I tend to prefer slower decks in CCGs, and I've been playing a fair amount of Runeterra since beta. Honestly, I don't think the gap is all that meaningful. I've been able to use the region rewards to focus in on regions that support the styles of play I enjoy, and those rewards combined with the weekly vault provide enough shards and wild cards to support building toward those types of decks. Even playing slow decks, I've found it's consistently easy to get to a vault between Level 5 and 10 in any given week by just getting completing my daily quests and getting a couple of wins.
I haven't completed every region, and I'm probably "missing out" on some rewards the way you're thinking about it, but it doesn't much matter if I miss out on some pile of aggro tools, since I've got what I want to play already.
I've already submitted my Curator (with new art and a modified name), but I'm wondering what folks think of this new rebuild of Sally Whitemane:
My first version was rightly called out as too powerful - effectively a stronger Kel'Thuzad that would make Taunt and Rush minions too powerful. While I have some ideas on how to adjust for that (e.g. make the aura only active on your turn to avoid the unfair taunt issues), I also got feedback that she was giving some people Res Priest PTSD.
The fact is, Sally Whitemane's whole shtick is resurrection, so she belongs in some kind of Res Priest build. But I think it's kind of a shame that Res Priest is exclusively a slow, control deck. Resurrection should also be able to slot reasonably into a midrange or tempo Priest build. So, this Sally resurrects minions, but is probably too small on her own to naturally slot into a typical "Big Res Priest" deck.
I assume you mean "mulligan" ("milling" usually refers to removing cards from your opponent's deck). If so, it works in this game just like it would with real-life cards: The exact cards you've selected from your hand are excluded from the redraw pool, but you can certainly draw additional copies of those cards if you're running multiple in your deck. It may be frustrating to get a copy of the same card you just mulliganed away, but it's perfectly logical and consistent.
Or maybe you already knew all that and just wanted to vent a little :P. That's fine, too. Everyone gets annoying mulligans every once in a while.
Sorry in advance, I know I'm being pedantic here (because you're basically right), but not all games remove your original hand from the mulligan pool. In MTG, for instance, you shuffle your entire deck and redraw, so you could get the literal exact same set of cards (though the odds are vanishingly small).
Of course, as you've said, when you have multiple copies of a card, you can easily draw the same card again despite a "no replacements" mulligan, but it's an oddity about digital CCGs that they're not more explicit about what kind of replacement policy they have for mulligans. LoR says "choose cards to replace" in their mulligan screen, so I guess they think that's explicit enough, but I could imagine ways to make it clearer - e.g. "Choose which cards to replace with other cards from your deck.")
Seems like a very fun competition - here are some of my first ideas for it:
Show Spoiler
Trying to go with a theme of Maiev's single-minded pursuit of Illidan, ignoring everything else. Also, trying to give Rogue a bit of a finisher as a weapon class.
Paladin is the only class that has really been pushed toward the Menagerie theme, and it's a theme that has never quite had enough support to work super well.
Technically renamed Sally Whitemane (usually renames get different honorifics, etc., like Reno the Relicologist vs Reno Jackson but I couldn't fit that much with the original name "High Inquisitor Whitemane"). I had a hard time deciding on the expansion icon for her too, and ultimately landed on KFT because Sally eventually becomes a death knight, and because her resurrection abilities feel in line with the undead themes of KFT.
No charge on this charger, but he gets to attack a lot if you can spam Pirates from your hand.
It's one thing to replace a card - the different name helps make it clear that players should expect different behavior.
I'm inclined to disagree on this particular point - I pretty much never read card names during a match. The card image is the single most recognizable element to me, and the only one I need. Because they didn't change the image for Accelerated Purrsuit, I wasn't even aware it was a different card until I saw somebody pointing it out on the forums.
Maybe when odds return to normal, there will simply be fewer Deep decks and the whole thing will feel better.
I also have to disagree here. If an expedition archetype is badly balanced, its prevalence in the game mode doesn't affect its power level. The only difference is that you'll be annoyed by it less often, but the core problem persists. Getting your Deep bonus 10 cards earlier means you'll often be able to trigger it 2-3 rounds earlier than in constructed, which is quite a massive difference.
Also Veteran Investigator also seems like a bad expedition card. You never want to give your opponent extra card draw.
I've never understood the logic behind this, myself. Of course, letting your opponent draw cards is generally disadvantageous. However, if I get to draw one at the same time, it pretty much cancels out, doesn't it? Only point I could see against this is if the opponent is running some sort of combo deck, which naturally benefits more from having a bigger hand than other decks.
You're right about the art - it's a major part of the "recogniziability" of any card, and they should probably have changed it for the Purrsuit. But imagine if they left the name and the art the same and just changed the text - you'd be left wondering if they had rebalanced the constructed version without you noticing, etc., and it would be even worse if they changed the definition/helptext of a keyword. That would be very hard to notice, and very confusing for anyone not intimately familiar with patch notes, etc.
It's true that a less frequent broken thing is still a broken thing, but my point here is that when the Rising Tides champions show up less often, it will be harder to get some of the crazy combos like Nautilus/Maokai in Expeditions. That decrease in the likelihood of highly synergistic Champions impacts which archetypes you're shown and how your overall draft goes, so it's possible that specifically in this case, it will balance the problem out.
Finally, with respect to Veteran Investigator, you're right that in constructed, the reason to play a symmetric card draw effect would be that you're playing a deck for which drawing a card is somehow more valuable that the average deck (maybe it's a combo deck that just needs more draw, maybe it's a Twisted Fate deck that wants to upgrade him, etc.). But the original point is scoped to Expeditions, where you're unlikely to be able to build a deck where your draws are more valuable. I'm not sure Sykomyke is right that it's bad - it's a decent size for a 2-drop and it replaces itself in hand - but there are certainly much better 2-drops, and your opponent is getting a free card without having to play an "okay, but not great" 2-drop.
Of course, the other side of this is that you draft in packs of 3, and get random trades, so you may end up with him even if you're not excited to play him. I don't think I'd ever trade for Veteran Investigator, but I wouldn't auto-skip a 3 card pack simply because he's in it.
I get the feeling of frustration from playing against tons of the same old aggro decks, especially right after a new expansion drops, but this is commonplace for every CCG. And there are pretty obvious reasons for this:
People who are playing the newest cards tend to be playing slower, greedier decks (because they want to play all the new cool cards, and see the new wacky interactions that are hypothetically possible but probably not practical)
Aggro tends to be easier to optimize than control decks (in part because the games go faster, so you get more data with which to optimize)
CCGs are expensive, so people will often play the old, already optimized decks they have, even when there are new cards available
That last bullet is the most impactful, I think. Legends of Runeterra bills itself as a game that's very F2P friendly, and it is more F2P friendly than most digital CCGs, but its reward systems are mostly random and require grinding wins/daily quests to get them. So, those folks who are F2P need to play and win games and grind through the game to get new cards, and the easiest way to do that is going to be with their old aggro decks.
This is actually something where I think LoR could take a page from Hearthstone's playbook. Hearthstone's recently added a lot of duplicate protection, their ranked rewards give you packs of the latest expansion, and they've taken to giving you interesting login rewards for free at the start of an expansion to motivate new deck building (e.g. Galakrond, tons of Demon Hunter cards, etc.).
Meanwhile, the LoR system of random chests/capsules could give you just about any card regardless of what your collection looks like (and the shard conversion rate is pretty lousy when you do get duplicates). On top of that, the daily login rewards for LoR are mostly random chests/capsules, and the non-random ones give you old cards (Ledros, Ashe, etc.). That's a bunch of good free stuff, but none of it will give you the makings of an expansion deck.
Now, LoR is admittedly in an odd position where they've simultaneously released an expansion and officially launched the game out of beta. As far as I'm concerned, that just means the open beta was the real official launch, but they called it a beta to get some good will from players because they knew there were some graphical bugs (e.g. cards floating over the victory/loss screen), and they knew there were some balance issues with cards and reward systems. Perhaps in the future, when they're just releasing an expansion and not "launching," their login rewards will be more focused on new content, etc., but in the meantime expansion launches are a very hard time to be F2P, even in LoR.
What you're describing sounds like a bug, but without some kind of log of the plays, it's hard to judge the order, etc. I haven't played with Lee Sin yet, so I can't speak to any bugs.
I've played a fair amount of Nautilus/Maokai, and it definitely is strong, but it's got vulnerabilities. Until the late game, the deck is mostly small to midsize minions and toss cards, so there's lots of room for aggro to get in and wreck it before it gets online. And even in the late game, a couple of big AOEs like The Ruination can be pretty crippling since the deck doesn't have a ton of draw power. And because it depends on a few big minions, chump blocking and hard removal can buy you a decent chunk of time.
I don't think the "0 strategy to play" accusation is entirely fair, by the way. It's certainly a deck with a very clear game plan that it wants to execute on in a linear fashion. That can make for less exciting matches (because the deck plays the same most of the time), but that doesn't mean it's trivial to pilot. The deck typically features a lot of big Sea Monsters (so that Nautilus will bring back a bunch of stuff when you play him). But the result of running so many understated/expensive cards is that through the midgame, you're playing only one or two cards a turn, and you're often playing a bit behind on tempo. And even after you've hit Deep, your minions aren't all that cheap, so you're still playing one or two cards a turn. Often you're stuck making the decision to spend your mana on a minion or spend your mana going deeper into your deck.
A lot of the times that I've won from behind with those decks, I've done so by baiting out blocks and then using burst toss cards like Jettison and Salvage to turn the game around. Because of how slow the deck can play in the midgame, you have to be pretty judicious about your blocks up until that turn so that you can have enough Sea Monsters in play to benefit from hitting Deep. While I do think I've won a lot more games than I've lost with the deck, many of those wins have been narrow wins because of how much damage you have to be willing to take to make sure your board survives.
I'm pretty sure it's supposed to include buffs/debuffs, so this may be a bug. I feel like it used to work as you described - maybe this was introduced with the latest patch?
I think the idea that Riot believes it's too hard to get to 20 in Expeditions is right - as you've pointed out, it's already pretty hard to get to 20 in a constructed format where you can easily plan around the card. I think the power level of the effect is probably why they haven't decreased it's threshold - they want you to be able to play it, but they also want you to plan around other win conditions.
I think the problem with changing keywords between formats is that the change is way too subtle. A lot of players will be confused by the changes, and will have a harder time playing around cards because their knowledge of one format won't necessarily map onto any other formats. It's one thing to replace a card - the different name helps make it clear that players should expect different behavior. You could imagine a case where all Deep cards are replaced with slightly different named cards that have slightly different behaviors/keywords, but after a lot of that I think you have the same problem where folks will be confused switching back and forth between formats.
Honestly, the choice Riot made to have Rising Tides Champion archetypes show up 2x as often may be the whole problem here. Because there are so many Bilgewater champions in that set of archetype picks, there are lots more Deep plays than seem reasonable. Maybe when odds return to normal, there will simply be fewer Deep decks and the whole thing will feel better.
You're right, they can't please everyone all the time, but there's definitely something odd about their UI when compared to games like Hearthstone or MTG Arena. One big example that I know has come up in the past is the lack of visual indicator for how many wild cards and shards you have while you're browsing your collection.
It just seems like a few small tweaks would go a long way to making relevant information more front-and-center. For example, there's a lot of room on that home screen that they're basically using for long buttons - maybe make each quests its own icon and shrink down the text so they can fit more stuff without obscuring the art. For quests with long text, they can use distinct icons, short text, and hover text for the full text of the quest.
I kind of thought this was going to be resolved with their first major release, but as far as I can tell, the only way to see what daily quests you have is to click into the quests. I know it's pretty minor, but it seems like a simple quality-of-life add. I often forget before my first match or two to look at it, and end up wasting time not making progress against it.
I was thinking about something like that - redefining the keyword or changing some of the cards slightly. They've done that with Purrsuit of Perfection being converted to Accelerated Purrsuit, but honestly I don't love that. It seems really confusing to have slightly different cards and/or slightly different fundamental rules between formats.
I had a similar experience with my pre-expansion decks. Ultimately I crafted a Sea Monster/Toss deck last night because I wanted to play something new anyway, and that deck felt very powerful. I think it's far from optimal, but I wanted to conserve my wildcards/shards.
That said, I'm not convinced that this is emblematic of some broad power creep in this new expansion (nor does it precluded massive power creep - it's just too early to say). A lot of the new cards and mechanics have pretty obvious builds - the Sea Monster/Toss deck, the Plunder/Face Damage aggro decks, etc., so I suspect some of this is just a combination of people being excited to play new stuff and the new stuff having a lot of obvious synergies. Once some meta starts to emerge, there may be more room to drop in older cards to shore up weaknesses of these new decks, or to counter them entirely.
The addition of Toss and Deep make a lot of sea monster decks feel unusually powerful thanks to the lower deck sizes in Expeditions, and the addition of "draw from your opponent's deck" cards can hit you twice, first by stealing your resources, then by decking you (again because the deck sizes are smaller in Expeditions).
In MTG, it's very rare to see any kind of mill type strategies be powerful in limited because they typically only work with a large combination of mill effects. Many of the Runeterra self-mill and enemy-mill cards are fairly efficient on their own, leading to what I think is a worse drafting experience.
It's obviously too early to call for a nerf to any cards (especially because I actually think a lot of these cards/interactions are fun in normal play), but I wouldn't be shocked if rebalancing the draft pool was one of the first things to come out of Bilgewater.
Do folks think this counts in terms of the requirements? It doesn't technically interact with the opponent's deck itself, but the battlecry does create deck interactions that wouldn't otherwise exist.
Make it Rain is only random when your opponent has more than 2 units in play (i.e. when there are more than 3 enemies to hit). Given that it's a fast spell, I think the skill-testing aspect of it will be to see if you can leverage other skills (like Miss Fortune's Bullet Time) to create a deterministic outcome in your favor.
Honestly, the extent to which people complain about randomness in card games is crazy to me. Randomness is built into the game simply by virtue of shuffling, and playing around randomness can be incredibly skill-testing. Certainly, there needs to be balance, but this kind of visceral reaction to anything even remotely random is just plain silly. Frankly, the use of randomness in Make It Rain is more likely to be skill-testing than if it just targeted several enemies based on some arbitrary condition.
I do not play LoR, but I a, not a fan of balancing cards in this way. If a card is too OP in a certain situation, then you shouldn't change the card to say "this doesn't work in this specific situation".
If Glimpse Beyond is too powerful at instant speed, then maybe reduce it to sorcery speed so that it can't be played as a response to another instant speed removal spell.
Respectfully, it's very clear you don't play LoR - you're talking about balancing it in MTG speed terms. There are three spell speeds: slow, fast, and burst. Slow and fast map well onto sorcery and instant speeds respectively, but burst speed works like an instant that automatically resolves rather than go on the stack.
But even more importantly, LoR has rounds that are shared in a way that MTG turns aren't. Whenever a player takes a slow action (casts a slow spell, plays a unit), priority switches, and a player can rally their attack on their opponent's turn. So, there are a lot of times when you can't afford to kill your own unit as part of a slow spell because it opens you up to attack, even if you have the mana to summon more units.
Riot has said they're monitoring Glimpse Beyond precisely for it's "soft counter" ability with card draw, so I think the sentiment that folks generally agree it's too powerful is entirely right.
There was a nerf prediction thread a while back where I suggested a change to this card. My change was very similar to yours - I suggested the following: Make it Burst Speed, and change the text to "Kill an ally to draw 2. You cannot cast this if other spells are on the stack."
I think printing more cards *might* work, but 1) that may dilute the region fantasy/theme. and 2) It might make matters worse printing all these niche cards to counter other cards to counter other cards. IMO keeping the core game simple is necessary because if the core game just prints a ton of cards instead of making balanced core regions, then the game is going to quickly spiral out of control into an unorganized mess.
For what it's worth, I agree that more regions and cards may dilute the individual region fantasy/theme, but that's yet another problem that Riot has set up for themselves. MTG has never added a color, and Hearthstone only just added its first new class after years and years. There's a lot of risk of diluting the design space, but oh well, Riot has been pretty clear they want to take that risk.
I tend to prefer slower decks in CCGs, and I've been playing a fair amount of Runeterra since beta. Honestly, I don't think the gap is all that meaningful. I've been able to use the region rewards to focus in on regions that support the styles of play I enjoy, and those rewards combined with the weekly vault provide enough shards and wild cards to support building toward those types of decks. Even playing slow decks, I've found it's consistently easy to get to a vault between Level 5 and 10 in any given week by just getting completing my daily quests and getting a couple of wins.
I haven't completed every region, and I'm probably "missing out" on some rewards the way you're thinking about it, but it doesn't much matter if I miss out on some pile of aggro tools, since I've got what I want to play already.
I've already submitted my Curator (with new art and a modified name), but I'm wondering what folks think of this new rebuild of Sally Whitemane:
My first version was rightly called out as too powerful - effectively a stronger Kel'Thuzad that would make Taunt and Rush minions too powerful. While I have some ideas on how to adjust for that (e.g. make the aura only active on your turn to avoid the unfair taunt issues), I also got feedback that she was giving some people Res Priest PTSD.
The fact is, Sally Whitemane's whole shtick is resurrection, so she belongs in some kind of Res Priest build. But I think it's kind of a shame that Res Priest is exclusively a slow, control deck. Resurrection should also be able to slot reasonably into a midrange or tempo Priest build. So, this Sally resurrects minions, but is probably too small on her own to naturally slot into a typical "Big Res Priest" deck.
Sorry in advance, I know I'm being pedantic here (because you're basically right), but not all games remove your original hand from the mulligan pool. In MTG, for instance, you shuffle your entire deck and redraw, so you could get the literal exact same set of cards (though the odds are vanishingly small).
Of course, as you've said, when you have multiple copies of a card, you can easily draw the same card again despite a "no replacements" mulligan, but it's an oddity about digital CCGs that they're not more explicit about what kind of replacement policy they have for mulligans. LoR says "choose cards to replace" in their mulligan screen, so I guess they think that's explicit enough, but I could imagine ways to make it clearer - e.g. "Choose which cards to replace with other cards from your deck.")
Seems like a very fun competition - here are some of my first ideas for it:
Trying to go with a theme of Maiev's single-minded pursuit of Illidan, ignoring everything else. Also, trying to give Rogue a bit of a finisher as a weapon class.
Paladin is the only class that has really been pushed toward the Menagerie theme, and it's a theme that has never quite had enough support to work super well.
Technically renamed Sally Whitemane (usually renames get different honorifics, etc., like Reno the Relicologist vs Reno Jackson but I couldn't fit that much with the original name "High Inquisitor Whitemane"). I had a hard time deciding on the expansion icon for her too, and ultimately landed on KFT because Sally eventually becomes a death knight, and because her resurrection abilities feel in line with the undead themes of KFT.
No charge on this charger, but he gets to attack a lot if you can spam Pirates from your hand.
You're right about the art - it's a major part of the "recogniziability" of any card, and they should probably have changed it for the Purrsuit. But imagine if they left the name and the art the same and just changed the text - you'd be left wondering if they had rebalanced the constructed version without you noticing, etc., and it would be even worse if they changed the definition/helptext of a keyword. That would be very hard to notice, and very confusing for anyone not intimately familiar with patch notes, etc.
It's true that a less frequent broken thing is still a broken thing, but my point here is that when the Rising Tides champions show up less often, it will be harder to get some of the crazy combos like Nautilus/Maokai in Expeditions. That decrease in the likelihood of highly synergistic Champions impacts which archetypes you're shown and how your overall draft goes, so it's possible that specifically in this case, it will balance the problem out.
Finally, with respect to Veteran Investigator, you're right that in constructed, the reason to play a symmetric card draw effect would be that you're playing a deck for which drawing a card is somehow more valuable that the average deck (maybe it's a combo deck that just needs more draw, maybe it's a Twisted Fate deck that wants to upgrade him, etc.). But the original point is scoped to Expeditions, where you're unlikely to be able to build a deck where your draws are more valuable. I'm not sure Sykomyke is right that it's bad - it's a decent size for a 2-drop and it replaces itself in hand - but there are certainly much better 2-drops, and your opponent is getting a free card without having to play an "okay, but not great" 2-drop.
Of course, the other side of this is that you draft in packs of 3, and get random trades, so you may end up with him even if you're not excited to play him. I don't think I'd ever trade for Veteran Investigator, but I wouldn't auto-skip a 3 card pack simply because he's in it.
I get the feeling of frustration from playing against tons of the same old aggro decks, especially right after a new expansion drops, but this is commonplace for every CCG. And there are pretty obvious reasons for this:
That last bullet is the most impactful, I think. Legends of Runeterra bills itself as a game that's very F2P friendly, and it is more F2P friendly than most digital CCGs, but its reward systems are mostly random and require grinding wins/daily quests to get them. So, those folks who are F2P need to play and win games and grind through the game to get new cards, and the easiest way to do that is going to be with their old aggro decks.
This is actually something where I think LoR could take a page from Hearthstone's playbook. Hearthstone's recently added a lot of duplicate protection, their ranked rewards give you packs of the latest expansion, and they've taken to giving you interesting login rewards for free at the start of an expansion to motivate new deck building (e.g. Galakrond, tons of Demon Hunter cards, etc.).
Meanwhile, the LoR system of random chests/capsules could give you just about any card regardless of what your collection looks like (and the shard conversion rate is pretty lousy when you do get duplicates). On top of that, the daily login rewards for LoR are mostly random chests/capsules, and the non-random ones give you old cards (Ledros, Ashe, etc.). That's a bunch of good free stuff, but none of it will give you the makings of an expansion deck.
Now, LoR is admittedly in an odd position where they've simultaneously released an expansion and officially launched the game out of beta. As far as I'm concerned, that just means the open beta was the real official launch, but they called it a beta to get some good will from players because they knew there were some graphical bugs (e.g. cards floating over the victory/loss screen), and they knew there were some balance issues with cards and reward systems. Perhaps in the future, when they're just releasing an expansion and not "launching," their login rewards will be more focused on new content, etc., but in the meantime expansion launches are a very hard time to be F2P, even in LoR.
What you're describing sounds like a bug, but without some kind of log of the plays, it's hard to judge the order, etc. I haven't played with Lee Sin yet, so I can't speak to any bugs.
I've played a fair amount of Nautilus/Maokai, and it definitely is strong, but it's got vulnerabilities. Until the late game, the deck is mostly small to midsize minions and toss cards, so there's lots of room for aggro to get in and wreck it before it gets online. And even in the late game, a couple of big AOEs like The Ruination can be pretty crippling since the deck doesn't have a ton of draw power. And because it depends on a few big minions, chump blocking and hard removal can buy you a decent chunk of time.
I don't think the "0 strategy to play" accusation is entirely fair, by the way. It's certainly a deck with a very clear game plan that it wants to execute on in a linear fashion. That can make for less exciting matches (because the deck plays the same most of the time), but that doesn't mean it's trivial to pilot. The deck typically features a lot of big Sea Monsters (so that Nautilus will bring back a bunch of stuff when you play him). But the result of running so many understated/expensive cards is that through the midgame, you're playing only one or two cards a turn, and you're often playing a bit behind on tempo. And even after you've hit Deep, your minions aren't all that cheap, so you're still playing one or two cards a turn. Often you're stuck making the decision to spend your mana on a minion or spend your mana going deeper into your deck.
A lot of the times that I've won from behind with those decks, I've done so by baiting out blocks and then using burst toss cards like Jettison and Salvage to turn the game around. Because of how slow the deck can play in the midgame, you have to be pretty judicious about your blocks up until that turn so that you can have enough Sea Monsters in play to benefit from hitting Deep. While I do think I've won a lot more games than I've lost with the deck, many of those wins have been narrow wins because of how much damage you have to be willing to take to make sure your board survives.
I'm pretty sure it's supposed to include buffs/debuffs, so this may be a bug. I feel like it used to work as you described - maybe this was introduced with the latest patch?
I think the idea that Riot believes it's too hard to get to 20 in Expeditions is right - as you've pointed out, it's already pretty hard to get to 20 in a constructed format where you can easily plan around the card. I think the power level of the effect is probably why they haven't decreased it's threshold - they want you to be able to play it, but they also want you to plan around other win conditions.
I think the problem with changing keywords between formats is that the change is way too subtle. A lot of players will be confused by the changes, and will have a harder time playing around cards because their knowledge of one format won't necessarily map onto any other formats. It's one thing to replace a card - the different name helps make it clear that players should expect different behavior. You could imagine a case where all Deep cards are replaced with slightly different named cards that have slightly different behaviors/keywords, but after a lot of that I think you have the same problem where folks will be confused switching back and forth between formats.
Honestly, the choice Riot made to have Rising Tides Champion archetypes show up 2x as often may be the whole problem here. Because there are so many Bilgewater champions in that set of archetype picks, there are lots more Deep plays than seem reasonable. Maybe when odds return to normal, there will simply be fewer Deep decks and the whole thing will feel better.
You're right, they can't please everyone all the time, but there's definitely something odd about their UI when compared to games like Hearthstone or MTG Arena. One big example that I know has come up in the past is the lack of visual indicator for how many wild cards and shards you have while you're browsing your collection.
It just seems like a few small tweaks would go a long way to making relevant information more front-and-center. For example, there's a lot of room on that home screen that they're basically using for long buttons - maybe make each quests its own icon and shrink down the text so they can fit more stuff without obscuring the art. For quests with long text, they can use distinct icons, short text, and hover text for the full text of the quest.
I kind of thought this was going to be resolved with their first major release, but as far as I can tell, the only way to see what daily quests you have is to click into the quests. I know it's pretty minor, but it seems like a simple quality-of-life add. I often forget before my first match or two to look at it, and end up wasting time not making progress against it.
I was thinking about something like that - redefining the keyword or changing some of the cards slightly. They've done that with Purrsuit of Perfection being converted to Accelerated Purrsuit, but honestly I don't love that. It seems really confusing to have slightly different cards and/or slightly different fundamental rules between formats.
I had a similar experience with my pre-expansion decks. Ultimately I crafted a Sea Monster/Toss deck last night because I wanted to play something new anyway, and that deck felt very powerful. I think it's far from optimal, but I wanted to conserve my wildcards/shards.
That said, I'm not convinced that this is emblematic of some broad power creep in this new expansion (nor does it precluded massive power creep - it's just too early to say). A lot of the new cards and mechanics have pretty obvious builds - the Sea Monster/Toss deck, the Plunder/Face Damage aggro decks, etc., so I suspect some of this is just a combination of people being excited to play new stuff and the new stuff having a lot of obvious synergies. Once some meta starts to emerge, there may be more room to drop in older cards to shore up weaknesses of these new decks, or to counter them entirely.
The addition of Toss and Deep make a lot of sea monster decks feel unusually powerful thanks to the lower deck sizes in Expeditions, and the addition of "draw from your opponent's deck" cards can hit you twice, first by stealing your resources, then by decking you (again because the deck sizes are smaller in Expeditions).
In MTG, it's very rare to see any kind of mill type strategies be powerful in limited because they typically only work with a large combination of mill effects. Many of the Runeterra self-mill and enemy-mill cards are fairly efficient on their own, leading to what I think is a worse drafting experience.
It's obviously too early to call for a nerf to any cards (especially because I actually think a lot of these cards/interactions are fun in normal play), but I wouldn't be shocked if rebalancing the draft pool was one of the first things to come out of Bilgewater.
Do folks think this counts in terms of the requirements? It doesn't technically interact with the opponent's deck itself, but the battlecry does create deck interactions that wouldn't otherwise exist.
Make it Rain is only random when your opponent has more than 2 units in play (i.e. when there are more than 3 enemies to hit). Given that it's a fast spell, I think the skill-testing aspect of it will be to see if you can leverage other skills (like Miss Fortune's Bullet Time) to create a deterministic outcome in your favor.
Honestly, the extent to which people complain about randomness in card games is crazy to me. Randomness is built into the game simply by virtue of shuffling, and playing around randomness can be incredibly skill-testing. Certainly, there needs to be balance, but this kind of visceral reaction to anything even remotely random is just plain silly. Frankly, the use of randomness in Make It Rain is more likely to be skill-testing than if it just targeted several enemies based on some arbitrary condition.
Respectfully, it's very clear you don't play LoR - you're talking about balancing it in MTG speed terms. There are three spell speeds: slow, fast, and burst. Slow and fast map well onto sorcery and instant speeds respectively, but burst speed works like an instant that automatically resolves rather than go on the stack.
But even more importantly, LoR has rounds that are shared in a way that MTG turns aren't. Whenever a player takes a slow action (casts a slow spell, plays a unit), priority switches, and a player can rally their attack on their opponent's turn. So, there are a lot of times when you can't afford to kill your own unit as part of a slow spell because it opens you up to attack, even if you have the mana to summon more units.
Riot has said they're monitoring Glimpse Beyond precisely for it's "soft counter" ability with card draw, so I think the sentiment that folks generally agree it's too powerful is entirely right.
There was a nerf prediction thread a while back where I suggested a change to this card. My change was very similar to yours - I suggested the following: Make it Burst Speed, and change the text to "Kill an ally to draw 2. You cannot cast this if other spells are on the stack."
For what it's worth, I agree that more regions and cards may dilute the individual region fantasy/theme, but that's yet another problem that Riot has set up for themselves. MTG has never added a color, and Hearthstone only just added its first new class after years and years. There's a lot of risk of diluting the design space, but oh well, Riot has been pretty clear they want to take that risk.