That just like saying hey let's replace this trash with garbage.
Twisted Fate/Fizz didn't play that much different from elusive poro it was mostly about spamming a bunch of zero mana elusives and buffing them. TF was just their to make the deck more consistent and offer a secondary win con.
Fiora/Shen was never toxic, it didn't make control or aggro unplayable and even at it's most powerful the deck had a mostly a 50/50, 45/55 match up table but it was a top tier for a long time so people got tired or it same thing happened to Ezreal/Draven.
The frustrating part to me is that they are lot's of fun deck in this meta Senna/Veigar, Taliyah/Ziggs, Pantheon/Taric, Turbo Thralls but they are overshadowed yet another elusive deck.
I don't really have a problem with spiders, Spiderling don't have evasive keywords so you can block them with your unit's, and SI/Freljords don't have many cheap ways of generating spiders outside of Crawling Sensation which you can play around. So yeah a Spider deck will out value you eventually but you can slow down their aggression until you get your own win con ready.
Elusive poros on the other hand are just cancer, you can tutor them with Poro Herder, you have many cheap ways to generate more in the form of Poro Cannon and Iterative Improvement and contrary to spiders they don't entirely depends on Iceborn Legacy, because they have Poro Snax for extra buffs. Then you have the Elusive keyword which require you to have a unit plus Sharpsight or a silence just to block the damn thing.
The game definitely need more reach like effects. Otherwise any time they make some good buff cards, you can bet that some elusive deck is gonna abuse them. It already happened in the past with Solitary Monk and Stand Alone and more recently with Poppy/Zed.
Ascended rise is a terrible card, and so is unworthy... mono shurima feels pretty decent to me vs other midrange/control matchups tho... I think the main problem with the deck is that it has 0 decent healing options... I run one devoted council but that's because I have no other option. Any form of aggro/ burn deletes the deck though.
Terrible as it is Ascended's Rise is still a win con and the only card that can level up the sun disc in any reasonable time. Unworthy doesn't do anything for the deck, attack reduction at slow speed is useless, it's second effect is great but very hard to trigger because the only anti-ramp card that deck is using is Rite of the Arcane.
I understand that it's not meant to be a competitive deck, but still I think we can do better than add a card who is the very definition of pack filler. Maybe a predict card to make the deck a little bit more consistent.
That aside this look like a fun deck. You bank 1 spell mana, play Azir on 3, Xerath on 4 and Ascended's Rise on 5 and hop you got yourself a turbo Restored Sun Disc.
Garen being a win con is debatable to say the least sure he can give lot's of rallies but he is vulnerable ( Like many Demacian champs ) to chump blocking. Usually with Garen you just keep getting chump blocked until your opponent find their removal or get his own win con online. If you look at all the meta champs you will notice that they all can deal damage directly to the Nexus either through burn damage or evasive keywords ( preferably with elusive or overwhelm but Impact and Fearsome can also get the job done ) or they buff unit that who have said keywords ( Like Sivir, Poppy and Nami ), but this is just me speaking from purely competitive standpoint. I suppose he works just fine if you play him at more casual level.
Nifty kinda has a point when he says that nerfing specific archetypes out of tier 1 status often results in just 1 deck less being viable without improving the rest of the metagame.
The thing that riot has to be aware of is: what archetypes are oppressive and completely devalue a legitimate strategy?
What I mean by that: should a meme deck get crushed by tier 1 decks? Most of the times it should. So if the majority of meme decks loose to a certain tier 1 deck that's not a problem. If strategies that proven itself in the past or that are overall 51%+ winrate strategies and if those can't win a certain popular matchup it's something you have to keep an eye on.
If a matchup is so polarized because 1 deck does exactly which is the weakness of the other deck it's more tolerable than a deck just doing it's thing leaving the other deck no chance to stop it.
Examples of problematic decks were therefore: Go Hard, AzirIrelia P&Z Noxus burn and TLC
Decks not being that problematic were ShenFiora(although Fiora herself is problematic)
If memory serves Fiora was nerfed because of the mono Fiora deck which depending on the match up could be an auto win or an auto lose, Fiora/Shen was a balanced deck with mostly 50/50 match up into the rest of the meta.
Now when it come balance nerfing tend to be more healthy than buffing, just look at recent buff to Dragon and daybreak what did those accomplish? Making the decks meta for 2 weeks? After the resent nerfs however many deck stated being more competitive just recently an EU player managed to reach rank on masters with Ekko/Zilian deck in previous meta that wasn't even a tier 3 deck.
That being said you are right when say that decks shouldn't be nerfed just because they are strong and that should be reserved to problematic ones.
Real talk : Do you even know what you want at this point? Game being balanced is bad now? It wasn't that long ago were you would spam new threads non stop to complain about Azir/Irelia and the Turbo meta in general demanding nerfs and now you miss them?
That's a very valid criticism, the ratio of region support vs archetype support is not something they always get right, but nightfall is not a good example of that.
Let's take a look a some nightfall cards for Shadow Isles we have Doombeast, Unspeakable Horror who are centered around the drain mechanic and we also have Stygian Onlooker which is a fearsome unit both of these mechanic are core to shadow Isles. As for Targon we have cards like Pale Cascade which a buff again that is core to Targon. These cards do see play in non-nightfall decks.
Nightfall is actually a good example about how you can introduce a new mechanic that can also help the region as a whole without breaking it's identity.
I think a more accurate example would be Tahm Kench and his followers the champion does introduce a new mechanic to Bilgwater which is self damage even though Bilgwater doesn't have access to any form of healing or any unit that benefit from being damaged, their design only make sense when paired with Targon since the region offer plenty of healing and a win con based on healing so you want your unit to be damaged.
You are not wrong on that, you can translate a champions ability in way that stay true to region identity, it's exactly what they did with LeBlanc.
In league Leblanc is a squishy burst mage who either one shot you or die so her LOR equivalent has high power with quick attack and low health, they also made her a combat oriented to fit within Noxus play style. The thing is most of the player base hated that design even dubbing her Lebland, because the majority of the player base care more about the champion fulfilling a certain power fantasy than how honest they are to a region identity.
That's why region identity for me at very least is tied more to the generic tool that a region have rather than the champions themselves. So if they release a champion like Urgot for example and made him a very good combat centric unit which is something that P&Z isn't supposed to be good at, that wouldn't bother me but if they start releasing a bunch a good generic combat centric cards that any P&Z deck could use then that would a problem.
Predict is a Shurima identity technically, but because of the champion pairing system, it is only 1/8 of Shurima's identity. The problem is that "identity" becomes so wide and muddled and there's so much crossover between region identity that regions don't really feel different anymore. Like OP said, region pairings have more identity than the regions themselves. The Shurima+PnZ pairing has more identity than Shurima on its own. Zilean feels more like a PnZ champion than a Shurima champion, and Nasus feels more like a Shadow Isles champion than a Shurima champion.
And yes, Bandle's main identity is card generation, but so is that of Targon and PnZ. The extreme overlap is pretty clear.
Region identity is not based around a single mechanic but rather strength and weakness :
P&Z for example has access to lots of removal, burn damage and is good at maintaining card advantage ( either with draw effect or card generation ), on flip side the region has no healing and struggle in combat because it's unit's tend to have underwhelming stat line.
Some regions can overlap with another and still tweak the mechanic enough for it to be different for example Ionia, Noxus and Freljord all have spell removal as part of their identity but they are different from one another :
- Ionia cannot completely get rid of an enemy unit they can only temporarily recall it with cards like Will of Ionia or Homecoming.
- With cards like Ravenous Flock or Scorched Earth Noxus is good at removing single high health unit's but don't have ways to deal with swarm.
- Freljord is good at dealing with swarm of low health unit with cards like Avalanche or Blighted Ravine but struggle at dealing with big ones.
Finally it's not a realistic expectation to think that every champion is going to fit withing the confine of region identity, Demacia for example is supposed to be a anti magical, combat oriented region but many of their remaining champions are mages ( Sona, Sylas, Morgana )
- With 5 health there is no mana efficient way to remove this card outside of Monster Harpoon, 4 would put him within the range of more removal cards and make him less likely to survive trades.
Bandle City Mayor: The first multi region you play each round cost 1 less.
- Reducing the mana cheat on this unit should limit bandle city swarming power without making him unplayable.
Curious Shellfolk : 4/5 and remove the discount from the created copy.
- I think it fine for 6 drop to generate lots of value what makes this card overtuned in my opinion is the combination of resource generation and mana cheat which is why I suggest getting rid of the latter.
- Pretty much impossible to kill without hard removal can reach crazy stat line very fast and if you think that you can just keep chump blocking it there is always Zenith Blade or Iula to turn him into a legitimate win con.
I respect BBG skill as player but his opinion on balance are frankly laughable to me, the guy was saying that 2 mana hush was Healthy for the game among other things.
With that being said I do agree it was a bit too soon to nerf Ezreal/Kennen, there are cases were a deck can seem too strong a first only to be revealed that its not the case. A good example of that would be dragons after their buff in patch 2.18 the deck was all over the place in ladder but after two weeks people figured out how to play against it and it ended up being a Tier 2 at best.
I do think that EZ/Kennen was genuinely OP be cause it was exactly one those "infinite value" type deck ( You created an ephemeral Kennen with God-Willow Seedling then you recall it which would remove the ephemeral which mean that you would never run out of Kennen and by extension Mark of the Storm even if your opponent managed to remove all three copies of that champion ) but I am an advocate for more wait and see approach to balancing ( as long as length between balance patches do not exceed one month )
Interesting opinion but it's not one that I agree with.
Unbalance make it impossible to build a good deck due to the polarizing match up table.
For example the only way to counter Azir/Irelia during it's prime was to play aggro decks, these decks got farmed by Tresh/Nasus if you tried to build something to counter Tresh/Nasus then it would get farmed by Azir/Irelia, there was no way to build a deck that was good or even decent against both. And let's not get into Trundle/Lissandra who made any deck that couldn't win before turn 8 unplayable.
Finally you can't just base a deck power level based on win rate alone, Pirate Aggro always had a solid win rate due to how easy to play it is. You just play on curve and go face then finish your opponent with burn effects but if your early aggression get countered you might just well hit concede. Lee Sin/Zoe despite the the lower win rate is much better deck than pirate because of all the counter play it provides.
If your gonna build an allegiance deck, make sure to not have more than 6 cards from the secondary region, otherwise you will be missing allegiance more than the papaya lord himself.
That just like saying hey let's replace this trash with garbage.
Twisted Fate/Fizz didn't play that much different from elusive poro it was mostly about spamming a bunch of zero mana elusives and buffing them. TF was just their to make the deck more consistent and offer a secondary win con.
Fiora/Shen was never toxic, it didn't make control or aggro unplayable and even at it's most powerful the deck had a mostly a 50/50, 45/55 match up table but it was a top tier for a long time so people got tired or it same thing happened to Ezreal/Draven.
The frustrating part to me is that they are lot's of fun deck in this meta Senna/Veigar, Taliyah/Ziggs, Pantheon/Taric, Turbo Thralls but they are overshadowed yet another elusive deck.
I don't really have a problem with spiders, Spiderling don't have evasive keywords so you can block them with your unit's, and SI/Freljords don't have many cheap ways of generating spiders outside of Crawling Sensation which you can play around. So yeah a Spider deck will out value you eventually but you can slow down their aggression until you get your own win con ready.
Elusive poros on the other hand are just cancer, you can tutor them with Poro Herder, you have many cheap ways to generate more in the form of Poro Cannon and Iterative Improvement and contrary to spiders they don't entirely depends on Iceborn Legacy, because they have Poro Snax for extra buffs. Then you have the Elusive keyword which require you to have a unit plus Sharpsight or a silence just to block the damn thing.
The game definitely need more reach like effects. Otherwise any time they make some good buff cards, you can bet that some elusive deck is gonna abuse them. It already happened in the past with Solitary Monk and Stand Alone and more recently with Poppy/Zed.
I liked most of changes in the patch but man was that Sion nerf stupid.
Terrible as it is Ascended's Rise is still a win con and the only card that can level up the sun disc in any reasonable time. Unworthy doesn't do anything for the deck, attack reduction at slow speed is useless, it's second effect is great but very hard to trigger because the only anti-ramp card that deck is using is Rite of the Arcane.
The best version runs X3 Unworthy?
I understand that it's not meant to be a competitive deck, but still I think we can do better than add a card who is the very definition of pack filler. Maybe a predict card to make the deck a little bit more consistent.
That aside this look like a fun deck. You bank 1 spell mana, play Azir on 3, Xerath on 4 and Ascended's Rise on 5 and hop you got yourself a turbo Restored Sun Disc.
Garen being a win con is debatable to say the least sure he can give lot's of rallies but he is vulnerable ( Like many Demacian champs ) to chump blocking. Usually with Garen you just keep getting chump blocked until your opponent find their removal or get his own win con online. If you look at all the meta champs you will notice that they all can deal damage directly to the Nexus either through burn damage or evasive keywords ( preferably with elusive or overwhelm but Impact and Fearsome can also get the job done ) or they buff unit that who have said keywords ( Like Sivir, Poppy and Nami ), but this is just me speaking from purely competitive standpoint. I suppose he works just fine if you play him at more casual level.
My bad, I somewhat read it as "I cost 2 " instead of "reduce cost by 2"
- The buff to vengeance and mono Shurima are nice and so are the nerfs to Bandle City.
- The buff to monster Harpoon and Nerf to Sion are puzzling to me, the former was already a great card, the later wasn't part of any tier 1 deck.
- The biggest change is definitely Ice borne legacy, elusive poros, mistwraiths, sand soldiers, so many decks can be enabled by that card.
- The rest are pretty meh.
If memory serves Fiora was nerfed because of the mono Fiora deck which depending on the match up could be an auto win or an auto lose, Fiora/Shen was a balanced deck with mostly 50/50 match up into the rest of the meta.
Now when it come balance nerfing tend to be more healthy than buffing, just look at recent buff to Dragon and daybreak what did those accomplish? Making the decks meta for 2 weeks? After the resent nerfs however many deck stated being more competitive just recently an EU player managed to reach rank on masters with Ekko/Zilian deck in previous meta that wasn't even a tier 3 deck.
That being said you are right when say that decks shouldn't be nerfed just because they are strong and that should be reserved to problematic ones.
Real talk : Do you even know what you want at this point? Game being balanced is bad now? It wasn't that long ago were you would spam new threads non stop to complain about Azir/Irelia and the Turbo meta in general demanding nerfs and now you miss them?
Or do you need a little reminder perhaps?
https://outof.cards/forums/legends-of-runeterra/runeterra-general/10147-riot-made-a-huge-mistake
https://outof.cards/forums/legends-of-runeterra/runeterra-general/10774-is-fixing-the-turbo-meta-possible
https://outof.cards/forums/legends-of-runeterra/runeterra-general/11002-soooo-azir-irelia-is-still-dominant
https://outof.cards/forums/legends-of-runeterra/runeterra-general/10716-waiting-on-changes-promised-on-reddit
https://outof.cards/forums/legends-of-runeterra/runeterra-general/10784-still-no-news-from-riot
That's a very valid criticism, the ratio of region support vs archetype support is not something they always get right, but nightfall is not a good example of that.
Let's take a look a some nightfall cards for Shadow Isles we have Doombeast, Unspeakable Horror who are centered around the drain mechanic and we also have Stygian Onlooker which is a fearsome unit both of these mechanic are core to shadow Isles. As for Targon we have cards like Pale Cascade which a buff again that is core to Targon. These cards do see play in non-nightfall decks.
Nightfall is actually a good example about how you can introduce a new mechanic that can also help the region as a whole without breaking it's identity.
I think a more accurate example would be Tahm Kench and his followers the champion does introduce a new mechanic to Bilgwater which is self damage even though Bilgwater doesn't have access to any form of healing or any unit that benefit from being damaged, their design only make sense when paired with Targon since the region offer plenty of healing and a win con based on healing so you want your unit to be damaged.
You are not wrong on that, you can translate a champions ability in way that stay true to region identity, it's exactly what they did with LeBlanc.
In league Leblanc is a squishy burst mage who either one shot you or die so her LOR equivalent has high power with quick attack and low health, they also made her a combat oriented to fit within Noxus play style. The thing is most of the player base hated that design even dubbing her Lebland, because the majority of the player base care more about the champion fulfilling a certain power fantasy than how honest they are to a region identity.
That's why region identity for me at very least is tied more to the generic tool that a region have rather than the champions themselves. So if they release a champion like Urgot for example and made him a very good combat centric unit which is something that P&Z isn't supposed to be good at, that wouldn't bother me but if they start releasing a bunch a good generic combat centric cards that any P&Z deck could use then that would a problem.
Anyway that my personal view on the subject.
Region identity is not based around a single mechanic but rather strength and weakness :
P&Z for example has access to lots of removal, burn damage and is good at maintaining card advantage ( either with draw effect or card generation ), on flip side the region has no healing and struggle in combat because it's unit's tend to have underwhelming stat line.
Some regions can overlap with another and still tweak the mechanic enough for it to be different for example Ionia, Noxus and Freljord all have spell removal as part of their identity but they are different from one another :
- Ionia cannot completely get rid of an enemy unit they can only temporarily recall it with cards like Will of Ionia or Homecoming.
- With cards like Ravenous Flock or Scorched Earth Noxus is good at removing single high health unit's but don't have ways to deal with swarm.
- Freljord is good at dealing with swarm of low health unit with cards like Avalanche or Blighted Ravine but struggle at dealing with big ones.
Finally it's not a realistic expectation to think that every champion is going to fit withing the confine of region identity, Demacia for example is supposed to be a anti magical, combat oriented region but many of their remaining champions are mages ( Sona, Sylas, Morgana )
My personal list of nerfs would be :
Conchologist and Loping Telescope : 1/2
- 2 power is good stat line that allow them to trade well into most early unit, they already generate value they don't need to trade well.
Stone Stackers : 2/2
- With 3 health this unit sit comfortably outside the range of every board wipe, that should not be the case for cheap aggro unit's.
Lecturing Yordle : 3/4
- With 5 health there is no mana efficient way to remove this card outside of Monster Harpoon, 4 would put him within the range of more removal cards and make him less likely to survive trades.
Bandle City Mayor: The first multi region you play each round cost 1 less.
- Reducing the mana cheat on this unit should limit bandle city swarming power without making him unplayable.
Curious Shellfolk : 4/5 and remove the discount from the created copy.
- I think it fine for 6 drop to generate lots of value what makes this card overtuned in my opinion is the combination of resource generation and mana cheat which is why I suggest getting rid of the latter.
Wounded Whiteflame : 2/3 or 2/2
- Pretty much impossible to kill without hard removal can reach crazy stat line very fast and if you think that you can just keep chump blocking it there is always Zenith Blade or Iula to turn him into a legitimate win con.
I respect BBG skill as player but his opinion on balance are frankly laughable to me, the guy was saying that 2 mana hush was Healthy for the game among other things.
With that being said I do agree it was a bit too soon to nerf Ezreal/Kennen, there are cases were a deck can seem too strong a first only to be revealed that its not the case. A good example of that would be dragons after their buff in patch 2.18 the deck was all over the place in ladder but after two weeks people figured out how to play against it and it ended up being a Tier 2 at best.
I do think that EZ/Kennen was genuinely OP be cause it was exactly one those "infinite value" type deck ( You created an ephemeral Kennen with God-Willow Seedling then you recall it which would remove the ephemeral which mean that you would never run out of Kennen and by extension Mark of the Storm even if your opponent managed to remove all three copies of that champion ) but I am an advocate for more wait and see approach to balancing ( as long as length between balance patches do not exceed one month )
Jinx braid growth serum is probably shimmer not that I would recommend it side effect include hallucination, insanity and murderous impulse.
Interesting opinion but it's not one that I agree with.
Unbalance make it impossible to build a good deck due to the polarizing match up table.
For example the only way to counter Azir/Irelia during it's prime was to play aggro decks, these decks got farmed by Tresh/Nasus if you tried to build something to counter Tresh/Nasus then it would get farmed by Azir/Irelia, there was no way to build a deck that was good or even decent against both. And let's not get into Trundle/Lissandra who made any deck that couldn't win before turn 8 unplayable.
Finally you can't just base a deck power level based on win rate alone, Pirate Aggro always had a solid win rate due to how easy to play it is. You just play on curve and go face then finish your opponent with burn effects but if your early aggression get countered you might just well hit concede. Lee Sin/Zoe despite the the lower win rate is much better deck than pirate because of all the counter play it provides.
Now this a great holiday gift.
If your gonna build an allegiance deck, make sure to not have more than 6 cards from the secondary region, otherwise you will be missing allegiance more than the papaya lord himself.
The nerf to Poppy don't affect her much the one to young witch on the other hand is pretty good.