How you play around a 7/6 elusive on turn 3? Or a 6/6 fiora? Landing stand alone on a key unit on turn 3 is normally game over. Unless you specifically have purify or will of Ionia.
No, that was my point: if I had a Stand Alone in my opening hand, its easy for me to only play 1 minion which I want to buff and near impossible for you to play around. Whereas for Take Heart: I need my target to take nonlethal damage which can be tricky. I've lost a lot of Braum because my opponent was smart enough to wait until mid-combat before adding a Mystic Shot or Get Excited! to the stack.
I imagine you intended this to be just about the current meta, but for my money there was nothing worse than pre-Dr. Boom nerf Control Warrior. If you want to make your deck be 20+ reactive cards: OK, that's your decision. But when those remaining slots can generate enough value to compete against aggro, midrange, AND other control decks, then something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Oh, and pre-nerf Galakrond Shaman. That archetype alone ruined this expansion for me to the point where I don't even care that Shaman is unplayable right now. Whoever let that slip through play testing should seriously reconsider their career choices.
If you look at Fiora's L2 full artwork, you see an awards ceremony. I get that the 2nd place guy is the Laurent Chevalier punk, comically sulking because he lost to Fiora--but who is that 3rd place guy? I would have expected it to be Laurent Protege or Laurent Duelist, but they're both blondes and this guy is distinctly brunette hair. Is he unique to this artwork?
I haven't played much LoR but from what I understand, Poisoned just deals 1 damage. If it takes 1 damage at the end of the round, and it loses poisoned at the start of the next round then it will just take one damage and stop being poisoned. So, what is the point except to activate Cassiopeia?
First off, Poison doesn't exist in game yet--part of Kinxil's proposal includes creating this new mechanic.
Second: I kinda like it. You are correct that it is just 1 damage, but it's 1 damage that the unit's owner anticipates. Sometimes that makes a big difference--i.e., if I'm on the attack with a 3/1 and I know you have this card, its probably better for me to attack then to let you ping it off for free. Or: I can play reservedly and try to get you to commit to poisoning it now before I attack. Which brings me to the only thing I dislike about this card/mechanic: a 1-mana burst is way too easy to play, so it doesn't set up much interaction either way. In the aforementioned example, I'm probably going to attack regardless because there's not much I can do to disincentize you from spending 1 mana at the end of your turn to take 3 attack of my board, and since you know this you're going to hold on until off on casting until after my attack so you not only get to chump block my 3/1 but also get 2 more damage into my other surviving units too. Contrast to if it was 2 mana for 2 poison damage, or 1-mana but limited to combating units: lots tougher decisions on both sides of the board.
I suppose what is most tricky for me is the mulligan - for instance, I'm unsure when to keep/mull Mystic Shot.
Again: watching streamers is great for this stuff.
In general: you want early minion damage. The 3 critical cards I mentioned are all great early-game drops. Pay attention to whether you're attacking on odds or evens because that affects which cards you want to keep. I think you only want to keep the Mystic Shot to answer an early Teemo or Zed; most of the time, you'll rather have a unit which can attack face a few times and use Mystic Shot / Get Excited! on your last turn to hit face. The biggest decision is when to open attack versus when to play additional units: you need to do the math to see what happens if you attack as-is, and then guess what will change if you play another unit but give them a chance to play a blocker. Sometimes that risk is worth the potential reward of playing an additional attacker; sometimes its not.
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.
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You know the little red bottle icon on your L2 means regeneration, right? So as-is, your Pike will be healing to full at the end of every round as soon as he attacks twice. That combined with challenger means he'll basically delete any opponent unit with <=2 attack every round indefinitely without the aid of a buff, and with buff he turns into Final Boss Mode.
Without the regen or elusive, I could see it working. 5/3 challenger is still pretty good, but at least it will die after an attack or two without intervention. He starts to look more like a cross between Fiora and Katarina: game-winning with the right support, but you DO need the right support.
do i just craft the mushroom cloud deck? that seems to always win. is that any good? i dont think it's my play style but i am running out of patience. I will play anything that can actually win and not require lucky topdecks.
Good god no, man! Not sure if you mean a Teemo 'shroom deck or an Ezreal 'shroom deck, but either way: those aren't good decks.
Did you not have luck with Noxus / P&Z burn? That should DESTROY both the aforementioned--for Teemo, you snipe him with Mystic Shot while applying your own pressure, for Ezrael, you just apply too much damage before he can even level up. I am usually 50:50 with this deck at Gold using an unrefined list, so you should have no trouble at bronze.
Here's a more refined list from Swim than the one I listed earlier, but honestly you don't even need to craft this. I'd say the Boomcrew Rookie, Legion Rearguard, and Precious Pet are all critical; everything else is "what's cheap and deals fast damage?" If you're still having trouble after that, try watching a few streamers on Youtube.
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.
It works the same for Tough. And I imagine a 0-mana Thermongenic BeamBADCARDNAME.
I can see the logic: the unit was assigned damage; the amount of damage happened to be 0. To go back to your example: if I had a Crimson Curator out, you cast Grasp of the Undying on it, and then I burst a Prismatic Barrier, I think the game would assign -0 HP to the Curator, +0 HP to your nexus, and grant me a crimson card. Similarly, if you Chain Vest instead, I think the game would assign -2 HP to the Curator and +2 HP to your nexus.
The thing that bugs me a little is that frostbite works differently: 0 attack units don't strike, so they never technically deal damage which is apparently different from dealing 0 damage. It's a bit far out, but that's the reason why brittle steel can stop a Teemo/runecard]vor Ezreal effect.
but u should prolly craft 3x crimson curator asap in that deck. and the 4 mana 5/5 dude.
Lol yeah; I'm F2P so when I'm trying something new I usually substitute a lot before committing wildcards. Plus, playing with 1-ofs helps me evaluate how good something feels before I commit to it.
I've refined this deck a lot since Wednesday, but then I started losing hard with it so I started experimenting again. I updated the OoC version to reflect my current decklist. Honestly, I think this archetype just isn't strong enough for the current meta. Like the Crimson Awakener guy you mention: OK, he's a good threat on Round 4, but then what? Aggro decks already have you below 10 HP by then, and Control decks are fine stalling a vanilla 5/5 while their value comes online. Meanwhile, his played effect does about as much harm as good--you almost always lose at least 1 unit.
If anyone has had any recent success with this archetype I'd love to hear how they're achieving it, but personally I've really soured on it over this week.
I saw this deck twice on ladder this afternoon and thought: wow, what a bold new deck--I bet some streamer has popularized it in the last 48 hours and these guys are just copying it. And I was right. :-P
Am I the only one who's a little sick of how prevalent Hecarim is on ladder right now?
The ironic thing is that before beta launched, I really wanted to make a legit Hecarim deck--you know, one that synergies on ephemerals and actively works to level him up instead of just slotting him for the +10 attack on Round 6--but between the fact I'm tired of seeing him and that the game refuses to gift me any free Hecarim (3 Elise 3 Kalista 2 Thresh 0 Hecarim QQ), it seems pretty pointless.
The big thing to me is that the meta seems to be shifting slightly on an almost daily basis, which is the desired goal. It remains to be seen though whether this is because of amazing balance or if its just the community hyper-aggressively trying to "solve" the meta.
I do really admire that they seem to have successfully downtuned the previously-meta-defining decks without making them non-viable. I'm still seeing wraithcaller decks, and I still lose to them sometimes but not nearly as much as before. I still see the occasional Rhasa and Ledros, but not nearly with the same persistence as before. And Deny has become more of a calculated risk than an automatic assumption. It is extremely commendable--proper balance is a very difficult thing to do, and most competitors err on the side of over-nerfing.
I don't like that there are some cards that are becoming extremely popular while others are nonexistent. For examples, Avarosan Hearthguard is included in almost every deck that include Frejlord, but when is the last time you've seen a Spectral Matron, Jae Medarda, or Captain Farron? Or: what would you guess the ratio is between the number of Karma+ Hecarim + Heimerdinger that you've seen in the past 3 days to Kalista + Thresh + Shen? If the unpopular cards I mention are just too niche to get much play, well then that's unfortunate (doubly so as I've opened a lot of them :-( ) but it's nothing terminal. I fear though that it's the opposite: that the popular cards are just that much better in earnest, and if that's the case then it means the community is becoming a lot better at finding meta-defining power cards and there's still a lot of work to do to tune the entire catalog.
I think you guys might be meaning to say the same thing but using different interpretations of what is control, mid-range, etc.
Swim's whole speal from that video (and others will tell you this too, its a fairly generic CCG principle) is that you want to be either slightly slower than your opponent or a lot faster. So you end up with a paper->rock->scissors that looks something like:
Noxus/P&Z burn aggro decks beat P&Z/Ionia Heimer+Karma control decks
P&Z/Ionia Heimer+Karma control decks beat SI Fearsome midrange decks
SI Fearsome midrange decks beat the aforementioned Noxus/P&Z decks.
Except this game is complex enough that you can't oversimplify. For example: whereas the P&Z/Ionia versions of Karma are typically waiting for Heimerdinger and as such are slow to answer these new aggro burn decks, there's a new SI/Ionia version that can drop early answers + healing via Withering Wail, Grasp of the Undying, and Darkwater Scourge. However that change sacrifices a lot of its potential to address fat boards, so it struggles against things like Dawn Spiders and Elnuks--decks which are traditionally described as midrange. And that's not even getting into sub-variants: e.g., Warmothers control generally beats other types of control because it gets so much value late game. So you can't make generic statements like "control beats X but loses to Y", you really need to put it in context of tempo.
i didnt too but i assumed it must have a cap right? i mean is impossible to program infinite shards , nothing is infinite, i was thinking it would be 10k or 100k but i happy the cap isnt low.
Assuming they aren't arbitrarily limiting it and/or doing some fancy byte packing, its at least a ushort which is 2^16 = 65.5k. I suspect they are using 23 bits (standard signed int), which would be just over 8.3 M.
True. I am assuming they do something like Hearthstone where there's a less popular / less curated eternal format where players can still use their older cards, but I guess they aren't ready to officially commit to that yet.
No, that was my point: if I had a Stand Alone in my opening hand, its easy for me to only play 1 minion which I want to buff and near impossible for you to play around. Whereas for Take Heart: I need my target to take nonlethal damage which can be tricky. I've lost a lot of Braum because my opponent was smart enough to wait until mid-combat before adding a Mystic Shot or Get Excited! to the stack.
I imagine you intended this to be just about the current meta, but for my money there was nothing worse than pre-Dr. Boom nerf Control Warrior. If you want to make your deck be 20+ reactive cards: OK, that's your decision. But when those remaining slots can generate enough value to compete against aggro, midrange, AND other control decks, then something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Oh, and pre-nerf Galakrond Shaman. That archetype alone ruined this expansion for me to the point where I don't even care that Shaman is unplayable right now. Whoever let that slip through play testing should seriously reconsider their career choices.
No guaranteed champs at any level, although sometimes you get lucky.
L10+ give Expedition tokens. A completed expedition (both trials) guarantees at least 1 random champion.
Silent Shadowseer.
I would assume so--usually if it keeps buffs, it has the keyword 'exact' a la Spectral Matron and Silverwing Vanguard--but try it out. :-P
Yeah; its a bit like Take Heart--insanely powerful tempo if you can land it right, but with a huge caveat.
Of course, Stand Alone is a LOT easier to anticipate / play for. :-P
If you look at Fiora's L2 full artwork, you see an awards ceremony. I get that the 2nd place guy is the Laurent Chevalier punk, comically sulking because he lost to Fiora--but who is that 3rd place guy? I would have expected it to be Laurent Protege or Laurent Duelist, but they're both blondes and this guy is distinctly brunette hair. Is he unique to this artwork?
This has been bugging me a lot lately. :-(
First off, Poison doesn't exist in game yet--part of Kinxil's proposal includes creating this new mechanic.
Second: I kinda like it. You are correct that it is just 1 damage, but it's 1 damage that the unit's owner anticipates. Sometimes that makes a big difference--i.e., if I'm on the attack with a 3/1 and I know you have this card, its probably better for me to attack then to let you ping it off for free. Or: I can play reservedly and try to get you to commit to poisoning it now before I attack. Which brings me to the only thing I dislike about this card/mechanic: a 1-mana burst is way too easy to play, so it doesn't set up much interaction either way. In the aforementioned example, I'm probably going to attack regardless because there's not much I can do to disincentize you from spending 1 mana at the end of your turn to take 3 attack of my board, and since you know this you're going to hold on until off on casting until after my attack so you not only get to chump block my 3/1 but also get 2 more damage into my other surviving units too. Contrast to if it was 2 mana for 2 poison damage, or 1-mana but limited to combating units: lots tougher decisions on both sides of the board.
Again: watching streamers is great for this stuff.
In general: you want early minion damage. The 3 critical cards I mentioned are all great early-game drops. Pay attention to whether you're attacking on odds or evens because that affects which cards you want to keep. I think you only want to keep the Mystic Shot to answer an early Teemo or Zed; most of the time, you'll rather have a unit which can attack face a few times and use Mystic Shot / Get Excited! on your last turn to hit face. The biggest decision is when to open attack versus when to play additional units: you need to do the math to see what happens if you attack as-is, and then guess what will change if you play another unit but give them a chance to play a blocker. Sometimes that risk is worth the potential reward of playing an additional attacker; sometimes its not.
Good luck!
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You know the little red bottle icon on your L2 means regeneration, right? So as-is, your Pike will be healing to full at the end of every round as soon as he attacks twice. That combined with challenger means he'll basically delete any opponent unit with <=2 attack every round indefinitely without the aid of a buff, and with buff he turns into Final Boss Mode.
Without the regen or elusive, I could see it working. 5/3 challenger is still pretty good, but at least it will die after an attack or two without intervention. He starts to look more like a cross between Fiora and Katarina: game-winning with the right support, but you DO need the right support.
Good god no, man! Not sure if you mean a Teemo 'shroom deck or an Ezreal 'shroom deck, but either way: those aren't good decks.
Did you not have luck with Noxus / P&Z burn? That should DESTROY both the aforementioned--for Teemo, you snipe him with Mystic Shot while applying your own pressure, for Ezrael, you just apply too much damage before he can even level up. I am usually 50:50 with this deck at Gold using an unrefined list, so you should have no trouble at bronze.
Here's a more refined list from Swim than the one I listed earlier, but honestly you don't even need to craft this. I'd say the Boomcrew Rookie, Legion Rearguard, and Precious Pet are all critical; everything else is "what's cheap and deals fast damage?" If you're still having trouble after that, try watching a few streamers on Youtube.
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.
It works the same for Tough. And I imagine a 0-mana Thermongenic BeamBADCARDNAME.
I can see the logic: the unit was assigned damage; the amount of damage happened to be 0. To go back to your example: if I had a Crimson Curator out, you cast Grasp of the Undying on it, and then I burst a Prismatic Barrier, I think the game would assign -0 HP to the Curator, +0 HP to your nexus, and grant me a crimson card. Similarly, if you Chain Vest instead, I think the game would assign -2 HP to the Curator and +2 HP to your nexus.
The thing that bugs me a little is that frostbite works differently: 0 attack units don't strike, so they never technically deal damage which is apparently different from dealing 0 damage. It's a bit far out, but that's the reason why brittle steel can stop a Teemo/runecard]vor Ezreal effect.
BADCARDNAMEThe OutOf.Cards team does a pretty good job of making weekly posts with good decklists on the front page. :-P
Here are some you can try.
1.) Aggro, except substitute your free Jinxfor the Vlad:
2.) Fearsome ideal:
3.) Fearsome budget; slot in any/all Hecarims you have, try to make it SI-heavy so you can use Wraithcaller
4.) Elusive Burn--lots of variants; you probably want something like this:
Lol yeah; I'm F2P so when I'm trying something new I usually substitute a lot before committing wildcards. Plus, playing with 1-ofs helps me evaluate how good something feels before I commit to it.
I've refined this deck a lot since Wednesday, but then I started losing hard with it so I started experimenting again. I updated the OoC version to reflect my current decklist. Honestly, I think this archetype just isn't strong enough for the current meta. Like the Crimson Awakener guy you mention: OK, he's a good threat on Round 4, but then what? Aggro decks already have you below 10 HP by then, and Control decks are fine stalling a vanilla 5/5 while their value comes online. Meanwhile, his played effect does about as much harm as good--you almost always lose at least 1 unit.
If anyone has had any recent success with this archetype I'd love to hear how they're achieving it, but personally I've really soured on it over this week.
I saw this deck twice on ladder this afternoon and thought: wow, what a bold new deck--I bet some streamer has popularized it in the last 48 hours and these guys are just copying it. And I was right. :-P
Am I the only one who's a little sick of how prevalent Hecarim is on ladder right now?
The ironic thing is that before beta launched, I really wanted to make a legit Hecarim deck--you know, one that synergies on ephemerals and actively works to level him up instead of just slotting him for the +10 attack on Round 6--but between the fact I'm tired of seeing him and that the game refuses to gift me any free Hecarim (3 Elise 3 Kalista 2 Thresh 0 Hecarim QQ), it seems pretty pointless.
The big thing to me is that the meta seems to be shifting slightly on an almost daily basis, which is the desired goal. It remains to be seen though whether this is because of amazing balance or if its just the community hyper-aggressively trying to "solve" the meta.
I do really admire that they seem to have successfully downtuned the previously-meta-defining decks without making them non-viable. I'm still seeing wraithcaller decks, and I still lose to them sometimes but not nearly as much as before. I still see the occasional Rhasa and Ledros, but not nearly with the same persistence as before. And Deny has become more of a calculated risk than an automatic assumption. It is extremely commendable--proper balance is a very difficult thing to do, and most competitors err on the side of over-nerfing.
I don't like that there are some cards that are becoming extremely popular while others are nonexistent. For examples, Avarosan Hearthguard is included in almost every deck that include Frejlord, but when is the last time you've seen a Spectral Matron, Jae Medarda, or Captain Farron? Or: what would you guess the ratio is between the number of Karma+ Hecarim + Heimerdinger that you've seen in the past 3 days to Kalista + Thresh + Shen? If the unpopular cards I mention are just too niche to get much play, well then that's unfortunate (doubly so as I've opened a lot of them :-( ) but it's nothing terminal. I fear though that it's the opposite: that the popular cards are just that much better in earnest, and if that's the case then it means the community is becoming a lot better at finding meta-defining power cards and there's still a lot of work to do to tune the entire catalog.
I think you guys might be meaning to say the same thing but using different interpretations of what is control, mid-range, etc.
Swim's whole speal from that video (and others will tell you this too, its a fairly generic CCG principle) is that you want to be either slightly slower than your opponent or a lot faster. So you end up with a paper->rock->scissors that looks something like:
Except this game is complex enough that you can't oversimplify. For example: whereas the P&Z/Ionia versions of Karma are typically waiting for Heimerdinger and as such are slow to answer these new aggro burn decks, there's a new SI/Ionia version that can drop early answers + healing via Withering Wail, Grasp of the Undying, and Darkwater Scourge. However that change sacrifices a lot of its potential to address fat boards, so it struggles against things like Dawn Spiders and Elnuks--decks which are traditionally described as midrange. And that's not even getting into sub-variants: e.g., Warmothers control generally beats other types of control because it gets so much value late game. So you can't make generic statements like "control beats X but loses to Y", you really need to put it in context of tempo.
Assuming they aren't arbitrarily limiting it and/or doing some fancy byte packing, its at least a ushort which is 2^16 = 65.5k. I suspect they are using 23 bits (standard signed int), which would be just over 8.3 M.
True. I am assuming they do something like Hearthstone where there's a less popular / less curated eternal format where players can still use their older cards, but I guess they aren't ready to officially commit to that yet.