No, they are better then random. Now that i think about it, they are even worse then random unless its a mirror match. Why? Because followers in this game have a role in the deck they are fit in. The game is balanced enough units are not being played for their stats/curve ratio. A unit that is good enough to see play in a given deck, won't usually see play in other decks unless its fullfilling the same role. Take a burn deck as an example. If you could pick, which cards would you steal from their deck? 90% of their cards are actually garbage for your gameplan. They work very well for their strategy but not for yours. Worse then random, as random cards may actually give you a shot to some counters.
I think you wildly misunderstand the difference between "game balance" and "card quality." Sure, there's a lot of effort put into balancing the game and making sure different strategies have entirely different sets of cards to support those strategies. But that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of bad cards in the game.
Taking your example of a burn deck, will my midrange or control deck be thrilled to steal a Crimson Disciple from my enemy? Probably not, because my deck probably doesn't have the self harm cards needed to trigger its effect. But it's objectively way better than Flame Chompers! or Feral Mystic or Intrepid Mariner or Jae Medarda any number of other units that aren't good enough to see play in any deck, or are totally pointless against the burn deck because of how expensive they are.
Almost by definition, if no meta deck is running a particular card, it's because that card isn't a very effective tool against the existing metagame. So, there will always be lots of cards which are below average in quality, don't see play, and are worse than stealing from your opponent's deck. Your stolen cards don't need to fit your deck's plan, they need to be better than the universe of random garbage you might have otherwise generated, and almost by definition, they will be.
Quote From Hellcopter
If both effects already exists in the game, why the combination of the 2 is a problem?
This kind of question reflects a really basic misunderstanding about game balance. I can have two cards that are complete garbage on their own, but when I combine them into a single card, even if there's a "bundling tax" on the mana cost, they become incredibly powerful. This is because you have a limit on how many cards you can run, and the opportunity cost associated with running two meh cards much higher than the opportunity cost of running one card with two meh effects attached to it.
It's hard to find an example in Legends of Runeterra because the game is relatively new, and there aren't a ton of these "bundling" examples yet. But a great example of this in Hearthstone is Branching Paths. 4 mana draw 2 is bad, 4 mana buff +2/+0 is okay for a token deck but not the best that Druid has, and 4 mana heal 12 is okay in certain metagames. You might not run any one of those cards in Druid, but the fact that they all came bundled on one card that let you mix and match effects made Branching Paths very powerful.
In my opinion is just a perspective issue... just think the cards they take are in the botton of your deck so you would not draw them anyway. What they get from your deck most of the time don't synergyse well with their deck. Getting 2 random cards is much worse then drawing 2 cards.
Yes, it can disrupt combos sometimes, but i don't think the idea of a card that can randomly interrupt plays is bad at all.
I think we're kind of talking across purposes here. You seem to be arguing that it's not a big deal because you might have never drawn the card anyway, and that they're effectively random cards for your opponent. On those points, I mostly agree, with one major caveat.The cards they steal may have no meaningful synergies with their decks, but they're better than random because you put them in your deck, so they're most like getting "good random" cards, with the upshot of potentially denying you something important.
Some reasons this is so frustrating to me:
Card draw in Runeterra is quite limited. A lot of cards that draw do not generate meaningful card advantage because they're just cantrips (e.g. Avarosan Sentry), and the ones that do are generally expensive, around a "4 mana draw 2" going rate. So, these klepto cards are some of the most efficient ways to generate card advantage, and the fact that they're probably "good random" cards as far as your opponent is concerned makes them very valuable. The result is a sense that your opponent is often better at drawing cards from you than you are, which feels pretty bad
There are strategies for which the "imagine these are the bottom cards of the deck" really breaks down. For example, Freljord has ways to put Yetis on top of your deck and buff cards near the top of your deck. These strategies generally involve playing weaker units/expensive spells up front for those future payoffs. It's a major part of the Freljord identity, and stealing from the top of the deck is uniquely punishing for those strategies.
It just feels really bad to see your opponent get your strong cards and know that you can't get them. This is true even if it's not statistically significant in terms of your win rates against klepto decks. It's probably very fun for the klepto deck, and can make for an interesting gameplay puzzle to solve on their end, but that spike in the klepto player's happiness is mirrored by a massive drop in the happiness of the player from whom they stole cards.
Disruption is good/healthy for CCGs, but disruption that also generates card advantage should be very limited/very expensive. Comparing to Hearthstone, while there are a variety of ways to waste or destroy combo tools your opponent is using, there's basically no card theft in the game. Even in the classes which can "steal," they get copies of their opponent's cards. This is because, regardless of its impact statistically on the game, it feels really bad for the player whose cards get stolen.
I don't think there are any top tier decks that rely heavily on the klepto cards (like Pilfered Goods, but playing against those cards is so goddamn frustrating.
Assuming you can activate the plunder effects with reasonable consistency, they're highly efficient card draw (in game where most card draw from your own deck is fairly inefficient) and they can significantly disrupt your opponent. It just seems like a very unfun design paradigm.
As a concept, pocketing cards seems interesting, but there's so much information underlying that one little sentence that I think the mechanic would need to be introduced as a set-wide keyword mechanic rather than a random one-off legendary mechanic.
She is almost useless. Even if you run three it is as if you only have one. The power you build up doesn't stay on the others and unless you have her in your opening hand she takes to long to power up. And even if she does level up there are normal none champion cards that could do her job but better with half the resources put into them.
I was pretty unimpressed with Vi too, but apparently she been a terror at the tournaments.
It looks like she's performing extremely well splashed into bannerman and corina archetypes as support / alt win condition, rather than actively trying to level her.
Eh - that article says the competition was only eight players in NA. I know the LoR community isn't huge as of yet, but eight data points is pretty small, and of those, fewer than half were playing Vi. This continues to be my biggest frustrations about Legends of Runeterra - there is really nowhere to go right now to get meaningful deck statistics. Mobalytics has a tier list, but as it plainly says on the tier list page, their "deck archetypes are curated by...TCG Experts [EG Swim and Alanzq]."
Setting the statistics aside, though, I agree that Vi is strong and probably fine as is. It's not hard to build a deck that can get her to 5/5 around the time you play her, and if you want to buff her early you can hard mulligan for her in your opening hand and have very good odds of getting her. Getting a Vanguard Cavalry with Challenger is already really strong. Add on top of that the fact that she will continue to get passive buffs regardless of what you play, and you can buff her with a variety of cards to get her to level despite not reaching +8|+0 naturally, and you have a very powerful Champion. She's not really built to be your main win condition, but that's clear from her Level 2 effect. She's built to pressure your opponent into making bad trades while still getting a little nexus damage in, not to smack your opponent in the face for 10 damage.
Fiery Warbringer: The theme/fantasy of the card is a tank that's building up rage before unleashing an attack. I didn't want to do +1/+1 for a weapon because that just seemed like too much for an Epic card, and getting bonus attacks is a big part of what you want with Hack the System.
Hakuna Matata: Similar to Oasis Surger - doesn't have rush, but it goes wider, which plays a bit better into the wide buffs that Untapped Potential Druid usually has to end games. Would put together some Druid tokens to match the art in the main card before submitting.
Better Part of Valor: Lets you pick up a valuable reborn minion to replay and build up on your Making Mummies quest
Quick preface: I'm not trying to put Blizzard on a pedestal - they've done a lot wrong over the years, and Hearthstone is clearly less F2P friendly than Legends of Runeterra. Despite that, I think this article is really trash. It's honestly almost impressive how lacking in neutrality this piece is. The aggressively pro-Riot/anti-Blizzard bias in this article is shocking.
Patching
Regarding patching, you undercut your own basic premise when you concede that Blizzard:
Has to deal with the publishing pipelines of the Android and iOS stores, which is entirely out of their control (just like Riot's current situation)
Has already been publishing major updates ahead of time to ensure seamless release dates (just like what Riot plans to do)
The explanation for why Blizzard is worse despite these points, is that their balance patches are still delayed. You decry the way this "forces mobile players to play on the old version of the game for a few hours, still being plagued by unjust card stats and effects." But you completely ignore the fact that the Riot version will simply have every player plagued by bad balance for an extra day, and completely ignore that when Blizzard recently did a hotfix for balance of various Demon Hunter cards, they did so without patching via server-side updates. (Here's the article you published about that hotfix, in case you forgot it: https://outof.cards/hearthstone/1142-the-day-2-demon-hunter-card-nerfs-details-on-the-changes-and-demon-hunter-arena-adjustments)
The fact is, while Blizzard has a history of slow mobile patching, they've also done a lot to try to make important content and balance patches as seamless as possible for users across platforms, and your praise for Riot ignores the benefits they get out of learning from Blizzard's mistakes (many of which they're working hard to make better).
Refunds
Regarding refunds, Riot gives no refunds regardless of what they do to rebalance the game, and they've shown a willingness to radically change cards. Capping a number of duplicate battlecries on Shudderwock is pretty minor compared to the massive shifts Riot made throughout the betas to Lux and her supporting cast of Mageseekers, for example. Moreover, while Riot says they want to make every card viable, that doesn't mean ever card is good (here's your piece on what they define as viable https://outof.cards/legends-of-runeterra/780-legends-of-runeterra-will-not-see-refunds-when-cards-change - note that it really focuses on having a critical mass of tools to build around each champion, not about making each card competitively viable).
Gold vs Experience points, and the business of card games
Yes gold is capped in HS. and yes, experience is no longer capped in LoR. But you don't bother to mention that Blizzard specifically caps gold to disincentive people from bot farming their accounts. Enabling players to bot farm your F2P game means less revenue, which makes it harder to support the game for the actual people trying to have fun playing it.
And yes, Riot has said that the "typical model" prioritizes business over player experience, but of course they did. They're a new player in the CCG space trying to fight for market share. You see these kinds of blatant attacks all over their PR and ad content - phrases like "skill not randomness" and "typical CCG models prioritize business, but not us." They are trying to attack the Goliaths in the market and create an environment where they can pull people away from other major CCGs, and being more F2P friendly is an important way to do that. There's nothing wrong with them doing that, but please don't drink the koolaid here and pretend that they're somehow more honest, or that their goals are just good, pure gameplay fun. Riot is a business, and their goal is revenue.
(Also worth noting that they made their statements about "typical models" back when they were still capping in-game purchases of cards to make for better deck building/exploration experiences. Today they've opened the floodgates for people to come in and buy/netdeck any meta deck, probably because it's the more profitable way to do things.)
From a price standpoint, if you're not F2P, the price really isn't that different from Hearthstone. Buying a full collection today would cost something like $670 dollars, $450 of which is the base launch set. Those base set numbers aren't meaningfully different from the costs to buy the classic set in Hearthstone, and while the expansion costs are certainly cheaper in LoR, they're also designed to scale up as more expansions come out (that is, more regions means more new champions for old regions when expansions hit, means higher and higher costs as the game expands).
Summary
To reiterate my preface - I'm not here to cheer the accolades of Blizzard. They, and Activision more broadly, have done a lot shitty things with their properties as a way to squeeze money from consumers. But Blizzard is not just some evil caricature of a company, and Riot isn't some bastion of good, honest game-making - they're a business just like Blizzard, and their goals are the same. Both have made some decisions to try to make for better gameplay experiences as well as some to make better revenue models, and both have to find ways to balance the two so they can continue to make their respective games. It's fine to have opinions about one company or another, but this kind of sycophantic content dropped right into the middle of your news feed really diminishes the integrity of the OutOf.Cards website.
The problem with these wildcards, is I have pretty low tier champion, and want to save my wildcards for high tier champions. But I keep getting wildcards instead of champion
The alternative is getting a random Champion, which may well be a low tier Champion as well. Saving your wildcards isn't doing you any favors - just craft some high tier champions. It's better to craft what you want and run fewer than 3 of any given champion than to try to run a deck that requires a specific champion and doesn't have it.
Glen is right about the attack token advantage. In any symmetrical game, the player with initiative always holds the advantage.
The problem here is that the games you're comparing this to (MTG, Hearthstone) are fundamentally asymmetric. The player who goes first consistently gets to play with more mana than their opponent until the late game when the mana is capped (as in Hearthstone) or well pas the ceiling of the deck (as in MTG after you've drawn a bunch of lands). In LoR, the game is far more symmetric because you have the same amount of mana at the start of round as your opponent (+/- any mana you chose to bank), and unless they immediately attack, you have time to respond to their board before they attack. And even if they do attack, you can play fast spells to respond.
I know that sounds kind of silly - "you have a chance to respond except when you don't" - but it's highly relevant to the complaint at hand. The OP is mad about playing and attacking on curve, especially with powerful 3 mana champions like Zed and Miss Fortune. But the only way to get an attack in without giving your opponent time to respond is to play your big attacker after your opponent has spent their mana, and then attacking at the start of the next round before your opponent can respond with more units or a slow spell.
All that is to say, the symmetry of the game is precisely why it's much more fair not to give either player a bonus advantage simply because they attack second. Sometimes attacking second is better - you can set up your Zed on turn 3 after your opponent has spent their mana, and attack at the start of turn 4. If you're losing to Zeds and Miss Fortunes, run more cards you can use to kill them before they get a shot at attacking, and avoid spending your mana too early.
The OP here is super long, and a lot of the content feels like filler to me. Quick summary before I begin so I can confirm my reading:
You've played a lot of CCGs in your time
You strongly dislike RNG as a major factor in winning/losing
You believe starting with the attack token is a major advantage because attacking with your champion on curve (especially when it has Quick Attack) is a huge advantage
You claim your problem is with the starting attack token, but it's pretty plainly the case that's not true. Even setting aside the question of how often you start with the attack token (probably about 50% of the time), attacking first only matters if you want to be attacking on turn 3. Despite your claim that you think there's "nothing wrong with [Quick Attack]," your issue is with the Quick Attack mechanic and your ability to answer it. Here's the set of champions you called out, organized by cost:
2 Mana: Elise
3 Mana: Zed, Miss Fortune, Draven, Katarina
4 Mana: Yasuo, Jinx
Toss Lucian in there and you've got a very even split of champions whose highly advantageous "on curve attack" will be an even or odd round. So, the problem has nothing to do with who gets the starting attack token - lots of champions are better when you attack second or fourth.
Quick Attack in the early game can be oppressive because there are so few good blocks for units with Quick Attack, and the magnitude of the tempo loss on those early game blocks is significant. But as you've pointed out, Quick Attack is offense only, so if you can kill or otherwise delay the attack, you can hit back and change the math considerably on what trades are good.
So really, this all comes down to have reasonable responses (i.e an answer that costs no more than 3 or 4) to play against these early champions. Here's what I think is a full accounting by region
SI: The Box, Chump Block + Black Spear (and to a lesser extend, Chump Block + Glimpse Beyond)
Noxus: Death's Hand, Noxian Fervor, Guile, Culling Strike, Whirling Death
Ionia: Steel Tempest, Concussive Palm, Will of Ionia, Spirit's Refuge
Freljord: Brittle Steel, Chump + Elixir of Iron, Flash Freeze, Fury of the North, Bloodsworn Pledge
Demacia: Single Combat, Prismatic Barrier, Stand Alone
Bilgewater: Riptide
When you look over the list, it's clear that several regions (Freljord, Demacia, Bilgewater, and to a lesser extend Noxus) are worse off - their answers are either temporary solutions or require having mid-sized units in play. Spending your mana on those early mid-sized units makes it hard to have enough mana left over to play your combat trick and beat these early game champions, so there's a lot that needs to go right to make that work.
But now we're really back to the fundamental problem with the balance in this game. It's not a specific mechanic like Quick Attack, and it's not who gets the starting attack token. It's whether a region can be used to meaningfully answer a given strategy, and that's where we see decks that feature P&Z, Shadow Isles, and Ionia* shining through time and time again. These regions are consistently the most popular in the meta because they have the most effective answers to the board. Add in the fact that they have many of these powerful, snowbally Quick Attack champions and you end up with several regions that are just plain better than the others.
* Thanks to some of the Rising Tides cards, Noxus is probably on this list now too, but historically it's not as consistently strong
I don't have specific experience playing this deck (though I've played around with similar mechanics in Expeditions). Shadow Isles and Ionia are the two best/most flexible regions in the game, and have been throughout the open beta.
Absent a deck list, I don't think we can say that your exact deck build will continue to be relevant in the metagame (feel free to share the deck list if you want specific advice around counters, weak points, etc.), but focusing in on getting cards from those two regions should give you the building blocks for meta decks for a long time.
I haven't had any problem with the iPhone mobile version in terms of performance. I think the trickiest things for me are things that don't map super well on to a small screen (e.g. hovering over my opponent's hand to see a revealed card proves to be nearly impossible).
Some regions work wonderfully as support. Thats normal and sometimes it varies with nerfs and buffs and ppl finding out what is good. Earlier elnuks were meme cards until ppl realized how good they were supporting ezrael deck so ppl played freiljord with pz and the deck was the nuts. Then the elnuks got nerfed and this was after a period where pz was the worst region in the game. Until ppl realized it worked wonderfully for aggro burn and combo decks or just pute control like the corina deck.
You're right, there have been decks (like the Lux Mageseeker deck) that are meaningfully novel and successful around nerfs. But I'm talking about something more endemic to the way the regions have been set up. Those three regions - SI, P&Z, and Ionia - have been given an array of tools that make them indispensable in a way that the other regions are not.
Here's a quick example. SI features drain spells and healing removal (e.g. Withering Wail and Grasp of the Undying). These are very power tools that remove small to midsize minions while healing your nexus. This kind of "deal damage and heal" mechanic is prevalent throughout SI, making the region a staple to any control deck. In the Freljord, a core mechanic is buffing units in your deck (e.g. Omen Hawk, Avarosan Hearthguard), but they lack significant card draw tools, so that mechanic's power level is limited by the card draw you get from any other region you pair with, and only if the extra buffs are worth diluting that other region (the Bannerman Midrange deck might enjoy extra buffs, for instance, has no need for the extra support from Freljord, which would dilute the Bannerman tempo/buff value).
Across all the beta patches, these regions have been major players. Despite many nerfs hitting their decks (typically by nerfing their cards, though your Elnuk example is an interesting case of nerfing one region to weaken another), they continue to rise up because they just have way better, meta-defining cards than the other regions.
This feels like something of a perennial issue with Legends of Runeterra, seeming to emerge despite any/all balance patches through the beta, but there seems to be a real balance problem across the regions. (Note that I'm taking the https://lor.mobalytics.gg/meta-tier-list tier list as my source of truth here.)
On the surface, the games balance seems pretty reasonable - each region shows up in at least one S or A tier deck, and there's a decent array of archetypes available to players. But three regions dominate that tier list: Shadow Isles, Ionia, and Piltover & Zaun. Together, they show up in some 87.5% of meta decks. And it's not hard to see why - SI and P&Z have access to good card draw and damage based removal, SI and Ionia have access to healing, P&Z and Ionia have access to useful aggro tools with Elusives and Direct Nexus damage. This was true throughout the beta, and remains true today despite Rising Tides.
Every other region feels like it's just playing a supporting role to these three, which are doing all of the heavy lifting for defining the metagame. The result is a lot of less exciting deck-building choices, and ultimately less interesting match-ups because you end up running the same "SI Control" package to make any control deck, etc. Many champions (e.g. Lux) end up feeling like a worse version of some other "meta champion" (in this example, Heimerdinger) because of the added burden of being outside of one of those "meta regions."
As others have pointed out, in most CCGs the answer to aggro is healing. Obviously you also need units to defend you and/or removal to clear your opponents board, but if you have a means of healing/stabilizing, you will eventually run the enemy out of resources.
In Legends of Runeterra, that's a pretty annoying answer. The fact is, the majority of lifesteal and healing exist in two regions: Ionia and Shadow Isles. Sources of healing outside of those regions are:
None of these are really very good options. Most of them come down pretty late - two of them are mid game units, and the only way you're getting Catalyst out early is if you spend your opening turns doing nothing, at which point you're dead anyway. So, the best answer to the ladder's Burn decks is unfortunately to run Shadow Isles or Ionia. Even just a small package of the healing/removal spells is probably enough to help you even the odds, but it does meaningfully limit your deck-building choices.
There has been a lot of discussion on Elusives through the open beta. The fact is, the mechanic of limited unit interaction is not inherently broken - MTG has it in the form of flying and it works without any major issues.
The problem is that Riot hasn't printed enough tools for enough regions to make interaction something you can consistently tech for. P&Z has damage based removal, SI has damage based and hard removal, Demacia has challengers, but many of the tools available are insufficient to deal with a big, early elusive minion. Run the "wrong" regions and you're just screwed.
There are ways to beat it today, and the metagame should balance as people optimize Rising TIdes decks. Play around it as best you can, give them one or two more expansions and then see if the mechanic is still super broken - that will tell you whether the game has a real, persistent problem here that can't be fixed without a major rework.
The title of this article (and any future article like it) should include the word "styles," as obviously as possible and perhaps even in multiple places.
I think you wildly misunderstand the difference between "game balance" and "card quality." Sure, there's a lot of effort put into balancing the game and making sure different strategies have entirely different sets of cards to support those strategies. But that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of bad cards in the game.
Taking your example of a burn deck, will my midrange or control deck be thrilled to steal a Crimson Disciple from my enemy? Probably not, because my deck probably doesn't have the self harm cards needed to trigger its effect. But it's objectively way better than Flame Chompers! or Feral Mystic or Intrepid Mariner or Jae Medarda any number of other units that aren't good enough to see play in any deck, or are totally pointless against the burn deck because of how expensive they are.
Almost by definition, if no meta deck is running a particular card, it's because that card isn't a very effective tool against the existing metagame. So, there will always be lots of cards which are below average in quality, don't see play, and are worse than stealing from your opponent's deck. Your stolen cards don't need to fit your deck's plan, they need to be better than the universe of random garbage you might have otherwise generated, and almost by definition, they will be.
This kind of question reflects a really basic misunderstanding about game balance. I can have two cards that are complete garbage on their own, but when I combine them into a single card, even if there's a "bundling tax" on the mana cost, they become incredibly powerful. This is because you have a limit on how many cards you can run, and the opportunity cost associated with running two meh cards much higher than the opportunity cost of running one card with two meh effects attached to it.
It's hard to find an example in Legends of Runeterra because the game is relatively new, and there aren't a ton of these "bundling" examples yet. But a great example of this in Hearthstone is Branching Paths. 4 mana draw 2 is bad, 4 mana buff +2/+0 is okay for a token deck but not the best that Druid has, and 4 mana heal 12 is okay in certain metagames. You might not run any one of those cards in Druid, but the fact that they all came bundled on one card that let you mix and match effects made Branching Paths very powerful.
I think we're kind of talking across purposes here. You seem to be arguing that it's not a big deal because you might have never drawn the card anyway, and that they're effectively random cards for your opponent. On those points, I mostly agree, with one major caveat.The cards they steal may have no meaningful synergies with their decks, but they're better than random because you put them in your deck, so they're most like getting "good random" cards, with the upshot of potentially denying you something important.
Some reasons this is so frustrating to me:
Disruption is good/healthy for CCGs, but disruption that also generates card advantage should be very limited/very expensive. Comparing to Hearthstone, while there are a variety of ways to waste or destroy combo tools your opponent is using, there's basically no card theft in the game. Even in the classes which can "steal," they get copies of their opponent's cards. This is because, regardless of its impact statistically on the game, it feels really bad for the player whose cards get stolen.
I don't think there are any top tier decks that rely heavily on the klepto cards (like Pilfered Goods, but playing against those cards is so goddamn frustrating.
Assuming you can activate the plunder effects with reasonable consistency, they're highly efficient card draw (in game where most card draw from your own deck is fairly inefficient) and they can significantly disrupt your opponent. It just seems like a very unfun design paradigm.
Zeratia, the text should probably say "with stats equal to" like Spirit of the Tiger
As a concept, pocketing cards seems interesting, but there's so much information underlying that one little sentence that I think the mechanic would need to be introduced as a set-wide keyword mechanic rather than a random one-off legendary mechanic.
Eh - that article says the competition was only eight players in NA. I know the LoR community isn't huge as of yet, but eight data points is pretty small, and of those, fewer than half were playing Vi. This continues to be my biggest frustrations about Legends of Runeterra - there is really nowhere to go right now to get meaningful deck statistics. Mobalytics has a tier list, but as it plainly says on the tier list page, their "deck archetypes are curated by...TCG Experts [EG Swim and Alanzq]."
Setting the statistics aside, though, I agree that Vi is strong and probably fine as is. It's not hard to build a deck that can get her to 5/5 around the time you play her, and if you want to buff her early you can hard mulligan for her in your opening hand and have very good odds of getting her. Getting a Vanguard Cavalry with Challenger is already really strong. Add on top of that the fact that she will continue to get passive buffs regardless of what you play, and you can buff her with a variety of cards to get her to level despite not reaching +8|+0 naturally, and you have a very powerful Champion. She's not really built to be your main win condition, but that's clear from her Level 2 effect. She's built to pressure your opponent into making bad trades while still getting a little nexus damage in, not to smack your opponent in the face for 10 damage.
First few ideas:
Fiery Warbringer: The theme/fantasy of the card is a tank that's building up rage before unleashing an attack. I didn't want to do +1/+1 for a weapon because that just seemed like too much for an Epic card, and getting bonus attacks is a big part of what you want with Hack the System.
Hakuna Matata: Similar to Oasis Surger - doesn't have rush, but it goes wider, which plays a bit better into the wide buffs that Untapped Potential Druid usually has to end games. Would put together some Druid tokens to match the art in the main card before submitting.
Better Part of Valor: Lets you pick up a valuable reborn minion to replay and build up on your Making Mummies quest
Kudos to whomever thought this theme up - it makes for an interesting puzzle. Should make for a lot of creative submissions!
Quick preface: I'm not trying to put Blizzard on a pedestal - they've done a lot wrong over the years, and Hearthstone is clearly less F2P friendly than Legends of Runeterra. Despite that, I think this article is really trash. It's honestly almost impressive how lacking in neutrality this piece is. The aggressively pro-Riot/anti-Blizzard bias in this article is shocking.
Patching
Regarding patching, you undercut your own basic premise when you concede that Blizzard:
The explanation for why Blizzard is worse despite these points, is that their balance patches are still delayed. You decry the way this "forces mobile players to play on the old version of the game for a few hours, still being plagued by unjust card stats and effects." But you completely ignore the fact that the Riot version will simply have every player plagued by bad balance for an extra day, and completely ignore that when Blizzard recently did a hotfix for balance of various Demon Hunter cards, they did so without patching via server-side updates. (Here's the article you published about that hotfix, in case you forgot it: https://outof.cards/hearthstone/1142-the-day-2-demon-hunter-card-nerfs-details-on-the-changes-and-demon-hunter-arena-adjustments)
The fact is, while Blizzard has a history of slow mobile patching, they've also done a lot to try to make important content and balance patches as seamless as possible for users across platforms, and your praise for Riot ignores the benefits they get out of learning from Blizzard's mistakes (many of which they're working hard to make better).
Refunds
Regarding refunds, Riot gives no refunds regardless of what they do to rebalance the game, and they've shown a willingness to radically change cards. Capping a number of duplicate battlecries on Shudderwock is pretty minor compared to the massive shifts Riot made throughout the betas to Lux and her supporting cast of Mageseekers, for example. Moreover, while Riot says they want to make every card viable, that doesn't mean ever card is good (here's your piece on what they define as viable https://outof.cards/legends-of-runeterra/780-legends-of-runeterra-will-not-see-refunds-when-cards-change - note that it really focuses on having a critical mass of tools to build around each champion, not about making each card competitively viable).
Gold vs Experience points, and the business of card games
Yes gold is capped in HS. and yes, experience is no longer capped in LoR. But you don't bother to mention that Blizzard specifically caps gold to disincentive people from bot farming their accounts. Enabling players to bot farm your F2P game means less revenue, which makes it harder to support the game for the actual people trying to have fun playing it.
And yes, Riot has said that the "typical model" prioritizes business over player experience, but of course they did. They're a new player in the CCG space trying to fight for market share. You see these kinds of blatant attacks all over their PR and ad content - phrases like "skill not randomness" and "typical CCG models prioritize business, but not us." They are trying to attack the Goliaths in the market and create an environment where they can pull people away from other major CCGs, and being more F2P friendly is an important way to do that. There's nothing wrong with them doing that, but please don't drink the koolaid here and pretend that they're somehow more honest, or that their goals are just good, pure gameplay fun. Riot is a business, and their goal is revenue.
(Also worth noting that they made their statements about "typical models" back when they were still capping in-game purchases of cards to make for better deck building/exploration experiences. Today they've opened the floodgates for people to come in and buy/netdeck any meta deck, probably because it's the more profitable way to do things.)
From a price standpoint, if you're not F2P, the price really isn't that different from Hearthstone. Buying a full collection today would cost something like $670 dollars, $450 of which is the base launch set. Those base set numbers aren't meaningfully different from the costs to buy the classic set in Hearthstone, and while the expansion costs are certainly cheaper in LoR, they're also designed to scale up as more expansions come out (that is, more regions means more new champions for old regions when expansions hit, means higher and higher costs as the game expands).
Summary
To reiterate my preface - I'm not here to cheer the accolades of Blizzard. They, and Activision more broadly, have done a lot shitty things with their properties as a way to squeeze money from consumers. But Blizzard is not just some evil caricature of a company, and Riot isn't some bastion of good, honest game-making - they're a business just like Blizzard, and their goals are the same. Both have made some decisions to try to make for better gameplay experiences as well as some to make better revenue models, and both have to find ways to balance the two so they can continue to make their respective games. It's fine to have opinions about one company or another, but this kind of sycophantic content dropped right into the middle of your news feed really diminishes the integrity of the OutOf.Cards website.
The alternative is getting a random Champion, which may well be a low tier Champion as well. Saving your wildcards isn't doing you any favors - just craft some high tier champions. It's better to craft what you want and run fewer than 3 of any given champion than to try to run a deck that requires a specific champion and doesn't have it.
The problem here is that the games you're comparing this to (MTG, Hearthstone) are fundamentally asymmetric. The player who goes first consistently gets to play with more mana than their opponent until the late game when the mana is capped (as in Hearthstone) or well pas the ceiling of the deck (as in MTG after you've drawn a bunch of lands). In LoR, the game is far more symmetric because you have the same amount of mana at the start of round as your opponent (+/- any mana you chose to bank), and unless they immediately attack, you have time to respond to their board before they attack. And even if they do attack, you can play fast spells to respond.
I know that sounds kind of silly - "you have a chance to respond except when you don't" - but it's highly relevant to the complaint at hand. The OP is mad about playing and attacking on curve, especially with powerful 3 mana champions like Zed and Miss Fortune. But the only way to get an attack in without giving your opponent time to respond is to play your big attacker after your opponent has spent their mana, and then attacking at the start of the next round before your opponent can respond with more units or a slow spell.
All that is to say, the symmetry of the game is precisely why it's much more fair not to give either player a bonus advantage simply because they attack second. Sometimes attacking second is better - you can set up your Zed on turn 3 after your opponent has spent their mana, and attack at the start of turn 4. If you're losing to Zeds and Miss Fortunes, run more cards you can use to kill them before they get a shot at attacking, and avoid spending your mana too early.
The OP here is super long, and a lot of the content feels like filler to me. Quick summary before I begin so I can confirm my reading:
You claim your problem is with the starting attack token, but it's pretty plainly the case that's not true. Even setting aside the question of how often you start with the attack token (probably about 50% of the time), attacking first only matters if you want to be attacking on turn 3. Despite your claim that you think there's "nothing wrong with [Quick Attack]," your issue is with the Quick Attack mechanic and your ability to answer it. Here's the set of champions you called out, organized by cost:
Toss Lucian in there and you've got a very even split of champions whose highly advantageous "on curve attack" will be an even or odd round. So, the problem has nothing to do with who gets the starting attack token - lots of champions are better when you attack second or fourth.
Quick Attack in the early game can be oppressive because there are so few good blocks for units with Quick Attack, and the magnitude of the tempo loss on those early game blocks is significant. But as you've pointed out, Quick Attack is offense only, so if you can kill or otherwise delay the attack, you can hit back and change the math considerably on what trades are good.
So really, this all comes down to have reasonable responses (i.e an answer that costs no more than 3 or 4) to play against these early champions. Here's what I think is a full accounting by region
When you look over the list, it's clear that several regions (Freljord, Demacia, Bilgewater, and to a lesser extend Noxus) are worse off - their answers are either temporary solutions or require having mid-sized units in play. Spending your mana on those early mid-sized units makes it hard to have enough mana left over to play your combat trick and beat these early game champions, so there's a lot that needs to go right to make that work.
But now we're really back to the fundamental problem with the balance in this game. It's not a specific mechanic like Quick Attack, and it's not who gets the starting attack token. It's whether a region can be used to meaningfully answer a given strategy, and that's where we see decks that feature P&Z, Shadow Isles, and Ionia* shining through time and time again. These regions are consistently the most popular in the meta because they have the most effective answers to the board. Add in the fact that they have many of these powerful, snowbally Quick Attack champions and you end up with several regions that are just plain better than the others.
* Thanks to some of the Rising Tides cards, Noxus is probably on this list now too, but historically it's not as consistently strong
I don't have specific experience playing this deck (though I've played around with similar mechanics in Expeditions). Shadow Isles and Ionia are the two best/most flexible regions in the game, and have been throughout the open beta.
Absent a deck list, I don't think we can say that your exact deck build will continue to be relevant in the metagame (feel free to share the deck list if you want specific advice around counters, weak points, etc.), but focusing in on getting cards from those two regions should give you the building blocks for meta decks for a long time.
I haven't had any problem with the iPhone mobile version in terms of performance. I think the trickiest things for me are things that don't map super well on to a small screen (e.g. hovering over my opponent's hand to see a revealed card proves to be nearly impossible).
You're right, there have been decks (like the Lux Mageseeker deck) that are meaningfully novel and successful around nerfs. But I'm talking about something more endemic to the way the regions have been set up. Those three regions - SI, P&Z, and Ionia - have been given an array of tools that make them indispensable in a way that the other regions are not.
Here's a quick example. SI features drain spells and healing removal (e.g. Withering Wail and Grasp of the Undying). These are very power tools that remove small to midsize minions while healing your nexus. This kind of "deal damage and heal" mechanic is prevalent throughout SI, making the region a staple to any control deck. In the Freljord, a core mechanic is buffing units in your deck (e.g. Omen Hawk, Avarosan Hearthguard), but they lack significant card draw tools, so that mechanic's power level is limited by the card draw you get from any other region you pair with, and only if the extra buffs are worth diluting that other region (the Bannerman Midrange deck might enjoy extra buffs, for instance, has no need for the extra support from Freljord, which would dilute the Bannerman tempo/buff value).
Across all the beta patches, these regions have been major players. Despite many nerfs hitting their decks (typically by nerfing their cards, though your Elnuk example is an interesting case of nerfing one region to weaken another), they continue to rise up because they just have way better, meta-defining cards than the other regions.
This feels like something of a perennial issue with Legends of Runeterra, seeming to emerge despite any/all balance patches through the beta, but there seems to be a real balance problem across the regions. (Note that I'm taking the https://lor.mobalytics.gg/meta-tier-list tier list as my source of truth here.)
On the surface, the games balance seems pretty reasonable - each region shows up in at least one S or A tier deck, and there's a decent array of archetypes available to players. But three regions dominate that tier list: Shadow Isles, Ionia, and Piltover & Zaun. Together, they show up in some 87.5% of meta decks. And it's not hard to see why - SI and P&Z have access to good card draw and damage based removal, SI and Ionia have access to healing, P&Z and Ionia have access to useful aggro tools with Elusives and Direct Nexus damage. This was true throughout the beta, and remains true today despite Rising Tides.
Every other region feels like it's just playing a supporting role to these three, which are doing all of the heavy lifting for defining the metagame. The result is a lot of less exciting deck-building choices, and ultimately less interesting match-ups because you end up running the same "SI Control" package to make any control deck, etc. Many champions (e.g. Lux) end up feeling like a worse version of some other "meta champion" (in this example, Heimerdinger) because of the added burden of being outside of one of those "meta regions."
As others have pointed out, in most CCGs the answer to aggro is healing. Obviously you also need units to defend you and/or removal to clear your opponents board, but if you have a means of healing/stabilizing, you will eventually run the enemy out of resources.
In Legends of Runeterra, that's a pretty annoying answer. The fact is, the majority of lifesteal and healing exist in two regions: Ionia and Shadow Isles. Sources of healing outside of those regions are:
None of these are really very good options. Most of them come down pretty late - two of them are mid game units, and the only way you're getting Catalyst out early is if you spend your opening turns doing nothing, at which point you're dead anyway. So, the best answer to the ladder's Burn decks is unfortunately to run Shadow Isles or Ionia. Even just a small package of the healing/removal spells is probably enough to help you even the odds, but it does meaningfully limit your deck-building choices.
There has been a lot of discussion on Elusives through the open beta. The fact is, the mechanic of limited unit interaction is not inherently broken - MTG has it in the form of flying and it works without any major issues.
The problem is that Riot hasn't printed enough tools for enough regions to make interaction something you can consistently tech for. P&Z has damage based removal, SI has damage based and hard removal, Demacia has challengers, but many of the tools available are insufficient to deal with a big, early elusive minion. Run the "wrong" regions and you're just screwed.
There are ways to beat it today, and the metagame should balance as people optimize Rising TIdes decks. Play around it as best you can, give them one or two more expansions and then see if the mechanic is still super broken - that will tell you whether the game has a real, persistent problem here that can't be fixed without a major rework.
The title of this article (and any future article like it) should include the word "styles," as obviously as possible and perhaps even in multiple places.
It's a two-card, 11 mana combo that's vulnerable to one of the most commonly played cards in the game (i.e Will of Ionia).
Not saying you're wrong to be frustrated, but this seems like an off-meta meme to me. Best thing to do is move on.