However, against certain decks the combo can be unfair and unforgiving.
In fact, that's the point of Fiora and Unyielding Spirit.
By design, these cards have a property I'd call "countermetish". They are gamebreaking if an opponent has no answer to them... but they are not that good if he does. The same deck constructed around Fiora may be great in one meta and awful in another. If it was too easy to answer her, nobody would play Fiora.
On the other hand, I must agree that Unyielding Spirit seems to be available to deploy a bit too early. But I don't think it needs anything else than cost nerf. Heightening it's price even by 1 would give more time to an opponent and burn more resources, giving slightly bigger chance to outspeed the deck. Which is crucial, because if another deck has no direct answer to a buffed unit, it's only way to win is to outspeed.
What you call "countermetish" design, most people would call "bad design." The argument you're presenting for it is basically "this card is only good in certain situations, so the meta game will just balance it out and it won't be oppressively powerful." The problem is that even when a card is not inherently ruining the game by being so OP that it dominates all match-ups and crowds out other strategies, it can still have warping effects on the meta game and make playing the game miserable.
A great example of this comes from Hearthstone. The Caverns Below was not a massively OP card - the win rates for the archetype were only narrowly over 50% - but it created a meta game where match-ups were super polarized. Either you were playing a deck that was good against Quest Rogue, or you weren't, and that was the deciding factor in whether or not you won, not how you played the game. Blizzard tried and failed to balance it multiple times with nerfs.
Okay, I think I misunderstood your meaning when you said "at the top" - I thought you meant the top of the image (that is, above the card), not the top of the text. That's my bad.....clearly I regularly gloss over the Hero Power part of the text....
Totally intended to go with the competition's title. The token is just simply one example of what you can do.
Just one question - what would happen with HPs that cancel each other out, like Mage and Priest. Do you choose two different targets, or does the target suffer both effects
If both Hero Powers target, then they both use the same target. Hearthstone doesn't have a double-targeting system (at least not yet).
So, you probably shouldn't combine Mage and Priest's Hero Power together because they would work against each other.
Does Doublecast Ogre combine combined hero powers if/when you play a second copy (or if/when your opponent plays one)?
I was goofing around playing some Poro decks, and noticed that when a buffed Poro gets recalled, they lose their Poro Snax buffs. At some level, this makes sense - recall typically removes buffs. But the Poro Snax buff applies "everywhere" and gets applied to any randomly generated Poro even after the Poro Snax are played.
Not sure if this is technically a bug, but it's not terribly intuitive - the Poros I have can lose the buff, but the Poros that don't yet exist have it.
I suspect that's going to be true about a lot of the region-specific quests - that they have numerous forms with random regions attached. Might even be true about the champion-specific quests, though I would bet that the ones that are "win a game with Champion X and Card Y" have specific pairs at least.
Today is patch notes day hopefully it gets addressed.
Are you sure about that? I thought patch notes only came out the week of the patch, and we just got a patch last week, so 1.2 should be coming along next week.
Both cards are BS separately and shouldn't exist in the game, but combined they make the cheapest, most boring, skilless, frustrating, unfun, unfair, and overwall bulls--t combo in all card game history.
It is a 2 card combo that has 0 counters and can single handely win you game, you don't need to play ANY other card, just those 2 and you win the game. Seriously, how are you supposed to deal with it? How is that fair?
If that wasn't enough, the only silence this game has cannot target champions. Like, come on. Why don't you make Unyielding Spirit unable to target champions? That would be a start..
I think you can pretty easily make the case that Fiora is boring - her plan to win is incredibly linear and the deck you build to support her is pretty obvious (lots of barriers and buffs to keep her in play and killing stuff and/or lots of Frostbite effects to protect her). But I don't think she's BS from a balance standpoint (at least in and of herself). She's fairly vulnerable to removal, recall sets her back considerably, and she lacks things like Quick Attack to make her self-sustaining.
Unyielding Spirit, though, is definitely a very poorly designed card. As you pointed out, there's basically no silence in the game, and none of it can target champions. There are still other answers to it, but they're also few and far between. The Obliterate keyword gets around it (it's functionally like MTGs Exile, so the immunity to death is irrelevant), but there's only card that can do that to an enemy champion - Devourer of the Depths. Recall also works, but that means you have to be running Ionia.
Honestly, I think there's a clear trend of thing kind of thing in LoR - powerful cards that can stomp over most regions. The result is that you either have to be playing more aggressively than the enemy (so they don't get a chance to play their nonsense) or you have to be playing exactly the right region for the match-up. Riot has a long way to go to getting the balance right in this game.
Well title says all, allegiance legends of Runeterra not working all the time, i know how to trigger it.
But it wont summon 2 , 1 cost units, when i draw the same region card . is it a bug? or i am doing something wrong?
Presumably you're talking about the Kinkou Wayfinder. The Allegiance effect of any such card triggers if the top card of your deck matches the region of the card with Allegiance. It sounds like you're saying you've seen cases where you played Kinkou, nothing happened, and then you drew an Ionia card next round (suggesting that something should have happened when you played him).
I've never noticed any bug like that, so I suspect that the most likely case is that there were no 1-cost units left in your deck to summon when you played Kinkou, so the result was nothing despite the top card being an Ionia card. (Note that Kinkou Wayfinder summons units from your deck, not random units, so you need to have 1-cost units in your deck to get any value out of him.)
Since its been ressurected, i have a legit question:
What happens when an Overwhelm unit with lifesteal attacks another with barrier? Does it Heal for the excess damage, full attack or not at all?
As luck would have it, I accidentally tested this the other day. The heal is only for the damage that is actually dealt to an enemy. After barrier, my overwhelm unit dealt 3 damage to the enemy nexus, and that's how much I healed for.
I think Vi is bad, but not in the way OP said it. Vi is among the champs who their level up is secondary to their baseline versions. This is bad in my eyes, you should try to level up your champs all the time, that's one of the selling points of the game. Braum and Sejuani suffer from this as well. Their leveled up forms simply aren't worth the time and effort they require to achieve. Sure, no one will complain if Vi levels up and slowly punches the enemy nexus to death, but she's used as just a good challenger unit, not a real build around. Her whole package of drawing cards, spamming 2 cost stuff fell flat. They work better in Jinx decks! And that's the opposite of how it should be thematic wise.
I partly agree with this, because I think levelling up a champion should something that feels rewarding, but I don't think Braum and Sejuani have the same problem as Vi regarding their level ups.
(Most of quote in spoiler)
Show Spoiler
Playing against a Braum, especially a buffed one, always forces you to keep his level up in mind, because he will create huge amounts of value once he reaches that point, and therefore his potential to level up is certainly impactful.
Sejuani may be really hard to level, but she also gives a huge advantage if the player manages to do it, and thereby players are still encouraged to try to level her (or prevent it when playing against her).
Vi's level up, on the other hand, isn't really in the form of "do X, then I do Y". She levels more gradually, but actually levelling her takes a lot of effort and the payoff just isn't really worth it (at least based on my experiences with her so far). Because of this and her base form already being strong enough, players are not encouraged enough to level her and instead play her as a very strong challenger unit.
I think better comparisons to Vi are Draven, Vladimir, Shen, Tryndamere, and Heimerdinger, because they are all champions that you don't play more for their base form and not because you want to level them (Although Tryndamere is a bit of an odd one regarding his level up). Draven, like Vi, is just a very solid card on his own that you don't play with the purpose of levelling him. The main difference with Vi is that he is still quite a bit easier to level and his levelled form is also much more threatening compared to his base form. Vladimir is kind of the same in that he is played for his base form effect and his levelled form just gives him a good bonus effect. The same can be said for Shen, because he is mainly played for his unique support effect. Sadly I hardly ever see Shen being played so I can't say for sure whether his level up is rewarding enough for the amount of effort it requires, but I don't think it's encouraging enough to consistently try to level him. Tryndamere, like I mentioned, is a weird one because he levels up very easily, but he is only played because he is a big dude with overwhelm that helps you finish the game, and that also happens to be difficult to deal with because he needs to be killed two times. And finally, Heimerdinger is also a champion that is almost solely played for his base effect, and his level up is just a nice bonus.
And here is where I partly disagree with the post above, because I don't think every champion should be played for the sole purpose of levelling up. However, I do think that they should at least meet one of the following requirements:
1. A unique base effect in combination with a fitting level up that is rewarding enough for the amount of effort it requires (like the examples I mentioned above)
2. A very rewarding level up that players should almost always want to achieve, which can excuse a lackluster base form (e.g. Kalista, Ezreal, Maokai, Thresh and Swain).
I think Vi certainly doesn't meet requirement 2, and I think it's debatable whether she meets requirement 1. I think I would lean more towards the opinion that her level up isn't rewarding enough for the effort it requires.
I 100% agree that the comparisons to Braum and Sejuani are wrong. Both have very powerful Level 2 forms, with Braum being capable of blocking just about any unit and generating a 3/3 with Overwhelm, and Sejuani being able to enable free attacks from anything with Fearsome (or your entire board if she's paired with Ashe). I also don't really think either is all that hard to level up, but they are slow to level, and Freljord doesn't have a ton of tools to make that easier, so you often find yourself relying on other regions to do the heavy lifting of leveling them up. (That's a separate problem for a separate discussion.)
With respect to the proposed two requirements for a level up, though, I disagree a bit. Your two requirements basically outline a spectrum of champion quality - the worse they are to start, the more impactful their Level 2 form needs to be. But I think there's a second aspect that's not captured in that, so I'd frame it more like this:
Every champion card needs to have a clear way it helps you to win the game*, and it should be usable as a major part of the win condition in its deck
Every Level 1 champion card needs to have its level up condition and base form properly weighted against the ease with which its Level 2 form wins the game. The stronger the Level 2 form, the weaker and less impactful the Level 1 form should be.
In this construction, it's okay if the level up isn't the be-all-end-all of the champion card, so long as the first requirement is met by the Level 1 form. In other words, your champion doesn't need to be exceptionally powerful, but there should be clear deck archetypes which are made stronger by including that champion.
The last part of my first requirement is the most important part in my mind, and it's where many of the champions you mentioned (Draven, Shen, Tryndamere) fall short of what's ideal. It's clear that they are all fairly powerful cards (maybe even finishers) in the archetypes they're designed for, but it's not clear that any of them are essential to their archetypes. They're more like tech cards that occasionally show up if the meta game suits them. Nowhere is this more obvious than the current Burn Aggro deck, which runs 0 champions despite looking like a natural fit for Draven
I think that's probably where Vi is. She's clearly insanely powerful - that's why she currently sees play in every top-tier midrange and control deck (even Demacian Bannerman, where she is occasionally a liability). But she's non-essential - she just shows up because P&Z is a very strong region and she's good in the current metagame as a tech card. All of those decks have other plans for winning the game, and it's not clear what deck/archetype you would play that would see Vi as a major or essential part of winning.
* A caveat here is that there will always be champions whose path to victory is not viable in a given metagame. Braum is a good example of this today. In his Poro Buff deck, he's an essential part of surviving the early game and generating a sufficiently threatening board to beat your opponent in the mid game. But the Burn Aggro deck goes right over Braum's head, so having him block units doesn't protect your life total much and you lose before your deck gets online. Most of the other major decks in the meta are control decks that don't attack enough in the early to mid game to enable Braum either, and by the late game they have stronger win conditions than him.
Catalyst of Aeons: I completely agree that this needs to do something more when you're at 10 mana. It can be hard to fit in during the mid game (especially thanks the addition of Wolfrider), so you often end up stuck with it well past when you need it. I would go simpler on this change, though. "Enlightened: Draw a card."
Troop of Elnuks: Seems like a bad change. Comparing it to Poro Herder, the body is weaker and draw condition is entirely out of your control. Comparing to Babbling Bjerg, it seems potentially a lot better, but the draw is still lower likelihood when it's scoped to the top 10 cards of your deck. Worse still, the things you'd draw are expensive (unlike a 1 mana Poro or Yeti), so you're gonna spend a lot of time and mana getting your Elnuks into play when you draw them. Sure, it buffs a little bit, you still have to pay for the units, which is a bummer.
Ultimately, I don't think this does a better job supporting the Elnuk Shuffle archetype - if you shuffle enough Elnuks, you should hit some when you play Troop, and getting them for free is a big deal. The nerf Riot made here is probably appropriate for making the Troop's value narrowly fitted to the Elnuk Shuffle archetype, but the archetype is bad. The best fix here is to print more interesting Elnuks.
Kindly Tavernkeeper: I'm fine with this change, but I'm not sure that this is a card I would target if I were trying to make Freljord a stronger "primary region" for a deck. There's still way more Nexus healing in Ionia and Shadow Isles, and burst speed buffs are often a better way to protect/heal your units.
Entreat: Tutoring out your champions at burst speed is already very powerful. I don't think this card needs buffing.
Unscarred Reaver: I don't think Challenger is a good idea here. First, I like the fact that the Freljord challengers are both wolves - I think it fits the theme/fantasy of the region well. The two biggest problems with her, as I see it, are her HP, and the ease with which your opponent can avoid triggering her. At 3 health, she rarely survives long enough to get two procs, and the first hit as an attacker/blocker typically means she deals no damage. She's constantly vulnerable to any 3 attack 2 drop (of which there are plenty), as well as P&Z and Noxus removal tools, and after taking one hit she's often vulnerable to a myriad of "deal 1" removal tools. And if your opponent doesn't help you proc her by attacking or blocking with a tiny unit, you have to spend time getting her online, which can often require developing another unit and spending mana on a spell.
With all that in mind, I think the fix for her is just to change the stats around. I'd probably make her a 0/4 unit with a +2|+0 effect. She grows a little slower, but should consistently stick around long enough to proc more than once.
Tarkaz the Tribeless: Tarkaz is already huge for his cost, and he exists to support the "survive damage" archetype, so I wouldn't focus on changing him specifically. I can imagine a deck that uses Tarkaz and various "survive damage" units along with Ursine Spiritwalker to make a wall of overwhelm units. What such a deck probably needs is some kind of board-wide heal like Citrus Courier or Sap Magic to keep your minions in play despite the damage, but if you wanted to make it work a little better without that, you could maybe buff Tarkaz so he curves out after Ursine Spiritwalker
A couple of my ideas:
Warmother's Call: Bring the cost down to 11. It's already the only card that costs more than 10, but getting to 12 mana is incredibly hard (especially given how inconsistent and/or unimpactful the ramp tools are), and if you're playing it in your deck, you're one Deny away from a miserable game.
Making him deal 2 will make him much more relevant as an early game removal tool, and a 3/1 unit is probably worth about 1 or 1.5 mana depending on the match-up (since he dies to just about everything, but is useful against fearsome units like Elise).
The decks there are ranked by a couple of LoR streamers, and their rankings are informed by data, but there aren't a ton of publicly available analytics today like there are for Hearthstone.
For what it's worth, if you watch Swim's Youtube channel on the meta tier list each week, you'll see that the way he arranges decks by tier level is highly data driven (he has access to Mobalytics statistics) including win rate, number of games played etc.
I'm not trying to impugn Swim's credibility here, I just think Mobalytics should build those lists based on data which is itself transparent, and their methodologies should be clearly explained on the page, rather than just leaving it up to one or two streamers to interpret the data however they see fit. I shouldn't have to go watch YouTube videos to figure out how these deck lists are being picked, especially when there may well be variance in similar lists for teching purposes.
Eh, maybe. As the first balance patch since the full release, it will certainly be interesting. But I'm very cautiously optimistic about the impact it will have.
Back in patch 0.9.2 they talked about Elise, Frenzied Skitterer, Glimpse Beyond, and Shadow Assassin on the watch list. Of those cards, the only one to see any changes in 0.9.4 was Frenzied Skitterer, and the change was fairly minor. Mind you, that drop in health it got was non-trivial, and I think it coincided with a significant increase in P&Z prevalence in the metagame. But if Shadow Isles and Ionia are the consistent "S Tier" regions in the game, P&Z has never been any lower than "A Tier." This change meant an increased valuation for P&Z, bringing it up to "S Tier," but it still left a lot of the weaker regions out in the cold.
Meanwhile, Shadow Assassin remains a 3-of in any deck that runs Ionia, Glimpse Beyond is a 2-of or 3-of in just about every Shadow Isles deck (with exceptions for Maokai decks, which toss so much they don't want the additional card draw), and Elise is such a powerful early game card that she warps a lot of the meta game around her. It's no coincidence that right now on Mobalytics, the S Tier decks all feature P&Z* - it's the region capable of consistently dealing with Elise (and really any early game snowball champ) before she becomes a problem.
*Technically Bannerman + Vi is one of those S-Tier decks, and they run basically no P&Z cards, but get by with strong early game curve into buffs to answer Elise.
If LoR can maintain strong viewership numbers like HS does, you'll see more of them stick to the game. At the end of the day, this is their livelihood - they're not going to play games that get no or low viewership. Perhaps it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem, but that's on Riot to fix with more events like this, etc., to build interest in the game.
At this point I'm something of a broken record on this point here on OutOf.Cards, but there is a real balance issue with Shadow Isles and Ionia. Through the beta and into release, they have proven to be the two most powerful regions because they have so many good tools for managing the board. Neither region is unbeatable, but both show up far more in top tier decks than seems healthy for a metagame.
What you call "countermetish" design, most people would call "bad design." The argument you're presenting for it is basically "this card is only good in certain situations, so the meta game will just balance it out and it won't be oppressively powerful." The problem is that even when a card is not inherently ruining the game by being so OP that it dominates all match-ups and crowds out other strategies, it can still have warping effects on the meta game and make playing the game miserable.
A great example of this comes from Hearthstone. The Caverns Below was not a massively OP card - the win rates for the archetype were only narrowly over 50% - but it created a meta game where match-ups were super polarized. Either you were playing a deck that was good against Quest Rogue, or you weren't, and that was the deciding factor in whether or not you won, not how you played the game. Blizzard tried and failed to balance it multiple times with nerfs.
Here's my first idea for this competition:
Okay, I think I misunderstood your meaning when you said "at the top" - I thought you meant the top of the image (that is, above the card), not the top of the text. That's my bad.....clearly I regularly gloss over the Hero Power part of the text....
Does Doublecast Ogre combine combined hero powers if/when you play a second copy (or if/when your opponent plays one)?
Can you explain to me why this matters? EDIT: I'm dumb, and misunderstood here...this is referring to the top of the text block, not the card image.
I was goofing around playing some Poro decks, and noticed that when a buffed Poro gets recalled, they lose their Poro Snax buffs. At some level, this makes sense - recall typically removes buffs. But the Poro Snax buff applies "everywhere" and gets applied to any randomly generated Poro even after the Poro Snax are played.
Not sure if this is technically a bug, but it's not terribly intuitive - the Poros I have can lose the buff, but the Poros that don't yet exist have it.
I suspect that's going to be true about a lot of the region-specific quests - that they have numerous forms with random regions attached. Might even be true about the champion-specific quests, though I would bet that the ones that are "win a game with Champion X and Card Y" have specific pairs at least.
Are you sure about that? I thought patch notes only came out the week of the patch, and we just got a patch last week, so 1.2 should be coming along next week.
I think you can pretty easily make the case that Fiora is boring - her plan to win is incredibly linear and the deck you build to support her is pretty obvious (lots of barriers and buffs to keep her in play and killing stuff and/or lots of Frostbite effects to protect her). But I don't think she's BS from a balance standpoint (at least in and of herself). She's fairly vulnerable to removal, recall sets her back considerably, and she lacks things like Quick Attack to make her self-sustaining.
Unyielding Spirit, though, is definitely a very poorly designed card. As you pointed out, there's basically no silence in the game, and none of it can target champions. There are still other answers to it, but they're also few and far between. The Obliterate keyword gets around it (it's functionally like MTGs Exile, so the immunity to death is irrelevant), but there's only card that can do that to an enemy champion - Devourer of the Depths. Recall also works, but that means you have to be running Ionia.
Honestly, I think there's a clear trend of thing kind of thing in LoR - powerful cards that can stomp over most regions. The result is that you either have to be playing more aggressively than the enemy (so they don't get a chance to play their nonsense) or you have to be playing exactly the right region for the match-up. Riot has a long way to go to getting the balance right in this game.
Presumably you're talking about the Kinkou Wayfinder. The Allegiance effect of any such card triggers if the top card of your deck matches the region of the card with Allegiance. It sounds like you're saying you've seen cases where you played Kinkou, nothing happened, and then you drew an Ionia card next round (suggesting that something should have happened when you played him).
I've never noticed any bug like that, so I suspect that the most likely case is that there were no 1-cost units left in your deck to summon when you played Kinkou, so the result was nothing despite the top card being an Ionia card. (Note that Kinkou Wayfinder summons units from your deck, not random units, so you need to have 1-cost units in your deck to get any value out of him.)
As luck would have it, I accidentally tested this the other day. The heal is only for the damage that is actually dealt to an enemy. After barrier, my overwhelm unit dealt 3 damage to the enemy nexus, and that's how much I healed for.
I 100% agree that the comparisons to Braum and Sejuani are wrong. Both have very powerful Level 2 forms, with Braum being capable of blocking just about any unit and generating a 3/3 with Overwhelm, and Sejuani being able to enable free attacks from anything with Fearsome (or your entire board if she's paired with Ashe). I also don't really think either is all that hard to level up, but they are slow to level, and Freljord doesn't have a ton of tools to make that easier, so you often find yourself relying on other regions to do the heavy lifting of leveling them up. (That's a separate problem for a separate discussion.)
With respect to the proposed two requirements for a level up, though, I disagree a bit. Your two requirements basically outline a spectrum of champion quality - the worse they are to start, the more impactful their Level 2 form needs to be. But I think there's a second aspect that's not captured in that, so I'd frame it more like this:
In this construction, it's okay if the level up isn't the be-all-end-all of the champion card, so long as the first requirement is met by the Level 1 form. In other words, your champion doesn't need to be exceptionally powerful, but there should be clear deck archetypes which are made stronger by including that champion.
The last part of my first requirement is the most important part in my mind, and it's where many of the champions you mentioned (Draven, Shen, Tryndamere) fall short of what's ideal. It's clear that they are all fairly powerful cards (maybe even finishers) in the archetypes they're designed for, but it's not clear that any of them are essential to their archetypes. They're more like tech cards that occasionally show up if the meta game suits them. Nowhere is this more obvious than the current Burn Aggro deck, which runs 0 champions despite looking like a natural fit for Draven
I think that's probably where Vi is. She's clearly insanely powerful - that's why she currently sees play in every top-tier midrange and control deck (even Demacian Bannerman, where she is occasionally a liability). But she's non-essential - she just shows up because P&Z is a very strong region and she's good in the current metagame as a tech card. All of those decks have other plans for winning the game, and it's not clear what deck/archetype you would play that would see Vi as a major or essential part of winning.
* A caveat here is that there will always be champions whose path to victory is not viable in a given metagame. Braum is a good example of this today. In his Poro Buff deck, he's an essential part of surviving the early game and generating a sufficiently threatening board to beat your opponent in the mid game. But the Burn Aggro deck goes right over Braum's head, so having him block units doesn't protect your life total much and you lose before your deck gets online. Most of the other major decks in the meta are control decks that don't attack enough in the early to mid game to enable Braum either, and by the late game they have stronger win conditions than him.
Does anyone know of a list of all of the daily quests in Legend of Runeterra? I've tried finding one but have had no luck.
Win with leveled Champions
0/2
Play Mecha-Yordles OR
Strike with 2 or more units in a round
0/5 OR
0/15
Countdown Landmarks OR
Summon units
0/15 OR
0/24
Deal damage with units
Activate Reputation effects OR
Play units that cost 4 or more
0/6 OR
0/10
Obliterate cards OR
Draw cards
0/2 OR
0/35
Deal damage
Cast spells
Attack with Attached allies OR
Slay enemy champions
0/4 OR
0/4
Play formidable units OR
Strike the enemy Nexus
0/5 OR
0/20
* We've seen examples of this quest with different values for the placeholder(s)
** These quests have been seen paired with "OR Play Games (Wins count double) - 0/6"
Feedback on your suggestions:
Catalyst of Aeons: I completely agree that this needs to do something more when you're at 10 mana. It can be hard to fit in during the mid game (especially thanks the addition of Wolfrider), so you often end up stuck with it well past when you need it. I would go simpler on this change, though. "Enlightened: Draw a card."
Troop of Elnuks: Seems like a bad change. Comparing it to Poro Herder, the body is weaker and draw condition is entirely out of your control. Comparing to Babbling Bjerg, it seems potentially a lot better, but the draw is still lower likelihood when it's scoped to the top 10 cards of your deck. Worse still, the things you'd draw are expensive (unlike a 1 mana Poro or Yeti), so you're gonna spend a lot of time and mana getting your Elnuks into play when you draw them. Sure, it buffs a little bit, you still have to pay for the units, which is a bummer.
Ultimately, I don't think this does a better job supporting the Elnuk Shuffle archetype - if you shuffle enough Elnuks, you should hit some when you play Troop, and getting them for free is a big deal. The nerf Riot made here is probably appropriate for making the Troop's value narrowly fitted to the Elnuk Shuffle archetype, but the archetype is bad. The best fix here is to print more interesting Elnuks.
Kindly Tavernkeeper: I'm fine with this change, but I'm not sure that this is a card I would target if I were trying to make Freljord a stronger "primary region" for a deck. There's still way more Nexus healing in Ionia and Shadow Isles, and burst speed buffs are often a better way to protect/heal your units.
Entreat: Tutoring out your champions at burst speed is already very powerful. I don't think this card needs buffing.
Unscarred Reaver: I don't think Challenger is a good idea here. First, I like the fact that the Freljord challengers are both wolves - I think it fits the theme/fantasy of the region well. The two biggest problems with her, as I see it, are her HP, and the ease with which your opponent can avoid triggering her. At 3 health, she rarely survives long enough to get two procs, and the first hit as an attacker/blocker typically means she deals no damage. She's constantly vulnerable to any 3 attack 2 drop (of which there are plenty), as well as P&Z and Noxus removal tools, and after taking one hit she's often vulnerable to a myriad of "deal 1" removal tools. And if your opponent doesn't help you proc her by attacking or blocking with a tiny unit, you have to spend time getting her online, which can often require developing another unit and spending mana on a spell.
With all that in mind, I think the fix for her is just to change the stats around. I'd probably make her a 0/4 unit with a +2|+0 effect. She grows a little slower, but should consistently stick around long enough to proc more than once.
Tarkaz the Tribeless: Tarkaz is already huge for his cost, and he exists to support the "survive damage" archetype, so I wouldn't focus on changing him specifically. I can imagine a deck that uses Tarkaz and various "survive damage" units along with Ursine Spiritwalker to make a wall of overwhelm units. What such a deck probably needs is some kind of board-wide heal like Citrus Courier or Sap Magic to keep your minions in play despite the damage, but if you wanted to make it work a little better without that, you could maybe buff Tarkaz so he curves out after Ursine Spiritwalker
A couple of my ideas:
Warmother's Call: Bring the cost down to 11. It's already the only card that costs more than 10, but getting to 12 mana is incredibly hard (especially given how inconsistent and/or unimpactful the ramp tools are), and if you're playing it in your deck, you're one Deny away from a miserable game.
Avarosan Marksman: Increase the play effect to 2 damage. There are several examples of dealing 2 being worth about 2 mana, with some variations on targeting and speed based on region. (Examples include Mystic Shot, Death's Hand - which can be thought of as bundling Mystic Shot with Blade's Edge, and Shunpo - which can be thought of as bundling Mystic Shot with Relentless Pursuit).
Making him deal 2 will make him much more relevant as an early game removal tool, and a 3/1 unit is probably worth about 1 or 1.5 mana depending on the match-up (since he dies to just about everything, but is useful against fearsome units like Elise).
Today, I think the best source of this information is https://lor.mobalytics.gg/meta-tier-list
The decks there are ranked by a couple of LoR streamers, and their rankings are informed by data, but there aren't a ton of publicly available analytics today like there are for Hearthstone.
I'm not trying to impugn Swim's credibility here, I just think Mobalytics should build those lists based on data which is itself transparent, and their methodologies should be clearly explained on the page, rather than just leaving it up to one or two streamers to interpret the data however they see fit. I shouldn't have to go watch YouTube videos to figure out how these deck lists are being picked, especially when there may well be variance in similar lists for teching purposes.
Eh, maybe. As the first balance patch since the full release, it will certainly be interesting. But I'm very cautiously optimistic about the impact it will have.
Back in patch 0.9.2 they talked about Elise, Frenzied Skitterer, Glimpse Beyond, and Shadow Assassin on the watch list. Of those cards, the only one to see any changes in 0.9.4 was Frenzied Skitterer, and the change was fairly minor. Mind you, that drop in health it got was non-trivial, and I think it coincided with a significant increase in P&Z prevalence in the metagame. But if Shadow Isles and Ionia are the consistent "S Tier" regions in the game, P&Z has never been any lower than "A Tier." This change meant an increased valuation for P&Z, bringing it up to "S Tier," but it still left a lot of the weaker regions out in the cold.
Meanwhile, Shadow Assassin remains a 3-of in any deck that runs Ionia, Glimpse Beyond is a 2-of or 3-of in just about every Shadow Isles deck (with exceptions for Maokai decks, which toss so much they don't want the additional card draw), and Elise is such a powerful early game card that she warps a lot of the meta game around her. It's no coincidence that right now on Mobalytics, the S Tier decks all feature P&Z* - it's the region capable of consistently dealing with Elise (and really any early game snowball champ) before she becomes a problem.
*Technically Bannerman + Vi is one of those S-Tier decks, and they run basically no P&Z cards, but get by with strong early game curve into buffs to answer Elise.
If LoR can maintain strong viewership numbers like HS does, you'll see more of them stick to the game. At the end of the day, this is their livelihood - they're not going to play games that get no or low viewership. Perhaps it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem, but that's on Riot to fix with more events like this, etc., to build interest in the game.
At this point I'm something of a broken record on this point here on OutOf.Cards, but there is a real balance issue with Shadow Isles and Ionia. Through the beta and into release, they have proven to be the two most powerful regions because they have so many good tools for managing the board. Neither region is unbeatable, but both show up far more in top tier decks than seems healthy for a metagame.