Seems fine, but needs a lot of support to make it good. Could be good with Inner Fire, and maybe the Paladin/Priest dual class card will be a cheap buff to make this more compelling.
Seems like a solid buff target, particularly if she comes down on curve. It'd be a lot more exciting to see a slightly lower attack and rush, though, so you can ensure you get real value out of the Spell Burst.
Certainly a good card for Spell Druid, but also kind of boring. Its saving grace is that the text reads "Your next spell costs (1) less" (unlike Haunting Visions which is "The next spell you cast this turn") so you can use this as something of a ramp tool for your huge spells by casting it in preparation for your next turn.
Seems like it is designed to fit into a Swarm/Ramp deck, but those rely on spells to generate minion swarms, so the deck and hand buffs may not be all that impactful. Still, it's a powerful enough effect that it wouldn't take much to make it playable as a one-of.
I tend to think the real problem is Atrocity. At 6 mana the fast speed makes it a little too easy to use as a soft counter/OTK after your opponent goes to remove your big threat. Other cards like Glimpse Beyond suffer the same problem from a balance perspective, but the cost of removing a large threat is really prohibitive in this case. If you expect your opponent to wait for you to play removal so they can drop Atrocity, then you either need a burst speed answer or you need multiple cheap answers so you can play one after the Atrocity comes down (since one expensive removal card just won't sequence the way you need it to).
But there isn't much in the way of burst answers. Various Frostbite effects work, and Purify works if we're talking about a unit like They Who Endure, but that's not the only big unit people play with this card. And for the "multiple cheap answers," that's basically dead on arrival. I guess you could happen to have multiple copies of Noxian Guillotine and the right circumstances to play it, but that's a pretty silly plan.
The biggest issue with Pilfer is card advantage and additional complexity of playing around your own cards without knowing what they are.
Pilfer is just far too efficient, getting 2 cards for 2 mana. THAT is the problem. This is a card game, and anytime you can significantly out-draw your opponent, you have automatic advantage in that game, regardless of what cards you draw.
I agree that the best solution would be to make the stolen cards visible to the opponent. That should be enough to level the playing field.
Lastly, anyone who is super tilted by yoink mechanics has just not played many other card games (such as MtG or Eternal). Those games have plenty of steal effects as well. You get used to it or you stop playing, but there is no point in raging about it. Personally, the only things that bother me about the yoink mechanics is that I don't know what they got, and that they gained significant card advantage over me. (Also, the fact that BMM always succeeds on his Allegiance ability.)
You're absolutely right that the Yoink mechanic is too mana efficient, and making it more expensive might naturally solve the problem it presents, but the comparison to MTG is a little unfair. Specifically, in MTG because the deck size is so much larger, and because a non-trivial number of cards are largely useless to your opponent (i.e. land cards), the odds of consistently having good cards to steal is much lower, as are the odds of stealing a critical card that your opponent absolutely needs.
That's why this version of card stealing is so much more tilting. Not only is it nowhere near properly priced in the game, but it's also dealing with different deck-building rules that make card stealing way more valuable than other games with similar mechanics.
I have not heard the exact advice you're describing from Swim's stream, but as you're describing it I would argue that it's actually pretty bad advice.
Playing for value vs. playing for tempo (or, even skipping a turn to try and bait out your opponent's threats) is a core part of the strategy of just about every CCG. And the question of when to maximize value of your cards has to be done in the context of the match. Imagine you're playing a midrange deck and your opponent is playing a control deck. In that case, your opponent probably has better late game cards, so if you spend the whole game waiting for opportunities to maximize value, you'll just lose by giving your opponent time to get their better cards online. This is the idea of knowing when you're the aggro players and when you're the control player in the context of the match (there's a widely popular article from about 20 years ago on this very topic in MTG - "Who's the Beatdown").
So, the suggestion that the game is about maximizing value at or below Platinum ranks suggests that there's some fundamentally different meta game at lower ranks. Specifically, it suggests that the meta game is all about control decks, which will naturally want to maximize value as a means of winning the game. The most generous interpretation of the advice being given is that Swim is saying that you can get away with just maximizing card value at or below Platinum rank (effectively saying that you can get away with playing the game worse), which seems to suggest that he thinks everyone at or below Platinum is either bad at the game or playing random, off-meta decks.
As @thazud said, the most important thing you can do is know what the meta game looks like and what your opponent's strategy is based on the regions/champions they're playing. From there, you can easily decide at a high level what your strategy for the match is - are you the aggro, or the control player? This is the single most important thing you can do to improve win rates, as knowing the broad strokes of your strategy going into a match informs your mulligan decisions.
Going beyond you can guess at which cards they might have that can screw you over, and gauge the likelihood of whether they have them in their hand over time. (E.g. if you're "the aggro player" in the match, and your opponent skipped a good opportunity to wipe your board with The Ruination, it may be an indicator that they don't have the card in hand and that it's safe to invest more in the board in order to close the match quickly.) If you're trying to get to a really serious expert level, you can try to develop hand-tracking skills (basically, monitoring which cards are lingering in their hands turn over turn to guess at what they are). This is something that popular Hearthstone decktrackers do for you, but it looks like Mobalytics doesn't have that feature.
The comparison between Miss Fortune and Anivia is absurd on its face. The two are designed to fit into radically different styles of play, with the former focused on frequent attacks and the latter focused on winning with inevitability in the late game.
You can certainly debate whether or not Anivia is good enough, but it's clear that in a match-up where your opponent can't deal with Eggnivia, or where you've managed to generate multiple Anivia's on board, you become nearly unbeatable. This is because Anivia's nearly indestructible status makes it easy to attack and defend every turn without additional resources.
I agree with DoubleSummon on this - maybe a +1|+1 buff here would be fine, but her real problem is the archetype she's design to fit into - the Freljord Ramp deck - is really bad. The ramp tools that exist are way too inefficient to make the deck get consistently ahead on mana, and its major win conditions (e.g. generating many Anivias or playing Warmother's Call and snowballing the board) are hard to pull off.
I have not seen the Twitch Rivals tournament so what I'm about to say could be wrong, but I don't think you should be too hard on Swim because of what he said on the podcast. If you're participating in a tournament where people expect you to be the expert who stomps all the inexperienced people, and the opposite happens followed by twitch chat endlessly making fun of you for it, it makes sense that you're going to be frustrated by it. In addition his loss(es?) was(/were) apparently to Noxus/P&Z burn aggro, on which I think we can all agree that it is not the type of deck you want to see being played in tournaments because it is incredibly easy to pilot and losing against it feels like losing a coinflip.
I'm not saying everything Swim is saying is completely correct or justified, but I don't think you should abandon all your respect for him just because of what he said here. Everyone says something dumb every once in a while, especially when they're frustrated about something.
For context on the tournament, he lost his first match to Kripp (lost to Burn Aggro, won a game, then lost a game because of the timer), then he tied to MegaMogwai in the second round (again due to the timer). He won his third match and made it into the winners bracket by the skin of his teeth, and then went on to take second place against DogDog.
I'm certainly sympathetic to your point about expectations - going into the tournament, Swim was considered a favorite to win, so there's a lot of pressure on him to do that. But it's not like he lost...he got second place. Sometimes your first seed in a tournament doesn't win, and that's not a big deal from a reputation standpoint. Had he come in last or been dropped down into the losers bracket like MegaMogwai, I could more easily understand the resentment over the results because that kind of failure directly flies in the face of his supposed expertise.
But my point really has a lot less to do with whether or not he's mad about the results, and more about how talks about it.
His description of his loss to Kripp's Burn Aggro deck was "because he brought this - one of his decks, it was Noxus/P&Z and he was running a lot of low cost cards and all of his cards reduced my Nexus health...then I just got zero health and lost." He talks about it like a crazy deck straight out of left field.
He could have said that the Burn Aggro archetype was degenerate for the game and bad for competitive play (which is true)
He could have talked about how the timer rules meant that popular control lineups were left worse off (which is also true, and contributed to his poor Swiss record)
Instead he talks about it like something unfair that no one could have seen coming, and continuously tries to downplay the impact that Kripp had on his losses because that would seemingly mean that he's worse than Kripp.
His broader description of his opponents is unduly disrespectful. "It's more competitive when everyone is on the level and you have some kind of anticipation of what people will bring and then if they bring something surprising it's because they're outgaming you instead of just bringing random stuff"
What he's describing here - opponents bringing decks he couldn't anticipate - is basically the nature of competitive CCG innovation. There are lots of examples across Digital CCGs of decks which aren't great on ladder but are great in tournaments because of how they play against specific, popular decks. This is extremely common.
In this moment, he's basically saying "I'm the expert, so if my opponent has brought something I couldn't anticipate, it's because they have no idea what they're doing and just got lucky"
While all of these opponents he's talking about are not major LoR streamers, they're all major CCG streamers with years of expertise in CCGs. LoR is not so different among CCGs that their experiences are not applicable or relevant.
When he says "on the level" he basically means "using my tier list on Mobalytics and treating it as undeniably correct"
In my mind, all of this speaks to an "expert" status that has been conferred onto Swim incorrectly. He's certainly one of the biggest LoR streamers, but given how small the LoR scene is right now, he's a big fish in a small pond.
He's a big part of how the weekly "meta tier list" is determined on Mobalytics, but I think he's taken that and convinced himself that his word is gospel on the strategy of the game. Going back to OldManSanns point - the Kinkou Elusive deck dropped off the tier list in a way that seemed pretty arbitrary and not truly reflective of its power level. And now it's back, simply because a nerf hit the Burn Aggro deck. It's not as though the Kinkou Elusive deck was ever bad, it just dropped of the tier list because Swim deemed it so. All of this points to an utter lack of self-awareness that leaves me with very little respect for him.
Nifty, I have tried to ignore these kinds of posts because I really do think you're just baiting people on this forum (I chose not to respond at all to the "new best decks" post, for instance), but congrats because this one really irks me enough to engage on it.
A week ago, when you claimed that the Freljord is the best region in the game, I posted a long comment refuting your point in which I called out Kinkou Elusives as a) the highest win rate deck based on data available at the time and b) a deck that already featured only a very minor Freljord splash in the form of Omen Hawk and Elixir of Iron. Your response was "Dude I'm sorry but elusives is not a deck that people run in this game at any tier."
So you can imagine my frustration to see you praising the archetype that you just dismissed as trash, all while falsely claiming that Swim has "fixed" the Elusive Kinkou list by adding a Freljord splash that it already had. OldManSanns has hit the nail on the head - the deck has been good for a long time and the edits Swim has actually made are incredibly minor techs to the deck.
Frankly, after tuning in to the Progress Day podcast on YouTube, I have just about zero respect for Swim's point of view. The episode in question was discussing the Twitch Rivals tournament and Patch 1.2, and Swim was really childish about the results. Specifically, he complains about losing to Kripp's Burn Aggro list and describes it as though it was some random list even though it was about as cut-and-dry a Burn Aggro netdeck as you could get. He then went on to complain about how tournaments are better when you can predict your opponent's line-ups, and that his opponents were just "bringing random stuff" instead of "outgaming [him]." He came off as a petulant child who felt entitled to first place simply because he plays more Legends of Runeterra on Twitch than the various Hearthstone streamers who joined the tournament.
For what it's worth, I agree that it's counter-intuitive, and I generally hate that in CCGs, but I there are several reasons I don't think it's a big deal:
The text makes it explicit what should happen, so there are easy ways in which players can educate themselves before or after seeing this happen
The likelihood that you find yourself in this position (that is, spending your damage-based spells targeting your units) is low, so most of the time the kegs will explode as expected through the natural course of the game
When this unintuitive interaction occurs, it generally benefits you because you still have the Powder Keg
There are cases where the Powder Keg's vulnerability could be a liability (e.g. against Sejuani), but that third point is mostly true, and a big part of why I don't mind this. Unintuitive interactions that lose you the game feel awful, but ones that can benefit you aren't as bad from a player experience standpoint.
I like a lot of these callouts, but I'd be very hesitant to update Overgrown Snapvine too much...it's not that hard to turn a lot of junk units into 4/3's with this card, so making it much bigger could be devastating. I'd rather have it be much larger itself, so the opportunity cost of top decking this isn't too high, but then have it summon some other smaller unit (e.g. make it a 5/6 that summons 3/3s or something like that). Obviously that would be tough without adding a new card, but I think it's a better design.
I would also consider Jagged Butcher - it's a very strong 1-drop to balance out your mana curve/give you other ways to get value out of cards like Warning Shot (especially if you add Yordle Grifter). You could probably also make the case for Crackshot Corsair as a way to trigger your plunder effects, but that seems like overkill to me.
Other obvious choices here include Chump Whump as a body to defend your life total and a way to generate more burst spells for your late game Ezreal finisher.
I don't have much of an opinion of "Celestial Crafter" - seems fine. Regarding "Starace, Solar Entity," I have two comments:
I immediately thought it should be pronounced Starace, so if you intend an "iss" type ending, I'd rename it to "Stariss." While there are some words that pronounce "ace" as "iss" (e.g. solace), the fact that "race" sounds like "ace" is unavoidable here.
It seems complicated in a way that would make it too hard to fit into a deck. Presumably the intention is that Starace is a way to consistently activate "played elemental last turn" effects, but +3 spell damage isn't worth 3 mana on its own (and if you bounce him, that's what you're getting - just +3 spell damage, no body), and he's a very expensive way to keep your elementals online (3 mana plus a spell just to have him available next time you need to play an elemental). I would think a better effect might be "After you cast a spell, add a 1/1 Star Elemental to your hand" or something to that effect - still gives you plenty of elemental activators, but they're just token units.
Seems fine, but needs a lot of support to make it good. Could be good with Inner Fire, and maybe the Paladin/Priest dual class card will be a cheap buff to make this more compelling.
Clearly this fixes the problem Pure Paladin had with a lack of 1-drops. Also might serve as a decent board reload in a weenie rush type deck.
Seems like a solid buff target, particularly if she comes down on curve. It'd be a lot more exciting to see a slightly lower attack and rush, though, so you can ensure you get real value out of the Spell Burst.
Certainly a good card for Spell Druid, but also kind of boring. Its saving grace is that the text reads "Your next spell costs (1) less" (unlike Haunting Visions which is "The next spell you cast this turn") so you can use this as something of a ramp tool for your huge spells by casting it in preparation for your next turn.
Seems like it is designed to fit into a Swarm/Ramp deck, but those rely on spells to generate minion swarms, so the deck and hand buffs may not be all that impactful. Still, it's a powerful enough effect that it wouldn't take much to make it playable as a one-of.
I'm most excited for Liliana, Waker of the Dead because I'm a big fan of reanimate styles of play in MTG, and she fits that extremely well.
I tend to think the real problem is Atrocity. At 6 mana the fast speed makes it a little too easy to use as a soft counter/OTK after your opponent goes to remove your big threat. Other cards like Glimpse Beyond suffer the same problem from a balance perspective, but the cost of removing a large threat is really prohibitive in this case. If you expect your opponent to wait for you to play removal so they can drop Atrocity, then you either need a burst speed answer or you need multiple cheap answers so you can play one after the Atrocity comes down (since one expensive removal card just won't sequence the way you need it to).
But there isn't much in the way of burst answers. Various Frostbite effects work, and Purify works if we're talking about a unit like They Who Endure, but that's not the only big unit people play with this card. And for the "multiple cheap answers," that's basically dead on arrival. I guess you could happen to have multiple copies of Noxian Guillotine and the right circumstances to play it, but that's a pretty silly plan.
You're absolutely right that the Yoink mechanic is too mana efficient, and making it more expensive might naturally solve the problem it presents, but the comparison to MTG is a little unfair. Specifically, in MTG because the deck size is so much larger, and because a non-trivial number of cards are largely useless to your opponent (i.e. land cards), the odds of consistently having good cards to steal is much lower, as are the odds of stealing a critical card that your opponent absolutely needs.
That's why this version of card stealing is so much more tilting. Not only is it nowhere near properly priced in the game, but it's also dealing with different deck-building rules that make card stealing way more valuable than other games with similar mechanics.
I have not heard the exact advice you're describing from Swim's stream, but as you're describing it I would argue that it's actually pretty bad advice.
Playing for value vs. playing for tempo (or, even skipping a turn to try and bait out your opponent's threats) is a core part of the strategy of just about every CCG. And the question of when to maximize value of your cards has to be done in the context of the match. Imagine you're playing a midrange deck and your opponent is playing a control deck. In that case, your opponent probably has better late game cards, so if you spend the whole game waiting for opportunities to maximize value, you'll just lose by giving your opponent time to get their better cards online. This is the idea of knowing when you're the aggro players and when you're the control player in the context of the match (there's a widely popular article from about 20 years ago on this very topic in MTG - "Who's the Beatdown").
So, the suggestion that the game is about maximizing value at or below Platinum ranks suggests that there's some fundamentally different meta game at lower ranks. Specifically, it suggests that the meta game is all about control decks, which will naturally want to maximize value as a means of winning the game. The most generous interpretation of the advice being given is that Swim is saying that you can get away with just maximizing card value at or below Platinum rank (effectively saying that you can get away with playing the game worse), which seems to suggest that he thinks everyone at or below Platinum is either bad at the game or playing random, off-meta decks.
As @thazud said, the most important thing you can do is know what the meta game looks like and what your opponent's strategy is based on the regions/champions they're playing. From there, you can easily decide at a high level what your strategy for the match is - are you the aggro, or the control player? This is the single most important thing you can do to improve win rates, as knowing the broad strokes of your strategy going into a match informs your mulligan decisions.
Going beyond you can guess at which cards they might have that can screw you over, and gauge the likelihood of whether they have them in their hand over time. (E.g. if you're "the aggro player" in the match, and your opponent skipped a good opportunity to wipe your board with The Ruination, it may be an indicator that they don't have the card in hand and that it's safe to invest more in the board in order to close the match quickly.) If you're trying to get to a really serious expert level, you can try to develop hand-tracking skills (basically, monitoring which cards are lingering in their hands turn over turn to guess at what they are). This is something that popular Hearthstone decktrackers do for you, but it looks like Mobalytics doesn't have that feature.
The comparison between Miss Fortune and Anivia is absurd on its face. The two are designed to fit into radically different styles of play, with the former focused on frequent attacks and the latter focused on winning with inevitability in the late game.
You can certainly debate whether or not Anivia is good enough, but it's clear that in a match-up where your opponent can't deal with Eggnivia, or where you've managed to generate multiple Anivia's on board, you become nearly unbeatable. This is because Anivia's nearly indestructible status makes it easy to attack and defend every turn without additional resources.
I agree with DoubleSummon on this - maybe a +1|+1 buff here would be fine, but her real problem is the archetype she's design to fit into - the Freljord Ramp deck - is really bad. The ramp tools that exist are way too inefficient to make the deck get consistently ahead on mana, and its major win conditions (e.g. generating many Anivias or playing Warmother's Call and snowballing the board) are hard to pull off.
Good call with this one - I just saw the "non-regioned" Arcane Apprentice myself, and you're right that it was 12 spells.
Here's one I put together a while ago for a different contest, but it fits here and I've always really liked it as a card.
For context on the tournament, he lost his first match to Kripp (lost to Burn Aggro, won a game, then lost a game because of the timer), then he tied to MegaMogwai in the second round (again due to the timer). He won his third match and made it into the winners bracket by the skin of his teeth, and then went on to take second place against DogDog.
I'm certainly sympathetic to your point about expectations - going into the tournament, Swim was considered a favorite to win, so there's a lot of pressure on him to do that. But it's not like he lost...he got second place. Sometimes your first seed in a tournament doesn't win, and that's not a big deal from a reputation standpoint. Had he come in last or been dropped down into the losers bracket like MegaMogwai, I could more easily understand the resentment over the results because that kind of failure directly flies in the face of his supposed expertise.
But my point really has a lot less to do with whether or not he's mad about the results, and more about how talks about it.
In my mind, all of this speaks to an "expert" status that has been conferred onto Swim incorrectly. He's certainly one of the biggest LoR streamers, but given how small the LoR scene is right now, he's a big fish in a small pond.
He's a big part of how the weekly "meta tier list" is determined on Mobalytics, but I think he's taken that and convinced himself that his word is gospel on the strategy of the game. Going back to OldManSanns point - the Kinkou Elusive deck dropped off the tier list in a way that seemed pretty arbitrary and not truly reflective of its power level. And now it's back, simply because a nerf hit the Burn Aggro deck. It's not as though the Kinkou Elusive deck was ever bad, it just dropped of the tier list because Swim deemed it so. All of this points to an utter lack of self-awareness that leaves me with very little respect for him.
Nifty, I have tried to ignore these kinds of posts because I really do think you're just baiting people on this forum (I chose not to respond at all to the "new best decks" post, for instance), but congrats because this one really irks me enough to engage on it.
A week ago, when you claimed that the Freljord is the best region in the game, I posted a long comment refuting your point in which I called out Kinkou Elusives as a) the highest win rate deck based on data available at the time and b) a deck that already featured only a very minor Freljord splash in the form of Omen Hawk and Elixir of Iron. Your response was "Dude I'm sorry but elusives is not a deck that people run in this game at any tier."
So you can imagine my frustration to see you praising the archetype that you just dismissed as trash, all while falsely claiming that Swim has "fixed" the Elusive Kinkou list by adding a Freljord splash that it already had. OldManSanns has hit the nail on the head - the deck has been good for a long time and the edits Swim has actually made are incredibly minor techs to the deck.
Frankly, after tuning in to the Progress Day podcast on YouTube, I have just about zero respect for Swim's point of view. The episode in question was discussing the Twitch Rivals tournament and Patch 1.2, and Swim was really childish about the results. Specifically, he complains about losing to Kripp's Burn Aggro list and describes it as though it was some random list even though it was about as cut-and-dry a Burn Aggro netdeck as you could get. He then went on to complain about how tournaments are better when you can predict your opponent's line-ups, and that his opponents were just "bringing random stuff" instead of "outgaming [him]." He came off as a petulant child who felt entitled to first place simply because he plays more Legends of Runeterra on Twitch than the various Hearthstone streamers who joined the tournament.
The part I'm referencing from Swim is here, a few minutes into the episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdUEac4l9J8&feature=youtu.be&t=538
For what it's worth, I agree that it's counter-intuitive, and I generally hate that in CCGs, but I there are several reasons I don't think it's a big deal:
There are cases where the Powder Keg's vulnerability could be a liability (e.g. against Sejuani), but that third point is mostly true, and a big part of why I don't mind this. Unintuitive interactions that lose you the game feel awful, but ones that can benefit you aren't as bad from a player experience standpoint.
+1 to HunterHunter's point. The text on Powder Keg reads "Destroy me when your spell or skill damages enemies."
I like a lot of these callouts, but I'd be very hesitant to update Overgrown Snapvine too much...it's not that hard to turn a lot of junk units into 4/3's with this card, so making it much bigger could be devastating. I'd rather have it be much larger itself, so the opportunity cost of top decking this isn't too high, but then have it summon some other smaller unit (e.g. make it a 5/6 that summons 3/3s or something like that). Obviously that would be tough without adding a new card, but I think it's a better design.
I like the suggestions FrostyFeet made of Make it Rain, Yordle Grifter, and Zap Sprayfin, especially the first two.
I would also consider Jagged Butcher - it's a very strong 1-drop to balance out your mana curve/give you other ways to get value out of cards like Warning Shot (especially if you add Yordle Grifter). You could probably also make the case for Crackshot Corsair as a way to trigger your plunder effects, but that seems like overkill to me.
Other obvious choices here include Chump Whump as a body to defend your life total and a way to generate more burst spells for your late game Ezreal finisher.
Here's a goofy one I put together today. Used the Winter Veil expansion icon, since a present seemed like the right choice.
I don't have much of an opinion of "Celestial Crafter" - seems fine. Regarding "Starace, Solar Entity," I have two comments: