I have been mostly playing Taliyah/Ziggs and Fizz/Lulu. Ahri/Kennen aside they tend to perform well against most of the meta. Jayce/Lux is also a deck that I enjoy but I haven't much success with it because it struggle greatly against aggro.
okay thanks flux! do you know when will be the next patch?
Based on the in game calendar the next expansion will drop in February 16, if you are talking about a balance patch, Riot didn't announce any new one yet.
I honestly don't know where you get your meta reports from. Maybe just browsing the tier list on Mobalytics? Wherever you get your reports, you need a new source.
Here you go, all gift wrapped and served on the proverbial platter. That guy posts a new report every Monday to the LorCompetitive subreddit.
If you don't like that one, Dr. Lor also makes a weekly meta report. He's late for this week, but here's a link that will take you to his list of reports.
Now, with all that out of the way, I'll summarize what the first link says about the meta.
Top 6 decks by playrate (in order): Scouts, Darkness, Lurk, Kennen Ahri (Shurima), Zilean Zerath, Kennen Ahri (SI).
Top 7 decks by winrate (in order): Kennen Ahri (Shurima), Taric Pantheon, Kennen Ahri (SI), Fizz Lulu, Scouts, Shyvana Pantheon, Elise Trundle
Not exactly dripping with Bilgewater. Also, no spiders at all. No pirates either.
Based on my personal experience on the ladder, the only Bilgewater deck that I see is Lurk. I guess you can count Scouts too, but that's mostly a Demacia deck with like 6-9 Bilgewater cards. Gankplank/Sejuani and Nami/TF are both gone from the ladder and haven't encountered a single pirate aggro in months now.
But that's way too narrow a view. As I said, the majority of aggro and midrange decks that include a Demacian package run Fleetfeather Tracker and Brightsteel Protector precisely because of how powerful that pair can be in the early game. These decks rely on winning the board in the early game so that in the mid game they can finish off the opponent (with Ionian elusives, or with a buffed Pantheon, etc.). Those followers don't close out games, but they're just as instrumental in winning games because they create the space to leverage those powerful units. It's also common to splash Vanguard Sergeant to get For Demacia! and take advantage of a wide board to win.
Yes and that's exactly the issue, Demacia has lot's useful cards and they instrumental in wining but you don't have many cards that close the game and have to rely on other regions to do so. What's even worse is that these cards are better when paired with other champs/followers from other region than they are with Demacian champs followers.
Take Fiora/Shen for example yes the deck used cards from Ionia and they were instrumental in helping you achieve victory but in the end day it was Fiora or Cithria who won you the game and it cards like those two that Demacia is lacking because when you don't close the game anything you did before will amount to nothing.
I used play lot's Jarvan/Shen and most of times I would be ahead on the board and still lose anyway because you don't have many ways to leverage your board advantage, you just attack and try to outgrind your opponent with value trading. It's like control level of slow but without those insane power turns that control has. That not something that happen with Sivir/Akshan for example, Sivir ability to share key words mean you can just give your entire board quick attack, spellshield and overwhelm with the The Absolver, so you get to both value trade and push damage.
Anyway as much as I have been enjoying this discussion, I have the feeling that we have said all that could be said on this subject ( or at very least I did) and that we are kinda just repeating ourselves at this point so this probably going to be my last post here. Plus there are other subjects that I would like to discuses.
Demacia isn't a region that's about big finishers - they're about skilled, disciplined armies winning in a fair fight through superior strategy and strength. They're good at getting value trades and building board advantage over time thanks to Challenger, Barrier, and Tough keywords. (44% of cards with Challenger, 50% of cards with Barrier, and 50% of cards with Tough are Demacian.) They've also got Dragons whose Fury keyword emphasizes value trading, and their removal tools are mostly based on striking. As a result, their big payoff cards aren't about directly blowing up the enemy, they're about capitalizing on what Demacia does best - build and maintain a board over a series of turns. This is well-emphasized by For The Fallen and Reinforcements whose payoffs come from building and trading an Elite army, but all of their 8+ cost followers do this too - their value scales directly with how wide your board is when you play them.
This is how it's supposed to work in theory in practice not so much. Either your opponent keeps throwing blockers at you which weaken your units and put them in removal range and when you lose your board in Demacia you just lose the game because the region lack good finishers or they stale long enough for their own win con to be online, you value trade then a Sejuani hit the board and start perma freezing your units... or Lee Sin oneshot you... or an Ezreal burst down your nexus... or an aggro finish you off with burn...
In a way you are wining the battles but losing the war.
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In many ways, I think you could actually argue quite the opposite of your original point - that Demacia is a fairly healthy region. It has three competitive decks that feature its Champs, all of which have varying playing styles (Laser Gate Control, Pantheon Dragon Midrange that focuses on buffing single units, and Scouts Midrange that focuses on going frequent attacks with wide boards). Even in decks that feature Demacia in a limited support capacity, you see key elements like Fleetfeather Tracker and Brightsteel Protector, a combo which is fundamental to what Demacia is good at, as well as splashes of Vanguard Sergeant to capitalize on a wide board or Ranger's Resolve to out-value your opponent on board.
Dragon are meta because they have access Dragon's Clutch a card that grant them overwhelm turning them from mere beatsticks into powerful finisher and that a Targonian card by the way. They also have Pantheon who is a finisher himself.
Lux/Jayce has Acceleration Gate to give your unit powerful keywords that let them finish off your opponent. Not only that but Lux herself has been recently buffed so that her Final Spark can target the nexus directly.
Saying that Demacia lack of good finisher is design choice to me is like saying the region isn't supposed to win with it's own champions/follower which not something that I consider to be a healthy design choice. Especially since no other region in game have this weakness and Demacia already plenty of weakness to begin with including poor card draw removal that require you to already have unit's on the board etc.
I think it's worth challenging the premise that Demacia is only used as a support region. If you trust the Mobalytics tier list, then there are two competitive decks that feature Demacian Champs: Pantheon Dragons at S Tier with Shyvana and Laser Gate at A Tier with Lux. While it's certainly true that other meta decks use Demacia as pure support, and it's true that you could build a Pantheon deck and a Jayce deck without those champs, it's not fair to say that Demacia is strictly support.
I said that Demacia is "mostly" used as a support region not "only".
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This is sort of the double-edged sword of Champ design in LoR - many of Demacia's Champs are well-designed from a traditional CCG standpoint, but that often renders them less compelling because of how synergy focused LoR is. They fit the regional identity very well, and offer powerful effects that exceed follower cards (persistent bonus Rally's, persistent free Barriers or challenger units to make for high value trades, etc), but the high-synergy champs end up being more relevant precisely because they'll find a home when any part of their synergistic deck is strong. When synergy is the primary driver for deck building, you end up with more narrow deck-building options and linear game plans, so there's just no room for a generically strong midrange Champ like Garen because he doesn't do enough to progress your main strategy. For what it's worth, I don't think this is strictly a problem for Demacia, but it may be true that it's a bigger problem for Demacia than other regions because the region is built for board-based, midrange playstyles.
This is not the issue with Demacia or the issue that I was trying to highlight. Champion requiring specific synergies to function is not Demacia's problem.
To illustrate my point let's compare some follower, for an 8 drop finisher Demacia has Tianna Crownguard she has tough which makes her good at trading but she can't finish the opponent by herself for Tianna to be useful you need to already have a board of unit, attack clear the your opponent's board with trades then play Tianna to rally and win. that a lot set up and Tianna just end up being a win more card but the worst part is that your opponent can counter you easily with just a chump blocker like Spiderling
Compare that to Noxus 8 drop finisher Captain Farron, he doesn't care about you having or no having a board with 8 overwhelm damage and another 8 burn damage he is more than capable of finishing the opponent all by himself and the opponent can't just survive with a mere Spiderling.
Rally is supposed to be Demacia way of finishing the game but because Demacia has no may to deal damage directly to the nexus the mechanic end up being just decent in Demacia and completely broken in any region that has Elusive or overwhelm, even scouts one the only few "real" Demacian deck use Miss Fortune to compensate for that weakness.
The problem with giving Demacia better rally is that other region are going use the mechanic way better than Demacia. Recently Relentless Pursuit got bumped into 4 mana because of rally elusive. Golden Aegis tend to be a fair card in Demacia because you still need to have a big board to win the game, but with other region the card tend to borderline busted because they just need one big elusive or overwhelm unit to do the same. Like what used to happen with pre-nerf Ruin Runner or Pantheon and Wounded Whiteflame for more recent examples.
This is something that I wanted to talk about for a while. If you look at some of the recent top tier decks that used Demacia ( Sivir/Akshan, Poppy/Zed, Pantheon) you notice that it is is mostly used as a support region, you basically use Demacia whenever you need the following cards ( Single Combat, Concerted Strike, Golden Aegis, Sharpsight, Brightsteel Protector ).
Barring a few exception Demacia's followers and champions don't seem to make it into competitive decks, the reason for that is, well at least in my opinion, is because Demacia lacks finishers unit's that can ignore chump blocker to deal damage directly to face, most of Demacia champions and followers are good at trading but they struggle with closing the game.
Regions like Shurima, Targon and Ionia tend abuse the above cards because they have access to unit's with overwhelm and elusive. If you opponent use a Cataclysm on Jarvan IV that just mean your going to lose a unit but a Cataclysm on Pantheon usually mean that you will lose the game.
Taking all of that into account it's no surprise that the Demacian champion who had the most success in the competitive scene is Fiora because she had an alternate win con, that also why Jarvan/Shen could never be as dominant as Fiora/Shen despite sharing 90% of it's card with that deck.
So how do we fix this problem? how do we give Demacia finisher? Well the obvious answer would be just give them unit's with elusive or overwhelm. But that just seem to be a lazy fix to me, plus elusive does not make sense from a lore perceptive ( Demecia is know for it's big mighty army, that is as far from stealthy as it get's ).
The first one is fearsome Cithria the Bold is one the few, good Demacian finisher having seen play in both MF/Quinn and Fiora/Shen and what does she do? she give your board fearsome plus a stat boost, plus it fits from lore perspective big armies are fearsome and let's no forget about the anti-mage secret police that kingdom have.
The other mechanic that comes to mind is the very underused give unit "can't block," Demacia is know for petricite a substance that nullify magic, mageseekers use it to restrain mages preventing them from defending themselves similar to how "can't block " prevent your opponent from using his unit's to defend his nexus.
Anyway this post ended up being longer than expected, so what do you guys think?
I really like it when your opponent focus all their removal on either Riven or Vi only to get smacked in the face with 10+ power Ballistic Bot with either elusive or overwhelm.
Frustration with Iceborn Poros aside, I am enjoying the current meta, I don't really face the same decks too many times on ladder which is always nice, my favorite deck at the moment are landmark midrange and darkness control.
Outside of Runeterra I mostly play single player games right now I just finished the first Ori game and started the sequel.
How about you stop always creating new posts for the same topic?
Just name a posts Nifty's metatalk and continue it.
The consistant flood of "new" topics is just annoying imo.
Edit: lets make an gentlemen agreement that if nifty creates another post of this kind we remain on one of his older posts on this topic? He eventually stops with that behavior then
Question. Why does it matter to us, the player what mobalytics say? It seems like it would make more sense for us gauge our enjoyment of the game off of whether the decks we are playing are entertaining us. As a player, why would I care how statistically good a deck is if it’s not one I enjoy or play?
Sites that provides statics like Mobalytics or Runeterra.Ar are a good way to know if your deck is going to be viable on ladder, even if your are not playing a meta deck. If you check the statistics and see that many aggro deck are top tier then you know that a deck that run many expensive spell's/unit's is simply not going to work for example.
Personally, I find no fun or entertainment in losing, like losing a couple of games is fine but going on losing streak is about as fun to me as a kick in the nut's. I don't need play the best deck but it has to be competitive enough
Some champions are viable other are not, the game has always been like that, nothing new here :
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Take a look with your eyeballs where's poke city, where's Poppy, where's Lee Sin, where's Plunder Midrange everything has shifted massively. So what do you want to talk about troll bro?
You blind or something buddy? Poppy (part of bandle swarm), poke city and plunder midrange are all tier A decks according to that list. Like seriously go buy yourself a pair of classes or even better start thinking a little bit before you start spamming threads.
Also saying you don't have to be a genius to build Ekko to only realize that rhe deck has like a 48% winrate.
You would have to be a genius to pilot a list to masters with Ekko in it. Do you guys even think about the words you write prior to posting?
I said that you don't need to be genius to know that a champion is gonna need some card that synergies with him if your gonna build a deck around him, at no point did I mention piloting said champion, don't act like we don't know what were are saying when your the one who can't understand a basic sentence.
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Face it hard nerfing every champ that begins to perform slightly statistically better than your average common follower is a stupid design philosophy and it's killing the game slowly.
Like was Poppy thaaaat bad as a 3/3 for 4 mana did she need to be a 2/3. Did Fiora really need to be a 3/2 for 3 mana like literally the same stats as the 2 mana dragon challenger.
Did TF need to be impossible to level?
What about Shen he's not even an op card?
What are you even talking about Shen was not nerfed.
Its not brain dead because you actually had to build a high synergy deck for your champion.
Any deck has to have synergy to be even mildly competitive, that's just like the ABC of deck building, it doesn't take genius to know that if you have Ekko in your deck then your gonna need a couple of predict cards, but when your deck is all about turbo leveling a champion then you usually repeat the same play patterns during every match and that is pretty braindead.
A good example of that would be lurks, lurks needs high synergy to work but it's one the most braindead deck out there, play unit attack, rinse and repeat and hope you high roll Pyke of Rek'Sai in your predicts or top decks.
As for plunder midrange, her a little bit of fact on the deck, it did existed since the Bilgewater expansion but back then it was a tier 3 at best, It didn't became top tier until patch 2.11.
Reason that it fall down the tier list are both the buff to Vengeance and the nerf to Monster Harpoon, the former is a good counter to it's champion who are the deck main win condition, the latter was an essential tool for deck to stabilize during midgame since plunder is bad at trading because most of your unit's have less than 3 power.
Now it's oh your champ leveled I don't care cuz you're dead, stop questing and get back to playing Runeterra at its most vanilla and brain dead version ever.
Variance is fun folks, strong champions auto winning games is fun…otherwise it's just nail dragging value wars and its boring. Synergy is dead, deck building is dead, Champs are dead, strategy is dead.
Champion auto wining on level up is exactly the kind of braindead play patter that you claim to be against, because that mean you just play a game of solitaire were the goal is turbo level your champions, but more importantly at no point of this game was that ever a thing.
Sure they were many champions who could win the game if left unanswered but that is not the same as auto winning take pre-nerf Sion when he level up and attack he would usually win the game but they were many ways your opponent could deal with him including silence, stunt, frostbite, obliterate, recall. Sejuani could perma-freeze your board but that did not win you the game in itself you needed another cards like Gangplank or The Dreadway to finish off the opponent plus any hard removal could deal with her.
That also goes for decks that built around a single champion like Anivia she did not auto win on level up since you needed to kill her multiple times then play The Harrowing to get a board full of Anivias and finish the game.
Even Twisted Fate who had one the most powerful level up in the game ( If not the most powerful ) mostly served as a powerful control and value engine, you needed either Pack Your Bags ( for TF/GoHard) or elusive unit's ( for TF/Fizz ) to actually win the game.
The problem with Lee is Zenith Blade, or any card that gives Overwhelm. THAT is why he was prevalent when he was, because he could OTK you without that much effort. I don't think it's good service to nerf Dragon's Rage and consequently his lvl 2 just because of Overwhelm, but that keyword makes OTK Lee decks that much more oppressive.
I would still think it's better to just nerf Zenith Blade without touching Lee - that way, he's not as oppressive because of less incentive to run him with Targon. Perhaps giving Overwhelm only on Daybreak would be a solid middle-ground so that the Lee player has to make a more meaningful choice, and also can't play Lee into Blade on the same time without Rahvun.
Zenith Blade isn't the problem. Lee Sin problem is his ability to grant himself a barrier every turn which coupled with the good already good protective tools in Ionia makes night impossible to remove without something like Minimorph.
Riven is a champion that can OTK you with even less effort than Lee because she can give herself overwhelm and boost her own stats, yet nobody complains about Riven because she doesn't require you to run burst speed removal.
I have been mostly playing Taliyah/Ziggs and Fizz/Lulu. Ahri/Kennen aside they tend to perform well against most of the meta. Jayce/Lux is also a deck that I enjoy but I haven't much success with it because it struggle greatly against aggro.
As far as I know no patch was planned this week but I wouldn't call you crazy, misremembering things is not uncommon.
Based on the in game calendar the next expansion will drop in February 16, if you are talking about a balance patch, Riot didn't announce any new one yet.
Those meta report do match the data from Runeterra.Ar : https://runeterra.ar/stats
Based on my personal experience on the ladder, the only Bilgewater deck that I see is Lurk. I guess you can count Scouts too, but that's mostly a Demacia deck with like 6-9 Bilgewater cards. Gankplank/Sejuani and Nami/TF are both gone from the ladder and haven't encountered a single pirate aggro in months now.
I do face spider Aggro every now and then tho.
Yes and that's exactly the issue, Demacia has lot's useful cards and they instrumental in wining but you don't have many cards that close the game and have to rely on other regions to do so. What's even worse is that these cards are better when paired with other champs/followers from other region than they are with Demacian champs followers.
Take Fiora/Shen for example yes the deck used cards from Ionia and they were instrumental in helping you achieve victory but in the end day it was Fiora or Cithria who won you the game and it cards like those two that Demacia is lacking because when you don't close the game anything you did before will amount to nothing.
I used play lot's Jarvan/Shen and most of times I would be ahead on the board and still lose anyway because you don't have many ways to leverage your board advantage, you just attack and try to outgrind your opponent with value trading. It's like control level of slow but without those insane power turns that control has. That not something that happen with Sivir/Akshan for example, Sivir ability to share key words mean you can just give your entire board quick attack, spellshield and overwhelm with the The Absolver, so you get to both value trade and push damage.
Anyway as much as I have been enjoying this discussion, I have the feeling that we have said all that could be said on this subject ( or at very least I did) and that we are kinda just repeating ourselves at this point so this probably going to be my last post here. Plus there are other subjects that I would like to discuses.
This is how it's supposed to work in theory in practice not so much. Either your opponent keeps throwing blockers at you which weaken your units and put them in removal range and when you lose your board in Demacia you just lose the game because the region lack good finishers or they stale long enough for their own win con to be online, you value trade then a Sejuani hit the board and start perma freezing your units... or Lee Sin oneshot you... or an Ezreal burst down your nexus... or an aggro finish you off with burn...
In a way you are wining the battles but losing the war.
Dragon are meta because they have access Dragon's Clutch a card that grant them overwhelm turning them from mere beatsticks into powerful finisher and that a Targonian card by the way. They also have Pantheon who is a finisher himself.
Lux/Jayce has Acceleration Gate to give your unit powerful keywords that let them finish off your opponent. Not only that but Lux herself has been recently buffed so that her Final Spark can target the nexus directly.
Saying that Demacia lack of good finisher is design choice to me is like saying the region isn't supposed to win with it's own champions/follower which not something that I consider to be a healthy design choice. Especially since no other region in game have this weakness and Demacia already plenty of weakness to begin with including poor card draw removal that require you to already have unit's on the board etc.
I said that Demacia is "mostly" used as a support region not "only".
This is not the issue with Demacia or the issue that I was trying to highlight. Champion requiring specific synergies to function is not Demacia's problem.
To illustrate my point let's compare some follower, for an 8 drop finisher Demacia has Tianna Crownguard she has tough which makes her good at trading but she can't finish the opponent by herself for Tianna to be useful you need to already have a board of unit, attack clear the your opponent's board with trades then play Tianna to rally and win. that a lot set up and Tianna just end up being a win more card but the worst part is that your opponent can counter you easily with just a chump blocker like Spiderling
Compare that to Noxus 8 drop finisher Captain Farron, he doesn't care about you having or no having a board with 8 overwhelm damage and another 8 burn damage he is more than capable of finishing the opponent all by himself and the opponent can't just survive with a mere Spiderling.
Rally is supposed to be Demacia way of finishing the game but because Demacia has no may to deal damage directly to the nexus the mechanic end up being just decent in Demacia and completely broken in any region that has Elusive or overwhelm, even scouts one the only few "real" Demacian deck use Miss Fortune to compensate for that weakness.
The problem with giving Demacia better rally is that other region are going use the mechanic way better than Demacia. Recently Relentless Pursuit got bumped into 4 mana because of rally elusive. Golden Aegis tend to be a fair card in Demacia because you still need to have a big board to win the game, but with other region the card tend to borderline busted because they just need one big elusive or overwhelm unit to do the same. Like what used to happen with pre-nerf Ruin Runner or Pantheon and Wounded Whiteflame for more recent examples.
This is something that I wanted to talk about for a while. If you look at some of the recent top tier decks that used Demacia ( Sivir/Akshan, Poppy/Zed, Pantheon) you notice that it is is mostly used as a support region, you basically use Demacia whenever you need the following cards ( Single Combat, Concerted Strike, Golden Aegis, Sharpsight, Brightsteel Protector ).
Barring a few exception Demacia's followers and champions don't seem to make it into competitive decks, the reason for that is, well at least in my opinion, is because Demacia lacks finishers unit's that can ignore chump blocker to deal damage directly to face, most of Demacia champions and followers are good at trading but they struggle with closing the game.
Regions like Shurima, Targon and Ionia tend abuse the above cards because they have access to unit's with overwhelm and elusive. If you opponent use a Cataclysm on Jarvan IV that just mean your going to lose a unit but a Cataclysm on Pantheon usually mean that you will lose the game.
Taking all of that into account it's no surprise that the Demacian champion who had the most success in the competitive scene is Fiora because she had an alternate win con, that also why Jarvan/Shen could never be as dominant as Fiora/Shen despite sharing 90% of it's card with that deck.
So how do we fix this problem? how do we give Demacia finisher? Well the obvious answer would be just give them unit's with elusive or overwhelm. But that just seem to be a lazy fix to me, plus elusive does not make sense from a lore perceptive ( Demecia is know for it's big mighty army, that is as far from stealthy as it get's ).
The first one is fearsome Cithria the Bold is one the few, good Demacian finisher having seen play in both MF/Quinn and Fiora/Shen and what does she do? she give your board fearsome plus a stat boost, plus it fits from lore perspective big armies are fearsome and let's no forget about the anti-mage secret police that kingdom have.
The other mechanic that comes to mind is the very underused give unit "can't block," Demacia is know for petricite a substance that nullify magic, mageseekers use it to restrain mages preventing them from defending themselves similar to how "can't block " prevent your opponent from using his unit's to defend his nexus.
Anyway this post ended up being longer than expected, so what do you guys think?
Riven/Vi is very fun.
I really like it when your opponent focus all their removal on either Riven or Vi only to get smacked in the face with 10+ power Ballistic Bot with either elusive or overwhelm.
Frustration with Iceborn Poros aside, I am enjoying the current meta, I don't really face the same decks too many times on ladder which is always nice, my favorite deck at the moment are landmark midrange and darkness control.
Outside of Runeterra I mostly play single player games right now I just finished the first Ori game and started the sequel.
Good suggestion.
Sites that provides statics like Mobalytics or Runeterra.Ar are a good way to know if your deck is going to be viable on ladder, even if your are not playing a meta deck. If you check the statistics and see that many aggro deck are top tier then you know that a deck that run many expensive spell's/unit's is simply not going to work for example.
Personally, I find no fun or entertainment in losing, like losing a couple of games is fine but going on losing streak is about as fun to me as a kick in the nut's. I don't need play the best deck but it has to be competitive enough
Some champions are viable other are not, the game has always been like that, nothing new here :
You blind or something buddy? Poppy (part of bandle swarm), poke city and plunder midrange are all tier A decks according to that list. Like seriously go buy yourself a pair of classes or even better start thinking a little bit before you start spamming threads.
The stuff is hilarious, Nifty a couple of month ago is like :
- Mobalytics tier list is not reliable because it's just the opinion of two people and completely bias :
https://outof.cards/forums/legends-of-runeterra/runeterra-general/16111-meta-changes-no-one-will-talk-about-but-me
but now it suddenly reliable and despite the list featuring lots champion based deck the guy is still like " CHAMPIONS ARE DEAD ".
Never change man never change.
I said that you don't need to be genius to know that a champion is gonna need some card that synergies with him if your gonna build a deck around him, at no point did I mention piloting said champion, don't act like we don't know what were are saying when your the one who can't understand a basic sentence.
What are you even talking about Shen was not nerfed.
Any deck has to have synergy to be even mildly competitive, that's just like the ABC of deck building, it doesn't take genius to know that if you have Ekko in your deck then your gonna need a couple of predict cards, but when your deck is all about turbo leveling a champion then you usually repeat the same play patterns during every match and that is pretty braindead.
A good example of that would be lurks, lurks needs high synergy to work but it's one the most braindead deck out there, play unit attack, rinse and repeat and hope you high roll Pyke of Rek'Sai in your predicts or top decks.
Same for Daybreak the deck need to be synergistic to work but it's pretty one dimensional you start with Solari Soldier turn 1, a Solari Shieldbearer (or another Soldier) turn 2, a Solari Priestess (or another Shieldbearer) on the turn 3, Leona on four, Rahvun, Daylight's Spear on five
As for plunder midrange, her a little bit of fact on the deck, it did existed since the Bilgewater expansion but back then it was a tier 3 at best, It didn't became top tier until patch 2.11.
Reason that it fall down the tier list are both the buff to Vengeance and the nerf to Monster Harpoon, the former is a good counter to it's champion who are the deck main win condition, the latter was an essential tool for deck to stabilize during midgame since plunder is bad at trading because most of your unit's have less than 3 power.
Still the deck is by no mean bad now.
Champion auto wining on level up is exactly the kind of braindead play patter that you claim to be against, because that mean you just play a game of solitaire were the goal is turbo level your champions, but more importantly at no point of this game was that ever a thing.
Sure they were many champions who could win the game if left unanswered but that is not the same as auto winning take pre-nerf Sion when he level up and attack he would usually win the game but they were many ways your opponent could deal with him including silence, stunt, frostbite, obliterate, recall. Sejuani could perma-freeze your board but that did not win you the game in itself you needed another cards like Gangplank or The Dreadway to finish off the opponent plus any hard removal could deal with her.
That also goes for decks that built around a single champion like Anivia she did not auto win on level up since you needed to kill her multiple times then play The Harrowing to get a board full of Anivias and finish the game.
Even Twisted Fate who had one the most powerful level up in the game ( If not the most powerful ) mostly served as a powerful control and value engine, you needed either Pack Your Bags ( for TF/GoHard) or elusive unit's ( for TF/Fizz ) to actually win the game.
Zenith Blade isn't the problem. Lee Sin problem is his ability to grant himself a barrier every turn which coupled with the good already good protective tools in Ionia makes night impossible to remove without something like Minimorph.
Riven is a champion that can OTK you with even less effort than Lee because she can give herself overwhelm and boost her own stats, yet nobody complains about Riven because she doesn't require you to run burst speed removal.
That good, don't know why they didn't do it sooner, after all Europe and North Africa also shared also share a queue.