I dunno guys, my verdict is yet to be determined on this. It definitely could be terrible, like everyone is saying.
But I did a quick skim of the leveled up champions that would be good without any support, and it looks like more than half of them fit that description. The ones that are obviously bad include Fizz, Teemo, Elise, Maokai, Fiora, Diana, Braum, and probably Nautilus (though Naut could be quite a hit if you're Deep). Karma, Heimer, and Lux could be bad, depending how many spells are in your deck. Tryndamere is pretty meh as well. Everything else is actually pretty good for its cost.
This card might be quite a bit more menacing than it looks at first. Even Katarina could be pretty amazing when you get her for free into a board that's already developed.
Edit: I counted out (according to my own opinion) four categories of level 2 champions: Bad, Iffy/Situational, Good, Very good. Here's my counts-
Good - 22 (51.2%) - (Everything not specifically listed)
Very good - 9 (21%) - (Sejuani, Asol, Swain, Twisted Fate, Thresh, Kalista, Vi, Lee Sin, Nautilus)
Meaning you have a 72% chance to get a champ that is either good or very good. And of course, we all know that a free flipped Asol into Invoked Living Legends is a thing that WILL happen.
Edit #2 - Topandito makes a great point, which my brain somehow missed. Nautilus is a 13/13 tough fearsome, every time. That puts him solidly in the Very Good bin instead of the bad one.
I agree on the Ezreal nerf - I dont understand why they nerfed him. And your second point also - I think both cards have a high skill cap.
Ezreal was the king of winning games he should have never won, just because he gets to do automatic nexus damage for every spellcast. Paired with Karma, it was an un-interactible OTK that felt ridiculous to lose to.
Lee Sin is now filling the role that pre-nerf Ezreal used to fill. And how do we feel about that world, exactly? Happy about it are we?
Ezreal was nerfed for the exact same reasons that Lee Sin is going to be nerfed.
I’m curious because I’ve run into several games where my opponent have things happen that aren’t supposed to. Getting attack tokens without playing rally on my turn, Capture not capturing a unit without them playing and counter spells or spellshields, etc. I looked through the move list, and I didn’t see anything to give them the abilities they had. Any thoughts? Am I just being paranoid?
All I can say is that I've never seen such things in 4 months of playing. There is always a clear reason for what happened.
That being said, when I was new to the game, there were lots of surprising things because I did not understand how all the interactions worked. By the way, are you aware that Lucian and Garen both can grant attack tokens? Citrus Courier can as well.
Side note - LoR does not have more keywords than HS. I counted them out a couple of months ago, and HS had at least 5-10 more, depending on whether you count the keywords that are pretty obvious what they do. Since then, LoR added more keywords, so they are probably close to even at this point. But LoR does not have more.
I counted 64 keywords in Runeterra, and only 19 in Hearthstone.
Here's a full list of keywords and abilities in HS. As I said, some of them are fairly obvious, but you still have to learn what they mean. There are 39 just counting the actual keywords. If you include all of the abilities that are printed in card text without keywords, you're up to nearly 80 different things that are found across more than just one card. We also must account for things like Lich King cards, or E.T.C. cards that generate extra cards out of a completely invisible pool of card options (there's a REALLY big one for confusion - absolutely nowhere in the entire game interface can you find what cards can be generated by those things; you can only find them on fansites). And yes, some of the HS abilities and keywords are quite obvious, such as Start of Game, Choose One, or Casts When Drawn, Can't Attack, Can't Attack Heroes, Draw, Discard, etc.
As for counting 64 keywords in LoR, yes, you can actually get up to 66 keywords in LoR (see here), if you count all of the following as keywords: Attack, Block, Can't Attack, Can't Block, Collectible, Death, Discard, Draw, Immobile, Play, Round End, Round Start, See, Silence, Strongest, and Weakest. Otherwise, it's 50, and some of those are almost as obvious as the ones listed above, such as Trigger, Stun, Revive, Lifesteal, Level up, and Capture, to name a few.
Hearthstone has a LOT more keywords and abilities than most people realize when they have played it for a long time. And they have some downright completely opaque mechanices (such as the ETC Battlecry).
Lastly, HS has literally zero explanations during a game of what a thing does or what a keyword means. You cannot mouse over anything, get any popouts, absolutely nothing. In contrast, literally everything you want to know about cards or mechanics can be found on every card in LoR, even in the middle of a game. If ETC were a card in LoR, it would have a popout showing every possible Power Chord card that could be generated when you play it.
I actually recently popped back into HS for a Tavern Brawl game and saw "Spellburst" for the first time ever. Tried to figure out in game what it does. Literally no way to find out what it does if I didn't already know (and I didn't). This would NEVER happen in LoR. I would have clicked on a card with Spellburst, and BAM! the explanation would be right there.
Bottom line- despite being more complex and much more difficult to master than Hearthstone, I argue that LoR is actually MORE friendly to new players than Hearthstone is.
Taking up a permanent card slot is actually a really big deal in LoR. HS has 7 slots (one more than LoR) and Eternal has 12 slots. Not sure how many MTG has. But I think presently, LoR has the smallest number of slots, so taking up one of them permanently is not trivial.
Runeterra (or any other of the popular card games) isn't going to kill Hearthstone.
Hearthstone has a pretty bad economy model and that's a huge issue. It will get a full revamp in two months. Then we will see if the game is going to provide better rewards and become more accessible or if it's going to be bad and die because of it. That's what is going to kill HS. If the economy doesn't become better, it will eventually strangle itself. But, even if it dies, the casual playerbase might not feel like moving to another more complex card game.
If you read my comment again more carefully, it was almost entirely about the economy and accessibility of cards in HS. Hearthstone was also my first ever card game. I never did MTG or anything else until HS. I'm in exactly the same boat as you, in that regard. And I'm still vastly more satisfied with my experiences in LoR than in HS.
Side note - LoR does not have more keywords than HS. I counted them out a couple of months ago, and HS had at least 5-10 more, depending on whether you count the keywords that are pretty obvious what they do. Since then, LoR added more keywords, so they are probably close to even at this point. But LoR does not have more.
I agree on the Leona picks. I cleared it with the Diana ability that gives free celestial cards with nightfall triggers, then choosing Ezreal and Fizz. Went hard into elusives, basically. I beat trundle and asol rounds with cosmic inspiration.
Same here as OP, I quit too. Blizz cannot correct HS it's too messed up. The only way would be to be start over and release HS 2. Not holding my breath for this though but I am still checking the HS websites for any meaningful changes that could bring me to play again.
If you still want to play a card game, pick up Legends of Runeterra. You'll have a competitive deck in a week or less, and can find out if you like it within two weeks.
I'm a little over 4 months in, never spent money on cards, and have almost literally every card in the game already.
It seems that i will gain more free stuff in one week of playing Runeterra than the amount of free stuff i got from HS in about three and a half years.
I am just over 4 months of playing Legends of Runeterra. My collection is almost literally complete. And I have enough resources to complete it, if I wanted to. I just don't value the 25 copies I don't have yet (yes, 25 missing copies across all of the cards in the entire game, at 3x each).
I was never even remotely close to a complete collection in Hearthstone after playing it for 2+ years and spending money on it. In LoR I have an essentially complete collection without spending any money on cards at all. I actually did spend some money, but it was for cosmetics during a special event.
Add to this the fact that LoR also has better gameplay - it's kinda stunning that HS is still alive, honestly.
Edit - total side note about the artwork. If you right-click on any unit card, so it gets bigger, you will see a little eyeball icon under the card. Click that eyeball, and you will get a view of the full card artwork. Click again, and the text will disappear, giving you a complete, full image of that unit's art. And man, there is some really great card art in this game!
Oh man, are you in for a treat. This game is fantastic, and it clobbers hearthstone pretty hard when it comes to player decisions actually mattering.
So far, the variety of viable decks is pretty high. The devs aim for about 30 competitive decks at any given time. Even when one or two decks are clearly the strongest, there are still many other viable decks.
As for budget decks, there is a great one with Elise that I'm using now in platinum. Link here
Going all-in on Lee Sin has not led to a poor winrate for me. About the Dragon's Rage just straight up in the deck - have you not found that Deny and Bastion just kind of wreck it?
So Lee Sin has a 50 percent winrate on mobalytics currently, so it's really bad.
The buff to bastion will absolutely change that however.
Expect it to go up to 55 percent with the next patch.
Or it has a steep learning curve and people just were not mastering it before they dropped it.
But with Bastion buffed, I don't think you even need to be very good with Lee Sin anymore. Give it about 3 days and the entire ladder will be full of Lee Sin mirrors.
I tried burning him with vengeance they used a burst spellshield with spell mana. I tried buffing a follower to drop him they used two cheap spells to give him barrier with the draw engine they have I just found it impossible to kill him with my deck. I’d say vengeance needs a buff but it’s fine against everyday that does’t have spellshield which leads me to believe once again spellshield is just to damn useful.
Glad to see I’m not alone in wondering how to kill him. I’m glad the are trying to balance underused cards so they are useful but damn he is strong
When playing a deck with frostbite though he isn’t that much of a proble
I have to disagree with the last sentence buddy, spell shield can counter frostbite and even if you don't have it Lee Sin players are only going to attack after they give him a barrier, so he will still survive the encounter even if he doesn't kill you units.
Spellshield does NOT counter frostbite from abilities - e.g. Icevale Archer, Sejuani, and Ashe's attack. I guarantee 100% that these abilities go right through the spellshield. It does counter harsh winds though.
Hmm the buff to bastion yap that seems about right. /Considers quitting
These kinds of changes happen at least 1-2 weeks ahead of the actual patch. So, when they planned the changes for this patch, they had only just buffed Lee Sin. At the time, Bastion was seeing no play. Even now, with Lee Sin proving so powerful, many of the decks still don't use Bastion. It has definitely been under-used until now.
However, this change is WAAAAY over the top. Now, the best Lee Sin deck is for SURE one with Targon. Maybe even including Taric to double up on the Bastion effect. Brace yourselves guys - you're gonna lose to Lee Sin a lot over the next two weeks. Or else you're gonna learn how to play him.
But mirror matches of Lee Sin ... those will be brutal.
I dunno guys, my verdict is yet to be determined on this. It definitely could be terrible, like everyone is saying.
But I did a quick skim of the leveled up champions that would be good without any support, and it looks like more than half of them fit that description. The ones that are obviously bad include Fizz, Teemo, Elise, Maokai, Fiora, Diana, Braum, and probably Nautilus (though Naut could be quite a hit if you're Deep). Karma, Heimer, and Lux could be bad, depending how many spells are in your deck. Tryndamere is pretty meh as well. Everything else is actually pretty good for its cost.
This card might be quite a bit more menacing than it looks at first. Even Katarina could be pretty amazing when you get her for free into a board that's already developed.
Edit: I counted out (according to my own opinion) four categories of level 2 champions: Bad, Iffy/Situational, Good, Very good. Here's my counts-
Bad - 7 (16.2%) - (see above)
Iffy - 5 (11.6%) - (Karma, Heimer, Lux, Tryndamere, Katarina)
Good - 22 (51.2%) - (Everything not specifically listed)
Very good - 9 (21%) - (Sejuani, Asol, Swain, Twisted Fate, Thresh, Kalista, Vi, Lee Sin, Nautilus)
Meaning you have a 72% chance to get a champ that is either good or very good. And of course, we all know that a free flipped Asol into Invoked Living Legends is a thing that WILL happen.
Edit #2 - Topandito makes a great point, which my brain somehow missed. Nautilus is a 13/13 tough fearsome, every time. That puts him solidly in the Very Good bin instead of the bad one.
*Randomly gets Level 2 Sejuani* - who's a meme now?
A 4/4 for 4 is already vanilla value, so it has not taken a hit to its stats. And it grants permanent overwhelm to anything already on the board.
This is going to be waaay stronger than people are currently giving it credit for here. This thing will be all over the place.
Ezreal was the king of winning games he should have never won, just because he gets to do automatic nexus damage for every spellcast. Paired with Karma, it was an un-interactible OTK that felt ridiculous to lose to.
Lee Sin is now filling the role that pre-nerf Ezreal used to fill. And how do we feel about that world, exactly? Happy about it are we?
Ezreal was nerfed for the exact same reasons that Lee Sin is going to be nerfed.
All I can say right now, that no one else seems to have said yet, is that Citrus Courier loves all these self-damaging effects.
All I can say is that I've never seen such things in 4 months of playing. There is always a clear reason for what happened.
That being said, when I was new to the game, there were lots of surprising things because I did not understand how all the interactions worked. By the way, are you aware that Lucian and Garen both can grant attack tokens? Citrus Courier can as well.
For sure Falling Comet can kill a landmark, since it shows that happening in the video.
Here's a full list of keywords and abilities in HS. As I said, some of them are fairly obvious, but you still have to learn what they mean. There are 39 just counting the actual keywords. If you include all of the abilities that are printed in card text without keywords, you're up to nearly 80 different things that are found across more than just one card. We also must account for things like Lich King cards, or E.T.C. cards that generate extra cards out of a completely invisible pool of card options (there's a REALLY big one for confusion - absolutely nowhere in the entire game interface can you find what cards can be generated by those things; you can only find them on fansites). And yes, some of the HS abilities and keywords are quite obvious, such as Start of Game, Choose One, or Casts When Drawn, Can't Attack, Can't Attack Heroes, Draw, Discard, etc.
As for counting 64 keywords in LoR, yes, you can actually get up to 66 keywords in LoR (see here), if you count all of the following as keywords: Attack, Block, Can't Attack, Can't Block, Collectible, Death, Discard, Draw, Immobile, Play, Round End, Round Start, See, Silence, Strongest, and Weakest. Otherwise, it's 50, and some of those are almost as obvious as the ones listed above, such as Trigger, Stun, Revive, Lifesteal, Level up, and Capture, to name a few.
Hearthstone has a LOT more keywords and abilities than most people realize when they have played it for a long time. And they have some downright completely opaque mechanices (such as the ETC Battlecry).
Lastly, HS has literally zero explanations during a game of what a thing does or what a keyword means. You cannot mouse over anything, get any popouts, absolutely nothing. In contrast, literally everything you want to know about cards or mechanics can be found on every card in LoR, even in the middle of a game. If ETC were a card in LoR, it would have a popout showing every possible Power Chord card that could be generated when you play it.
I actually recently popped back into HS for a Tavern Brawl game and saw "Spellburst" for the first time ever. Tried to figure out in game what it does. Literally no way to find out what it does if I didn't already know (and I didn't). This would NEVER happen in LoR. I would have clicked on a card with Spellburst, and BAM! the explanation would be right there.
Bottom line- despite being more complex and much more difficult to master than Hearthstone, I argue that LoR is actually MORE friendly to new players than Hearthstone is.
Taking up a permanent card slot is actually a really big deal in LoR. HS has 7 slots (one more than LoR) and Eternal has 12 slots. Not sure how many MTG has. But I think presently, LoR has the smallest number of slots, so taking up one of them permanently is not trivial.
If you read my comment again more carefully, it was almost entirely about the economy and accessibility of cards in HS. Hearthstone was also my first ever card game. I never did MTG or anything else until HS. I'm in exactly the same boat as you, in that regard. And I'm still vastly more satisfied with my experiences in LoR than in HS.
Side note - LoR does not have more keywords than HS. I counted them out a couple of months ago, and HS had at least 5-10 more, depending on whether you count the keywords that are pretty obvious what they do. Since then, LoR added more keywords, so they are probably close to even at this point. But LoR does not have more.
I agree on the Leona picks. I cleared it with the Diana ability that gives free celestial cards with nightfall triggers, then choosing Ezreal and Fizz. Went hard into elusives, basically. I beat trundle and asol rounds with cosmic inspiration.
If you still want to play a card game, pick up Legends of Runeterra. You'll have a competitive deck in a week or less, and can find out if you like it within two weeks.
I'm a little over 4 months in, never spent money on cards, and have almost literally every card in the game already.
I am just over 4 months of playing Legends of Runeterra. My collection is almost literally complete. And I have enough resources to complete it, if I wanted to. I just don't value the 25 copies I don't have yet (yes, 25 missing copies across all of the cards in the entire game, at 3x each).
I was never even remotely close to a complete collection in Hearthstone after playing it for 2+ years and spending money on it. In LoR I have an essentially complete collection without spending any money on cards at all. I actually did spend some money, but it was for cosmetics during a special event.
Add to this the fact that LoR also has better gameplay - it's kinda stunning that HS is still alive, honestly.
Edit - total side note about the artwork. If you right-click on any unit card, so it gets bigger, you will see a little eyeball icon under the card. Click that eyeball, and you will get a view of the full card artwork. Click again, and the text will disappear, giving you a complete, full image of that unit's art. And man, there is some really great card art in this game!
Oh man, are you in for a treat. This game is fantastic, and it clobbers hearthstone pretty hard when it comes to player decisions actually mattering.
So far, the variety of viable decks is pretty high. The devs aim for about 30 competitive decks at any given time. Even when one or two decks are clearly the strongest, there are still many other viable decks.
As for budget decks, there is a great one with Elise that I'm using now in platinum. Link here
https://lorguardian.com/app/deck?metaId=5f71f97556a7347c1e01b243
It seemed to me like they were trying to hide the best info behind a pay gate when I was last there. Money grab, most likely.
It's ok though. I never really paid much attention to them anyways. No big loss for me. I kinda preferred LoR Guardian already, so I'll use that.
Going all-in on Lee Sin has not led to a poor winrate for me. About the Dragon's Rage just straight up in the deck - have you not found that Deny and Bastion just kind of wreck it?
Or it has a steep learning curve and people just were not mastering it before they dropped it.
But with Bastion buffed, I don't think you even need to be very good with Lee Sin anymore. Give it about 3 days and the entire ladder will be full of Lee Sin mirrors.
Spellshield does NOT counter frostbite from abilities - e.g. Icevale Archer, Sejuani, and Ashe's attack. I guarantee 100% that these abilities go right through the spellshield. It does counter harsh winds though.
These kinds of changes happen at least 1-2 weeks ahead of the actual patch. So, when they planned the changes for this patch, they had only just buffed Lee Sin. At the time, Bastion was seeing no play. Even now, with Lee Sin proving so powerful, many of the decks still don't use Bastion. It has definitely been under-used until now.
However, this change is WAAAAY over the top. Now, the best Lee Sin deck is for SURE one with Targon. Maybe even including Taric to double up on the Bastion effect. Brace yourselves guys - you're gonna lose to Lee Sin a lot over the next two weeks. Or else you're gonna learn how to play him.
But mirror matches of Lee Sin ... those will be brutal.
Lee Sin is going to be over the top insanely good for the next two weeks. That buffed Bastion is going to make him incredibly consistent.