Snuff Out the Light on Runeterra's Ladder with These 6 Scary Nocturne Decks

Today in our ongoing champion spotlight series, we look at Nocture, the Eternal Nightmare. A fun bit of trivia: League of Legends canon establishes Nocturne as a "global" entity without affiliate to any specific region of Runeterra, yet within LoR he has been designated as a Shadow Isle champion. Presumably, this was done for aesthetic and mechanic-synergy reasons. Does this mean other "spooky" regionless champions like Evelynn, Fiddlesticks, and Shaco will follow suit? Only time will tell.

You can always find the latest Nocturne decks in our deck listing!

Various Diana + Nocturne Nightfall

Faithful readers, we'll level with you: Nocturne really wants to be used as a closer to a Targon / SI Nightfall deck. His base stats are unimpressive, his Nightfall ability can be useful but is hardly as utilitarian as say Sejuani's Play ability, and he is extremely difficult to level up without investing heavily in Nightfall units and incorporating Targon. But you really do want to work towards that level up -- the combination of giving your units fearsome and enemy units -1/-1 will quite often give you a just-in-time lethal. A lot of players mistake this niche application as weakness, but that's as inappropriate as calling Nautilus weak for wanting to be run in Bilgewater / SI Deep decks or Quinn for wanting to be run in Demacia / Bilgewater Scout decks.

With that in mind, we're going to cheat a little and provide 3 very similar Nightfall decks. Note that unlike the Lulu decks we provided which looked similar but played differently, all these decks will play almost identically. NicMakesPlays's deck (which we included in Diana's spotlight) features 1x Cygnus the Moonstalker as a potential closer but can be vulnerable to AoE like Avalanche and Icequake. Swim's version is nearly identical and features 2x Atrocity for his closer to allow a possible lethal at fast speed. Finally, Mogwai's version focuses on minimal curve (all cards except for Nocturne are only 0-3 mana) and card draw.

So if Nocturne only excels when partnered with Diana, where does that leave us? In short: looking for existing strong archetypes that can benefit from his Nightfall ability and only resorting to his leveled-up form as a backup win condition. Be advised that LoR content creators haven't experimented with non-Diana decks yet (open challenge to any content creators who happen to be reading!), so we had to go off the beaten path for the following decks. All 3 are firmly in the "just for fun" category; however, we have tested each out and can confirm that they were surprisingly successful.

Cosine Joe's Nocturne + Ashe Cold Fear

First up is a homebrew deck I made with Swole Wampa and Cosine Joe over in the Runeterrable Radio Discord that looks to the synergies between frostbite and fearsome. Most of the time you'll be using Nocturne like a Hired Gun, however, it is possible to level him -- sometimes off The Harrowing. Also, this deck will often play like a control deck, so be very selective in how you use your Fading Memories.

TwinSunz's Kalista + Nocturne Mistwraiths

Next up is an SI-allegiance Mistwraith deck from the TwinSunz podcast. The Lunari Duskbringer looks little questionable risk to the allegiance at first, but he provides one of the few early game tempo plays besides Mistwraith and his Duskpetal Dust can be extremely useful. Nocturne's main role here will be to act like a Frenzied Skitterer, although if you do manage to level him up then it will make your opponent's defenses extremely vulnerable.

Nocturne + Swain Fearsome

Finally, we have a homebrew that marries Nocturne with the very successful Swain / The Leviathan package. The pitch for including Nocturne is again his Nightfall ability, but here we are using it for both the -1/-1 and the vulnerable effect to clear a way for Fearsome Swain to Nexus Strike. Note that Nocturne's staples Unspeakable Horror and Doombeast can both progress L1 Swain or hit nexus for a free stun if L2 Swain is on-board.

And thus concludes our Nocturne highlight article. What is your favorite Nocturne deck? Have you found a great non-Diana decklist that we haven't? Tell us below. And don't forget to tune in tomorrow to see who our final champion spotlight of this series will be!