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.
Any unit that has a "when you survive damage" effect will trigger when it has barrier. While that kind of effect is not hugely problematic today, it seems generally unintuitive to me, as the unit hasn't actually taken any damage. Other effects (like the "drain" from Grasp of the Undying) don't treat that as damage.
I never really played LoL, but this seems like a fun exercise regardless. Here's my take on Pyke:
What is the point of "grant me elusive this round"? i dont recall anything that would matter for him to have it anywhere but during attacking, so it might as well just have elusive, which makes the ability a bit weird. Other than that, seems interesting.
I guess if you are not atacking, then you are not elusive, thus you wont trigger level up, so is it designed like that solely for the lvlup condition?
Yeah, it gates the level up a little bit, but it also prevents him from blocking elusive units, which is relevant for the leveled up version (the kill condition is separate from attack, though there's no good way to show that with the card creator I used).
I'm honestly curious to see what everyone thinks about the fact that Lux has been buffed for a THIRD time now, which seems odd. I can't think of too many times in card games where cards were buffed multiple times. Plenty that were nerfed multiple times....=(
Are you sure about three buffs? The latest change is a clear, simple buff, but the only other change I can recall was a pretty major overhaul.
Her update in the "Expeditions Preview Patch" was: her cost was increased, attack was reduced, health was increased, and level up condition and payoff were changed (some good, some bad). Ultimately this is a buff, as the good outweighs the bad, but it's a much larger change than a typical buff.
In the closed beta, Cloud Drinker had an enlightened ability to decrease by 2 instead of 1, and it was insane when combo'd with Karma. Granted you still had to make it to 10 mana, but once you did it was basically GG.
Maybe the trick here is to do something similar: i.e., find a unassuming follower and give it something like Enlightened: whenever you summon a follower, add a copy to your hand. Or cast again this turn / "echo" if that's too much. Basically: HS's Glinda Crowskin, but it doesn't work with champions. A late game 6/6 LS for 3 mana is unimpressive; but three 6/6 LS for 9 mana is another story--you heal to full if they all connect. Same story with Feral Mystic and five 6/6 overwhelms for 10 mana.
This assumes Enlightened isn't fine as it is, and needs some level of fixing. In MTG, cards with a kicker are typically weaker than their non-kickered counterparts, but they are more flexible because they get more value later. Being a bit on the weaker end is an important part of that trade-off. If you didn't have that, you'd just auto-pick kicker cards over non-kicker cards all the time.
Honestly, I think Enlightened is the keyword that's hardest to balance because its condition is inevitable and uninteractable. (Returning to my MTG comparison, at least in that case you can go land dry, or your opponent can destroy your lands.) If the game goes long enough, you'll reach 10 mana gems, so non-Champion cards that benefit from the Enlightened keyword need to have more subdued effects rather than game-ending ones, or you'll see them in all control decks. So, these cards are probably fine as they are for now.
Enlightened is overall a very weak keyword. There's very little value right now for building a deck around it. Even with Karma, it's still very gimmicky and tends to brick a lot against unit swarming.
Maybe if it granted +6/+6. Enlightened should be a type that gives you a crazy powerful ability late game, but forces you to choose between sacrificing units and spells before you get to that point.
I think this is exactly right. Apart from Karma and Anivia, there are very few cards that care about being enlightened, and they're all pretty bad:
Feral Mystic and Emerald Awakener both suffer from the same problem - before turn 10, they're both understated with keywords that rely on high attack values
The upshots of these cards is that they're good, cheap plays in the late game, and you'll be able to combo with them because you'll have mana open after playing them. But there are more consistently powerful plays you can make before turn 10 (e.g. Commander Ledros), and it's just not worth building your whole deck around late game combos right now, particularly when it means trading off this much early game value.
This is actually kind of funny - I suspect Riot saw feedback online about frustrations around how damage is rounded up despite no indication (and a slew of other card games that consistently round down), and so tried to incorporate that into their card text, and went backwards on clarity.
Clearly, the effect is "cut the enemy health in half, rounded down" or "deal damage equal to half the enemy nexus' health, rounded up." In either case, the effect remains the same as it always was, so at least that level of consistency is there. But the text should certainly reflect that more accurately.
I actually think the Overwhelm keyword is fine for a couple of reasons. First, the help text explicitly states "my blocker," and blocking only happens in combat. Second, it's very consistent with MTG's Trample keyword. Trample deals excess damage to your opponent's health, but if you use a spell to force your creature to fight another creature, it doesn't cause trample damage to hit the enemy life total. This is because when you attack, you are targeting enemy HP, so of course any excess damage continues to target that enemy HP. But when two units attack each other as a result of a spell, there's no target for the excess damage, so it goes nowhere.
There isn't at all, assuming you're reading analytically rather than just looking to snipe. I stated clearly that it was an anecdotal example. The difference between this and the earlier instance is that the earlier post gave no real argument or context - just gave an anecdote and said 'this is why it needs to change'. That's attempting to use an anecdote as evidence, which is worthless.
My use-case was purely as an example to better explain what I was saying. It wasn't intended to be supporting evidence - which is why I called out the anecdote myself, twice - it was purely to make it clear what point I was trying to make. By calling it out I was attempting to make it clear that I wasn't trying to hang any point on it, but apparently that was unsuccessful.
Incidentally, the anecdote itself was raised purely in the context of the Fearsome tag and whether removing it makes trades more or less interesting. It wasn't connected to the rest of the card, and wasn't used to make any point in relation to the burn effect or similar. Again, thought that was obvious from the discussion.
I'm not looking to snipe - I just think you're treating your own arguments with a double-standard. I think franky's goal with an anecdote was to demonstrate how significant Ledros' burn damage can be - it, combined with Fearsome, literally flipped a game from a loss to a win by dealing 16 damage in a single turn despite being way behind on the board. You don't have to agree with the argument that the burn damage is the biggest problem with the card, but your anecdote is not somehow unique or better than franky's simply because you like your point of view better.
Your argument around blocking basically says that giving your opponent card advantage and extra burn tools doesn't matter if you're ahead enough on board and can get lethal before your opponent can react/burn you out. This is certainly true, and is the basic thesis for why aggro decks work. But this case requires board-centric play (which clearly doesn't always win you the game, as per franky's example), and it certainly doesn't address the way that the direct damage can be a death knell for anyone trying to play a slower, more controlling strategy that might otherwise beat the common Aggro + Ledros decks in the metagame but for his inevitable burn damage (which was the my complaint with the card to begin with).
Again, I'm willing to believe that removing the Fearsome tag could shift the metagame such that his inevitable long-game lethal will be made less oppressive by simply seeing less of him on the ladder, but his burn is non-trivial and suppressing in his current state.
Are you looking at an old version of the card? I thought they replaced all mentions of "Ready your attack" with the keyword "Rally," with fairly good helptext: "If you don't have one, gain the attack token. You can attack this round."
Removing Fearsome doesn't make blocking interesting, it makes it obvious. If Ledros didn't have Fearsome, you'd always chump block him to ensure he takes very little damage over time. This would be the best play every time to delay the inevitable bounce back to your opponent's hand.
On a surface-level analysis, sure. The inverse (as is currently on live) is that you're shoved into an automatic lose-lose situation in which you either take eight to the dome or bounce him back in two turns max while losing a chunk of your board. It's hard to make something an interesting decision when either result is atrocious for you.
By contrast, removing restrictions opens up decision-making options. Entirely anecdotal example - I had a game last night in which I purposefully blocked a Ledros with a 6/5 spider rather than a 4/1spiderling, killing it intentionally. My reasoning was that my opponent had burned all mana for the turn and didn't have lethal, so I had the opportunity for counter-lethal if I could bait the Ledros play. Following round, he did indeed drop the Ledros - giving me 100% security that he couldn't then stop my play for lethal which would otherwise have been risky and depended on him not having counter-buffs.
Obviously, as I say, anecdotal (and something I was able to do with Ledros having Fearsome already, obviously). Point is, though, opening more options makes for a more involved decision.
There's a real irony in dropping an anecdote shortly after saying "When it comes to analysis, 'practical examples' are better known as 'anecdotal evidence' and are generally worthless." It's quite possible that your opponent played Ledros specifically because he or she had no counter-buffs, so Ledros was the only play left, and that your anecdote could just as easily have played out in your favor with a chump block instead. There's no way to know.
To be clear on this, I'm not against removing Fearsome - in fact, I think it's a good idea - but the idea that it will make blocking "more interesting" seems ridiculous. Giving your opponent more burn tools/card advantage in almost universally bad in card games. The trade you described in your anecdote only works when that burn can't kill you, or when you can attack back for lethal before your opponent does anything, so if anything it's the exception rather than the rule.
Perhaps removing the Fearsome tag is enough to rebalance Ledros' impact on the metagame, but the infinite burn is part of an overall massively OP package that suppresses even the strongest control strategies.
I managed to get this combo off once or twice in Expedition - it was awesome, and my opponent didn't seem to realize the eggs would come back as real Anivia's.
I don't know specifically which cards would be hit with a nerf, but there will certainly be nerfs coming in soon for the Shadow Isles. I've played games where my opponent was running Shadow Isles without any champions and still beat me because of how OP their numerous last breath and card draw effects are.
It's fine to run a deck without a full 6 champions, but it's silly that the available cards in Shadow Isles are so good that running zero champions can be a reasonable idea in a game to centered around champion cards.
I don't think I'd agree with lowering his attack value because making him kinda garbage on the board leaves him with all his cost going to pay for the effect. Having him be top heavy but blockable by trash makes him more interesting by design - the opponent needs to make tough decisions as to how to block him.
Removing Fearsome doesn't make blocking interesting, it makes it obvious. If Ledros didn't have Fearsome, you'd always chump block him to ensure he takes very little damage over time. This would be the best play every time to delay the inevitable bounce back to your opponent's hand.
-When you are blocking with a card that has a Barrier to one that has overwhelm, it should absorb ALL the damage and not just the part proportional to life I think it makes no sense since the Barrier what it does is just that, absorb the damage …
It makes sense because there's a lot of historical understanding that this is how it works across similar games. Take MTG, for example. When a creature has indestructible and blocks a creature with trample, the damage that goes through is whatever's above lethal on the creature, despite the fact that the creature will not die to that damage. Divine Shield in Hearthstone behaves in a similar way.
Quote From Mascre
-If you use Grasp of the Undying against the barrier it is logical that the barrier disappears but it does not seem logical for the opponent to heal since he has not really absorbed anything.
This I agree with 100%. No damage is truly dealt, and the barrier doesn't have HP to drain from.
Quote From Mascre
-Another thing that doesn't convince me is that you can kill a barrier card. I mean with a ruination you can kill her since it is somehow a very expensive card and kill ''everthing'' but with a Culling Strike or Vengeance I think it shouldn't.The barrier is to protect a creature but if there are cards that skip that rule it loses the reason for its use.
This I don't find convincing. Barrier isn't immunity to death, it's a temporary immunity to damage. To go back to MTG, an indestructible creature can be reduced to 0 HP through non-damage effects (e.g. a -X/-X aura), and the result is still the same - the creature dies.
I'm suggesting that when your opponent is running an extremely inefficient 8-drop onto the board, your corresponding board play should be stronger
The idea that this 8 drop is an inefficient follower is simply wrong. The average stats for an 8-drop in LoR is about 7/6. So, Ledros is slight above average in terms of stats, he can't be chump blocked, his play effect is very powerful, and he bounces on death. There are certainly faster plays you can make with 8 mana (such as Battle Fury or Progress Day!), but that doesn't make Ledros inefficient.
Quote From Bystekhilcar
Similarly, if you're losing because you're both down to topdecks and he can bounce Ledros as well as play off his deck, you're again not losing to the burn - you're losing to the bounce.
This is kind of a ridiculous argument, as the bounce enables the burn that your opponent might not otherwise be topdecking.
There's definitely too much Ionia on the ladder, but a lot of their mechanics are easily diffused with silence effects in Demacia. So, I don't think their toolkit is massively problematic.
I do, however, think that Shadow Isles has a bit too many "good in all archetypes" cards. Some examples:
Hapless Aristocrat: Good early game defense for control decks, good spider generation for aggro
Vengeance: Hard removal the can work for mid to late game removal in control or a curve-topper in aggro decks that want to clear your biggest blocker
Glimpse Beyond: Cheap card draw (in a game with relatively little card draw) that you can drop to active useful last breath effects in aggro (e.g. Cursed Keeper), or to get extra value from a chump block in a control deck
Rhasa the Sunderer and Commander Ledros as finishers for aggro or control decks that want something to apply some major, last-minute pressure on board (like dropping Leeroy Jenkins, but it's suitable in many archetypes).
Some of these cards certainly shine more in control vs. aggro, but they have applications, which is why Shadow Isles is so much of the metagame right now. The region just seems way too overtuned.
I agree with oldManSanns, but I think riot will increase his mana cost to 9 or 10 to make it harder to play, or remove fearsome to make it so you can block it with tokens. (the card should stay as a finisher, but reduce his power level..)
I am ok with such card existing.. it costs a lot and it should be impactful.
For what it's worth, I think cutting your life total in half is already a pretty huge impact, particularly since you max out at 20 HP and Ledros is an 8/6 that keeps coming back. If you only have token minions, his Fearsome will kill you, and if you have large minions, you'll be stuck trading your board away while your opponent gets to drop Ledros each round.
Now, perhaps my suggestion that he should round down is not the right fix, but there's a whole host of ways he could be changed to make the effect more reasonable. I saw one suggestion on Reddit that changes his last breath effect to shuffle him into the deck rather than returning to hand, and having him lose Fearsome or changing his stats and/or cost because right now he's mostly an uncounterable win condition.
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.
Any unit that has a "when you survive damage" effect will trigger when it has barrier. While that kind of effect is not hugely problematic today, it seems generally unintuitive to me, as the unit hasn't actually taken any damage. Other effects (like the "drain" from Grasp of the Undying) don't treat that as damage.
Has anyone else been surprised by this?
Yeah, it gates the level up a little bit, but it also prevents him from blocking elusive units, which is relevant for the leveled up version (the kill condition is separate from attack, though there's no good way to show that with the card creator I used).
Are you sure about three buffs? The latest change is a clear, simple buff, but the only other change I can recall was a pretty major overhaul.
Her update in the "Expeditions Preview Patch" was: her cost was increased, attack was reduced, health was increased, and level up condition and payoff were changed (some good, some bad). Ultimately this is a buff, as the good outweighs the bad, but it's a much larger change than a typical buff.
I never really played LoL, but this seems like a fun exercise regardless. Here's my take on Pyke:
This assumes Enlightened isn't fine as it is, and needs some level of fixing. In MTG, cards with a kicker are typically weaker than their non-kickered counterparts, but they are more flexible because they get more value later. Being a bit on the weaker end is an important part of that trade-off. If you didn't have that, you'd just auto-pick kicker cards over non-kicker cards all the time.
Honestly, I think Enlightened is the keyword that's hardest to balance because its condition is inevitable and uninteractable. (Returning to my MTG comparison, at least in that case you can go land dry, or your opponent can destroy your lands.) If the game goes long enough, you'll reach 10 mana gems, so non-Champion cards that benefit from the Enlightened keyword need to have more subdued effects rather than game-ending ones, or you'll see them in all control decks. So, these cards are probably fine as they are for now.
I think this is exactly right. Apart from Karma and Anivia, there are very few cards that care about being enlightened, and they're all pretty bad:
The upshots of these cards is that they're good, cheap plays in the late game, and you'll be able to combo with them because you'll have mana open after playing them. But there are more consistently powerful plays you can make before turn 10 (e.g. Commander Ledros), and it's just not worth building your whole deck around late game combos right now, particularly when it means trading off this much early game value.
Nope - they just tried, and failed, to clarify his behavior
This is actually kind of funny - I suspect Riot saw feedback online about frustrations around how damage is rounded up despite no indication (and a slew of other card games that consistently round down), and so tried to incorporate that into their card text, and went backwards on clarity.
Clearly, the effect is "cut the enemy health in half, rounded down" or "deal damage equal to half the enemy nexus' health, rounded up." In either case, the effect remains the same as it always was, so at least that level of consistency is there. But the text should certainly reflect that more accurately.
I actually think the Overwhelm keyword is fine for a couple of reasons. First, the help text explicitly states "my blocker," and blocking only happens in combat. Second, it's very consistent with MTG's Trample keyword. Trample deals excess damage to your opponent's health, but if you use a spell to force your creature to fight another creature, it doesn't cause trample damage to hit the enemy life total. This is because when you attack, you are targeting enemy HP, so of course any excess damage continues to target that enemy HP. But when two units attack each other as a result of a spell, there's no target for the excess damage, so it goes nowhere.
I'm not looking to snipe - I just think you're treating your own arguments with a double-standard. I think franky's goal with an anecdote was to demonstrate how significant Ledros' burn damage can be - it, combined with Fearsome, literally flipped a game from a loss to a win by dealing 16 damage in a single turn despite being way behind on the board. You don't have to agree with the argument that the burn damage is the biggest problem with the card, but your anecdote is not somehow unique or better than franky's simply because you like your point of view better.
Your argument around blocking basically says that giving your opponent card advantage and extra burn tools doesn't matter if you're ahead enough on board and can get lethal before your opponent can react/burn you out. This is certainly true, and is the basic thesis for why aggro decks work. But this case requires board-centric play (which clearly doesn't always win you the game, as per franky's example), and it certainly doesn't address the way that the direct damage can be a death knell for anyone trying to play a slower, more controlling strategy that might otherwise beat the common Aggro + Ledros decks in the metagame but for his inevitable burn damage (which was the my complaint with the card to begin with).
Again, I'm willing to believe that removing the Fearsome tag could shift the metagame such that his inevitable long-game lethal will be made less oppressive by simply seeing less of him on the ladder, but his burn is non-trivial and suppressing in his current state.
Are you looking at an old version of the card? I thought they replaced all mentions of "Ready your attack" with the keyword "Rally," with fairly good helptext: "If you don't have one, gain the attack token. You can attack this round."
There's a real irony in dropping an anecdote shortly after saying "When it comes to analysis, 'practical examples' are better known as 'anecdotal evidence' and are generally worthless." It's quite possible that your opponent played Ledros specifically because he or she had no counter-buffs, so Ledros was the only play left, and that your anecdote could just as easily have played out in your favor with a chump block instead. There's no way to know.
To be clear on this, I'm not against removing Fearsome - in fact, I think it's a good idea - but the idea that it will make blocking "more interesting" seems ridiculous. Giving your opponent more burn tools/card advantage in almost universally bad in card games. The trade you described in your anecdote only works when that burn can't kill you, or when you can attack back for lethal before your opponent does anything, so if anything it's the exception rather than the rule.
Perhaps removing the Fearsome tag is enough to rebalance Ledros' impact on the metagame, but the infinite burn is part of an overall massively OP package that suppresses even the strongest control strategies.
I managed to get this combo off once or twice in Expedition - it was awesome, and my opponent didn't seem to realize the eggs would come back as real Anivia's.
I don't know specifically which cards would be hit with a nerf, but there will certainly be nerfs coming in soon for the Shadow Isles. I've played games where my opponent was running Shadow Isles without any champions and still beat me because of how OP their numerous last breath and card draw effects are.
It's fine to run a deck without a full 6 champions, but it's silly that the available cards in Shadow Isles are so good that running zero champions can be a reasonable idea in a game to centered around champion cards.
Removing Fearsome doesn't make blocking interesting, it makes it obvious. If Ledros didn't have Fearsome, you'd always chump block him to ensure he takes very little damage over time. This would be the best play every time to delay the inevitable bounce back to your opponent's hand.
I’m pretty sure each Trial awards separate XP, and it is awarded right at the end of the trial. So, you probably got 2300XP tota
It makes sense because there's a lot of historical understanding that this is how it works across similar games. Take MTG, for example. When a creature has indestructible and blocks a creature with trample, the damage that goes through is whatever's above lethal on the creature, despite the fact that the creature will not die to that damage. Divine Shield in Hearthstone behaves in a similar way.
This I agree with 100%. No damage is truly dealt, and the barrier doesn't have HP to drain from.
This I don't find convincing. Barrier isn't immunity to death, it's a temporary immunity to damage. To go back to MTG, an indestructible creature can be reduced to 0 HP through non-damage effects (e.g. a -X/-X aura), and the result is still the same - the creature dies.
The idea that this 8 drop is an inefficient follower is simply wrong. The average stats for an 8-drop in LoR is about 7/6. So, Ledros is slight above average in terms of stats, he can't be chump blocked, his play effect is very powerful, and he bounces on death. There are certainly faster plays you can make with 8 mana (such as Battle Fury or Progress Day!), but that doesn't make Ledros inefficient.
This is kind of a ridiculous argument, as the bounce enables the burn that your opponent might not otherwise be topdecking.
There's definitely too much Ionia on the ladder, but a lot of their mechanics are easily diffused with silence effects in Demacia. So, I don't think their toolkit is massively problematic.
I do, however, think that Shadow Isles has a bit too many "good in all archetypes" cards. Some examples:
Some of these cards certainly shine more in control vs. aggro, but they have applications, which is why Shadow Isles is so much of the metagame right now. The region just seems way too overtuned.
For what it's worth, I think cutting your life total in half is already a pretty huge impact, particularly since you max out at 20 HP and Ledros is an 8/6 that keeps coming back. If you only have token minions, his Fearsome will kill you, and if you have large minions, you'll be stuck trading your board away while your opponent gets to drop Ledros each round.
Now, perhaps my suggestion that he should round down is not the right fix, but there's a whole host of ways he could be changed to make the effect more reasonable. I saw one suggestion on Reddit that changes his last breath effect to shuffle him into the deck rather than returning to hand, and having him lose Fearsome or changing his stats and/or cost because right now he's mostly an uncounterable win condition.