There's a lot to unpack in this post. Breaking down what you're talking about a bit, you seem to have points about a lot more than just the Celestial cards:
Is Invoke a healthy mechanic? You seem to think that it's bad because you believe Discover is widely considered OP and too much RNG (note: not "r and g" - it's an acronym)
Are the actual Celestial cards too powerful/is the cost of getting a Celestial card too low? You seem to think that the cost to get one (e.g. playing an understated 3-drop) is too low relative to their powerful, as they are themselves above the power curve for their respective costs
Is Aurelion Sol too powerful? You seem to think he is too powerful because he is almost certainly the most powerful late-game bomb available in Legends of Runeterra.
Is Targon in too many Meta decks? You seem to think that it is, based on Swim's "day 2 meta" analysis
My responses
Is Invoke a healthy mechanic? I think the mechanic is fine in the abstract, but that it's bad to limit a mechanic this big and impactful to one region. Discover is one of the most interesting types of RNG in Hearthstone because the player has to make a choice about which random card they want. Invoke works in much the same way, where players have to make decisions about random cards, and that can be a very skill-testing form of randomness. But Discover was available to all classes, and Invoke is only available to Targon, so that makes Targon unfairly powerful so long as Celestials are better than a lot of the other control strategies in other regions.
Are the actual Celestial cards too powerful/is the cost of getting a Celestial card too low? Some specific cards like Solari Priestess, which pick from a very limited pool of Celestials, are probably a little overtuned. But most of the cards seem decently priced for the power level of the cards, in no small part due to the fact that most Celestial spells are slow, so your opponent has time to react to just about every Celestial card before it snowballs to a win.
Is Aurelion Sol too powerful? Maybe? He's clearly crazy powerful, but he's also a 10-drop, so once the metagame stops being super greedy (which is the most common start for a day 1 or day 2 meta), he might just be too expensive to reasonably play. Only time will tell.
Is Targon in too many Meta decks? What meta decks? It's day 2. That Swim has a video talking about meta decks is silly, and the claim he made that a mere 8 hours of play is all he needs to fully optimize an archetype is also silly, particularly because the meta isn't stable enough to optimize against. Targon is in most of the decks people are playing because it's brand new, and because numerous other regions got next to no new content at all. I certainly think Riot should have released meaningful content for each region, rather than delaying the real content for four of them, but this doesn't really reflect a new meta game.
given that the progress is pretty fast in general i would not say that the system needs to be changed. We are 3 days into the expansion and i am already level 20 in targon what is easyly doable if you play some expansions. I know many players dont play expansions but even then... you should be around level 8 at least already with a decent card pool available for being just 2 days into the expansion. After 1 week you should have access to every deck you want to play even if you started from 0 and if that is not generous enough for you... well then you should go play dota :)
Are you posting this from the future? We're not three days into the expansion - we're not even two days into the expansion. It went live around 1pm EDT on Wednesday, so we'll be two days into it around 1pm EDT today.
I don't know how much you play in a given day, but getting to level 20 in Targon in three days is not a realistic goal for most players. If you assume around 3600 XP a day (which is not too hard to do if you're playing your daily quests and XP farming), then you're still only getting to level 20 after about 11 days. I agree that getting to level 8 is much more reasonable in the couple of days, but that's not going to get you enough cards to make a deck. Not accounting for the shards you get (which are semi-random values), getting to level 8 should get you 27 cards in a given region, only one of which is guaranteed to be a champion.
Perhaps most importantly, though, completing a region's reward road doesn't mean you have all the cards for that region. It may still require several weeks of vault openings to get what you need to have that level of completion. That doesn't mean you can't start playing fun new decks before that point, but I wouldn't describe that as "access to every deck you want to play"
You just play LoR and you are given one champion and one wild card every week. Also at this time shards are accumulating. In HS you don't get a legendary for free every week. I don’t know why you spend 1/4 shards for a champion. I don't play a lot, but it will take 1/9 of the shards to craft champion. And that's not counting the wild cards. Why don't you count them? I don’t understand what you don’t like. Both games have their own advantages. LoR is more F2P than HS in my opinion. But they also need to make money.
I agree that in general, LoR is way more F2P friendly than other games. But I think GerritDeMan really hit the nail on the head here. On day 1, when you haven't had time to rack up rewards and get new champions, etc., it's hard to feel confident in how to spend your limited resources. You want to build decks you're sure that you'll enjoy, and ideally you'd like to build a deck that's at least a bit competitively viable. And while the game is very F2P friendly, and it won't be hard to rack up all the cards if you play regularly, it still weakens the impact of that day 1 launch.
Regarding your questions about the fractions, I'm not referring to my personal pool of shards. Here's what I mean: when you get a champion card that you already have three of (assuming you have all champions), you get 750 shards. When you get an epic card that you already have three of, you get 250 shards (and a rare gives you 60, and a common gives you 15). These shards are far lower value required to craft new cards. Yes, you can get wildcards, but that's hard to account for since it's semi-random, so I'm just using shard values to determine crafting. That's admittedly a worst-case scenario, but without knowledge of exactly the odds of wildcard upgrades, it's hard to judge in any other way.
because you can't bank EXP, it feels like you're always going to be stuck starting from zero with new cards
Because there are shards and wild cards for this purpose.
Extra champion cards produce 1/4 of the shards needed to craft them, Epics and Rares produce about 1/5, and Commons produce about 1/6. Perhaps if you consistently play the game, that will eventually add up to enough, but it's a very slow way to build up resources.
By comparison, Hearthstone lets you bank up in-game resources if you're done spending them on the current expansion, and they give away some free packs on day 1 of a new set. That first one is important, because if Blizzard demanded that you spend all your in-game gold ahead of an expansion and only got new cards with dust, everyone would be stuck getting far fewer cards. It's the difference between getting full value out of your resources vs 1/4 the value (or, in the case of LoR, often worse than 1/4).
I'm not sure if this is something I'm experiencing because I took a break from the game, or if it's just the nature of F2P in Legends of Runeterra, but it's a bit of a struggle to actually get cards on day 1.
It's a bit odd - LoR is generally one of the most F2P friendly CCGs out there, but specifically in the context of expansions, and because you can't bank EXP, it feels like you're always going to be stuck starting from zero with new cards.
Does anyone else feel this way, or is it just me? I like the fact that they ensured Labs meant everyone got to try new cards, but I want to make my own decks with the new cards but don't have the resources yet.
My gut feeling is that there are a lot of problematic mechanics in this set, but I have to agree with iWatchUSleep - the expansion hasn't even been out for a day, so it's hard to reasonably argue something is metabreaking.
Respectfully, any reading of that text that suggests Riot isn't saying that he's too weak is wrong. They would not feel a need to make a "major update" to Lee Sin in which he gets "more options for synergies" and will be able "to come online and impact the game earlier in a match" if he were already good enough as is (at least in the eyes of the Riot dev team). Maybe the change will be so significant that more closely resembles the old Lux/Mageseeker revamp rather than a normal buff/nerf patch (as it happens, the potential for this makes experimenting now even less appealing), but there's no world in which getting more synergies and coming online earlier translates to a nerf.
In any previous balance patch, I might have agreed with you that people will feel encouraged to revisit him as a means of preparing for his upgrade, but in an expansion patch when you know he's going to change, there's no point. There's already tons of new content to experiment with, and Riot has signaled that he isn't worth your time between now and next month.
Your point about him synergizing with Targon Gems is exactly the kind of thing that makes me think Riot shouldn't have said what they did. Right now, Lee Sin is not seeing much play, but there might be good Lee Sin decks with Targon in the metagame. But Riot is already signaling they don't think that's true, and right now they're the only ones with data about how these new cards will impact the game.
I get that people appreciate how public Riot is about what they're working on and what changes are coming down the pike. In some ways, I agree, it's refreshing and positive. But there's also merit in playing these things a little closer to the chest. A better, more cryptic alternative to announcing specifically that a major rework for Lee Sin and an adjustment to the level up requirements for Ezreal are coming might have been something like "With the influx of powerful burst spells in Call of the Mountain, we'll be closely monitoring champions with spell synergies to ensure proper balance." This doesn't call out any particular champion by name, but still hints at some of things they'll be looking into over the next month.
It seems a little crazy to me that they're teasing a major update to Lee Sin right as a ton of new cards are arriving. It creates a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby players will think Lee Sin is bad and avoid him because Riot is effectively saying as much - after all, they wouldn't be planning a big buff if the thought he would be good after the cards are released. It is entirely possible that someone would have made a meta deck with Lee Sin, but this artificially creates a bias against him.
Players should be the ones figuring out the metagame - it should not be dictated from on high by Riot's balance previews. For all Riot knows, the decks they think are the best decks in the format at v1.8 will never be discovered. Maybe players will only play worse decks, maybe better, but regardless these kinds of broadcasts only serve to mess with player perceptions.
The text on this card is a mess, but it seems reasonably easy to power up, and you probably only need to power it up twice to make it well worth the cost. That said, I'm not convinced it will see a lot of play, as this doesn't upgrade in your deck. P&Z has a lot of card draw, but the slow nature of this card might mean it's worth including.
The cheap invokes are all going to be very good for an aggro/tempo deck, and there are ways to get value out of discard, so I expect to see a decent amount of play from Spacey Sketcher.
This seems pretty unintuitive. And I know I'm kind of a broken record here, but this feels like a way to push off balancing these cards until after the content is released. Dropping 24 super powerful, non-collectible cards that only one region gets to access is a balance risk from the start, and this feels like the most confusing way to tamp down on that risk.
Now that we know what the cards are and that Invoke is weighted instead of true random, Solari Priestess really puts Lunari Priestess to shame in terms of overall value. All of the Celestial cards you can get are really solid, but I'm most interested in getting Written in Stars from this effect. You've got decent odds of getting it when you play her, making this a good way to tutor out your champion/win condition.
Obviously the Daybreak is something of a limitation here, and this might not see play in a dedicated Daybreak Leona deck (since that seems more tempo oriented, and this feels like a value generator for Aurelion Sol), but this definitely seems like one of the most powerful Invoke cards thanks to the cost restriction, particularly given that they've said the effect is weighted toward cheaper cards and toward units.
Written in Stars is a crazy powerful effect - comparing to Entreat, you're getting a cost reduction and +2|+2 for a mere 2 mana more. It's also exactly the kind of wonky copy editing I've come to expect from this game...why isn't it "Written in the Stars"?
I agree that drawing always costs mana. When I say "'taxing a player' for the flexibility" I'm trying to draw a distinction between drawing a single card from your deck vs. generating a random card from a small pool of super efficient cards (and specifically, getting to choose the card from the pool, rather than just top-decking or getting a random thing). Those are certainly not the same value, and therefore shouldn't be the same typical price - so I opted to use the word "tax" to describe that difference. My language probably could have been clearer, but I think we're basically saying the same thing.
I wouldn't bother with Iceborn Legacy - I don't think it's actually that hard to get a lot of big Mistwraiths without it, and it will screw up the consistency of the Wraithcaller, which is the real workhorse of the deck. That said, I love the idea of Atrocity - pairs very reasonably with Risen Mists for a sort of game-ending Pyroblast type effect.
Just looking over the costs of all of the Invoke cards revealed so far, it seems like they're saying Invoke is worth about 2 mana (maybe 1.5 after you account for the other little "costs," like the cost added for a Daybreak/Nightfall synergy, or the cost of Burst Speed).
The biggest thing to me is that Celestial cards (mostly) cost more mana on top of that. They've revealed six as of my writing this, and it's clear that some will cost at much as 4, 5, and 6 mana (based on Solari Priestess). The cards you can get seem pretty good, but since they will (mostly) cost more mana, that 2 mana Invoke cost seems to be how Riot is "taxing a player" for the flexibility of this discover-like ability. We'll have to see the full set of cards before it's fair to judge, but to me that seems like a fair price to pay - "2 mana draw a better than average card."
Maybe when the full set is revealed, we'll find that the use-cases are too varied to make that price fair (i.e. there are going to be thousands of potential triples to choose from, so if there aren't a critical mass of cards for particular use cases - aggro tools vs. removal tools vs. card draw tools, etc. - then the variance in value will go up and the cost will seem expensive).
I'm a fairly cynical person, but this goes pretty far even for me. I absolutely believe that Blizzard/Activision has a history of trading short-term profits for long-term employee satisfaction and player satisfaction. But there's more viable competition than ever in the CCG space and there's a major spotlight on their bad business practices. Things like this to generate good will are good for business precisely because of how negative an image everyone has of them right now. With that in mind, I think there's very little reason to believe, for instance, that they're simply "masking it really well" to avoid giving players more rewards.
So, it's a fancy Discover effect? Very hard to judge at this point without knowing the full set of Celestial cards, though the flexibility of Discover in Hearthstone makes it a pretty good effect. I like the parallels between of Lunari Priestess and Solari Priestess - that's a nice touch.
I dunno, I think 1 mana cheaper than Scarmaiden is pretty nice. I think everyone's really overestimating the challenge inherent in Behold.
All you're doing by keeping an 8-cost card in your mulligan is accepting the likelihood of early-game tempo loss. It's not the end of the world. There are all kinds of slow decks with little to no early-game tempo, and they do just fine. Sacrificing early tempo for future value is a time-honored, successful strategy in CCGs. Have you noticed that they put Behold in the region with some of the best mitigation and AOE damage? Maybe there's a reason for that.
If you evaluate every card as if it's going into a perfect curve tempo deck, you're basically ignoring half the game. Not to mention, having a critical mass of Regeneration (Troll Ravager AND Scarmaiden Reaver AND whatever else) will be utterly back-breaking for any opponent who's not running The Ruination.
I don't want to entirely count out the Behold mechanic, but not even the best control decks in LoR have been able to run more than about six 8+ cost cards. Troll Ravager is right on the borderline where that many triggers is enough to make him work most of the time, but the early game Behold synergies are going to be inconsistent. If you throw Trundle into the mix, you can boost that effectiveness for synergies starting around turn 6 or 7, but if you're up against a serious aggro deck that might be too late for a 3/5 with Regeneration to mitigate enough damage to win you the game.
I would argue that the Freljord has actually been surprisingly weak when it comes to low-tempo early game strategies. Many of the best cards in the region are burst speed buffs, so fighting for the board with early game tempo is actually pretty important and the region looks a lot more like a midrange region with some random ramp tools than it does a control region. I think that's a big part of why it has only recently emerged as powerful - much of the metagame for months was dominated by serious control and aggro decks, and the midrange content in the Freljord was outclassed. To the extent that it saw play in control and combo decks (e.g. They Who Endure Spiders, Ezreal OTK), Freljord was a bit player, not the star.
Maybe that changes here - like I said, Troll Ravager is right on the borderline of reasonable, and the critical mass of Regeneration in this set may make it easy for the Freljord to get value out of units over multiple turns and last into the late game. But so far, I think the region has had a very midrange "fair fight" vibe to it that makes losing the early game an automatic loss.
Data is a bit limited at this point, but it doesn't seem like any of these classes need that much help. Zoo Warlock, Totem Shaman, Bomb Warrior, and Highlander Mage are all pretty good decks. These cards you're highlighting focus on archetypes that aren't very good, but that's not that important. Those archetypes can come back/be powerful with subsequent expansions or with rotation next year.
There's a lot to unpack in this post. Breaking down what you're talking about a bit, you seem to have points about a lot more than just the Celestial cards:
My responses
Are you posting this from the future? We're not three days into the expansion - we're not even two days into the expansion. It went live around 1pm EDT on Wednesday, so we'll be two days into it around 1pm EDT today.
I don't know how much you play in a given day, but getting to level 20 in Targon in three days is not a realistic goal for most players. If you assume around 3600 XP a day (which is not too hard to do if you're playing your daily quests and XP farming), then you're still only getting to level 20 after about 11 days. I agree that getting to level 8 is much more reasonable in the couple of days, but that's not going to get you enough cards to make a deck. Not accounting for the shards you get (which are semi-random values), getting to level 8 should get you 27 cards in a given region, only one of which is guaranteed to be a champion.
Perhaps most importantly, though, completing a region's reward road doesn't mean you have all the cards for that region. It may still require several weeks of vault openings to get what you need to have that level of completion. That doesn't mean you can't start playing fun new decks before that point, but I wouldn't describe that as "access to every deck you want to play"
I agree that in general, LoR is way more F2P friendly than other games. But I think GerritDeMan really hit the nail on the head here. On day 1, when you haven't had time to rack up rewards and get new champions, etc., it's hard to feel confident in how to spend your limited resources. You want to build decks you're sure that you'll enjoy, and ideally you'd like to build a deck that's at least a bit competitively viable. And while the game is very F2P friendly, and it won't be hard to rack up all the cards if you play regularly, it still weakens the impact of that day 1 launch.
Regarding your questions about the fractions, I'm not referring to my personal pool of shards. Here's what I mean: when you get a champion card that you already have three of (assuming you have all champions), you get 750 shards. When you get an epic card that you already have three of, you get 250 shards (and a rare gives you 60, and a common gives you 15). These shards are far lower value required to craft new cards. Yes, you can get wildcards, but that's hard to account for since it's semi-random, so I'm just using shard values to determine crafting. That's admittedly a worst-case scenario, but without knowledge of exactly the odds of wildcard upgrades, it's hard to judge in any other way.
Extra champion cards produce 1/4 of the shards needed to craft them, Epics and Rares produce about 1/5, and Commons produce about 1/6. Perhaps if you consistently play the game, that will eventually add up to enough, but it's a very slow way to build up resources.
By comparison, Hearthstone lets you bank up in-game resources if you're done spending them on the current expansion, and they give away some free packs on day 1 of a new set. That first one is important, because if Blizzard demanded that you spend all your in-game gold ahead of an expansion and only got new cards with dust, everyone would be stuck getting far fewer cards. It's the difference between getting full value out of your resources vs 1/4 the value (or, in the case of LoR, often worse than 1/4).
I'm not sure if this is something I'm experiencing because I took a break from the game, or if it's just the nature of F2P in Legends of Runeterra, but it's a bit of a struggle to actually get cards on day 1.
It's a bit odd - LoR is generally one of the most F2P friendly CCGs out there, but specifically in the context of expansions, and because you can't bank EXP, it feels like you're always going to be stuck starting from zero with new cards.
Does anyone else feel this way, or is it just me? I like the fact that they ensured Labs meant everyone got to try new cards, but I want to make my own decks with the new cards but don't have the resources yet.
My gut feeling is that there are a lot of problematic mechanics in this set, but I have to agree with iWatchUSleep - the expansion hasn't even been out for a day, so it's hard to reasonably argue something is metabreaking.
Respectfully, any reading of that text that suggests Riot isn't saying that he's too weak is wrong. They would not feel a need to make a "major update" to Lee Sin in which he gets "more options for synergies" and will be able "to come online and impact the game earlier in a match" if he were already good enough as is (at least in the eyes of the Riot dev team). Maybe the change will be so significant that more closely resembles the old Lux/Mageseeker revamp rather than a normal buff/nerf patch (as it happens, the potential for this makes experimenting now even less appealing), but there's no world in which getting more synergies and coming online earlier translates to a nerf.
In any previous balance patch, I might have agreed with you that people will feel encouraged to revisit him as a means of preparing for his upgrade, but in an expansion patch when you know he's going to change, there's no point. There's already tons of new content to experiment with, and Riot has signaled that he isn't worth your time between now and next month.
Your point about him synergizing with Targon Gems is exactly the kind of thing that makes me think Riot shouldn't have said what they did. Right now, Lee Sin is not seeing much play, but there might be good Lee Sin decks with Targon in the metagame. But Riot is already signaling they don't think that's true, and right now they're the only ones with data about how these new cards will impact the game.
I get that people appreciate how public Riot is about what they're working on and what changes are coming down the pike. In some ways, I agree, it's refreshing and positive. But there's also merit in playing these things a little closer to the chest. A better, more cryptic alternative to announcing specifically that a major rework for Lee Sin and an adjustment to the level up requirements for Ezreal are coming might have been something like "With the influx of powerful burst spells in Call of the Mountain, we'll be closely monitoring champions with spell synergies to ensure proper balance." This doesn't call out any particular champion by name, but still hints at some of things they'll be looking into over the next month.
It seems a little crazy to me that they're teasing a major update to Lee Sin right as a ton of new cards are arriving. It creates a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby players will think Lee Sin is bad and avoid him because Riot is effectively saying as much - after all, they wouldn't be planning a big buff if the thought he would be good after the cards are released. It is entirely possible that someone would have made a meta deck with Lee Sin, but this artificially creates a bias against him.
Players should be the ones figuring out the metagame - it should not be dictated from on high by Riot's balance previews. For all Riot knows, the decks they think are the best decks in the format at v1.8 will never be discovered. Maybe players will only play worse decks, maybe better, but regardless these kinds of broadcasts only serve to mess with player perceptions.
The text on this card is a mess, but it seems reasonably easy to power up, and you probably only need to power it up twice to make it well worth the cost. That said, I'm not convinced it will see a lot of play, as this doesn't upgrade in your deck. P&Z has a lot of card draw, but the slow nature of this card might mean it's worth including.
The cheap invokes are all going to be very good for an aggro/tempo deck, and there are ways to get value out of discard, so I expect to see a decent amount of play from Spacey Sketcher.
This seems pretty unintuitive. And I know I'm kind of a broken record here, but this feels like a way to push off balancing these cards until after the content is released. Dropping 24 super powerful, non-collectible cards that only one region gets to access is a balance risk from the start, and this feels like the most confusing way to tamp down on that risk.
Now that we know what the cards are and that Invoke is weighted instead of true random, Solari Priestess really puts Lunari Priestess to shame in terms of overall value. All of the Celestial cards you can get are really solid, but I'm most interested in getting Written in Stars from this effect. You've got decent odds of getting it when you play her, making this a good way to tutor out your champion/win condition.
Obviously the Daybreak is something of a limitation here, and this might not see play in a dedicated Daybreak Leona deck (since that seems more tempo oriented, and this feels like a value generator for Aurelion Sol), but this definitely seems like one of the most powerful Invoke cards thanks to the cost restriction, particularly given that they've said the effect is weighted toward cheaper cards and toward units.
Written in Stars is a crazy powerful effect - comparing to Entreat, you're getting a cost reduction and +2|+2 for a mere 2 mana more. It's also exactly the kind of wonky copy editing I've come to expect from this game...why isn't it "Written in the Stars"?
I agree that drawing always costs mana. When I say "'taxing a player' for the flexibility" I'm trying to draw a distinction between drawing a single card from your deck vs. generating a random card from a small pool of super efficient cards (and specifically, getting to choose the card from the pool, rather than just top-decking or getting a random thing). Those are certainly not the same value, and therefore shouldn't be the same typical price - so I opted to use the word "tax" to describe that difference. My language probably could have been clearer, but I think we're basically saying the same thing.
I wouldn't bother with Iceborn Legacy - I don't think it's actually that hard to get a lot of big Mistwraiths without it, and it will screw up the consistency of the Wraithcaller, which is the real workhorse of the deck. That said, I love the idea of Atrocity - pairs very reasonably with Risen Mists for a sort of game-ending Pyroblast type effect.
Just looking over the costs of all of the Invoke cards revealed so far, it seems like they're saying Invoke is worth about 2 mana (maybe 1.5 after you account for the other little "costs," like the cost added for a Daybreak/Nightfall synergy, or the cost of Burst Speed).
The biggest thing to me is that Celestial cards (mostly) cost more mana on top of that. They've revealed six as of my writing this, and it's clear that some will cost at much as 4, 5, and 6 mana (based on Solari Priestess). The cards you can get seem pretty good, but since they will (mostly) cost more mana, that 2 mana Invoke cost seems to be how Riot is "taxing a player" for the flexibility of this discover-like ability. We'll have to see the full set of cards before it's fair to judge, but to me that seems like a fair price to pay - "2 mana draw a better than average card."
Maybe when the full set is revealed, we'll find that the use-cases are too varied to make that price fair (i.e. there are going to be thousands of potential triples to choose from, so if there aren't a critical mass of cards for particular use cases - aggro tools vs. removal tools vs. card draw tools, etc. - then the variance in value will go up and the cost will seem expensive).
I'm a fairly cynical person, but this goes pretty far even for me. I absolutely believe that Blizzard/Activision has a history of trading short-term profits for long-term employee satisfaction and player satisfaction. But there's more viable competition than ever in the CCG space and there's a major spotlight on their bad business practices. Things like this to generate good will are good for business precisely because of how negative an image everyone has of them right now. With that in mind, I think there's very little reason to believe, for instance, that they're simply "masking it really well" to avoid giving players more rewards.
So, it's a fancy Discover effect? Very hard to judge at this point without knowing the full set of Celestial cards, though the flexibility of Discover in Hearthstone makes it a pretty good effect. I like the parallels between of Lunari Priestess and Solari Priestess - that's a nice touch.
I don't want to entirely count out the Behold mechanic, but not even the best control decks in LoR have been able to run more than about six 8+ cost cards. Troll Ravager is right on the borderline where that many triggers is enough to make him work most of the time, but the early game Behold synergies are going to be inconsistent. If you throw Trundle into the mix, you can boost that effectiveness for synergies starting around turn 6 or 7, but if you're up against a serious aggro deck that might be too late for a 3/5 with Regeneration to mitigate enough damage to win you the game.
I would argue that the Freljord has actually been surprisingly weak when it comes to low-tempo early game strategies. Many of the best cards in the region are burst speed buffs, so fighting for the board with early game tempo is actually pretty important and the region looks a lot more like a midrange region with some random ramp tools than it does a control region. I think that's a big part of why it has only recently emerged as powerful - much of the metagame for months was dominated by serious control and aggro decks, and the midrange content in the Freljord was outclassed. To the extent that it saw play in control and combo decks (e.g. They Who Endure Spiders, Ezreal OTK), Freljord was a bit player, not the star.
Maybe that changes here - like I said, Troll Ravager is right on the borderline of reasonable, and the critical mass of Regeneration in this set may make it easy for the Freljord to get value out of units over multiple turns and last into the late game. But so far, I think the region has had a very midrange "fair fight" vibe to it that makes losing the early game an automatic loss.
Data is a bit limited at this point, but it doesn't seem like any of these classes need that much help. Zoo Warlock, Totem Shaman, Bomb Warrior, and Highlander Mage are all pretty good decks. These cards you're highlighting focus on archetypes that aren't very good, but that's not that important. Those archetypes can come back/be powerful with subsequent expansions or with rotation next year.