I completely agree - this card is far more viable with its current behavior (as opposed to its stated behavior). But I can imagine a case for why they wanted him as printed. Basically this:
His base stats are about average for a 5-drop follower in LoR
Once buffed, his stats are close to the average stats for a 7-drop, and he gains quick attack (making his the biggest quick attack follower before buffs)
So, you could imagine that they wanted to balance Unstable Voltician such that he's playable early and strong in the late game.
The best corollary in LoR is Enlightened cards - they're bland but playable before the trigger goes off, and then they get much better later in the game. But those notably gain their bonus while in play as well, so perhaps that comparison doesn't help clarify the intention behind this interaction.
"Deal 4 damage to a unit. If that unit dies, deal excess damage to the enemy Nexus"
Sorry if this sounds nitpicky, but I'd like to point out that "If that unit dies" is a problematic way of wording it; after all, the excess damage applies to the nexus in full if the unit is removed (e.g. recalled) by other means before Final Spark resolves.
In general, however, I think your idea is sound.
That's a good callout. I've played a little Lux/Karma, but I haven't seen this interaction with Final Spark and recall.
Perhaps something like "Deal 4 damage to an enemy unit. All excess damage targets the enemy Nexus." This will inevitably have a lot of the same confusion that some folks have had around how Overwhelm works when blockers are removed from combat (i.e. removing the blocker just means all damage goes through, even though there's still a "blocker"), but at least it will behave consistently with Overwhelm, and now the enemy Nexus is an explicit target in the text.
if they do new spells that work this way i can see them doing a new keyword to clarify better but with final spark as the only case i dont see a point, besides HS is so inconsistent with keywords that i think your point about the other card games is only half right if it was so important HS team would make it right for the get go, i think you are being a little hard on riot on this it is a beta and a keyword just for one spell would feel superfolus IMO.
I don't think they need to do a new keyword - in fact it would be pretty over-the-top to make a keyword for one card. What I think they need to do is change the text of Final Spark so that it doesn't use a keyword. Keywords are for common interactions, and this is very plainly a one-off interaction. To BlueSpark's point, if it just explicitly mentioned that the Nexus is an automatic secondary target for the spell, it wouldn't need Overwhelm and the lack of fizzle would be entirely consistent with other spells (e.g. "Deal 4 damage to a unit. If that unit dies, deal excess damage to the enemy Nexus").
I certainly don't mean to be overly harsh to Riot, and it's true that this is in beta. However, Legends of Runeterra has been in development for years and years (see https://www.pcgamesn.com/legends-of-runeterra/nine-year-development), and this kind of consistency is really important for helping new and experienced players learn the game. There's a reason that modern MTG cards are so well-templated - their years and years of experience have made them very good at it. Riot should be able to take some of the learnings from these other games and their inconsistency snafus and apply them to LoR.
With respect to your criticism of Hearthstone, I actually think their keyword consistency is very good lately, and they've made major strides in retroactively fixing inconsistencies in old cards (e.g. Druid of the Claw's former lack of a transform keyword). I did mention above some of the problems they faced with inconsistent "whenever" vs "after" triggers, but they've laid out clear rules for how those should work, and tried very hard to fix any inconsistencies there. Moreover, there are clear expectations for what they should do, so players can easily know whether a card's behavior is intended or a bug.
Ultimately I don't mean to sound angry about any of this. I don't expect Riot's work to be perfect - there are examples across all CCGs of inconsistencies that make the game harder for players. But the framework/point of view I set forth is what I think they should be trying to do/striving for, and Final Spark is a clear example of where they can improve on this.
Quote From meisterz39To your second point, don't think it's really possible to just let Runeterra be Runeterra. It exists in a highly saturated CCG marketplace, with lots of people coming to it after years of playing games like Hearthstone and MTG. These kinds of preconceived understandings and comparisons exist for a reason, and I think Riot knows they're operating within them. In fact, I think they said they were highly inspired by those games, and so these comparisons are in many ways built in.
But that raises the question of keywords that are already inconsistent across different games. Is there a consensus about which is the "master" game, whose template other games are expected to follow? You might be tempted to say that should obviously be Magic, but there are plenty of players who have never played that, particularly in the PC and mobile markets.
I think, perhaps, I've done a bad job of explaining my point of view. Here it is at a high level:
Templating and keywords are extremely import to making a CCG comprehensible - both should be entirely consistent in the way they're applied within a game. No template or keyword should be used only to approximately match the intended behavior - instead, different templating and/or keywords should be used to make sure there's no ambiguity about what a template or keyword means.
People are natural pattern matchers, and will try to find ways to conform new information to preconceived notions about similar information. In this case, that means looking for similar templating and keywords to previous CCGs. This is entirely unavoidable when you're creating a new product in an existing marketplace.
Riot doesn't need to treat any game as the "master CCG," but when it draws inspiration from MTG, Hearthstone, or any other game, the designers should be aware of how players who know those games will react to the templating/keywords that ultimately describe those inspirations.
With a marketplace as heavily saturated as the CCG marketplace today, leveraging similar templates and keywords to the most commonly played games in the marketplace (MTG and Hearthstone) makes it easier for folks looking for a new CCG to start playing LoR
Sounds a lot like my earlier confusion with how the "survive damage" effects interact with barrier. I guess it's consistent, although it seems highly unintuitive.
but lets analyze this for a sec: to do that you need to be at least in round 10 control lux and karma , use at least 6 mana on spells to get { if the spell wasnt dawn and dusk} a extra shot on final spark . dont you think after all these loops [ and the opponent didnt have removal for them after all this time] you should get something else instead of a fizzle? besides if riot do more overwhelm spells in the future this interaction would be the rule, and if they dont this will be inconsistent with other spells but will be such a fringe case that i dont think they would see it as a problem, its not like final spark karma is dominating the ladder and is a fun combo that take time and effort to do so they should let it slide :D also why dont we ask riot if is intended? they made the game after all they should know the answer and we would be more in peace with a confirmation.
Just to make my position entirely clear - I absolutely believe that the Lux/KarmaFinal Spark interaction is intentional on the part of Riot, and an entirely positive interaction that makes playing such a deck fun and rewarding. I just think they are wrong to use the Overwhelm keyword, which very plainly doesn't apply to spells and makes this interaction less clear. Quick summary of why:
Overwhelm help text clearly only applies to offensive combat
Spells that cause Overwhelm units to attack other units (the closest corollary to Final Spark) do not cause excess damage to hit the Nexus
All other spells that lose their target as a result of some spell higher up the stack fizzle instead of triggering
It's certainly possible that they could create more Overwhelm burn spells in the future, and that they could modify the help text to properly explain how Overwhelm is intended to behave on units vs. spells, but today all indications are that it is designed to be a keyword that uniquely applies to attacking units and has no business on a spell. And frankly, I think if they do choose to make some official alternative meaning for Overwhelm, that meaning will be better encapsulated by some other keyword that is unique to spells.
To help illustrate my point, consider this example. Imagine if they didn't include the Burst speed keyword for spells, but instead had spells with the Quick Attack keyword as stand-ins for the Burst keyword. That would be very confusing for players because they'd be using one keyword to define two loosely related things, and the help text for Quick Attack today doesn't mean anything for spells. Those players would quickly learn that alternative meaning for Quick Attack, but it's very clear that having two keywords is better for clarity.
I'm 99% sure I played him at least once in an Expedition and he entered the board with the buff intact. So at the very least, it's not like his printed card effect doesn't work. However, I guess his effect may also trigger the way meisterz described, which clearly looks like a bug.
Yeah, sorry, I wasn't clear. It works fine if you've already met the "cast a 6+ cost spell" condition, it just also works if you cast the spell later in the game after he's already in play
I think there's a real problem here with respect to the Overwhelm keyword. It's clearly intended to match the Trample keyword in MTG,
That's actually a pretty big assumption, considering how many other aspects of the game fail to map exactly to their Magic or Hearthstone counterparts. Maybe it's better to just let Runeterra be Runeterra and discard expectations that are based on other games.
In the end, once you know how Final Spark works, you're not likely to forget it, so maybe this isn't a great hill to die on? I don't think we're likely to see a lot of Overwhelm spells in the future, so it's probably a moot point.
Haha, Final Spark is certainly not a hill worth dying on, but I think it highlights a misuse of a keyword, and Riot ought not to do that. CCGs are full of keywords designed to make games comprehensible while still ensuring economy of text. Keywords should describe rules which are entirely consistent in their application - if they're not, then ultimately the keyword makes things less clear, not more clear. Final Spark is perhaps the only example of this today in LoR, but it's still a very clear case of using a keyword to mean something that only kind of fits it.
To your second point, don't think it's really possible to just let Runeterra be Runeterra. It exists in a highly saturated CCG marketplace, with lots of people coming to it after years of playing games like Hearthstone and MTG. These kinds of preconceived understandings and comparisons exist for a reason, and I think Riot knows they're operating within them. In fact, I think they said they were highly inspired by those games, and so these comparisons are in many ways built in.
When I say Overwhelm is the problem because it doesn't work like Trample, I don't mean that it has to be like Trample. I just mean that everything (with one very odd exception) in the game points to it being exactly like Trample. The help text reads "Excess damage I deal to my blocker is dealt to the enemy Nexus," and when its attached to a unit it triggers exclusively on attacks (i.e. not from "unit fights another unit" type spells, and not from blocking). It's fine if they want to change it to mean something broader than Trample, but they should only use it when it actually applies.
EDIT: Just one follow-up here - LoR is a game that has been under wraps and in development for years. While it's certainly nitpicky to complain about mildly counter-intuitive wording on one card or another, particularly since it's the kind of thing you learn once and remember, I don't think it's fair to give Riot a pass on bad templating after so much time to get it right. This is a huge part of card games, and Hearthstone got caught up with a lot of problems around their "whenever" vs "after" trigger orders a while back, and then had to issue some bug fixes with mixed results to improve consistency. It's better now, but it was pretty messy at the time.
Because it's currently the only burn spell in the game with Overwhelm, I don't think it's correct to say the interaction is wrong. It just proves that Overwhelm takes precedence over fizzle, that's all. It's not like the fizzle rules are written down anywhere. If they were written down, they might say, "If a spell's target no longer exists when it's time for the spell to resolve, the spell will fizzle unless it has Overwhelm, in which case it will affect the enemy Nexus if possible."
As long as any future Overwhelm burn spells behave the same, it's totally fine.
I think there's a real problem here with respect to the Overwhelm keyword. It's clearly intended to match the Trample keyword in MTG, but there's a reason the Trample keyword doesn't show up on burn spells in MTG - its behavior simply doesn't map to how instant and sorcery spells target their damage.
LoR is clearly trying to strike the same paradigm with spells by having them fizzle when they lose their stated targets, and with Overwhelm only triggering during offensive combat. So, if Riot wants a spell like Final Spark to make sense, it shouldn't use a combat keyword, it should explicitly state its targets and/or behavior. Some potential changes that would make this work:
Deal 4 damage to an enemy unit. If that unit dies, deal any excess damage to the enemy Nexus.
Deal 4 damage to an enemy unit. Excess damage continues to the left.
Admittedly, that last one changes the behavior of the spell, but it enables the damage to carry on to other targets despite the death of the original target.
Also agree on Relentless Pursuit. I'd say 5-mana would be acceptable. Rally is extremely underrated as an effect and most other cards with the same effect come with a huge cost or specific requirement (like Katarina or Garen)
I actually think Relentless Pursuit is about right in terms of its cost.
First, lets consider some comparisons: Shunpo is basically Relentless Pursuit + Mystic Shot, which adds up to their combined mana value and incurs a minor "bundling tax" (i.e. the spell is slow instead of fast, and targets are more restricted). If you adjust Relentless Pursuit up to 5, that math gets out of wack and you basically kill it in favor of Shunpo. (Yes, one is fast rather than slow, but I think there aren't a ton of cases where that will matter more than the chance to ping an enemy unit before combat.)
The other issue with dramatically increasing its cost is that Demacia really needs ways to leverage its advantage on board. Demacian "removal" tools mostly come in the form of unit buffs/combat tricks, so if they can't consistently push the attack and leverage a wide mid-sized board, they're basically dead in the water and relegated to a supporting role.
That second point really highlights the real issue here - it's too easy to drop a small Demacian support package into a deck that wants to attack (Hecarim resurrection decks, Elusive decks, etc.) and abuse the heck out of it. Instead, I would play a little more with what the effect of the card is.
Perhaps a better nerf would be to change the text to read "If you have a Demacian ally, Rally." This would leave it as a powerful tool for folks trying to make a Demacian deck work, but would limit the ease of abuse in other decks that only run it to make aggro shells OP.
I've been running a couple of copies of Unstable Voltician in my Lux/Heimerdinger deck, and he has an unintuitive interaction with 6+ cost spells. Specifically, while his text implies he is granted bonuses at the moment he is summoned, the reality is that he is granted an aura that activates whenever you cast your first 6+ cost spell.
Obviously this makes him a better card (play him on 5, play a 6 drop spell on 6 to buff him), so I can't really complain. However, just based on the wording, the behavior seems wrong, and the existing behavior would be entirely described by just dropping "when I'm summoned" bit.
I would argue that this interaction is definitely, but intentionally, wrong.
Typically, if a spell would kill a unit, any other spells that target that unit below it in the stack simply fizzle. In that way, the second Final Spark ought to just fizzle, as it no longer has a valid target.
That said, I think it's intentionally designed this way because:
It's kind of consistent with the Overwhelm keyword's behavior (though I'd argue that's tenuous at best - Overwhelm on attack works because the original target is the Nexus, and it's notable that a spell that causes an Overwhelm unit to attack another unit doesn't cause Overwhelm damage)
It makes Lux/Karma a compelling combo to play with, and ultimately the devs want people to explore lots of ways to combine champions and regions.
+ to the point about Chain Vest. The only deck I can imagine where it's not just a very specific tech card would be a Crimson deck, but since that means running Noxus/Freljord, it's a pretty unattractive option across the board.
Given that you're running Ionia, and that the deck is aggro, I would expect Rush to be better than Radiant Strike most of the time. It's slightly worse on your champions, but the extra +1 HP probably isn't doing much in that case anyway, and the value of having a follower walk away from a block entirely unscathed seems much higher.
I'd also probably consider Vanguard Bannerman over Dawnspeakers. As mentioned above, you don't have a lot of units, most of them are units you want to stick to the board for a turn or two at least anyway. So you're probably not getting that to trigger more than once or twice before you've either won or run out of steam. Given how much Demacia you have in the deck, it seems better to instead run a unit with a relevant body that buffs on play rather than end of round (and conveniently comes down on curve right after your champions).
If this were Hearthstone, I'd be inclined to agree, because those guys have no qualms about letting a bad meta fester for months at a time.
But Riot is committed to biweekly patches, so by the time a broken card surfaces and becomes truly oppressive, it's probably only another week at most before it's corrected.
That's a fair point - the frequent patches give Riot a lot more room to have these kinds of amplifying issues without ruining the game for an extended period of time.
That said, I think it really would be pretty easy to abuse the SI shell with other Champions today from other regions (see my previous two examples), and whether or not the amplification is the core of the problem, it's something players will latch on to as being a significant, negative impact on their enjoyment. There are lots of other card games to choose from, and players will only suffer so many bad metagames supported by The Rekindler before it becomes a nerf it or leave it situation.
Regarding The Rekindler, I don't think it would be appropriate to nerf it unless you can come up with a couple of other decks where it's truly oppressive.
If Hecarim is pretty much the only time Rekindler is a problem, that points to the real problem being Hecarim.
While there's no question that the Hecarim/The Rekindler combo is uniquely frustrating (I suspect in part due to the overall power level of SI to begin with), I don't think it's inappropriate to think about whether each piece of that combo is itself broken.
The average 6-drop in this game is about a 5/6, so when The Rekindler's play effect triggers, it's basically guaranteed to put stats on the board that are at least vanilla and given you an effective "7th Champion" in a game that wants you to build around Champion cards. This effect is best abused with Hecarim because he makes The Rekindler a 6 mana 14/14 spread across 4 bodies in a game with fairly limited removal and AOE tools. There are other champions that get close to that too, and have relevant keywords to make them attractive choices for abuse (Tryndamere or Darius, for example). They're not as good though, by some margin, so they aren't being abused yet. But if all they do is change Hecarim, I expect you'll just see one of them take over for these decks.
Quote From FortyDust
In fact, Rekindler could make a good canary in the coal mine for detecting troublesome Champions in general.
This is a pretty shocking suggestion. Leaving a card in the game as a "canary in the coal mine" is a disastrous way to design a game. This design philosophy basically means that every time the balance team screws up in a way that interacts with that card (in this example, makes a broken Champion), the resulting problematic metagame is worse than it needs to be.
Frankly, I think The Rekindler should see a much more radical change than a simple stat or cost nerf. Leave it as a 6 mana 4/4 and change the text to resurrect followers. It's crazy that Shadow Isles has access to so many uniquely powerful removal and card advantage tools.
With Hecarim, I think FortyDust hit the nail on the head - there's kind of too much going on with him to make any simple nerf stick. (Except maybe a cost nerf, but those tend to either fail or make a deck so slow as to not be competitive, which is probably too swingy a nerf.)
I do think one thing you could do to limit his power is changing his level up condition. Bystekhilcar argued that he needs to go on the offensive, making any health nerf very swingy. I think that's wrong, and I'd argue that his level up condition is a big part of why it's wrong*. Because Hecarim's level up condition is a "you've done X" condition and not an "I've seen X" condition, you don't really need to worry about having him stick to the board, so long as you can consistently get a new copy of him.
As DoubleSummon mentioned in the original post, the first Hecarim is often manageable, but the redundancy of a deck running Hecarim, The Rekindler, and even The Harrowing (not to mention some of the best card draw in the game) means you have to deal with a lot of Hecarims after turn 6. It also means your opponent doesn't really care whether you trade with him - if you don't, your opponent gets to deal tons of damage, and if you do, you lose some resources and your opponent powers up his or her late game Hecarim plays. It's win win, especially if you trade and your opponent has something like Rhasa the Sunderer in hand.
So, really, to nerf him, Riot needs to decrease that kind of consistent win/win scenario the deck can produce. I think changing his level-up to be something more like "I've seen 4+ Ephemeral allies attack" goes a long way to making him weaker in the mid game turns, but leaves The Harrowing as a kind of game ending play. (Maybe also decrease his HP a tiny bit to make trading with him on board a little easier.) If he's still too powerful after that, you could probably do one of two things. Option one, nerf his leveled up version to say "Ephemeral followers have +2|+0" to avoid cases where several leveled up Ephemeral Hecarims power each other up a ton. Option 2, nerf The Harrowing so that it resurrects unique units.
* You could probably drop his health to be so low that he wouldn't be able to attack (e.g. at 3 HP, he'd be very vulnerable to all manner of removal before combat). If his health were so low that he could never get an attack in, that would be a very swingy nerf, but I think he could easily go as low as 4 HP and it wouldn't make much of a difference in terms of how these Hecarim decks operate today.
Just accept that Barrier negates damage after it has been dealt, and everything falls into place for this and many other interactions (such as Overwhelm).
It is also helpful to remember that "negates" only means that the damage (which definitely was dealt and definitely exists) has no effect -- that is to say, it is not subtracted from the protected unit's Health.
Drain damage, however, is apparently not the same as normal damage, it is more of a zero-sum game: The Health you regain has to come from somewhere, so if nothing was actually taken from an enemy, nothing is gained by you. (But the damage is still being "dealt" and negated by Barrier.)
The very fact that you have to special case drain here is my problem with it. I prefer to think that Barrier absorbs all damage directed at a unit, which is fine for effects like drain and overwhelm; barriers don't have HP, so they produce zero drain, and the excess damage was never going at that unit anyway, so it still goes through.
The problem is that the unit isn't taking damage, because any damage the would have taken was absorbed by their barrier, so the absorption model fails for these "survive damage" effects. I know it's nitpicky, but that's how I see it.
Pyke + Ashe on the field would be pretty nasty, I imagine. Or Pyke + Shen.
Yeah, if you could get both up and running you'd easily win the game, but I really do think he'd be fairly balanced despite those wacky offensive combos. He has to stick to the board for two attacks in order to upgrade, and he's consistently vulnerable to mid-tier removal tools (especially prior to leveling up, when he hasn't gained regen yet).
You could grant him elusive on a defensive round with some Piltover & Zaun stuff, but then you're not pairing him the best champion partners.
I never really played LoL, but this seems like a fun exercise regardless. Here's my take on Pyke:
I do really like the thought of "when I kill, Rally"--it reminds me a bit of HS Gonk Druid. But I fear your numbers are way overstat'ed--challenger elusive regeneration would be busted on its own for 3 mana before even considering the ability to challenge a low-health unit and rally.
Yeah - Pyke isn't supposed to be able to gain life (which is why my leveled up version only gains attack). If I had a reasonable way to template that on the card, I probably would. Really, I want him to be able to pick off one or two tiny units in a turn, but as is, you're right that with a burst speed health buff he'd be massively OP.
?
You know the little red bottle icon on your L2 means regeneration, right?
Sorry to be skipping over the rest of your comment in this quote, but I think you've misunderstood me. When I said "he shouldn't gain life," I didn't mean healing, I meant increasing his max HP. This is based on his "Gift of the Drowned Ones" passive: https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/champions/pyke/ which grants him regen but blocks any life increases.
If he's permanently capped at 3 HP, I think the OP nature of his abilities are pretty well kept in check. Yes, he has the capacity to kill a <=2 power unit every combat and start to go off with loads of attacks, but every time he attacks or defends a unit he'll be left vulnerable because of the many different ways there are to deal 1, 2, or 3 extra damage to a unit in combat.
I completely agree - this card is far more viable with its current behavior (as opposed to its stated behavior). But I can imagine a case for why they wanted him as printed. Basically this:
So, you could imagine that they wanted to balance Unstable Voltician such that he's playable early and strong in the late game.
The best corollary in LoR is Enlightened cards - they're bland but playable before the trigger goes off, and then they get much better later in the game. But those notably gain their bonus while in play as well, so perhaps that comparison doesn't help clarify the intention behind this interaction.
That's a good callout. I've played a little Lux/Karma, but I haven't seen this interaction with Final Spark and recall.
Perhaps something like "Deal 4 damage to an enemy unit. All excess damage targets the enemy Nexus." This will inevitably have a lot of the same confusion that some folks have had around how Overwhelm works when blockers are removed from combat (i.e. removing the blocker just means all damage goes through, even though there's still a "blocker"), but at least it will behave consistently with Overwhelm, and now the enemy Nexus is an explicit target in the text.
I don't think they need to do a new keyword - in fact it would be pretty over-the-top to make a keyword for one card. What I think they need to do is change the text of Final Spark so that it doesn't use a keyword. Keywords are for common interactions, and this is very plainly a one-off interaction. To BlueSpark's point, if it just explicitly mentioned that the Nexus is an automatic secondary target for the spell, it wouldn't need Overwhelm and the lack of fizzle would be entirely consistent with other spells (e.g. "Deal 4 damage to a unit. If that unit dies, deal excess damage to the enemy Nexus").
I certainly don't mean to be overly harsh to Riot, and it's true that this is in beta. However, Legends of Runeterra has been in development for years and years (see https://www.pcgamesn.com/legends-of-runeterra/nine-year-development), and this kind of consistency is really important for helping new and experienced players learn the game. There's a reason that modern MTG cards are so well-templated - their years and years of experience have made them very good at it. Riot should be able to take some of the learnings from these other games and their inconsistency snafus and apply them to LoR.
With respect to your criticism of Hearthstone, I actually think their keyword consistency is very good lately, and they've made major strides in retroactively fixing inconsistencies in old cards (e.g. Druid of the Claw's former lack of a transform keyword). I did mention above some of the problems they faced with inconsistent "whenever" vs "after" triggers, but they've laid out clear rules for how those should work, and tried very hard to fix any inconsistencies there. Moreover, there are clear expectations for what they should do, so players can easily know whether a card's behavior is intended or a bug.
Ultimately I don't mean to sound angry about any of this. I don't expect Riot's work to be perfect - there are examples across all CCGs of inconsistencies that make the game harder for players. But the framework/point of view I set forth is what I think they should be trying to do/striving for, and Final Spark is a clear example of where they can improve on this.
I think, perhaps, I've done a bad job of explaining my point of view. Here it is at a high level:
Sounds a lot like my earlier confusion with how the "survive damage" effects interact with barrier. I guess it's consistent, although it seems highly unintuitive.
Just to make my position entirely clear - I absolutely believe that the Lux/Karma Final Spark interaction is intentional on the part of Riot, and an entirely positive interaction that makes playing such a deck fun and rewarding. I just think they are wrong to use the Overwhelm keyword, which very plainly doesn't apply to spells and makes this interaction less clear. Quick summary of why:
It's certainly possible that they could create more Overwhelm burn spells in the future, and that they could modify the help text to properly explain how Overwhelm is intended to behave on units vs. spells, but today all indications are that it is designed to be a keyword that uniquely applies to attacking units and has no business on a spell. And frankly, I think if they do choose to make some official alternative meaning for Overwhelm, that meaning will be better encapsulated by some other keyword that is unique to spells.
To help illustrate my point, consider this example. Imagine if they didn't include the Burst speed keyword for spells, but instead had spells with the Quick Attack keyword as stand-ins for the Burst keyword. That would be very confusing for players because they'd be using one keyword to define two loosely related things, and the help text for Quick Attack today doesn't mean anything for spells. Those players would quickly learn that alternative meaning for Quick Attack, but it's very clear that having two keywords is better for clarity.
Yeah, sorry, I wasn't clear. It works fine if you've already met the "cast a 6+ cost spell" condition, it just also works if you cast the spell later in the game after he's already in play
Haha, Final Spark is certainly not a hill worth dying on, but I think it highlights a misuse of a keyword, and Riot ought not to do that. CCGs are full of keywords designed to make games comprehensible while still ensuring economy of text. Keywords should describe rules which are entirely consistent in their application - if they're not, then ultimately the keyword makes things less clear, not more clear. Final Spark is perhaps the only example of this today in LoR, but it's still a very clear case of using a keyword to mean something that only kind of fits it.
To your second point, don't think it's really possible to just let Runeterra be Runeterra. It exists in a highly saturated CCG marketplace, with lots of people coming to it after years of playing games like Hearthstone and MTG. These kinds of preconceived understandings and comparisons exist for a reason, and I think Riot knows they're operating within them. In fact, I think they said they were highly inspired by those games, and so these comparisons are in many ways built in.
When I say Overwhelm is the problem because it doesn't work like Trample, I don't mean that it has to be like Trample. I just mean that everything (with one very odd exception) in the game points to it being exactly like Trample. The help text reads "Excess damage I deal to my blocker is dealt to the enemy Nexus," and when its attached to a unit it triggers exclusively on attacks (i.e. not from "unit fights another unit" type spells, and not from blocking). It's fine if they want to change it to mean something broader than Trample, but they should only use it when it actually applies.
EDIT: Just one follow-up here - LoR is a game that has been under wraps and in development for years. While it's certainly nitpicky to complain about mildly counter-intuitive wording on one card or another, particularly since it's the kind of thing you learn once and remember, I don't think it's fair to give Riot a pass on bad templating after so much time to get it right. This is a huge part of card games, and Hearthstone got caught up with a lot of problems around their "whenever" vs "after" trigger orders a while back, and then had to issue some bug fixes with mixed results to improve consistency. It's better now, but it was pretty messy at the time.
I think there's a real problem here with respect to the Overwhelm keyword. It's clearly intended to match the Trample keyword in MTG, but there's a reason the Trample keyword doesn't show up on burn spells in MTG - its behavior simply doesn't map to how instant and sorcery spells target their damage.
LoR is clearly trying to strike the same paradigm with spells by having them fizzle when they lose their stated targets, and with Overwhelm only triggering during offensive combat. So, if Riot wants a spell like Final Spark to make sense, it shouldn't use a combat keyword, it should explicitly state its targets and/or behavior. Some potential changes that would make this work:
Admittedly, that last one changes the behavior of the spell, but it enables the damage to carry on to other targets despite the death of the original target.
I actually think Relentless Pursuit is about right in terms of its cost.
First, lets consider some comparisons: Shunpo is basically Relentless Pursuit + Mystic Shot, which adds up to their combined mana value and incurs a minor "bundling tax" (i.e. the spell is slow instead of fast, and targets are more restricted). If you adjust Relentless Pursuit up to 5, that math gets out of wack and you basically kill it in favor of Shunpo. (Yes, one is fast rather than slow, but I think there aren't a ton of cases where that will matter more than the chance to ping an enemy unit before combat.)
The other issue with dramatically increasing its cost is that Demacia really needs ways to leverage its advantage on board. Demacian "removal" tools mostly come in the form of unit buffs/combat tricks, so if they can't consistently push the attack and leverage a wide mid-sized board, they're basically dead in the water and relegated to a supporting role.
That second point really highlights the real issue here - it's too easy to drop a small Demacian support package into a deck that wants to attack (Hecarim resurrection decks, Elusive decks, etc.) and abuse the heck out of it. Instead, I would play a little more with what the effect of the card is.
Perhaps a better nerf would be to change the text to read "If you have a Demacian ally, Rally." This would leave it as a powerful tool for folks trying to make a Demacian deck work, but would limit the ease of abuse in other decks that only run it to make aggro shells OP.
I've been running a couple of copies of Unstable Voltician in my Lux/Heimerdinger deck, and he has an unintuitive interaction with 6+ cost spells. Specifically, while his text implies he is granted bonuses at the moment he is summoned, the reality is that he is granted an aura that activates whenever you cast your first 6+ cost spell.
Obviously this makes him a better card (play him on 5, play a 6 drop spell on 6 to buff him), so I can't really complain. However, just based on the wording, the behavior seems wrong, and the existing behavior would be entirely described by just dropping "when I'm summoned" bit.
I would argue that this interaction is definitely, but intentionally, wrong.
Typically, if a spell would kill a unit, any other spells that target that unit below it in the stack simply fizzle. In that way, the second Final Spark ought to just fizzle, as it no longer has a valid target.
That said, I think it's intentionally designed this way because:
+ to the point about Chain Vest. The only deck I can imagine where it's not just a very specific tech card would be a Crimson deck, but since that means running Noxus/Freljord, it's a pretty unattractive option across the board.
+1 to running Silent Shadowseer and Vanguard Redeemer since you need things to die to level up Lucian and card draw is always good.
I could imagine running one or two copies of Dawn and Dusk as a top end to make a buffed Lucian, Zed, or Senna, Sentinel of Light a game ending attack.
Given that you're running Ionia, and that the deck is aggro, I would expect Rush to be better than Radiant Strike most of the time. It's slightly worse on your champions, but the extra +1 HP probably isn't doing much in that case anyway, and the value of having a follower walk away from a block entirely unscathed seems much higher.
I'd also probably consider Vanguard Bannerman over Dawnspeakers. As mentioned above, you don't have a lot of units, most of them are units you want to stick to the board for a turn or two at least anyway. So you're probably not getting that to trigger more than once or twice before you've either won or run out of steam. Given how much Demacia you have in the deck, it seems better to instead run a unit with a relevant body that buffs on play rather than end of round (and conveniently comes down on curve right after your champions).
That's a fair point - the frequent patches give Riot a lot more room to have these kinds of amplifying issues without ruining the game for an extended period of time.
That said, I think it really would be pretty easy to abuse the SI shell with other Champions today from other regions (see my previous two examples), and whether or not the amplification is the core of the problem, it's something players will latch on to as being a significant, negative impact on their enjoyment. There are lots of other card games to choose from, and players will only suffer so many bad metagames supported by The Rekindler before it becomes a nerf it or leave it situation.
While there's no question that the Hecarim/The Rekindler combo is uniquely frustrating (I suspect in part due to the overall power level of SI to begin with), I don't think it's inappropriate to think about whether each piece of that combo is itself broken.
The average 6-drop in this game is about a 5/6, so when The Rekindler's play effect triggers, it's basically guaranteed to put stats on the board that are at least vanilla and given you an effective "7th Champion" in a game that wants you to build around Champion cards. This effect is best abused with Hecarim because he makes The Rekindler a 6 mana 14/14 spread across 4 bodies in a game with fairly limited removal and AOE tools. There are other champions that get close to that too, and have relevant keywords to make them attractive choices for abuse (Tryndamere or Darius, for example). They're not as good though, by some margin, so they aren't being abused yet. But if all they do is change Hecarim, I expect you'll just see one of them take over for these decks.
This is a pretty shocking suggestion. Leaving a card in the game as a "canary in the coal mine" is a disastrous way to design a game. This design philosophy basically means that every time the balance team screws up in a way that interacts with that card (in this example, makes a broken Champion), the resulting problematic metagame is worse than it needs to be.
Frankly, I think The Rekindler should see a much more radical change than a simple stat or cost nerf. Leave it as a 6 mana 4/4 and change the text to resurrect followers. It's crazy that Shadow Isles has access to so many uniquely powerful removal and card advantage tools.
With Hecarim, I think FortyDust hit the nail on the head - there's kind of too much going on with him to make any simple nerf stick. (Except maybe a cost nerf, but those tend to either fail or make a deck so slow as to not be competitive, which is probably too swingy a nerf.)
I do think one thing you could do to limit his power is changing his level up condition. Bystekhilcar argued that he needs to go on the offensive, making any health nerf very swingy. I think that's wrong, and I'd argue that his level up condition is a big part of why it's wrong*. Because Hecarim's level up condition is a "you've done X" condition and not an "I've seen X" condition, you don't really need to worry about having him stick to the board, so long as you can consistently get a new copy of him.
As DoubleSummon mentioned in the original post, the first Hecarim is often manageable, but the redundancy of a deck running Hecarim, The Rekindler, and even The Harrowing (not to mention some of the best card draw in the game) means you have to deal with a lot of Hecarims after turn 6. It also means your opponent doesn't really care whether you trade with him - if you don't, your opponent gets to deal tons of damage, and if you do, you lose some resources and your opponent powers up his or her late game Hecarim plays. It's win win, especially if you trade and your opponent has something like Rhasa the Sunderer in hand.
So, really, to nerf him, Riot needs to decrease that kind of consistent win/win scenario the deck can produce. I think changing his level-up to be something more like "I've seen 4+ Ephemeral allies attack" goes a long way to making him weaker in the mid game turns, but leaves The Harrowing as a kind of game ending play. (Maybe also decrease his HP a tiny bit to make trading with him on board a little easier.) If he's still too powerful after that, you could probably do one of two things. Option one, nerf his leveled up version to say "Ephemeral followers have +2|+0" to avoid cases where several leveled up Ephemeral Hecarims power each other up a ton. Option 2, nerf The Harrowing so that it resurrects unique units.
* You could probably drop his health to be so low that he wouldn't be able to attack (e.g. at 3 HP, he'd be very vulnerable to all manner of removal before combat). If his health were so low that he could never get an attack in, that would be a very swingy nerf, but I think he could easily go as low as 4 HP and it wouldn't make much of a difference in terms of how these Hecarim decks operate today.
Okay, here's another take, this time on Sylas. Coloring in the art makes it a little harder to read.
The very fact that you have to special case drain here is my problem with it. I prefer to think that Barrier absorbs all damage directed at a unit, which is fine for effects like drain and overwhelm; barriers don't have HP, so they produce zero drain, and the excess damage was never going at that unit anyway, so it still goes through.
The problem is that the unit isn't taking damage, because any damage the would have taken was absorbed by their barrier, so the absorption model fails for these "survive damage" effects. I know it's nitpicky, but that's how I see it.
Yeah, if you could get both up and running you'd easily win the game, but I really do think he'd be fairly balanced despite those wacky offensive combos. He has to stick to the board for two attacks in order to upgrade, and he's consistently vulnerable to mid-tier removal tools (especially prior to leveling up, when he hasn't gained regen yet).
You could grant him elusive on a defensive round with some Piltover & Zaun stuff, but then you're not pairing him the best champion partners.
Sorry to be skipping over the rest of your comment in this quote, but I think you've misunderstood me. When I said "he shouldn't gain life," I didn't mean healing, I meant increasing his max HP. This is based on his "Gift of the Drowned Ones" passive: https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/champions/pyke/ which grants him regen but blocks any life increases.
If he's permanently capped at 3 HP, I think the OP nature of his abilities are pretty well kept in check. Yes, he has the capacity to kill a <=2 power unit every combat and start to go off with loads of attacks, but every time he attacks or defends a unit he'll be left vulnerable because of the many different ways there are to deal 1, 2, or 3 extra damage to a unit in combat.
So really, what I wanted is more like this: