I think the expansion is fine so far. I'm neither excited nor disappointed.
Just a quick comment about The University of Piltover - you said it would work in discard aggro. I can tell you that I picked up discard aggro for the first time last week, just after the release of Monuments of Power (ironically, since it has no cards in it from that expac). I have been playing that deck exclusively for the past week with no changes. And I can say with some certainty that The University of Piltover would make the deck worse. If I slotted it, it would take up a board spot (in a deck that needs to go wide to win), and it would have to replace Augmented Experimenter, who does basically the same thing, but is a 3/3 body that deals 3 damage to something when he comes down, and draws three cards from my own deck, which is vastly better than 3 random ones. Discard aggro does not have time for The University of Piltover to do it's thing, and Jinx usually does not stick long enough for her to get value from it either.
TL;DR - The University of Piltover doesn't do enough to synergize with discard aggro. Discard aggro is aggro first, discard second. The discarding provides a means of going very wide, very fast, but just adding more discard does not automatically make the deck better. I've never found myself saying, "Hmm, if I only I could discard my whole hand right now, then I'd be in a much better place in this game."
Then I have a different view of the university than you apparently ...
To me is drawing 3 cards in a discard deck as valuable as drawing 2 cards in a usual deck since the cards in discard are primerily mana efficient and not at all card efficient. That you deal 3 damage and play a 3/3 hardly matters at turn 6 so the most times that you play Augmented Experimenter in a spot where you are behind on board you are going to loose anyways. The University of Piltover however lets you switch to an infinite but random arsenal (a little bit like experimental frenzy in mtg) which is not really reliable but also absolutely unpredictable and potentially very powerful + that you start with rockets in hand every round if you got Jinx.
In limited this card singlehandedly wins games and in constructed its really not bad, just unpredictable what many players dislike
Do you like sorakench? Do you like dragons and the new landsmarks?
There wasn't much talk lately so i wonder how active everyone is in LoR right now...
For me this expansions was quite disappointing.
The heal package -while having clear counters- is just absurdly powerful against damage oriented decks and is very polarising imo. Some cards like Soraka and Star Spring seem undercosted for their effect and while Tahm Kench is not op in my oppinion, he is just soooo annoying as a concept (4 mana removal engine). In general runeterra went much into a an value-engine-oriented way, causing more grindy games. If we for example take The Howling AbyssVaults of HeliaThe Slaughter Docks and Noxkraya Arena we have 4 different landmarks that create very huge value over time, which encourages to play control oriented decks and in general slow gameplans. Decks build in that way feel really boring to play agains although i got to admit that the Vaults of Helia at least enables neat combos that are more interesting than the other 3 landmarks.
While many players hate it and ask for a rework, I really like the The University of Piltover which really embraces the flavour of experiementation. While it is weird that it is a Jinx support card it actually can lead to weird and hilerious plays and takes more skill to use than people give it credit for (since you got to make up a plan for the random cards gained every turn) also it clearly has decks where it is good in (discard aggro).
About dragons i don't need to repeat my oppinion that i gave already...
But what do you guys think? Is the "new" meta cool? Do you like the games you play and would you change something about the new cards?
There are currently a total of 3 boardwipes in the game that deal with soraka kench which are The Skies DescendThe Ruination and Reckoning all of them are universal unit counters and deal with ANY units that do not have a form of recursion/spellshield on them so saying that they are "vulnerable" for them isn't saying anything.
The actual weakpoints that are Culling Strike and fearsome are quite polarising because there are many decks out there that do not care about culling strike at all, unless you play forstbite builds -> the old ashe noxus build and there are many decks that will crush your fearsome spiders with ease so...
My expectation is that we will end up with a meta where you get forced to play ashe noxus or the healing package. Yet i still wait for a cheesy Stargazer build to come up and annoy everyone...
who else thinks that a 3 mana units should not be kinda unkillable with damage (looking at you Soraka) i mean 3 mana 1/6 and she even heals herself back up as she attacks so that she has pseudo regeneration on a 3 mana 1/6 in a deck that wins through unit heal... i mean she eighter has to go to 4 mana or nerfed to a 1/4 statline.
That she is 3 mana just to create the dream curve of Crusty Codger-> Star Spring (which deserves a nerf to 3 or 4 mana aswell) -> Soraka ->Tahm Kench is very forced synergy. That level of forced synergy is... not an enrichment to the game imo.
While it the perfect curve is a dream scanario that often doesn't happen it is often hardly possible to beat Soraka as a tempo oriented deck, which needs to be adressed imo..
I acutally did it by playing a Teemo/Heimerdinger deck with only 1x Teemo in the Gauntled.
Expectation: Players would select an anti-aggro deck to face it while in fact its late game control designed to beat it. Reality: That deck was banned almost 100% of the time. (Guess everyone hates Teemo lol)
There is a reason why my sejuani deck got 3 copies of Blade's Edge and 3 copies of Death's Hand (aside the fact that they are meant as a plunder trigger)
Suboptimal decks yes but bad draws... i mean Twisted Fate and Swain aren't bad draws in pirate aggro in general. You won't chose Champions that completely suck if you don't play around them like Heimerdinger.
Yet you should not underestimate the meaning of your mulligan and first plays you do. If your opponent realizes the false flag in turn 3 it might be too late already...
For those who don't know what false Flag in reality is: it means that someone pretends to be someone else as he commits something bad (for example starts a conflict with another country in the name of a third country)
Now what does that (well used political) strategy to do with LoR?
Now: we usually show flag at the start of the game as we show regions and Champions that we use.
There have been some decent championless decks in the past and thought myself: why not going false flag with your deck?
You pretend to be another deck by putting established Champion combinations into a deck (as a 1 off ofc) and build your deck in an absolute opposite flavour to catch people offguard.
For example: you pretend to be control as SwainTwisted Fate but play Pirate aggro.
But what about you: have you encountered these decks already, do you like the idea, do you think it is worth it to build and play such decks?
About Divergent Paths : landmarks see a lot of play right now so it is fine to run it as a 3 of right now, later we can argue to go down to 2 copies. Having the Star Spring in play is a huge deal so I think you want divergent paths in your deck.
about Grandfather Rumul: While we get to 8 mana, we need to control the board until turn 8 and we need A LOT of tricks to deal with dragon decks so that we are in a better spot if we skip 8+ mana units entirely but sure you can try going with 8 mana units
And about Trundle: he is a pseudo challenger with regeneration what is solid. 3 copies of Soraka seem to me like an overkill since wish is not that great of a card and because Soraka hardly ever dies so that you often just need to draw 1 copy of her.
Collected answer for part 1: I mean you have a point, discussing in forums is not for everyone and dislikes are just the more silent part of the conversation. My oppinion is polarised and that was not unintended since I clearly dislike over simplistic (some call it even nobrain) archetypes. Demacia dragon is not the worst kind of the easy decks - looking at cycling decks in MTG- but it is one of them in a game like legends of Runeterra that so far always found a middleground between simple to grasp and hard to master.
This leadst to the collected answer of part 2:
I don't see how demacia dragons will have much of a learning curve, they will perform at a high AVERAGE winrate (54%) therefore. Meanwhile it won't be a deck that improves it's performance much over the number of games played (which fits shyvana quite well, since she is one of the champions in LoL that have a lower winrate on mains than on average) and I expect other decks to outperform demacia dragons IF you are good with them.
Dragon decks can have their place in the meta but I find them unteresting and I am not affraid to openly mention my disappointment that they got realeased as such a vanilla archetype.
And about HS players:
I ... do not like them ...and i'll spare concrete and disrespectful comments on them.
I just... don't want to have them in my game to take 1 minute to make an simple pass/attack.
@TheTriferianGeneral You are wrong on the first line of your comment I don't see how the dragons of LoR compare to the dragons in HS except 2 cards having "behold a dragon" which is different from holding it as well since it counts dragons on board. that being said I am not the one who down voted you this thread and you don't need to be angry about people disagreeing with you.. I assure you it's not malice for most people who downvote comments they think are wrong.
What i meant that all dragon themed cards that i saw have a hs tribal vibe (not dragons in particular) they all follow the formula "put 20 cards of that tribe into your deck and you will benefit". This in my oppinion is neither encouraging interesting deck building nor interesting gameplay. You still can like and play it, but i don't like it and won't play it myself.
Just as an Idea: how about telling from time to time why you dislike certain comments instead of just downvoting them?
It is not productive at all if you just say "I don't like that oppinion " because that is not what get us anwhere on this forum.
We are here to discuss aren't we?
And it should also be legit to give negative feedback about new content right?
If you bring up points, one can discuss them. If you just go like: thats a bad oppinion or I don't like this guy so i dislike his comments well... then this forum is pointless
To me, the entire dragon archetype looks like an attempt to lure hearthstone players into Legends of Runeterra,
It reeks of Hearthstone card design and represents a Statstick tribal playstyle that is easy to grasp but ultimately very vanilla and unappealing to players like me to want to build stronger and more versatile decks.
With shyvana you are going to have the bigger units for sure but will you win the game like that? I doubt it.
The archetype will for sure have a high average winrate because it is so simple to play.
Will it shape top tier? Well that would really surprise me. But I don't mind getting surprised.
Maybe it is enough to have raw stats in order to win games...
The stats are a bit problematisch because the opponent could have a 6 Attack unit that makes the Dragon just a 7 Mana 6/6. I think a Dragon or Scout deck would need combat tricks to make this card viable. Alternatively, Scout decks could grant enemies Vulnerable and make this card a more terrifying Genevieve.
Another Tailermade card, but this time it is meant for TF Swain. Aggressive noxus decks don't want to play this card.
Midrange decks proably will have to run this card since landmarks and very tanky units are going to be a thing. Overall i don't like the need of tech cards that landmarks cause...
In general i agree with the ideas brought up but bringing back the Zephyr Sage combo? That seems like a bad call really...
No deck should have infinite 4/4 units in a full removal shell...
Then I have a different view of the university than you apparently ...
To me is drawing 3 cards in a discard deck as valuable as drawing 2 cards in a usual deck since the cards in discard are primerily mana efficient and not at all card efficient. That you deal 3 damage and play a 3/3 hardly matters at turn 6 so the most times that you play Augmented Experimenter in a spot where you are behind on board you are going to loose anyways. The University of Piltover however lets you switch to an infinite but random arsenal (a little bit like experimental frenzy in mtg) which is not really reliable but also absolutely unpredictable and potentially very powerful + that you start with rockets in hand every round if you got Jinx.
In limited this card singlehandedly wins games and in constructed its really not bad, just unpredictable what many players dislike
How do you guys experience it?
Do you like sorakench? Do you like dragons and the new landsmarks?
There wasn't much talk lately so i wonder how active everyone is in LoR right now...
For me this expansions was quite disappointing.
The heal package -while having clear counters- is just absurdly powerful against damage oriented decks and is very polarising imo. Some cards like Soraka and Star Spring seem undercosted for their effect and while Tahm Kench is not op in my oppinion, he is just soooo annoying as a concept (4 mana removal engine). In general runeterra went much into a an value-engine-oriented way, causing more grindy games. If we for example take The Howling Abyss Vaults of Helia The Slaughter Docks and Noxkraya Arena we have 4 different landmarks that create very huge value over time, which encourages to play control oriented decks and in general slow gameplans. Decks build in that way feel really boring to play agains although i got to admit that the Vaults of Helia at least enables neat combos that are more interesting than the other 3 landmarks.
While many players hate it and ask for a rework, I really like the The University of Piltover which really embraces the flavour of experiementation. While it is weird that it is a Jinx support card it actually can lead to weird and hilerious plays and takes more skill to use than people give it credit for (since you got to make up a plan for the random cards gained every turn) also it clearly has decks where it is good in (discard aggro).
About dragons i don't need to repeat my oppinion that i gave already...
But what do you guys think? Is the "new" meta cool? Do you like the games you play and would you change something about the new cards?
I'm really curious what you have to say :)
There are currently a total of 3 boardwipes in the game that deal with soraka kench which are The Skies Descend The Ruination and Reckoning all of them are universal unit counters and deal with ANY units that do not have a form of recursion/spellshield on them so saying that they are "vulnerable" for them isn't saying anything.
The actual weakpoints that are Culling Strike and fearsome are quite polarising because there are many decks out there that do not care about culling strike at all, unless you play forstbite builds -> the old ashe noxus build and there are many decks that will crush your fearsome spiders with ease so...
My expectation is that we will end up with a meta where you get forced to play ashe noxus or the healing package. Yet i still wait for a cheesy Stargazer build to come up and annoy everyone...
Speaking of obnoxious overtuned cards...
who else thinks that a 3 mana units should not be kinda unkillable with damage (looking at you Soraka) i mean 3 mana 1/6 and she even heals herself back up as she attacks so that she has pseudo regeneration on a 3 mana 1/6 in a deck that wins through unit heal... i mean she eighter has to go to 4 mana or nerfed to a 1/4 statline.
That she is 3 mana just to create the dream curve of Crusty Codger-> Star Spring (which deserves a nerf to 3 or 4 mana aswell) -> Soraka ->Tahm Kench is very forced synergy. That level of forced synergy is... not an enrichment to the game imo.
While it the perfect curve is a dream scanario that often doesn't happen it is often hardly possible to beat Soraka as a tempo oriented deck, which needs to be adressed imo..
There is a reason why my sejuani deck got 3 copies of Blade's Edge and 3 copies of Death's Hand (aside the fact that they are meant as a plunder trigger)
Suboptimal decks yes but bad draws... i mean Twisted Fate and Swain aren't bad draws in pirate aggro in general. You won't chose Champions that completely suck if you don't play around them like Heimerdinger.
Yet you should not underestimate the meaning of your mulligan and first plays you do. If your opponent realizes the false flag in turn 3 it might be too late already...
For those who don't know what false Flag in reality is: it means that someone pretends to be someone else as he commits something bad (for example starts a conflict with another country in the name of a third country)
Now what does that (well used political) strategy to do with LoR?
Now: we usually show flag at the start of the game as we show regions and Champions that we use.
There have been some decent championless decks in the past and thought myself: why not going false flag with your deck?
You pretend to be another deck by putting established Champion combinations into a deck (as a 1 off ofc) and build your deck in an absolute opposite flavour to catch people offguard.
For example: you pretend to be control as Swain Twisted Fate but play Pirate aggro.
But what about you: have you encountered these decks already, do you like the idea, do you think it is worth it to build and play such decks?
About Divergent Paths : landmarks see a lot of play right now so it is fine to run it as a 3 of right now, later we can argue to go down to 2 copies. Having the Star Spring in play is a huge deal so I think you want divergent paths in your deck.
about Grandfather Rumul: While we get to 8 mana, we need to control the board until turn 8 and we need A LOT of tricks to deal with dragon decks so that we are in a better spot if we skip 8+ mana units entirely but sure you can try going with 8 mana units
And about Trundle: he is a pseudo challenger with regeneration what is solid. 3 copies of Soraka seem to me like an overkill since wish is not that great of a card and because Soraka hardly ever dies so that you often just need to draw 1 copy of her.
Collected answer for part 1: I mean you have a point, discussing in forums is not for everyone and dislikes are just the more silent part of the conversation. My oppinion is polarised and that was not unintended since I clearly dislike over simplistic (some call it even nobrain) archetypes. Demacia dragon is not the worst kind of the easy decks - looking at cycling decks in MTG- but it is one of them in a game like legends of Runeterra that so far always found a middleground between simple to grasp and hard to master.
This leadst to the collected answer of part 2:
I don't see how demacia dragons will have much of a learning curve, they will perform at a high AVERAGE winrate (54%) therefore. Meanwhile it won't be a deck that improves it's performance much over the number of games played (which fits shyvana quite well, since she is one of the champions in LoL that have a lower winrate on mains than on average) and I expect other decks to outperform demacia dragons IF you are good with them.
Dragon decks can have their place in the meta but I find them unteresting and I am not affraid to openly mention my disappointment that they got realeased as such a vanilla archetype.
And about HS players:
I ... do not like them ...and i'll spare concrete and disrespectful comments on them.
I just... don't want to have them in my game to take 1 minute to make an simple pass/attack.
He is the definition of a big and bad creature ..
The only question to me is if i can fit this guy into a shadowisles dragon shell and resummon him multiple times :O
What i meant that all dragon themed cards that i saw have a hs tribal vibe (not dragons in particular) they all follow the formula "put 20 cards of that tribe into your deck and you will benefit". This in my oppinion is neither encouraging interesting deck building nor interesting gameplay. You still can like and play it, but i don't like it and won't play it myself.
Just as an Idea: how about telling from time to time why you dislike certain comments instead of just downvoting them?
It is not productive at all if you just say "I don't like that oppinion " because that is not what get us anwhere on this forum.
We are here to discuss aren't we?
And it should also be legit to give negative feedback about new content right?
If you bring up points, one can discuss them. If you just go like: thats a bad oppinion or I don't like this guy so i dislike his comments well... then this forum is pointless
To me, the entire dragon archetype looks like an attempt to lure hearthstone players into Legends of Runeterra,
It reeks of Hearthstone card design and represents a Statstick tribal playstyle that is easy to grasp but ultimately very vanilla and unappealing to players like me to want to build stronger and more versatile decks.
With shyvana you are going to have the bigger units for sure but will you win the game like that? I doubt it.
The archetype will for sure have a high average winrate because it is so simple to play.
Will it shape top tier? Well that would really surprise me. But I don't mind getting surprised.
Maybe it is enough to have raw stats in order to win games...
Are you now disliking my comments on principle?
I mean it was you who said that he doesn't want OOC to be another hearthpwn so I wonder if you would act as childish like this...
German player spotted :P
Powerful but not powerful enough to compete with the other demacia units therefore it proably won't make it into demacia dragons
So we got our first reach card... this game is becoming more like magic the gathering and I don't know if i like that
Anyways we kinda needed that mechanic in the game in order to deal with elusives without printing 20 elusives in each region
Another Tailermade card, but this time it is meant for TF Swain. Aggressive noxus decks don't want to play this card.
Midrange decks proably will have to run this card since landmarks and very tanky units are going to be a thing. Overall i don't like the need of tech cards that landmarks cause...