The data I'm referencing is not out-of-date; all of it is post patch 1.2, and the "last updated" timestamp on the site is currently as recent as 13 hours ago. (Again, I really cannot stress enough that I am using the raw data tab, not the tier lists tab, on Mobalytics.) I am not arguing that Kinkou Elusives is hugely popular, but in terms of the data available, it has a high win rate (54.4% across all ranks, and 58.9% at Master Ranks). I don't think it's a particularly fun deck, and I recognize that the low popularity also means it has less data from which to draw conclusions, but the data that does exist suggests that it's still a competitively viable deck.
More to the point though, you've honed in very aggressively on my mention of the Kinkou Elusive deck, but done nothing to refute my broader points about your tier list. Sejuani is a good standalone card, but most of the Freljord is bad and most of the decks that feature the Sejuani package do so to support Noxus and Bilgewater win conditions - she's just icing on the cake. Any other deck that uses cards from the Freljord uses very few, always in support of some other region's win conditions. The Freljord is the worst region, stuck playing second fiddle to any region it's paired with, and the fact that decks with Sejuani are more popular post patch 1.2 does nothing to diminish the reality that Freljord is the worst region in the game.
I am aware that it is listed as B-tier deck. But those lists are based on picks from streamers, and I made a point of saying that the data I'm using to inform that list is the raw data on the site. I'm not particularly interested in the ranked order offered up by two streamers. And I am also aware that it's not hugely popular right now - play rate is around 2%. But that does not make it a bad deck in terms of how it performs.
Seriously, Nifty, please stop with the extra new lines and arbitrary text centering. Your posts are so hard to read....Also, the region name is "Noxus" not "Noxious." And one last thing here (though I'm sure I could find more) - it's not "R and G," it's "RNG" - it stands for "Random Number Generator" and is used as a reference to how software creates pseudo-randomness.
Your tier list is obviously wrong - Freljord is still by far the worst region in the game, Shadow Isles and Ionia are still the best, and Demacia is certainly well above last. Just looking at the top region combos on Mobalytics (not the tier list, just the meta stats), here are the top seven decks in terms of win rates in order:
Kinkou Elusives
Burn Aggro
Deep Sea Monsters
Demacia Bannerman
Yasuo Control
They Who Endure/Atrocity
Sej/Vlad Crimson
So, in terms of win rate, the only Freljord deck on that list shows up at 7th. Technically the first and sixth decks include Freljord, but they include very few Freljord cards...Omen Hawk and Elixir of Iron for the first, Avarosan Sentry and They Who Endure for the second. Neither is really a Freljord deck. And the unusual cut-off point I chose - "top 7" - was to get a real Freljord deck into the list. Continuing down the list by win rate, and the next deck to feature Freljord is in 15th place and is more like Kinkou Elusives in terms of how many Freljord cards show up in the deck list.
What I think you're seeing is a spike in play rate of Freljord decks, and you're misinterpreting that as a major tier boost. Taking that same data on Mobalytics and sorting by play rate, it's clear that Sejuani paired with Noxus or Bilgewater is very popular right now. Together these make up nearly 20% of the games since patch 1.2, so you're certainly going to see a lot of Freljord on ladder.
But while these are decently strong decks, they're not the best decks in the game, and Freljord isn't really the star of the show. The Freljord/Noxus decks use Swain or Vladimir as their win conditions, and the Freljord/Bilgewater decks care a lot more about stealing enough of your cards to make a cohesive win condition - the Freljord deck-buffing they feature is a nice-to-have but is also a potential liability in mirror matches.
What this data does show is that Sejuani is a powerful standalone card, not unlike Vi, and the nerfs to aggro and Vi as well as the buff to Vladimir made her an appealing tool for removal and Nexus damage. But that doesn't make Freljord a strong region.
Yeah, I've been rerolling any 1000 I get, and I'm surprised at how many we already have. I suspect there are still some 1500 variants we don't have, but that will be slow going.
My first reaction is that this card shouldn't have regeneration because it's a Noxus card. The Freljord is the only region with a follower that has regeneration, and while Riot seems reticent to print regeneration units (there's only five in the whole game), I do think that thematically any new regeneration followers belong in the Freljord.
You call out the fact that your new Crimson card's skill might be denied, but that seems very unlikely on turn 1 or 2. Not to mention the play effect can give you ~33% toward Vlad's level up if you use it on an ally, and 25% for Swain. Vlad and Swain are already not that hard to upgrade, and getting this level of consistency for very early level up would probably be bad for the game.
Crimson decks already have access to a perfectly good 1 drops drop in the form of Unscarred Reaver when you're pairing with Freljord and Cithria of Cloudfield or even Plucky Poro with Demacia (the two most likely regions to pair it with) because all of these units can survive small amount of damage and synergize with your other damage dealing cards. If you're not running any of these in your Crimson deck, you're making a conscious choice not to. The game is about pairing regions together to mix and match their strengths/weaknesses. Noxus is a region that wants to play aggressively, and its early game plays reflect that. It does not need any changing.
Some nitpicky things to start - thanks for no longer centering all of your text, but please stop putting two new lines at the end of every sentence. It makes in unnecessarily hard to read and process what you're saying. Also, please add some color to the "Gwent" example you keep referring to - I haven't played Gwent, and I'm betting others here haven't either, so it's helpful to add more description when referencing some other CCG.
Quote From Nifty129
Nerfing things that aren't top tier doesn't make sense
In principle, this is not really true. There are often things which are not top tier, but are super unfun when they see competitive play. I think Unyielding Spirit and the "Klepto-heavy" decks are great examples of this - they're not so over-powered that they are breaking the metagame, but they're super unfun to play against because they lack significant counterplay and produce unfun situations like unkillable units, or scenarios where your opponent knows more about your deck than you do.
More generally, we have to believe that Riot (and really any CCG creator) tries to be two or three steps ahead with their nerfs. Sometimes it may make sense to nerf a lower tier deck along with a higher tier deck because you've tested it and know that said lower tier deck is going to simply replace the higher tier deck as the problematic deck in the game.
Quote From Nifty129
mtg understands this that's why prices are impacted by commander not standard.
Is this a reference to the MTG secondary market? I don't consider secondary market prices on cards as a balancing mechanism in the game, and don't see how this relates to creating a well-balanced CCG - more than anything, it's a (perhaps unintentional) way to block poorer players from joining competitive play.
Quote From Nifty129
They wanted to nerf burn and only hit 1 of it's trademark tools. Boomcrew. Then they nerfed rearguard which hurt Noxious's region identity. There was a better way to nerf burn without harming low tier noxious champions like Katarina and Darius
What do you recommend? It's not really much of an argument to say "there's a better way to do this" and just leave it at that.
Frankly, I think the change to Legion Rearguard made a lot of sense. Noxus does feature overstated units that can't block as part of its identity, and I can see why you might think that shrinking one of those units (particularly when there are already very few "Can't Block" cards in the game) hurts that aspect of the Noxus identity. But really I think this just reflects Riot correcting their own misconception on the "Can't Block" effect. Comparing the pre-nerf Legion Rearguard to Reckless Trifarian, both had statlines which were about 1.5 to 2 mana over the average stats for their cost (that is, a 3/2 body is worth about 3 mana, and a 5/4 is worth about 5 mana).
On the surface, this made sense - they're basically saying that blocking is worth about 2 mana, so units that are otherwise vanilla but can't block should have bodies that are about 2 mana bigger than their cost. However, what we've seen in practice with these cards, and what anyone who's played a lot of CCGs can tell you, the value of an effect is not always linear with its cost. Getting 3 mana's worth of stats on turn 1 is worth a lot more than getting 5 mana's worth of stats on turn 3 (it's the difference between 300% mana efficiency vs. ~166% mana efficiency). This is especially true in a game that features LoRs Spell Mana bank - it's much easier to respond to 5 mana's worth of stats on turn 3 if you've banked mana, but your mana bank is empty on turn one, leaving you with inadequate tools for dealing with a 3 mana body.
Quote From Nifty129
The point wasn't that one opinion is better than an other, but that fan feedback is bad for strategy card games. I opened with the Gwent example for a reason, fan feedback killed that game. So here we see the case where Riot is balancing based on fan complaints.
While I don't agree with the blanket statement that "fan feedback is bad for strategy card games," I agree with the overall sentiment that game balance is about more than just tweaking the most popular decks every four weeks to keep players happy. A well-balanced CCG should have a metagame that regularly changes because players find new strategies to beat top-tier decks, not because the cards change out from under them.
And this is honestly something I think Riot needs to be better about. I am not a game developer, but it seems to me like a four week balance patch cycle is a tight time-frame to do right (that is, for a full cycle of investigating potential problem cards, implementing changes, and testing those updates). It takes time for players to experiment with the newly nerfed/buffed cards to see how the metagame might shape up, meaning that a non-trivial amount of the data Riot has to work off of for the next balance patch is experimentation and not very valuable for balancing purposes. And without good data, you're more likely to make less effective balance changes, further sticking you into a bad cycle of putting your thumb on the scale to address the metagame and making it impossible to see whether or not the game can self-balance.
Now, perhaps Riot's future balance patches will feature fewer buffs/nerfs, and the balancing will stabilize. I sort of doubt it, based on the watchlist and the last few balance patches, but maybe they will slow down.
The combo you're describing sounds like a huge pain, and a way to severely abuse the limited weaknesses of Unyielding Spirit, but it also sounds very slow. I would expect an Ionia/Demacia deck featuring Fiora to win well before playing such a slow combo.
That said, are you saying that each Fiora adds to the kill count of the other Fiora's? (That is, the first one gets 1 kill for each, the second gets 2 kills for each and levels, the third gets each to three kills?) If that's the case, that sounds like it should be treated as a bug, as the text on Fiora clearly says "I've killed 2 enemies" and therefore ought to be scoped to the individual unit, not "Fiora's in play" generally. (Note that I'm not saying Riot considers it a bug, just that I think the template implies the opposite and that it risks breaks like this in the balance of various Champions...)
I mean, it's also possible this is some new bug introduced by the latest patch, which is why I haven't seen it before. Or it could be something as stupid a driver update. But giant pink blocks is a pretty glaring mistake....even for a game like LoR with it's various graphical failings, I'd expect that to be caught and fixed by QA
LoR has plenty of graphical oddities (e.g. when I hover over my hand mid-animation for Vi's in-hand buff animation, it freezes and lingers until she's played), but I've never seen anything as crazy as the image you've linked. Sounds like you might need to turn down your graphics settings.
As far as I can tell, there's no real downside to getting a full collection as fast as possible, so the plan to spend wildcards, finish out rarity levels, and rack up shards makes a lot of sense to me. In fact, I was just doing this with common wildcards today, and found myself very annoyed that there doesn't appear to be an easy way to view "missing cards" (that is, exclusively cards of which you have fewer than three - so a bit more advanced than the "show unowned" button).
You could maybe argue that hording wildcards is better because it means you have more resources to craft when the next expansion drops, but you'll get more wildcards before then anyway, especially for the low rarity cards.
Burst speed is definitely one of the mechanics in LoR that makes it much harder to balance than a typical CCG, but it's also one of the ways in which LoR sets itself apart from other CCGs. Certainly you need to know what burst spells your opponent is likely to be playing, and plan around them differently than you might for slow or fast spells, but that doesn't make it inherently unfair.
I also think it's not basically the opposite of a "brainless mechanic" as you describe it - if anything, it makes timing your plays so much harder than other games (like MTG) that even seasoned CCG players regularly come out of interactions in LoR feeling a bit dumb about how they sequenced their plays.
Also, it would make Ephemeral units synergize with Yasuo, which would be a fun little synergy that could make a Shadow Isles Ionia Stun deck hypothetically possible.
What you see as a "fun little synergy," I expect would actually be a huge problem. It's not hard to generate lots of little Ephemeral units, so leveling up Yasuo would be super easy. He's one of the most frustrating L2's to play against, and the combo of Shadow Isles and Ionia would mean access to all of the most powerful control tools in the game. That deck would be miserable in the meta game.
As for myself, i don't think Unyielding Spirit trully needs to be changed.
Score!
I think you're misreading the patch notes - they didn't say it doesn't need to be changed, they said changing it is hard and they're still testing:
"This card offers some unique challenges in adjusting, as a quick numbers change is more likely to just push the card out of playability rather than addressing any core issues, so for now we’re watchlisting it while considering adjustments."
The craziest thing to me regarding the Kindly Tavernkeeper buff was the description - "Healing is part of Freljord’s regional identity, but hasn’t been as available to non-ramp decks as we’d like." Freljord has two healing cards, and until now they've both been trash. If they want to make it a meaningful part of the identity of the Freljord, they need a much bigger change.
I'm glad to see that the Klepto cards and Unyielding Spirit are all on the watchlist, and I appreciate that their explanations of the cards clearly highlight the very real problems they have - if they're not going to fix it right now, at least I can feel a bit vindicated that they understand what's wrong. But then again, Elise was on the watchlist and nothing happened to change her - she just fell off the list with no particular explanation as to why.
Honestly, I think the balance team is making it up as they go. At this point, they've nerfed and buffed the same cards over a period of several patches (thinking of Hecarim and Brood Awakening as two good "flip flopping" examples). It feels less like they're trying to balance the game and more like they're just trying to shuffle the meta game.
(Side note, you could argue that "Regeneration" is a form of healing, and that Freljord is the only region a) with two Regen units and b) with a non-champion that has Regen. That's a fine interpretation of the region's healing identity, but it's not expressed enough in the cards to make it a meaningful identity.)
Based on your newly stated set of patterns, I think Grizzled Ranger going from 4 to 5 mana seems pretty fair. He's certainly an overly popular card with the potential to create board advantage (though that category seems incredibly broad). More importantly in my mind, he's very easy to curve into Radiant Guardian today if your attack rounds are odd. Drop him at the end of round 4, then open attack with at the start of next round - worse case, you deal 4 damage, best case you get a 4/4 and an active Radiant Guardian to attack with when you go in with your whole board.
I am perfectly familiar with those discussions, and have even partaken in a few of them. And looking back on them, I think you articulated exactly why Unyielding Spirit needs to be nerfed.
In that first linked post: "Riot has plans to release more Obliterate cards in the future, i would not worry too much about it."
"In the future," so the card is not being properly balanced out by the existing set of answers in LoR today.
In the second linked post: "Let's not forget Judgment played on Fiora can potencially [sic] win the game right away while Unyielding spirit will take a couple turns."
The reason Judgment isn't a massively OP card is that its speed allows for counterplay from any region (with hard removal, damage-based removal, bounces/stuns, Frostbite, etc.).
In the third linked post: "it is too costly/situational for high level games...its too annoying/lacks counterplay for casual/slow games."
You conflate casual and slow here, suggesting that "high level" is equivalent to fast/aggro. I suspect this is why you don't see clearly that this card is a problem. Two of the top tier decks today are slower Demacia decks that run one or two copies of Unyielding Spirit. Expensive, situation cards are the bread and butter of control decks, which plan to stabilize in the mid game and win with big, powerful, expensive plays in the late game. When the only reasonable counterplay to the card is "win with aggressive decks before Round 5 or 6," the meta game gets warped in a way that makes the play experience less fun for all archetypes. This was exactly what happened in Hearthstone with The Caverns Below.
I fully agree with you but wasn't Hearthstone always this way after Naxxaramas?
I mean, there was always this 1 way too powerfull [sic] deck warping the meta which was so much stronger then [sic] everything else that forced every other deck to either tech against it or to play counters.
I added the bold-facing in that quote to draw your attention to the critical part here - balance only works when other decks can tech against/play counters for the OP effects of decks they face off against.
When I first saw this list, I though the Ember Maiden was a great idea for a buff; I've played a lot of Sejuani/Swain and would love to see Ember Maiden stick to the board a little longer and/or offer a meaningful blocker after one proc.
This morning, though, I've been playing some Demacia/Freljord midrange, and her 2 Health has actually been a pretty big deal for how well she curves out in the deck. As a 3/2, she can easily activates Wolfrider and Radiant Guardian on curve*. Add in the fact that you can pretty easily use Take Heart to keep her on the board, and all the sudden I'm not convinced she needs any buffing.
* Obviously the "on curve" part gets a little odd if you manage to get both on curve rather than just one or the other, as you'll have 6 mana going into Round 5 and might prefer to play something like Sejuani
The data I'm referencing is not out-of-date; all of it is post patch 1.2, and the "last updated" timestamp on the site is currently as recent as 13 hours ago. (Again, I really cannot stress enough that I am using the raw data tab, not the tier lists tab, on Mobalytics.) I am not arguing that Kinkou Elusives is hugely popular, but in terms of the data available, it has a high win rate (54.4% across all ranks, and 58.9% at Master Ranks). I don't think it's a particularly fun deck, and I recognize that the low popularity also means it has less data from which to draw conclusions, but the data that does exist suggests that it's still a competitively viable deck.
More to the point though, you've honed in very aggressively on my mention of the Kinkou Elusive deck, but done nothing to refute my broader points about your tier list. Sejuani is a good standalone card, but most of the Freljord is bad and most of the decks that feature the Sejuani package do so to support Noxus and Bilgewater win conditions - she's just icing on the cake. Any other deck that uses cards from the Freljord uses very few, always in support of some other region's win conditions. The Freljord is the worst region, stuck playing second fiddle to any region it's paired with, and the fact that decks with Sejuani are more popular post patch 1.2 does nothing to diminish the reality that Freljord is the worst region in the game.
I am aware that it is listed as B-tier deck. But those lists are based on picks from streamers, and I made a point of saying that the data I'm using to inform that list is the raw data on the site. I'm not particularly interested in the ranked order offered up by two streamers. And I am also aware that it's not hugely popular right now - play rate is around 2%. But that does not make it a bad deck in terms of how it performs.
Seriously, Nifty, please stop with the extra new lines and arbitrary text centering. Your posts are so hard to read....Also, the region name is "Noxus" not "Noxious." And one last thing here (though I'm sure I could find more) - it's not "R and G," it's "RNG" - it stands for "Random Number Generator" and is used as a reference to how software creates pseudo-randomness.
Your tier list is obviously wrong - Freljord is still by far the worst region in the game, Shadow Isles and Ionia are still the best, and Demacia is certainly well above last. Just looking at the top region combos on Mobalytics (not the tier list, just the meta stats), here are the top seven decks in terms of win rates in order:
So, in terms of win rate, the only Freljord deck on that list shows up at 7th. Technically the first and sixth decks include Freljord, but they include very few Freljord cards...Omen Hawk and Elixir of Iron for the first, Avarosan Sentry and They Who Endure for the second. Neither is really a Freljord deck. And the unusual cut-off point I chose - "top 7" - was to get a real Freljord deck into the list. Continuing down the list by win rate, and the next deck to feature Freljord is in 15th place and is more like Kinkou Elusives in terms of how many Freljord cards show up in the deck list.
What I think you're seeing is a spike in play rate of Freljord decks, and you're misinterpreting that as a major tier boost. Taking that same data on Mobalytics and sorting by play rate, it's clear that Sejuani paired with Noxus or Bilgewater is very popular right now. Together these make up nearly 20% of the games since patch 1.2, so you're certainly going to see a lot of Freljord on ladder.
But while these are decently strong decks, they're not the best decks in the game, and Freljord isn't really the star of the show. The Freljord/Noxus decks use Swain or Vladimir as their win conditions, and the Freljord/Bilgewater decks care a lot more about stealing enough of your cards to make a cohesive win condition - the Freljord deck-buffing they feature is a nice-to-have but is also a potential liability in mirror matches.
What this data does show is that Sejuani is a powerful standalone card, not unlike Vi, and the nerfs to aggro and Vi as well as the buff to Vladimir made her an appealing tool for removal and Nexus damage. But that doesn't make Freljord a strong region.
Yeah, I've been rerolling any 1000 I get, and I'm surprised at how many we already have. I suspect there are still some 1500 variants we don't have, but that will be slow going.
My first reaction is that this card shouldn't have regeneration because it's a Noxus card. The Freljord is the only region with a follower that has regeneration, and while Riot seems reticent to print regeneration units (there's only five in the whole game), I do think that thematically any new regeneration followers belong in the Freljord.
You call out the fact that your new Crimson card's skill might be denied, but that seems very unlikely on turn 1 or 2. Not to mention the play effect can give you ~33% toward Vlad's level up if you use it on an ally, and 25% for Swain. Vlad and Swain are already not that hard to upgrade, and getting this level of consistency for very early level up would probably be bad for the game.
Crimson decks already have access to a perfectly good 1 drops drop in the form of Unscarred Reaver when you're pairing with Freljord and Cithria of Cloudfield or even Plucky Poro with Demacia (the two most likely regions to pair it with) because all of these units can survive small amount of damage and synergize with your other damage dealing cards. If you're not running any of these in your Crimson deck, you're making a conscious choice not to. The game is about pairing regions together to mix and match their strengths/weaknesses. Noxus is a region that wants to play aggressively, and its early game plays reflect that. It does not need any changing.
You should check out https://lor.mobalytics.gg/
Some nitpicky things to start - thanks for no longer centering all of your text, but please stop putting two new lines at the end of every sentence. It makes in unnecessarily hard to read and process what you're saying. Also, please add some color to the "Gwent" example you keep referring to - I haven't played Gwent, and I'm betting others here haven't either, so it's helpful to add more description when referencing some other CCG.
In principle, this is not really true. There are often things which are not top tier, but are super unfun when they see competitive play. I think Unyielding Spirit and the "Klepto-heavy" decks are great examples of this - they're not so over-powered that they are breaking the metagame, but they're super unfun to play against because they lack significant counterplay and produce unfun situations like unkillable units, or scenarios where your opponent knows more about your deck than you do.
More generally, we have to believe that Riot (and really any CCG creator) tries to be two or three steps ahead with their nerfs. Sometimes it may make sense to nerf a lower tier deck along with a higher tier deck because you've tested it and know that said lower tier deck is going to simply replace the higher tier deck as the problematic deck in the game.
Is this a reference to the MTG secondary market? I don't consider secondary market prices on cards as a balancing mechanism in the game, and don't see how this relates to creating a well-balanced CCG - more than anything, it's a (perhaps unintentional) way to block poorer players from joining competitive play.
What do you recommend? It's not really much of an argument to say "there's a better way to do this" and just leave it at that.
Frankly, I think the change to Legion Rearguard made a lot of sense. Noxus does feature overstated units that can't block as part of its identity, and I can see why you might think that shrinking one of those units (particularly when there are already very few "Can't Block" cards in the game) hurts that aspect of the Noxus identity. But really I think this just reflects Riot correcting their own misconception on the "Can't Block" effect. Comparing the pre-nerf Legion Rearguard to Reckless Trifarian, both had statlines which were about 1.5 to 2 mana over the average stats for their cost (that is, a 3/2 body is worth about 3 mana, and a 5/4 is worth about 5 mana).
On the surface, this made sense - they're basically saying that blocking is worth about 2 mana, so units that are otherwise vanilla but can't block should have bodies that are about 2 mana bigger than their cost. However, what we've seen in practice with these cards, and what anyone who's played a lot of CCGs can tell you, the value of an effect is not always linear with its cost. Getting 3 mana's worth of stats on turn 1 is worth a lot more than getting 5 mana's worth of stats on turn 3 (it's the difference between 300% mana efficiency vs. ~166% mana efficiency). This is especially true in a game that features LoRs Spell Mana bank - it's much easier to respond to 5 mana's worth of stats on turn 3 if you've banked mana, but your mana bank is empty on turn one, leaving you with inadequate tools for dealing with a 3 mana body.
While I don't agree with the blanket statement that "fan feedback is bad for strategy card games," I agree with the overall sentiment that game balance is about more than just tweaking the most popular decks every four weeks to keep players happy. A well-balanced CCG should have a metagame that regularly changes because players find new strategies to beat top-tier decks, not because the cards change out from under them.
And this is honestly something I think Riot needs to be better about. I am not a game developer, but it seems to me like a four week balance patch cycle is a tight time-frame to do right (that is, for a full cycle of investigating potential problem cards, implementing changes, and testing those updates). It takes time for players to experiment with the newly nerfed/buffed cards to see how the metagame might shape up, meaning that a non-trivial amount of the data Riot has to work off of for the next balance patch is experimentation and not very valuable for balancing purposes. And without good data, you're more likely to make less effective balance changes, further sticking you into a bad cycle of putting your thumb on the scale to address the metagame and making it impossible to see whether or not the game can self-balance.
Now, perhaps Riot's future balance patches will feature fewer buffs/nerfs, and the balancing will stabilize. I sort of doubt it, based on the watchlist and the last few balance patches, but maybe they will slow down.
The combo you're describing sounds like a huge pain, and a way to severely abuse the limited weaknesses of Unyielding Spirit, but it also sounds very slow. I would expect an Ionia/Demacia deck featuring Fiora to win well before playing such a slow combo.
That said, are you saying that each Fiora adds to the kill count of the other Fiora's? (That is, the first one gets 1 kill for each, the second gets 2 kills for each and levels, the third gets each to three kills?) If that's the case, that sounds like it should be treated as a bug, as the text on Fiora clearly says "I've killed 2 enemies" and therefore ought to be scoped to the individual unit, not "Fiora's in play" generally. (Note that I'm not saying Riot considers it a bug, just that I think the template implies the opposite and that it risks breaks like this in the balance of various Champions...)
It definitely looks like the kind of "Champion + Related Card" quest I'd expect for Lucian. I don't recall ever seeing it either.
I mean, it's also possible this is some new bug introduced by the latest patch, which is why I haven't seen it before. Or it could be something as stupid a driver update. But giant pink blocks is a pretty glaring mistake....even for a game like LoR with it's various graphical failings, I'd expect that to be caught and fixed by QA
LoR has plenty of graphical oddities (e.g. when I hover over my hand mid-animation for Vi's in-hand buff animation, it freezes and lingers until she's played), but I've never seen anything as crazy as the image you've linked. Sounds like you might need to turn down your graphics settings.
Here's a handful of ideas I came up with today:
As far as I can tell, there's no real downside to getting a full collection as fast as possible, so the plan to spend wildcards, finish out rarity levels, and rack up shards makes a lot of sense to me. In fact, I was just doing this with common wildcards today, and found myself very annoyed that there doesn't appear to be an easy way to view "missing cards" (that is, exclusively cards of which you have fewer than three - so a bit more advanced than the "show unowned" button).
You could maybe argue that hording wildcards is better because it means you have more resources to craft when the next expansion drops, but you'll get more wildcards before then anyway, especially for the low rarity cards.
Burst speed is definitely one of the mechanics in LoR that makes it much harder to balance than a typical CCG, but it's also one of the ways in which LoR sets itself apart from other CCGs. Certainly you need to know what burst spells your opponent is likely to be playing, and plan around them differently than you might for slow or fast spells, but that doesn't make it inherently unfair.
I also think it's not basically the opposite of a "brainless mechanic" as you describe it - if anything, it makes timing your plays so much harder than other games (like MTG) that even seasoned CCG players regularly come out of interactions in LoR feeling a bit dumb about how they sequenced their plays.
What you see as a "fun little synergy," I expect would actually be a huge problem. It's not hard to generate lots of little Ephemeral units, so leveling up Yasuo would be super easy. He's one of the most frustrating L2's to play against, and the combo of Shadow Isles and Ionia would mean access to all of the most powerful control tools in the game. That deck would be miserable in the meta game.
I think you're misreading the patch notes - they didn't say it doesn't need to be changed, they said changing it is hard and they're still testing:
"This card offers some unique challenges in adjusting, as a quick numbers change is more likely to just push the card out of playability rather than addressing any core issues, so for now we’re watchlisting it while considering adjustments."
The craziest thing to me regarding the Kindly Tavernkeeper buff was the description - "Healing is part of Freljord’s regional identity, but hasn’t been as available to non-ramp decks as we’d like." Freljord has two healing cards, and until now they've both been trash. If they want to make it a meaningful part of the identity of the Freljord, they need a much bigger change.
I'm glad to see that the Klepto cards and Unyielding Spirit are all on the watchlist, and I appreciate that their explanations of the cards clearly highlight the very real problems they have - if they're not going to fix it right now, at least I can feel a bit vindicated that they understand what's wrong. But then again, Elise was on the watchlist and nothing happened to change her - she just fell off the list with no particular explanation as to why.
Honestly, I think the balance team is making it up as they go. At this point, they've nerfed and buffed the same cards over a period of several patches (thinking of Hecarim and Brood Awakening as two good "flip flopping" examples). It feels less like they're trying to balance the game and more like they're just trying to shuffle the meta game.
(Side note, you could argue that "Regeneration" is a form of healing, and that Freljord is the only region a) with two Regen units and b) with a non-champion that has Regen. That's a fine interpretation of the region's healing identity, but it's not expressed enough in the cards to make it a meaningful identity.)
Based on your newly stated set of patterns, I think Grizzled Ranger going from 4 to 5 mana seems pretty fair. He's certainly an overly popular card with the potential to create board advantage (though that category seems incredibly broad). More importantly in my mind, he's very easy to curve into Radiant Guardian today if your attack rounds are odd. Drop him at the end of round 4, then open attack with at the start of next round - worse case, you deal 4 damage, best case you get a 4/4 and an active Radiant Guardian to attack with when you go in with your whole board.
I am perfectly familiar with those discussions, and have even partaken in a few of them. And looking back on them, I think you articulated exactly why Unyielding Spirit needs to be nerfed.
Frankly, I don't know why I'm bothering to continue to argue this with you. We've already had this discussion (https://outof.cards/forums/legends-of-runeterra/runeterra-general/4170-fiora-unyielding-spirit-is-bs?page=1#comment-90407), and you yourself made my point for me:
I added the bold-facing in that quote to draw your attention to the critical part here - balance only works when other decks can tech against/play counters for the OP effects of decks they face off against.
When I first saw this list, I though the Ember Maiden was a great idea for a buff; I've played a lot of Sejuani/Swain and would love to see Ember Maiden stick to the board a little longer and/or offer a meaningful blocker after one proc.
This morning, though, I've been playing some Demacia/Freljord midrange, and her 2 Health has actually been a pretty big deal for how well she curves out in the deck. As a 3/2, she can easily activates Wolfrider and Radiant Guardian on curve*. Add in the fact that you can pretty easily use Take Heart to keep her on the board, and all the sudden I'm not convinced she needs any buffing.
* Obviously the "on curve" part gets a little odd if you manage to get both on curve rather than just one or the other, as you'll have 6 mana going into Round 5 and might prefer to play something like Sejuani