gets about 13 cards, but a "new champion package" typically takes 10, so there's very little room to reinvest in old archetypes, and in every set they have more old archetypes in need of investment.
But if they had, from the start, built out mechanics that were widespread (e.g. adding Daybreak and Nightfall cards to each region), then there would already been a lot of room for experimenting with the mechanic, and lots of room to try different synergies. It wouldn't matter as much whether or not they added new Daybreak/Nightfall cards because there would be enough at the start to push players to think about lots of region pairs as new content was added. Quick hypothetical: we can imagine a world where Freljord got some card named "Season of the Sun" that riffs off the long, sunny summers near the North Pole, and has some cool Daybreak ability. Maybe the Daybreak Targon/Freljord deck is bad today, but later one of those regions gets a couple of new cards that happen to work in that archetype - they don't even have to be Daybreak cards. That can make players revisit the idea of running Leona and a Daybreak package in that pairing, and that's fantastic. But, because of how narrowly defined the synergies are, any "off-synergy pairing" (e.g. running Noxus Self Harm with Demacia) has to be successful on the merits of a single region's synergy cards. This does happen, but mostly just when one region is too powerful in the metagame.
That hypothetical gets at the kind of thing I expect from a healthy card game. We see that in MTG all the time - they plan out how every pair or even triples of colors will interact in each set, and over time the player has the option of revisiting those set/combination mechanics as the overall card pool changes. Hearthstone, by contrast, tends to emphasize archetypes within a class, but then provide neutral cards to bolster lots of different archetypes. The net result of both approaches is the same - each color/class/region has access to a huge number of new cards and archetypes (MTG typically adds about 50 cards per color, Hearthstone typically adds about 10 cards per class plus 30 neutrals). But in LoR, mechanics are narrowly defined in only a couple of sets, and there are no "neutrals" to fill in gaps, so the result is a major reduction in the the level of agency a player has to make deck-building choices.
In fairness to Vincent, the rewards for playing on ladder aren't that compelling - who really needs another token?
Flower Child seems like a natural inclusion that you're missing. It gets a permanent buff any time it gets support, and it's a 1-drop for Kinkou Wayfinder. I also generally like Young Witch over Herald of Spring. She's elusive, so she frequently just gets to put in chip damage, and she is more useful than Herald when she gets a buff from Lulu. She also provides a very meaningful combat buff, while the Herald just gives lifesteal. (Ideally you won't need lifesteal, since your deck is aggressive and you should be able to use a lot of life as a resource while chipping away at your opponent.)
I like the basic idea of the deck - it seems fun. But honestly, Nifty, I think the critique being offered here has less to do with how easy it is to get Darius into play and more about how bad Apprehend is. Looking at your examples:
The reality here is that Riot has designed this card to rally very infrequently. This is plain from the fact that Relentless Pursuit has an unconditional rally effect, but it costs 3. And since rally is worth 3 mana, if this ever became a consistent way to rally, it would be considered too cheap and get nerfed.
Most of the time this is just a much less efficient Guile, suggesting that it's really more of an aggro tech card you'd run 1x of to give Darius decks a little boost against a varied metagame.
Responding briefly to the original post - it's actually fine for a small number of regions to be uniquely effective at card advantage. Taking MTG as an example, Blue is unique in its capacity to generate card advantage, but that doesn't break the game because it has weaknesses too. This kind of gets at what Hellcopter is saying - there's a broader context in which card advantage exists, and that context is important. No region should be great at everything, and maybe there's a case to be made that certain mechanics (Daybreak and Celestials being the most likely in my mind) push Targon to be too good at too much, but having one region be the best at card advantage is not inherently bad.
I think perhaps you're inflating the extent to which people were laughing off particular cards. Diana, for instance, is featured in at least one deck on the "meta list" on Mobalytics, and while I certainly have my criticisms of that list, her being there means at least some pro players think she's a good champion, and that list does impact the metagame.
But to your main question, I think the answer is still yes, we can determine that this game is being designed in an amateurish way. And I think that claim is reasonable because the core design flaws of the game have been on display for a while, and this expansion only continues that trend. In particular, I'm talking about a few different design goals in the context of what seems like Riot ignoring Goodhart's Law. (Goodhart's law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.) The design goals I'm thinking about are:
The first creates a muddled region identity, where very few cards exist to establish what the region is good at because almost all cards exist to be in service of some champion's archetype. Take Noxus for example. In the launch set, they were mostly focused on combat with big, overwhelming units - they had cards that buffed attack, cards with quick attack and overwhelm, cards that benefit from surviving damage, and finally an array of cards that benefited from having high power stuff (5+ power). Even some of the cards that produced non-combat damage (e.g. Legion Saboteur and Legion Grenadier) still emphasize entering combat. In Rising Tides, all of the sudden there's tons of non-combat damage tools in service of leveling up Swain, and the card most in line with the original themes of the region (Armored Tuskrider) never sees any play. Without clear region identities, the reason to pair regions ends up being "because the synergy is baked in." Want to run Self Harm? Better run Noxus/Freljord. Want to run Deep? Better run Bilgewater/Shadow Isles. Etc., etc., etc.
The second creates an over-emphasis on adding new mechanics rather than exploring and mastering the design of existing mechanics. This expansion features six new mechanics, and when the set is done it may feature many more. These mechanics are clearly added in service of a champion rather than good game design. Take Daybreak, for example. It exists to support the fantasy of Leona, but it plays out very strangely: Turn 1 Solari Soldier, turn 2 Solari Shieldbearer, turn 3 Solari Priestess, turn 4 leveled up Leona, turn 5 Rahvun, Daylight's Spear. The package is strange because Leona is clearly a midrange style champion, and the mechanic they added to support her (i.e. play this card as your first card) just rewards the player for playing exactly as they would in any midrange style deck - curve out with units. The result is a mechanic which does two things: makes deck-building a boring exercise (because if I'm playing Leona, I obviously want to include a bunch of Daybreak stuff), and makes playing the deck one-note (because the mechanic doesn't get you to ever push against the linear gameplay pattern the archetype already naturally has). Ultimately, if their patches result in a good opportunity for midrange again (as it did with Sej/Ashe recently), I fully expect Daybreak to become a problem that needs some kind of change because of how it was designed to overemphasize linear midrange play rather than challenge the player to think.
The previous two goals contribute to an environment where balance is very hard to produce, directly impacting that final design goal. And it's the final design goal where we really get into Goodhart's law, because it emphasizes constant tinkering with the metagame in pursuit of "balance metrics" that the overall design approach has made incredibly difficult. This approach has been stated plainly by designer Andrew Yip in a Q&A session: "we’ll lean on more common tools like balance updates and different formats for cards to have a chance to shine." They have a goal of seeing all cards be good at some point, and they plan to achieve that by constantly tweaking cards so that some become relevant and some become irrelevant over time. And I'm sure when they look to see which champions have been good or bad and which cards have been good or bad, their data will tell them they've achieved their goal, because they've got their thumb on the scale. Some might look at this as a good thing, but I think it deeply hampers the fun of strategic deck-building in service of the fun of active decision-making during play. Both are important parts of a CCG, but Riot seems to care a lot less about the former. Again, in that interview, Yip says "my goals are to make sure players feel their skill matters but also that players have a hugely varied experience with lots of novel situations and memorable moments." They approach skill in a CCG as being able to pilot a deck against a wide array of scenarios, but that's not the whole picture.
I don't really disagree with the idea that the design of Call of the Mountain is amateurish (which, as it happens, means exactly the same thing as the adjective form of "dilettante"), but I do take issue with your characterizing it as "for clueless casual mobile players." Nothing about truly bad design supports any group of players - mobile, casual, or pro - and hating on casual players doesn't really help anyone. If you have one or more critiques of the design, please share them. But hating on a player group and calling the expansion "stupid" isn't a very productive way to engage in a discussion.
Yeah, I've found this to be particularly annoying with Stalking Shadows, where the only visual indicator that one of the two cards is Ephemeral is in the tooltip section on hover. Ideally they'd have some way to add the relevant keyword icon to the card in a way that indicates it's added (e.g. by giving it some kind of "aura" visual effect or something). (Maybe worth noting that this problem isn't unique to Ephemeral - it would also be nice for the same type of visuals for Ki Guardian, which grant Barrier.)
One of the odd potential challenges here is the interaction of any new visual element for added keywords with Fleeting. This is more a problem with Fleeting than any potential upgrade to added keywords - the visual effect covers the whole card and creates a wobbly distortion that could make any additional visual elements a mess.
For what it's worth, I think this was a problem at the release of the Rising Tides expansion, first with the Deep Sea Monster decks and then with the Nox/P&Z Championless Aggro decks. Perhaps those examples were less extreme than what you're seeing, but they weren't great in terms of deck diversity.
To the extent that this expansion is resulting in more extreme skew relative to Rising Tides, I expect it is because of the shift away from traditional expansions and towards what Riot is calling "sets." I suspect the shift to releasing expansions in sets was designed to produce exactly this kind of overemphasis on Targon archetypes. Just thinking about the numbers for a second, with Rising Tides (which released 122 new cards) ~50% of the content was Bilgewater and the other ~50% was new content for other regions. When the Call of the Mountain set is done, Targon will have picked up around 72 or 73 cards, which will only be ~42% of the new content in the set. (Assuming they continue a pattern of adding more 13+ cards to each region in each set, the new region will always end up with less than 50% of the new content.)
But, in this first expansion of the Call of the Mountain set, Targon actually makes up ~57% of the new content, and the other major content released (Freljord, Shadow Isles, and Ionia) is specifically designed to pair with that Targon content. That probably won't be the case for every region they release - there are only two more Targon champions, but four more old regions left to reveal. So, the majority of new content pushes players to pick up exactly these few Targon archetypes, and Ramp Aurelion Sol happens to be the early front runner in terms of power level, so it's getting all the attention.
I'm not trying to suggest that Swim is not good at the game, or that he can't possibly make useful predictions. But the suggestion that he can, after a mere eight hours with a single deck, build "the best version" demonstrates a major blind spot in the fundamentals of what a metagame is in a practical sense.
But you've actually inadvertently struck on my biggest gripe with LoR, and I think Swim is tied into it in an interesting way. Specifically, I'm talking about your comment that "by week 4 the meta will be just about set." We know that after week 4, there will be a balance patch. We also know from the preview content in patch 1.8 that 1.10 will feature a major change to Lee Sin, regardless of what other balance changes we might expect to the new cards introduced in 1.8. So, right as a meta starts to reach a stable state, it is thrown back into chaos.
The result is an odd loop. Swim decides which decks he thinks are the best and then proceeds to set the tier list on Mobalytics. Mobalytics presents a veneer of public data, so the tier list seems well-informed and people starting playing those decks. They become the metagame because they are presented as the metagame, so it starts to solidify. In any other card game, this is the point where players would come along and start looking for off-meta decks that can beat the meta. But in LoR, this is the point where a balance patch comes in and resets the whole thing. The result is that Swim can consistently find a sort of "local maxima" in deck-building - that is, a set of decks that are pretty good, even if they're not the best - and just assert that they are the meta, and the meta changes fast enough from Riot's end that he just gets to be right in a de facto way.
And he doesn't always get it right. I can recall at least one time when I saw Kinkou Elusives with a high win rate according to the actual data on Mobalytics, but it was nowhere in sight on Swim's tier list. It took a solid week before he revised that. And when he lost that Twitch Rivals tournament to Dogdog, someone who doesn't play LoR at all, he went on the Progress Day podcast and complained about the random decks that he couldn't predict people playing in the tournament.
I get that you like Swim's content - you regularly reference it in your posts - but while I think he's a good player, I also think he's overrated as a deck-builder, and that the way Riot is handling the game helps to prop him up.
Mind you, my greatest criticism has less to do with Swim and more to do with Riot. They shouldn't tinker as much as they do with the meta, but that tinkering has odd implications for Swim's position as one of the biggest names in LoR streaming.