What I meant was that it behaves like Double-Attack, except that the first strike hits the enemy nexus. So if a 3/3 elusive was blocked with a 3/3 without elusive, the elusive would first deal 3 damage to the enemy nexus, then it would attack the blocking 3/3 and they would both die
Okay, that's very different from what I thought you meant. Now that you've clarified, I think that's an awful plan. Elusives don't need to be able to get free hits in on the Nexus more than they already do, and it certainly wouldn't be fair for them to be dealing 2x their attack power simply because you tried to block them.
The phrase "strikes the enemy nexus before the blocker" doesn't really make sense because it would seem to be some kind of inverse overwhelm, where you only deal damage to the blocker if you have excess damage after killing the nexus. Is a fair rewording of your rule "This unit deals damage as though it is not blocked, unless its blocker has Elusive"? This would mean they can only deal attack damage to enemy units with Elusive, and may often get killed during a block despite dealing damage to the enemy nexus.
If my rephrasing is a correct understanding of your meaning, I actually think that's a fairly creative reworking of the keyword. I do wonder, though, if that starts to look a bit too much like Ephemeral with respect to how that deck archetype intends to play out, where the one-turn Ephemeral units are replaced with disposable face damage that frequently gets blocked to death the first turn it attacks.
After running it with coworkers came up with this (snowing we’re bored).
Kalista 3M
2/4 Fearsome
Play or attack: Grant an ally +1/+0
Strike: If I die revive me at end of round.
Level up - I’ve seen 3 allies die.
4/4 Fearsome
Play or attack: Grant an ally and I +1/+0
Stike: If I die revive me at end of round.
I like that you're thinking outside the box on this, but it's not clear how the "Play or Attack" would resolve, since it can grant "an ally" (rather than all allies) but there's no opportunity to target things with "Attack" abilities today.
Also, I don't really get why your version revives herself. The distinguishing features of Kalista in League seem to be:
She turns an allied Champion into her Oathsworn at the start of the game
Her Pierce and Rend abilities enable her to kill an enemy and immediately start stacking up damage on the nearest target
When she and her Oathsworn attack the same target, she deals extra damage
Her ult teleports her Oathsworn to her to deliver a big hit to a Champion and all enemies in an area
Kalista is explicitly not a support hero because her role is ADC/Marksman (i.e. she should be able to go on offense)
From a flavor/fantasy standpoint, I think the existing Kalista really checks a lot of those boxes. Some problems, though, are that you don't really want to use her on offense or she'll die before she levels up, and the bond isn't permanent.
What about this:
In this version, the bond is permanent, so things like recall don't leave you stuck with two meh units when you replay the bonded unit. It also buffs both of them when they're both in play. So, Kalista is still vulnerable to a fair number of damage-based removal spells, but so long as her Oathsworn is in play she's a bit sturdier than she is today. Additionally, her level-up condition has changed to be focused on enemy deaths, as she is much more focused on killing enemies one after another in LoL.
I suspect this keyword is fairly problematic. As long as you can play cheap token minions, this keyword operates very similarly to perma-stealth. Seems like it would be easily abused in a class like Paladin that can fairly easily buff and generate tokens.
I'm not a Runeterra player (haven't played the game even once), but I've read about this "Elusive" issue many times and we can say that I got pretty curious.
To put it simple, what's the matter? Why is it perceived so poorly?
To put it in simple terms it is like having flying before they added reach, though saying that is also making the assumption that reach fixed flying in MtG
I thank you for your reply, but unfortunately I'm not familiar with MtG either :(
The Elusive keyword on a unit means that unit can only be blocked by units which also have the Elusive keyword.
This has become rather common because Legends of Runeterra features a "spell mana" reserve that lets you carry over up to 3 mana between rounds (with the cavaet that it can only be used on spells). So, when you play your first Elusive unit in Round 3, you frequently have access to an additional mana to spend on buffs, making it a huge threat immediately.
By contrast, most hard removal in the game doesn't come down until around 5 or 6 mana, and the buffs get your elusive units out of range of most damage-based removal, so this makes it pretty easy to bash your opponent in with unblockable units before they can rally a reasonable response.
The fact that the bond is so easily broken is a big part of the problem, but it seems like it would be more thematic if she were bonded to another champion, and if that bond occurred at the start of the game. What about something like this:
Level 1: "Start of game: I bond with another Champion in your deck. Grant it +2|+0 while we're both in play."
Level 2: "The first time I attack this game, revive my bonded Champion attacking."
I can imagine some ways this would get busted, so it may be too strong, but if they want to leave her as an aggressively stated 3-drop, she needs to also have the bond occur either at start of game or as a support trigger, because today needing to play her into a decent unit means she comes down well after she's useful.
Sounds like a bug. I expect what's happening here is that Lux checks for progress updates when spells resolve, but that there are only really two cases where LoR considers the spells resolved:
Burst spells resolve immediately
All other spells resolve with the stack
So, rather than check after every spell on the stack, Lux checks once the stack is done. This loses your extra progress. If you had instead had something like Purify as your means of removing barrier, I think this would have worked exactly as intended and won you the game.
There was a similar recommendation around Karma's spell duplication in the balance predictions thread. At the end of the day, lots of CCGs use stacks to resolve spells and spell-like abilities, and once something goes on the stack, the only way to remove it is with something else on the stack that explicitly removes it (e.g. Deny in LoR). However, you could imagine a case where, when its turn comes up to resolve, a skill fizzles based on the condition you described. Ultimately I think that is a worse way to handle skills.
First, this would be inconsistent with similar CCGs, and hewing close to the behavior of other games makes it easier for players familiar with the genre to ramp onto a game.
Second, and more importantly, I think this version makes sense in the context of the fantasy of the game. The skill was triggered, and stopping its source shouldn't necessarily stop the effect of the skill. Let's take Avarosan Marksman as an example. The Marksman enters the battlefield and fires off his arrow. You kill him with Blade's Edge. Should that stop the arrow that's already been fired? Anyone imaging this playing out in physical space would agree that it shouldn't. The game may not play out in physical space, but the fantasy of the game, of these clashing armies and their Champions, should translate cleanly into the rules of the game.
Have you considered playing Expeditions? That tends to have a lot of variety. Also, it's kind of funny that you seem to have signed up specifically to say goodbye.
Yeah, it definitely sounds like a bug, either with Katarina specifically because of her recall, or with Quick Attack more broadly. Seems like it's worth experimenting with.
Karma - I don't think she is overpowered and i can see why her doubling spell doesn't disappear if she dies before spell triggers but well, this is not so healthy in my opinion and it is not just for an archetype.
The problem with trying to change this is that the spell is already on the stack, even if she dies. If her effect was simply that the spell triggers twice, that would be one thing, but she casts it twice, so it ends up on the stack and I think it would be less intuitive if these spells were somehow removed in a way no other spell can be removed from the stack.
Ok they won't leave bodies on the field but changing the rule is better than nerfing all ephemeral units in my opinion. It already punishes you to spend your resources to temporary units. This change will answer most of the broken situations about them, Hecarim/Mark of the Isles/Darkwater Scourge/Death Mark etc. instead of nerfing all of these cards seperately.
Yes, they're generally overstated units, but if they die to any damage source (i.e. can be killed before combat by taking any damage at all), then anyone playing Ephemeral units gets both the punishment of buying temporary units (as you said) and a new extra punishment of often losing those units to extremely cheap removal tools before they could eke any value out of those temporary attackers. This change would certainly answer the most broken Ephemeral problems in the game, but it does it by nerfing Ephemeral into the ground and making it largely unplayable as a strategy.
Quote From Almaniarra
This change makes elusive units more attack-oriented like how they are used right now. Unbuffed elusives are not an issue already. This change makes players more attentive when they should attack and prevents the game being braindead face game
This just seems like another nerf into the ground. If you lose Elusive when you attack, then your units are bad for most of the time you have them (that is, you've traded one guaranteed nexus strike for a relatively weak unit). You seem to think this would make players more thoughtful with their attacks (e.g. I build up a board of Elusive units before attacking), but really that would mean you have two choices - build a board while doing nothing else for a while, or attack with one unit every other turn and be stuck with weak non-Elusive units afterwards. The former gets beaten down by any other aggro deck, and the latter never builds up enough pressure on board to win against midrange or control. It's lose lose.
Quote From Almaniarra
Speeding up/Slowing down might bring some other issues. I really don't get it why it is so hard and confusing to understand this. A single-use buff should be single-use. That's so simple. +2 health buff for a round should stay for one round. Shouldn't heal the unit. It doesn't make the unit die suddenly after the turn ends because it will go back to its previous health once the turn ends.
The issue comes up when your buff exceeds the remaining HP of the unit. Let's say I've played a +3|+3 buff on an injured 3/1 unit, made a trade, and now my unit is a 6/2. Does removing the buff kill my unit because -3|-3 would leave it at 3/-1? Does removing the buff only do -3|-1 so that my unit returns to its earlier 3/1 state? If it's the former, a lot of buffs will seem kind of pointless because you're frequently getting a 1-for-2 trade out of your units (i.e. you lose a unit and a buff to make a trade). If it's the latter, then the debuff is going to be no more inconsistent than it is now in terms of how many stats are dropped off.
Quote From Almaniarra
It was a flavour related suggestion at first tbh. and then i figured that might help for some other broken interactions with Relentless Pursuit and random Shadowshifts/Prismatic Barriers from Karma while you don't have any Lux or Zed in your deck.
…
Contrarily to you, I really think that this opens more deckbuilding opportunities rather than limiting it. If you want to use Death Lotus in your Vladimir deck, You should try a Katarina/Vladimir deck instead of throwing 2x Death Lotus without a Katarina in your deck for example.
This feels and seems openning more opportunities for deckbuilding for me. Also seems more logical for that The singature spells are cast by those champions.
I get it from a flavor standpoint, but by the very nature of what your'e suggesting, it's going to limit deckbuilding options. Take your example: if you want to use Death Lotus and Vladimir today, you have several options:
Your version removes one of those three options, and notably it removes the one that helps most with deck diversity because of the rules around Champion inclusions in a deck. In your version, if a particular signature spells is massively OP in a given archetype, then that Champion will be an auto-include even if you'd like to try to build that deck with a different Champion or set of Champions.
I've thought first she needs to survive and played around it always but tried it while i have the attack token (while her Quick attack is active), she turned back to my hand even tho she didn't survive. I'm not so sure that was a bug or intended tho.
Now that you mention is, the description of Quick Attack says that it's active "while attacking," doesn't it? That phrasing could indicate that a Single Combat resolving during combat takes Quick Attack into account. It's ambiguous, though.
The help text for Quick Attack reads "While attacking, strikes before its blocker." In that way, it behaves just like Overwhelm - it only applies during combat, and only with respect to the blocking unit if such a unit exists.
Almaniarra, you posted change suggestions for over 10% of the cards in the game, and I'm having a hard time engaging on your various suggested nerfs/buffs. Would you please organize your nerfs into themes (e.g. "Deck archetype X seems like it's under-performing, so here are some nerfs/buffs to help fix that."). Right now many of them feel kind of arbitrary and it's hard to understand why you think the change is necessary/what impact it will have on the health of the metagame
Regarding your rule changes:
If Ephemeral units die after taking damage from any source, most of them will be made totally useless because of how easy it is to deal 1 damage. I think the goal of Ephemeral units generally is to have strong offensive turns and fairly weak defensive turns, and your proposed change just makes them weak all-around.
Elusive is a keyword, so I'm strongly opposed to the idea of having it behave differently on Champions. Adding the "After I deal damage, I lose Elusive" text to followers gets around that issue, but such a rule change would require a significant shift in their stats since they'd just be normal, understated minions after that first hit
If I understand you correctly, you're saying that the stack should allow for burst speed responses to burst speed spells. I think this would actually take something away from the game that makes it interesting/unique when compared to other CCGs
There's already been some discussion on the damaged HP issue, but I tend to agree that the way it works now is the most intuitive, even if it can be very frustrating for damage-based removal tools that get negated by buffs. I think a better way to deal with those kinds of interactions is to slow down or speed up some spells to make damage-based removal more consistent.
This last rule is very interesting, but I'm not convinced it's a good idea. Basically this rule says that the "Champion Spell" as a standalone card is special, and must be paired with the champion. I think the ultimate result of such a change would be increased play rates for Champions whose spells are very much a "win more" for them (e.g. Ezreal's Mystic Shot), which in turn would result in play rates dropping for other Champions who don't (e.g. Katarina's Death Lotus, which really helps other Champions/Archetypes more than her). To your point about Relentless Pursuit, I expect that rather than reduce the frequency of seeing it in play, it would just mean more decks that want to run it would run Lucian. Ultimately this would make the game less interesting by forcing Champion choices based on these spells and not on the Champions themselves.
I continue to be frustrated by the lack of statistics available on decks in LoR - I think that makes it really hard to determine which cards should be nerfed - but if you trust the meta tier lists on Mobalytics, then the cards that need to get hit are going to be the Ionia and Shadow Isles cards that are dominating the top tier decks. Each of those regions show up in about 50% of the best decks, and there's at least one of those two regions in about 85% of top tier decks on the site:
Shadow Assassin - should probably be a 1/2 (maybe a 2/1 since 1 damage removal is available in several regions). Comparing to Vanguard Redeemer, today it trades 1/1 in stats for Elusive (which seems more than fair) and gets its card draw entirely condition free. The card is just way too good.
Kinkou Lifeblade - Still a problem despite the health drop because buffs are plentiful and Elusive aggro decks love the lifesteal to reduce the need to block. It feels like the intended purpose of this card is to help control decks stabilize against Elusive aggro decks, so maybe it should be a 1/3 whose attack increases on defense, or a 2/4 with "can't attack" or something like that.
Mark of the Isles - A little to strong a buff for 1 mana, maybe reduce it to a +2|+2
Glimpse Beyond - This is a tough one. As a fast spell, it seems generally unfair that you get to play it at the last minute to make opposing removal tools irrelevant and draw 2 cards - that's a pretty big card advantage swing since your opponent is now out one or more removal cards and your unit sacrifice didn't really cost you anything you wouldn't lose anyway. But if it were slow, you'd never play it because any fast removal would negate it. So perhaps what it needs to be is a Burst spell with the text "You cannot cast this if other spells are on the stack." or "You cannot cast this if your opponent has unresolved spells." or something like that. It will always go off, but you have to actually make a sacrifice to get the card draw.
The Rekindler - The biggest problem here is that this is frequently "vanilla stats with a champion," and scales up to "oppressive amount of stats for cheap" as the game goes on and you play your more powerful champion cards. There are a lot of ways you could nerf this. Some ideas: change the text to "strongest ally" to make it harder to get free champions, drive the cost up to 7 or 8 to make its cost more appropriate for the immediate stats on board that you get, drive its stats down to a 3/3 or a 2/2 to make it far less meaningful a unit, etc.
I'm sure they'll find their way to some happy medium with respect to the animations. Some of the things I'm very happy have sped up are the delays between taking an action and seeing it play out (I'm thinking mostly about the unit drop speed and the time to start combat animations)
Another overall improvement, albeit a bit jarring, is the animation for drawing several cards. Card draw is pretty clumsy thanks to a couple of problems Legends of Runeterra has with layout around card draw:
The card draw starts on the left and has to travel across the screen to reach its place on the right side of your hand
The cards are mostly obscured if you aren't hovering over your hand (i.e. can't see card names, can only see part of the art)
That first issue always means the animation needs more time than in similar games (Hearthstone, MTG Arena) where the deck is on the same side as the drawn card, giving it less screen space to cover.
The second issue gets better as you learn the cards, but it always means you run the risk of mistaking a card in your hand for some other card (especially since art style and color are similar within any given region). This, in turn, means the card has to do its little pause in the middle of the screen to let you know what you've drawn. Most other digital CCGs have information like card names at the top of the card, making them easier to identify and allowing the animators to avoid these kinds of big animations that reinforce what you've drawn. This made drawing several cards pretty tedious from a pacing standpoint.
Now when you play something like Progress Day!, all of the cards seem to draw nearly at once. This is great for pacing, but because of these layout problems it can be harder for players to internalize what exactly they just drew.
It was discussed previously, but we need to adress how strong the card is ON TOP of how strong the fation operates with him.
I will talk ONLY about Hecarim and not mention the other cards that should be watched like The Rekindler couse I will miss the point.
While I generally agree that Hecarim does a little too much for his cost, I think you should be careful to just toss aside the rest of the Shadow Isles package around him when you think about his power level.
The champion cards in LoR are the build-arounds of the game, and a lot of what the popular Hecarim decks do today achieves the so called "fantasy" of playing Hecarim - summon a bunch of ethereal creatures, push hard on offense, and have big burst turns where your Ethereal army stomps your opponent.
The question really is "is it too easy to achieve that, and if so why?" Hecarim's overall power level plays a role in that, but the Shadow Isles packages around him prop him up and make the deck as powerful as it is. With that in mind, are there any data aggregation sites yet for LoR? Something like HSReplay, where we can look at win rates for decks, cards, etc.? I've seen that Mobalytics has some content around a meta tier list, but it's not clear whether any of its content is informed by data, and they certainly do not have those kinds of detailed breakdowns.
Haha, I don't think we meant to gang up like that, I think we just all tried to be the first response.
You're 100% right that this wording can be improved, and there's already at least one example (Unstable Voltician) where we see Riot using the wording you're suggesting (i.e. "you've cast"), but it very amusingly works in an untintuitive way whereby it triggers regardless of whether the spell is past or future.
I think this is a great example of where Riot can tighten up its templating and make both cards (and any more like it) better, but I think the "play" keyword removes ambiguity because it takes precedent over any ambiguous timing details in the effect text.
FortyDust, I'm interesting what you think of the version I proposed after BlueSpark's comment. Specifically, "Deal 4 damage to an enemy unit. All excess damage targets the enemy Nexus."
I think this is fairly concise, uses the same notion of excess damage that exists for Overwhelm (i.e. it goes through whether or not a blocker remains alive/in play/in combat prior to damage), and specifically mentions the Nexus as a target for damage to help the player understand that the unit is not the unique target of the spell.
That last part is a little tricky because you don't specifically tell the spell to target the nexus, and I think you're right that if you wanted to get very precise and clear, you'd end up very wordy (e.g. "Target a unit and the enemy Nexus, and deal 4 damage to the unit, with excess damage hitting the enemy Nexus.")
I agree that including the word "have" would make the interaction more obvious, but I think the use of the "play" keyword is what ultimately makes this wording clear/deterministic.
The effect occurs when you play Mageseeker Investigator from your hand, and unlike some games (e.g. MTG), playing a unit doesn't interact with the stack, so the only way to trigger this is by playing a spell prior to playing this unit.
With respect to the "elusives in expedition mode" problem, if that were the only problem with elusives then I'd say the real fix would just be to rebalance the various bundles and their frequencies to limit the number of elusives that show up. Most elusives have fairly low HP, and can be beaten with numerous removal tools so long as they are not overrunning the board.
The problem of elusives in constructed is harder. Riot has said that they want other types of aggro decks to be be able to push damage faster, and it seems like they're trying to create a bit of a push-pull in the metagame around which aggro decks are best. I wonder if the only real fix for elusives is new cards (especially new AOE) to help control players.
Okay, that's very different from what I thought you meant. Now that you've clarified, I think that's an awful plan. Elusives don't need to be able to get free hits in on the Nexus more than they already do, and it certainly wouldn't be fair for them to be dealing 2x their attack power simply because you tried to block them.
The phrase "strikes the enemy nexus before the blocker" doesn't really make sense because it would seem to be some kind of inverse overwhelm, where you only deal damage to the blocker if you have excess damage after killing the nexus. Is a fair rewording of your rule "This unit deals damage as though it is not blocked, unless its blocker has Elusive"? This would mean they can only deal attack damage to enemy units with Elusive, and may often get killed during a block despite dealing damage to the enemy nexus.
If my rephrasing is a correct understanding of your meaning, I actually think that's a fairly creative reworking of the keyword. I do wonder, though, if that starts to look a bit too much like Ephemeral with respect to how that deck archetype intends to play out, where the one-turn Ephemeral units are replaced with disposable face damage that frequently gets blocked to death the first turn it attacks.
I like that you're thinking outside the box on this, but it's not clear how the "Play or Attack" would resolve, since it can grant "an ally" (rather than all allies) but there's no opportunity to target things with "Attack" abilities today.
Also, I don't really get why your version revives herself. The distinguishing features of Kalista in League seem to be:
From a flavor/fantasy standpoint, I think the existing Kalista really checks a lot of those boxes. Some problems, though, are that you don't really want to use her on offense or she'll die before she levels up, and the bond isn't permanent.
What about this:
In this version, the bond is permanent, so things like recall don't leave you stuck with two meh units when you replay the bonded unit. It also buffs both of them when they're both in play. So, Kalista is still vulnerable to a fair number of damage-based removal spells, but so long as her Oathsworn is in play she's a bit sturdier than she is today. Additionally, her level-up condition has changed to be focused on enemy deaths, as she is much more focused on killing enemies one after another in LoL.
I suspect this keyword is fairly problematic. As long as you can play cheap token minions, this keyword operates very similarly to perma-stealth. Seems like it would be easily abused in a class like Paladin that can fairly easily buff and generate tokens.
The Elusive keyword on a unit means that unit can only be blocked by units which also have the Elusive keyword.
This has become rather common because Legends of Runeterra features a "spell mana" reserve that lets you carry over up to 3 mana between rounds (with the cavaet that it can only be used on spells). So, when you play your first Elusive unit in Round 3, you frequently have access to an additional mana to spend on buffs, making it a huge threat immediately.
By contrast, most hard removal in the game doesn't come down until around 5 or 6 mana, and the buffs get your elusive units out of range of most damage-based removal, so this makes it pretty easy to bash your opponent in with unblockable units before they can rally a reasonable response.
The fact that the bond is so easily broken is a big part of the problem, but it seems like it would be more thematic if she were bonded to another champion, and if that bond occurred at the start of the game. What about something like this:
Level 1: "Start of game: I bond with another Champion in your deck. Grant it +2|+0 while we're both in play."
Level 2: "The first time I attack this game, revive my bonded Champion attacking."
I can imagine some ways this would get busted, so it may be too strong, but if they want to leave her as an aggressively stated 3-drop, she needs to also have the bond occur either at start of game or as a support trigger, because today needing to play her into a decent unit means she comes down well after she's useful.
Sounds like a bug. I expect what's happening here is that Lux checks for progress updates when spells resolve, but that there are only really two cases where LoR considers the spells resolved:
So, rather than check after every spell on the stack, Lux checks once the stack is done. This loses your extra progress. If you had instead had something like Purify as your means of removing barrier, I think this would have worked exactly as intended and won you the game.
There was a similar recommendation around Karma's spell duplication in the balance predictions thread. At the end of the day, lots of CCGs use stacks to resolve spells and spell-like abilities, and once something goes on the stack, the only way to remove it is with something else on the stack that explicitly removes it (e.g. Deny in LoR). However, you could imagine a case where, when its turn comes up to resolve, a skill fizzles based on the condition you described. Ultimately I think that is a worse way to handle skills.
First, this would be inconsistent with similar CCGs, and hewing close to the behavior of other games makes it easier for players familiar with the genre to ramp onto a game.
Second, and more importantly, I think this version makes sense in the context of the fantasy of the game. The skill was triggered, and stopping its source shouldn't necessarily stop the effect of the skill. Let's take Avarosan Marksman as an example. The Marksman enters the battlefield and fires off his arrow. You kill him with Blade's Edge. Should that stop the arrow that's already been fired? Anyone imaging this playing out in physical space would agree that it shouldn't. The game may not play out in physical space, but the fantasy of the game, of these clashing armies and their Champions, should translate cleanly into the rules of the game.
Have you considered playing Expeditions? That tends to have a lot of variety. Also, it's kind of funny that you seem to have signed up specifically to say goodbye.
Yeah, it definitely sounds like a bug, either with Katarina specifically because of her recall, or with Quick Attack more broadly. Seems like it's worth experimenting with.
The problem with trying to change this is that the spell is already on the stack, even if she dies. If her effect was simply that the spell triggers twice, that would be one thing, but she casts it twice, so it ends up on the stack and I think it would be less intuitive if these spells were somehow removed in a way no other spell can be removed from the stack.
Yes, they're generally overstated units, but if they die to any damage source (i.e. can be killed before combat by taking any damage at all), then anyone playing Ephemeral units gets both the punishment of buying temporary units (as you said) and a new extra punishment of often losing those units to extremely cheap removal tools before they could eke any value out of those temporary attackers. This change would certainly answer the most broken Ephemeral problems in the game, but it does it by nerfing Ephemeral into the ground and making it largely unplayable as a strategy.
This just seems like another nerf into the ground. If you lose Elusive when you attack, then your units are bad for most of the time you have them (that is, you've traded one guaranteed nexus strike for a relatively weak unit). You seem to think this would make players more thoughtful with their attacks (e.g. I build up a board of Elusive units before attacking), but really that would mean you have two choices - build a board while doing nothing else for a while, or attack with one unit every other turn and be stuck with weak non-Elusive units afterwards. The former gets beaten down by any other aggro deck, and the latter never builds up enough pressure on board to win against midrange or control. It's lose lose.
The issue comes up when your buff exceeds the remaining HP of the unit. Let's say I've played a +3|+3 buff on an injured 3/1 unit, made a trade, and now my unit is a 6/2. Does removing the buff kill my unit because -3|-3 would leave it at 3/-1? Does removing the buff only do -3|-1 so that my unit returns to its earlier 3/1 state? If it's the former, a lot of buffs will seem kind of pointless because you're frequently getting a 1-for-2 trade out of your units (i.e. you lose a unit and a buff to make a trade). If it's the latter, then the debuff is going to be no more inconsistent than it is now in terms of how many stats are dropped off.
I get it from a flavor standpoint, but by the very nature of what your'e suggesting, it's going to limit deckbuilding options. Take your example: if you want to use Death Lotus and Vladimir today, you have several options:
Your version removes one of those three options, and notably it removes the one that helps most with deck diversity because of the rules around Champion inclusions in a deck. In your version, if a particular signature spells is massively OP in a given archetype, then that Champion will be an auto-include even if you'd like to try to build that deck with a different Champion or set of Champions.
The help text for Quick Attack reads "While attacking, strikes before its blocker." In that way, it behaves just like Overwhelm - it only applies during combat, and only with respect to the blocking unit if such a unit exists.
Almaniarra, you posted change suggestions for over 10% of the cards in the game, and I'm having a hard time engaging on your various suggested nerfs/buffs. Would you please organize your nerfs into themes (e.g. "Deck archetype X seems like it's under-performing, so here are some nerfs/buffs to help fix that."). Right now many of them feel kind of arbitrary and it's hard to understand why you think the change is necessary/what impact it will have on the health of the metagame
Regarding your rule changes:
I continue to be frustrated by the lack of statistics available on decks in LoR - I think that makes it really hard to determine which cards should be nerfed - but if you trust the meta tier lists on Mobalytics, then the cards that need to get hit are going to be the Ionia and Shadow Isles cards that are dominating the top tier decks. Each of those regions show up in about 50% of the best decks, and there's at least one of those two regions in about 85% of top tier decks on the site:
I'm sure they'll find their way to some happy medium with respect to the animations. Some of the things I'm very happy have sped up are the delays between taking an action and seeing it play out (I'm thinking mostly about the unit drop speed and the time to start combat animations)
Another overall improvement, albeit a bit jarring, is the animation for drawing several cards. Card draw is pretty clumsy thanks to a couple of problems Legends of Runeterra has with layout around card draw:
That first issue always means the animation needs more time than in similar games (Hearthstone, MTG Arena) where the deck is on the same side as the drawn card, giving it less screen space to cover.
The second issue gets better as you learn the cards, but it always means you run the risk of mistaking a card in your hand for some other card (especially since art style and color are similar within any given region). This, in turn, means the card has to do its little pause in the middle of the screen to let you know what you've drawn. Most other digital CCGs have information like card names at the top of the card, making them easier to identify and allowing the animators to avoid these kinds of big animations that reinforce what you've drawn. This made drawing several cards pretty tedious from a pacing standpoint.
Now when you play something like Progress Day!, all of the cards seem to draw nearly at once. This is great for pacing, but because of these layout problems it can be harder for players to internalize what exactly they just drew.
While I generally agree that Hecarim does a little too much for his cost, I think you should be careful to just toss aside the rest of the Shadow Isles package around him when you think about his power level.
The champion cards in LoR are the build-arounds of the game, and a lot of what the popular Hecarim decks do today achieves the so called "fantasy" of playing Hecarim - summon a bunch of ethereal creatures, push hard on offense, and have big burst turns where your Ethereal army stomps your opponent.
The question really is "is it too easy to achieve that, and if so why?" Hecarim's overall power level plays a role in that, but the Shadow Isles packages around him prop him up and make the deck as powerful as it is. With that in mind, are there any data aggregation sites yet for LoR? Something like HSReplay, where we can look at win rates for decks, cards, etc.? I've seen that Mobalytics has some content around a meta tier list, but it's not clear whether any of its content is informed by data, and they certainly do not have those kinds of detailed breakdowns.
Haha, I don't think we meant to gang up like that, I think we just all tried to be the first response.
You're 100% right that this wording can be improved, and there's already at least one example (Unstable Voltician) where we see Riot using the wording you're suggesting (i.e. "you've cast"), but it very amusingly works in an untintuitive way whereby it triggers regardless of whether the spell is past or future.
I think this is a great example of where Riot can tighten up its templating and make both cards (and any more like it) better, but I think the "play" keyword removes ambiguity because it takes precedent over any ambiguous timing details in the effect text.
FortyDust, I'm interesting what you think of the version I proposed after BlueSpark's comment. Specifically, "Deal 4 damage to an enemy unit. All excess damage targets the enemy Nexus."
I think this is fairly concise, uses the same notion of excess damage that exists for Overwhelm (i.e. it goes through whether or not a blocker remains alive/in play/in combat prior to damage), and specifically mentions the Nexus as a target for damage to help the player understand that the unit is not the unique target of the spell.
That last part is a little tricky because you don't specifically tell the spell to target the nexus, and I think you're right that if you wanted to get very precise and clear, you'd end up very wordy (e.g. "Target a unit and the enemy Nexus, and deal 4 damage to the unit, with excess damage hitting the enemy Nexus.")
I agree that including the word "have" would make the interaction more obvious, but I think the use of the "play" keyword is what ultimately makes this wording clear/deterministic.
The effect occurs when you play Mageseeker Investigator from your hand, and unlike some games (e.g. MTG), playing a unit doesn't interact with the stack, so the only way to trigger this is by playing a spell prior to playing this unit.
With respect to the "elusives in expedition mode" problem, if that were the only problem with elusives then I'd say the real fix would just be to rebalance the various bundles and their frequencies to limit the number of elusives that show up. Most elusives have fairly low HP, and can be beaten with numerous removal tools so long as they are not overrunning the board.
The problem of elusives in constructed is harder. Riot has said that they want other types of aggro decks to be be able to push damage faster, and it seems like they're trying to create a bit of a push-pull in the metagame around which aggro decks are best. I wonder if the only real fix for elusives is new cards (especially new AOE) to help control players.