Graplr just went 6-1 with starspring now you say that's a small sample size, statistical anomaly yatta yatta, I don't care he was kicking butt with a freaking healing deck
I agree completely. Great players, like Grapplr, can take mediocre decks and play them to insanely high winrates. I mean, I used to watch Firebat or Brian Kibler play HS decks on their streams - they could play just about anything and get a positive winrate out of it. That says nothing about the decks at all. If one of their viewers picked up one of those decks and started playing it, they would have a losing record for sure, because the decks were hot garbage. But the players are so good that they can play anything and win with it.
The point of a meta report is to publish the decks that are winning across a broad sample size of players, thus removing the pilot from the equation.
Side note, since you brought up Poros - the first time I ever made masters was playing a poros deck, waaaay before any major players thought it was viable.
I've been playing a completely new deck idea through Diamond 4 into Diamond 3 and nearly Diamond 2 (with only a couple of losses).
Leona/Katarina - I saw it listed as a hot new thing that's making waves, and I have to say that it is really impressive. It's aggro enough that it can just win games if your opponent doesn't do much on the first two turns, and the makers called it aggro, but it seems a bit more like early midrange or something.
Doesn't have a high playrate currently, but the winrate is quite high ... like around the 60% mark. I'm currently at 76/100 in Diamond 3, with only one loss since 0/100 Diamond 4. So, figuring the math for that ... I'm 9-1 at the moment, though I did lose one game when I was at 0/100 Diamond 4. So, 9-2 I guess (unless you include the 3 games in Platinum, which would make it 12-2 since I first picked up the deck from scratch with no tutorial about how to use it or anything).
Secondly, let's talk about Snapping. Unlike Hearthstone (and most other CCGs with a ladder), in Snap, a player can make their wins count way more than their losses by knowing when they have the advantage and when they've been beat. No, you're not going to have a 75% winrate, no matter what deck you play - this is true of every card game (unless you're a Youtuber and you play four games with a deck). However, you can climb like you have a 75% winrate by retreating before you lose more than 2 cubes and snapping when you have a good chance of winning the game to increase your payout.
I am well aware of how snapping works. My final collection level before uninstalling the game was around 2700-2800.
Defenders of the game keep talking about snapping and how you need to do it properly. But here's the thing - let's assume everyone in the game learns how to snap properly (and based on your comments and those from other people, that shouldn't take all that long, so it's a completely reasonable assumption). What happens at that point?
Scenario 1 - you're in a losing position, so you retreat. Your opponent gets 1 lousy cube. Yay for them sort of? No big loss for you.
Scenario 2 - you're in a winning position, so your opponent retreats. You get 1 lousy cube. Yay? Not really.
Scenario 3 - it's unclear who is winning, or you expect a surprise, but you think you have a chance. You don't snap, and your opponent doesn't either (because they are thinking the same as you are, since they also understand snapping). The game ends and someone gets 2 cubes. Clearly better than 1, but still not that exciting.
Scenario 4 - one of you is confident of winning and snaps. At this point, if the snapper was playing correctly (which we already assumed they are), they will win this game. That means the one who didn't snap will retreat. Snapper gets only 1 cube.
There are several other variations, but I think the point is quite clear by now - if everyone snaps properly, no one ever gets or loses more than 2 cubes, and they generally only get or lose 1.
And you will think how to accompany them with cards you have in a best possible way. And this period lasts for a several months, until you have all the pool 3 cards.
I agree, it would take several months of steady playing to collect the entire pool 3.
Just to remind you, your claim here has consistently been that Marvel Snap is better than LoR, because it's harder to get all the cards.
Now, to repeat my previous comment: it takes a full year of steady playing to collect complete sets of all of the cards in LoR.
Last I checked, a year is longer than a few months.
Edit - I should clarify that I don't think Snap is actually bad - it's mediocre at best, but with some cool new ideas. What I do think is that it's highly deceptive at the beginning - the player experience through pools 1 and 2 are not even remotely similar to the experience after entering pool 3. Which brings me to the crux of my issue with Snap - it's not nearly as good as the hype makes it out to be, and it definitely did not deserve to win game of the year. If the entire game experience was similar to the pool 1 and 2 experience, the game would be flat-out amazing. But pool 3+ completely ruins it for me. It's like they did a giant bait-and-switch.
And the collections are different for everyone - that's the beauty, so primitive netdeking is impossible. Moreover, the collections are different for everyone not only throughout the entire third pool, but even after it, given how difficult it is to get cards from pool 4 and 5.
There are a couple things going on this quote that are misunderstandings.
1) Literally everyone who hits collection level 486 has EXACTLY the same collection at that moment. Every single player, no exceptions. There is zero difference in their cards, just in their variants. Same thing for collection level 222 - every player at collection level 222 has identical collections with every other player at collection level 222.
2) Everyone in pool 3 has all of the pool 1 and pool 2 cards, guaranteed, no exceptions. This means that the only remaining variable is which cards your deck has that are exclusive to pool 3 or higher. This certainly allows for variations, but every deck will still contain a significant number of cards from pools 1 and 2.
3) Pools 4 and 5 are not actually separate pools. The only reason they are mentioned is because they have a different drop chance than pool 3. But you could theoretically get a "pool 5" card immediately after moving into pool 3 - anytime after collection level 486. You don't "move out" of pool 3 at any point, though I suppose you could say you're no longer in pool 3 if you manage to collect every single pool 3 card. But there is no collection level where you move from pool 3 to pool 4.
There are no such conditions in Hearthstone, or in Legends of Runeterra, or in Gwent, God rest his soul.
You are severely underestimating how long it takes to compile a full collection in Hearthstone, or even to build a specific deck on purpose. [EDIT - many people in HS, especially F2P players, have to build homebrew versions of meta decks because they dont have and cannot get all the cards, just like happens in Snap. The only difference is that Snap NEVER allows you to target a specific card you want, EVER.]
And of course, you are free to have your own preferences of what you want to do in a card game. Apparently you really enjoy a sense of accomplishment from collecting things that are hard to get.
In contrast, most people want to actually play the game with whatever cards they want to use at a given moment. Legends of Runeterra is perfect for that, since you can always target specific cards you want to get, and then you can build a deck with them and actually play it. And by the way, I have to call you out for your comment on LoR being so absurdly easy to get cards. Yes, it's very generous. But even with their generosity, it would still take the better part of a year to have a fully complete collection in LoR, as a F2P player. There are a TON of cards to collect. (When I started it took me about 9 months to fully complete my collection ... and there are a lot more cards now than when I started.)
You play a highly competitive decklist or you lose
I mean, I've been playing with nothing but homebrew Galactus (low tier 2) and hazmat (not even on this tierlist) decks for a month or so now and I'm still able to climb the ladder with them. Knowing when and when not to snap is a important skill that you can generally transfer to all of your decks.
You can climb with a negative winrate in Snap, as long as you get a 8-cube win for every 7 or less 1-cube losses.
My point was that you will lose more than you win ... not that you can't climb at all.
Edit - also, you responded so absurdly fast that you're quoting the original version of my post, which was only up for less than 5 minutes before I edited it to be more precise, as follows:
"You play a highly competitive decklist or you have a losing record over time - there is no middle ground."
I forgot one more advantage compared to other CCGs is that often in this game you have to think for yourself what to include in your deck. This is facilitated by both the randomness of receiving cards and the days of locations.
This is true in Pool 1 - you can have success with a lot of variations in the deck builds. It's kinda still true in Pool 2. Not really true at all in Pool 3.
Sure, you can choose to create your own decklist of pool 3 cards, based on what you managed to open so far. (Hint: you can also do this in literally every other CCG ever. And the result is always the same in all of them. Read on.) But your list will always be inferior to the tested and proven lists for Pool 3 (same for whatever other CCG you want to talk about). "Homebrew" decklists are always inferior to the netdeck lists, regardless of game, and SNAP is absolutely, 100% not an exception to this rule once you get to pool 3. You play a highly competitive decklist or you have a losing record over time - there is no middle ground.
And also to be fair to Patriot and Cerebro decks you should expect different things from them. When playing against a Patriot deck you should expect an Ultron coming at the final turn.
Fun fact - I had some success running Ultron without Patriot. Just Karzan and Blue Marvel was enough to make him work pretty well.
Dream curve is Patriot -> Karzan -> Blue Marvel -> Ultron. Even better if you can get Invisible Woman on 2 to hide almost everything else.
I understand that disruption is frustrating to play against, but it's definitely a necessary evil. The disruption cards that they printed are for the long run. They printed one for every situation where if it goes unanswered, it will turn the game into solitaire. Cosmo is there to prevent Wong from getting free value. Leech is there to prevent Sera from running away from the game easily. Armor is there to stop Bucky and Death from pretty much getting a free advantage.
I don't have that much issue with Enchantress, Cosmo, and Armor, because (as you said) they do serve to keep certain strategies in check. Probably Shang-chi is also fine.
Most of the rest of the disruption cards should never have been printed, IMO. To me, they are just there to prevent me from being able to execute my plan. In addition, disruption cards should have a decent chance of being dead cards (and Armor is a great example of this). It should be at least a bit of a risk to include them in your deck. But many of the disruption cards have a very low inclusion risk - they are just too good against nearly anything your opponent is doing. Both goblins are a fantastic example of this problem.
Two other examples: why would you ever not use Debrii if you're playing a zoo-type strategy? She causes a huge headache for your opponent, and she's neutral or even good for your own deck. And Daredevil? Literally every deck should have him in it. He gives an absurdly unfair advantage. (Incidentally, did you know that Daredevil reveals literally every card the person is playing, even if should be hidden otherwise? Whatever they do, you see it, even if it's behind the Invisible Woman.) I do own him, and I was using him often until I uninstalled the game again yesterday, but it felt super unfair to have such an enormous advantage over my opponent.
Anyways, bottom line - the game concept of Snap is fantastic, but I believe they made fatal errors in some of the cards they printed.
The saving grace for Snap is that you can really play whatever you want and so do your opponents. The decks are much smaller, which is a big PLUS. There are just enough disruption cards so that you can have a chance, even though that's not even the point.
I completely agree that disruption is not the point of Snap. But if you stick with it long enough, you will hit a point where everything you try to do gets countered by your opponent. Literally everything, no matter what deck you choose to play.
And as I said a couple months ago on these forums, that's what is going to ruin the game long-term. There is too much disruption. They should have printed extremely limited direct disruption (and I mean maybe only 2 or 3 cards), making the game entirely about whether you can execute your game plan better than your opponent, while also surprising them enough to max out your cubes.
Instead, we have more than enough disruption cards that you can just make a deck entirely out of them alone, and people actually do that successfully. Aero, Doc Oct, Leader, Debrii, Green Goblin and Hobgoblin, Cosmo, Armor, Iceman, Enchantress, Goose, Storm, Juggernaut, Magneto ... and those are just the ones I can think of without checking a list. Most of those cards are supremely un-fun to play against. Given that Snap is supposedly all about having crazy fun, they have clearly very much missed that mark.
Again, just give it long enough, and you'll find yourself getting increasingly frustrated about not being able to just play your cards, because your opponents keep disrupting you.
P.S. - I'm still playing the game a bit, to give it the best possible chance to prove me wrong. And I'm about to uninstall it again. Without any exaggeration at all, my funnest games are literally against bots. And that's just plain sad. I know immediately my opponent is a real person when they start dropping all of the disruption cards and ruining any chance I had of actually playing my cards and having fun. For reference, my current collection level is in the 2700s; so, I've played the game a LOT, and for a much longer period of time than just about anyone else on this site, since I started at the Philippines release in June.
People having no idea how to properly play it doesn't make it a bad game.
Despite what some people might think, it's actually not a difficult game to play at all. The biggest problem is that most decks have a lot of flex spots in them. Even if you know your opponent's main game plan, you have no idea at all what tech cards they are running, or if they even drew them.
And most crucially of all - even if you correctly guess what your opponent can do to counter you, 9 times out of 10, you STILL CAN'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT except quit the game and start another. I'm holding my Ultron and I guess my opponent has Leech. What can I do? Well, unless I have Cosmo AND I win my guess about which lane he will play Leech on AND I have priority on the flip, then I can do literally nothing about his Leech. And I auto-lose that game. And there are hundreds of other scenarios just like that one. Playing Sera and opponent has Wave? You lose. Playing Odin and opponent has Cosmo? Sucks to be you. Playing Deathwave and opponent has Armor or Cosmo or even Shang-chi - yep, you're screwed. Knowing what your opponent can do to stop you is nearly always useless knowledge, because there is nothing you can do to stop them (except in very niche situations, and most of those require luck to actually work).
At the end of the day, that's exactly what I would call a bad game.
In Marvel Snap, it's like rock paper scissors with prior knowledge. You have to know on the spot what you're opponent is playing based on the given information throughout the game.
I respectfully disagree that a game is good if it just boils down to Rock, Paper, Scissors. And you are correct that Snap does exactly that.
If I'm playing a turn-6 deck with important text, Leech really does just auto-win against me. If I'm playing a destroy deck and you have priority for the flip, I'm gonna lose when you drop Armor or Cosmo on my destroy location.
Having situations where one player instantly wins over the other before the end of the game is actively bad, not good.
As of November 2021, LoR had 180 million monthly players. Let's just suppose that its numbers have been cut in half since a year ago. That would still be 90 million monthly players.
Let's further suppose that only 10% of those players play on a daily basis.
That's still 9 million daily players. Extremely far from a dead game, even with extremely non-generous estimates.
Bottom line- You have GOT to get over the Twitch fixation. Just because major streamers made major mistakes and jumped ship to Snap (a fundamentally flawed game that is only going to force them to switch jump ship again to yet something else) - that doesn't say anything about LoR. It says much more about them.
The most recent LoR championship was so good that my CHILDREN (who are 8 and 10) were begging to watch it.
I'm deep into pool 3, but I still lack some of the crucial cards. I'm not willing to buy season passes, so no Surfer. I haven't opened Patriot, Human Torch, Hela, Dracula, and others I'm not remembering.
I agree completely. Great players, like Grapplr, can take mediocre decks and play them to insanely high winrates. I mean, I used to watch Firebat or Brian Kibler play HS decks on their streams - they could play just about anything and get a positive winrate out of it. That says nothing about the decks at all. If one of their viewers picked up one of those decks and started playing it, they would have a losing record for sure, because the decks were hot garbage. But the players are so good that they can play anything and win with it.
The point of a meta report is to publish the decks that are winning across a broad sample size of players, thus removing the pilot from the equation.
Side note, since you brought up Poros - the first time I ever made masters was playing a poros deck, waaaay before any major players thought it was viable.
Very interesting breakdown of the current LoR meta here.
I've been playing a completely new deck idea through Diamond 4 into Diamond 3 and nearly Diamond 2 (with only a couple of losses).
Leona/Katarina - I saw it listed as a hot new thing that's making waves, and I have to say that it is really impressive. It's aggro enough that it can just win games if your opponent doesn't do much on the first two turns, and the makers called it aggro, but it seems a bit more like early midrange or something.
Doesn't have a high playrate currently, but the winrate is quite high ... like around the 60% mark. I'm currently at 76/100 in Diamond 3, with only one loss since 0/100 Diamond 4. So, figuring the math for that ... I'm 9-1 at the moment, though I did lose one game when I was at 0/100 Diamond 4. So, 9-2 I guess (unless you include the 3 games in Platinum, which would make it 12-2 since I first picked up the deck from scratch with no tutorial about how to use it or anything).
I am well aware of how snapping works. My final collection level before uninstalling the game was around 2700-2800.
Defenders of the game keep talking about snapping and how you need to do it properly. But here's the thing - let's assume everyone in the game learns how to snap properly (and based on your comments and those from other people, that shouldn't take all that long, so it's a completely reasonable assumption). What happens at that point?
Scenario 1 - you're in a losing position, so you retreat. Your opponent gets 1 lousy cube. Yay for them sort of? No big loss for you.
Scenario 2 - you're in a winning position, so your opponent retreats. You get 1 lousy cube. Yay? Not really.
Scenario 3 - it's unclear who is winning, or you expect a surprise, but you think you have a chance. You don't snap, and your opponent doesn't either (because they are thinking the same as you are, since they also understand snapping). The game ends and someone gets 2 cubes. Clearly better than 1, but still not that exciting.
Scenario 4 - one of you is confident of winning and snaps. At this point, if the snapper was playing correctly (which we already assumed they are), they will win this game. That means the one who didn't snap will retreat. Snapper gets only 1 cube.
There are several other variations, but I think the point is quite clear by now - if everyone snaps properly, no one ever gets or loses more than 2 cubes, and they generally only get or lose 1.
I agree, it would take several months of steady playing to collect the entire pool 3.
Just to remind you, your claim here has consistently been that Marvel Snap is better than LoR, because it's harder to get all the cards.
Now, to repeat my previous comment: it takes a full year of steady playing to collect complete sets of all of the cards in LoR.
Last I checked, a year is longer than a few months.
Edit - I should clarify that I don't think Snap is actually bad - it's mediocre at best, but with some cool new ideas. What I do think is that it's highly deceptive at the beginning - the player experience through pools 1 and 2 are not even remotely similar to the experience after entering pool 3. Which brings me to the crux of my issue with Snap - it's not nearly as good as the hype makes it out to be, and it definitely did not deserve to win game of the year. If the entire game experience was similar to the pool 1 and 2 experience, the game would be flat-out amazing. But pool 3+ completely ruins it for me. It's like they did a giant bait-and-switch.
There are a couple things going on this quote that are misunderstandings.
1) Literally everyone who hits collection level 486 has EXACTLY the same collection at that moment. Every single player, no exceptions. There is zero difference in their cards, just in their variants. Same thing for collection level 222 - every player at collection level 222 has identical collections with every other player at collection level 222.
2) Everyone in pool 3 has all of the pool 1 and pool 2 cards, guaranteed, no exceptions. This means that the only remaining variable is which cards your deck has that are exclusive to pool 3 or higher. This certainly allows for variations, but every deck will still contain a significant number of cards from pools 1 and 2.
3) Pools 4 and 5 are not actually separate pools. The only reason they are mentioned is because they have a different drop chance than pool 3. But you could theoretically get a "pool 5" card immediately after moving into pool 3 - anytime after collection level 486. You don't "move out" of pool 3 at any point, though I suppose you could say you're no longer in pool 3 if you manage to collect every single pool 3 card. But there is no collection level where you move from pool 3 to pool 4.
You are severely underestimating how long it takes to compile a full collection in Hearthstone, or even to build a specific deck on purpose. [EDIT - many people in HS, especially F2P players, have to build homebrew versions of meta decks because they dont have and cannot get all the cards, just like happens in Snap. The only difference is that Snap NEVER allows you to target a specific card you want, EVER.]
And of course, you are free to have your own preferences of what you want to do in a card game. Apparently you really enjoy a sense of accomplishment from collecting things that are hard to get.
In contrast, most people want to actually play the game with whatever cards they want to use at a given moment. Legends of Runeterra is perfect for that, since you can always target specific cards you want to get, and then you can build a deck with them and actually play it. And by the way, I have to call you out for your comment on LoR being so absurdly easy to get cards. Yes, it's very generous. But even with their generosity, it would still take the better part of a year to have a fully complete collection in LoR, as a F2P player. There are a TON of cards to collect. (When I started it took me about 9 months to fully complete my collection ... and there are a lot more cards now than when I started.)
You can climb with a negative winrate in Snap, as long as you get a 8-cube win for every 7 or less 1-cube losses.
My point was that you will lose more than you win ... not that you can't climb at all.
Edit - also, you responded so absurdly fast that you're quoting the original version of my post, which was only up for less than 5 minutes before I edited it to be more precise, as follows:
"You play a highly competitive decklist or you have a losing record over time - there is no middle ground."
This is true in Pool 1 - you can have success with a lot of variations in the deck builds. It's kinda still true in Pool 2. Not really true at all in Pool 3.
Sure, you can choose to create your own decklist of pool 3 cards, based on what you managed to open so far. (Hint: you can also do this in literally every other CCG ever. And the result is always the same in all of them. Read on.) But your list will always be inferior to the tested and proven lists for Pool 3 (same for whatever other CCG you want to talk about). "Homebrew" decklists are always inferior to the netdeck lists, regardless of game, and SNAP is absolutely, 100% not an exception to this rule once you get to pool 3. You play a highly competitive decklist or you have a losing record over time - there is no middle ground.
Here's my source for the hotfix info - https://www.reddit.com/r/LoRCompetitive/comments/104dtgp/hotfix_later_today/
Here are the changes:
Back Alley Bar: c6 > c7
Darkin Aegis: 1|1 > 0|1
World Ender: c13 > c16
Fallen Reckoner: 4|3 > 3|2
Risen Reckoner: 6|3 > 5|2
Vayne: 3|4 > 3|3
Vayne (Level 2): 4|5 > 4|4
Fun fact - I had some success running Ultron without Patriot. Just Karzan and Blue Marvel was enough to make him work pretty well.
Dream curve is Patriot -> Karzan -> Blue Marvel -> Ultron. Even better if you can get Invisible Woman on 2 to hide almost everything else.
This is a weekly article that puts up the current winrates and playrates of the top decks in LoR.
Feel free to argue with the commentary if you like, but the winrates and playrates are not open to debate.
I assume you are commenting on his comments, because the data is not open to argument.
Numbers are numbers, whether you like them or not.
I don't have that much issue with Enchantress, Cosmo, and Armor, because (as you said) they do serve to keep certain strategies in check. Probably Shang-chi is also fine.
Most of the rest of the disruption cards should never have been printed, IMO. To me, they are just there to prevent me from being able to execute my plan. In addition, disruption cards should have a decent chance of being dead cards (and Armor is a great example of this). It should be at least a bit of a risk to include them in your deck. But many of the disruption cards have a very low inclusion risk - they are just too good against nearly anything your opponent is doing. Both goblins are a fantastic example of this problem.
Two other examples: why would you ever not use Debrii if you're playing a zoo-type strategy? She causes a huge headache for your opponent, and she's neutral or even good for your own deck. And Daredevil? Literally every deck should have him in it. He gives an absurdly unfair advantage. (Incidentally, did you know that Daredevil reveals literally every card the person is playing, even if should be hidden otherwise? Whatever they do, you see it, even if it's behind the Invisible Woman.) I do own him, and I was using him often until I uninstalled the game again yesterday, but it felt super unfair to have such an enormous advantage over my opponent.
Anyways, bottom line - the game concept of Snap is fantastic, but I believe they made fatal errors in some of the cards they printed.
I completely agree that disruption is not the point of Snap. But if you stick with it long enough, you will hit a point where everything you try to do gets countered by your opponent. Literally everything, no matter what deck you choose to play.
And as I said a couple months ago on these forums, that's what is going to ruin the game long-term. There is too much disruption. They should have printed extremely limited direct disruption (and I mean maybe only 2 or 3 cards), making the game entirely about whether you can execute your game plan better than your opponent, while also surprising them enough to max out your cubes.
Instead, we have more than enough disruption cards that you can just make a deck entirely out of them alone, and people actually do that successfully. Aero, Doc Oct, Leader, Debrii, Green Goblin and Hobgoblin, Cosmo, Armor, Iceman, Enchantress, Goose, Storm, Juggernaut, Magneto ... and those are just the ones I can think of without checking a list. Most of those cards are supremely un-fun to play against. Given that Snap is supposedly all about having crazy fun, they have clearly very much missed that mark.
Again, just give it long enough, and you'll find yourself getting increasingly frustrated about not being able to just play your cards, because your opponents keep disrupting you.
P.S. - I'm still playing the game a bit, to give it the best possible chance to prove me wrong. And I'm about to uninstall it again. Without any exaggeration at all, my funnest games are literally against bots. And that's just plain sad. I know immediately my opponent is a real person when they start dropping all of the disruption cards and ruining any chance I had of actually playing my cards and having fun. For reference, my current collection level is in the 2700s; so, I've played the game a LOT, and for a much longer period of time than just about anyone else on this site, since I started at the Philippines release in June.
Hot off the presses, here's the current 23 best decks in LoR.
Aatrox is all over the place, but there are still a variety of good options out there.
Edit - I'm personally trying out a Bandle City Poro brew. So far, it's feeling quite a bit stronger than I expected.
Despite what some people might think, it's actually not a difficult game to play at all. The biggest problem is that most decks have a lot of flex spots in them. Even if you know your opponent's main game plan, you have no idea at all what tech cards they are running, or if they even drew them.
And most crucially of all - even if you correctly guess what your opponent can do to counter you, 9 times out of 10, you STILL CAN'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT except quit the game and start another. I'm holding my Ultron and I guess my opponent has Leech. What can I do? Well, unless I have Cosmo AND I win my guess about which lane he will play Leech on AND I have priority on the flip, then I can do literally nothing about his Leech. And I auto-lose that game. And there are hundreds of other scenarios just like that one. Playing Sera and opponent has Wave? You lose. Playing Odin and opponent has Cosmo? Sucks to be you. Playing Deathwave and opponent has Armor or Cosmo or even Shang-chi - yep, you're screwed. Knowing what your opponent can do to stop you is nearly always useless knowledge, because there is nothing you can do to stop them (except in very niche situations, and most of those require luck to actually work).
At the end of the day, that's exactly what I would call a bad game.
I respectfully disagree that a game is good if it just boils down to Rock, Paper, Scissors. And you are correct that Snap does exactly that.
If I'm playing a turn-6 deck with important text, Leech really does just auto-win against me. If I'm playing a destroy deck and you have priority for the flip, I'm gonna lose when you drop Armor or Cosmo on my destroy location.
Having situations where one player instantly wins over the other before the end of the game is actively bad, not good.
As of November 2021, LoR had 180 million monthly players. Let's just suppose that its numbers have been cut in half since a year ago. That would still be 90 million monthly players.
Let's further suppose that only 10% of those players play on a daily basis.
That's still 9 million daily players. Extremely far from a dead game, even with extremely non-generous estimates.
Bottom line- You have GOT to get over the Twitch fixation. Just because major streamers made major mistakes and jumped ship to Snap (a fundamentally flawed game that is only going to force them to switch jump ship again to yet something else) - that doesn't say anything about LoR. It says much more about them.
The most recent LoR championship was so good that my CHILDREN (who are 8 and 10) were begging to watch it.
I'm deep into pool 3, but I still lack some of the crucial cards. I'm not willing to buy season passes, so no Surfer. I haven't opened Patriot, Human Torch, Hela, Dracula, and others I'm not remembering.