Hello everybody and welcome back to another Fan Community Spotlight. This week, we have one of those rare times where we're actually looking at a Runeterra set instead of a Hearthstone one. We've got FenrirWulf with us to talk about a custom Runeterra set of theirs called Honor in Vainglory. This is the first full-fledged custom expansion for Legends of Runeterra that I've covered on the series, focusing on every available region in the game and containing 12 collectible cards for each region. This expansion notably does not add any new keywords, a sharp contrast compared to real Runeterra expansions which tend to add several at a time.

This is also the first set I've covered on this series that's entirely focused on translating a completely different game into gameplay for either Hearthstone or Legends of Runeterra. The theme of this set is translating characters and other various elements from Vainglory into Runeterra cards. Vainglory is another MOBA game among the likes of games of League of Legends or Dota 2. Fittingly, League of Legends serves as the basis for what Legends of Runeterra is based on, much like Warcraft with Hearthstone. Dota 2 would be stuck with... Artifact. If you've ever played Vainglory before, then you will surely recognize many of the characters and other parts of the game in these cards.

With that said, it's time to talk to FenrirWulf about how this set came to be.

What exactly is this set about? What is the inspiration for the set theme?

FenrirWulf: "This set is about trying to implement characters from another MOBA called Vainglory (hence the name of the set) into Legends of Runeterra, just as Riot has done for League of Legends. Just as Riot was able to properly translate the theme and skillset of the champions from the MOBA counterpart to their champion cards and accompanying cards (spells, skills, followers), the goal of this set was to make sure that the heroes I chose from Vainglory as champion cards still felt similar to both their lore and gameplay. This means that I didn’t devise an underlying thematic lore with regards to the entire set; usual Runeterra expansions involved introducing an entirely new region, and placing that region as the set’s main focus. In contrast, because the connections of each Vainglory champion by lore were minimal at best, it was difficult to create a core theme for this set. Ultimately, I just decided to pick out the heroes from the game that I thought could fit very well into the gameplay of Runeterra, and formulated each region package accordingly.

The inspiration for this set came from my personal adoration of the game. The heroes in Vainglory had fun, original, and cohesive gameplay, which made it more than feasible to create custom cards for them. Not only that, I’ve always thought that their splash arts have always been very well done, as their consistent quality could very well pass as card arts. I would use their art very often for the Weekly Design Card Competition for Hearthstone as well. Since there were a lot of them, "Why not just make a set around them?" was what I thought."

What is the experience of trying to implement characters from an entirely different game into your own cards?

FenrirWulf: "Surprisingly, it was easier than I had initially expected. A big factor for this was because the game I had chosen to represent my custom set was a MOBA that bore a striking resemblance to League of Legends in the way that each hero in Vainglory played out, which tremendously facilitated the card designing aspect of this set, when considering that a lot of the thinking (i.e. What each hero can do that we’re trying to depict in card form, the impressions we want each hero to give off, how supporting cards should mesh within regions with their respective champions, etc.) had already been done for me in the first place. As aforementioned, all the card arts in this set originated from Vainglory itself, so it boiled down to picking arts that we thought were fitting for a particular region, creating a name for that card, and making an effect which matched the name, or vice versa.

All of the Champions that I made were planned to be paired with pre-existing archetypes, so that may have played a major part in how I designed the cards. Take one of my personal favorite examples, Glaive. He's a Champion that I made to be an easy slot-in champion that is able to pair with every Noxus Champion (Katarina with Quick Attack and Blade's Edge, Vladimir with self-harm, Swain with out-of-combat damage, LeBlanc with Reputation, Darius with face damage, Draven with Quick Attack and Whirling Death, and Riven with Blade Fragments). Thematically, by using the fact that he uses his sense of smell to hunt, and how he does an AoE cleave when he attacks, I made those properties into his effects, and made him into a Noxus champion, where his abilities and design practically fit in perfectly with the Noxus champion crew."

There are notably no new keywords in this set compared to real sets, which tend to add several at a time. Is this perhaps because there are already a lot of good keywords to use?

FenrirWulf: "There's... a lot of reasons for this. Personally, I'm not a fan of how many keywords Riot adds into the game with every new expansion. The thing is, huge amounts of new mechanics, while interesting, could easily lead to a lot of problems. For one, it makes entrants for someone who is not used to card games feel very easily overwhelmed when there are too many keywords to keep up with or remember, which creates a very strong deterring effect. Additionally, half the time, more than it is meaningful and useful, the keyword ends up becoming a huge burden on card design, and we see this recurring pattern in some keywords that no longer get printed anymore.

There are multiple keywords we can pick on for this reason. Poor flavor or limiting designs (Reputation), hard to balance (Blade Dance/SpellShield), or hard to implement (Immobile). The reality is that it's not hard to create new keywords, but it is incredibly daunting and taxing to balance and design other cards that revolve around the keyword. Create too few cards that relate to the keyword, and you end up with an extremely isolated and small keyword package that provides or receives barely to no support. Make too big a package, and it’s very possible that you’d find yourself scratching your head trying to figure out which additional angles you can take to make a refreshing aspect of the keyword. Because certain keywords like Reputation and Blade Dance have very arbitrary effects in nature (the cutoff threshold for 5 damage and it needs to be 4 times exactly and summoning a 1/1 blade abusing free attacks), many of the cards with those keywords end up having very similar effects (Reputation: This card costs cheaper, or Blade Dance x).

In the end, I decided that it would be best to re-shift my focus into expanding more on base game keywords that were simplistic, well-designed, and offered better degrees of freedom to design cards in, especially because they don’t have to be necessarily limited to a single region. Keywords such as stun, overwhelm, quick attack, etc. can be found in multiple regions, and because of that, instead of tunnel-visioning into a newly created keyword, I figured it would be better to broaden my perspective instead, and create unique, one-of, out-of-the-box effects that were outside of the constraints of self-imposed keywords. As a result, I was able to create cards that had outlandish effects, but still appeared feasible, such as Benevolent Sunstrider, King of the Ring, Loyal Companion, and Rattlego- I mean The Churned Sisters.

I did think about making keywords though. One example of this would be Zenmaster who initially was a Champion called San Feng and was playing around not using the Attack token, coining it Patience. However, it conflicted with one of my plans to make the Champions fit into pre-existing archetypes, so I scrapped it. Instead, I delved into unique pre-existing keywords that didn’t receive too much attention before, so I played around with Immobile and making it removable, and with that, I created Impale and Clockwork Marionette."

Are there any other cards you wish to highlight for any particular reason?

FenrirWulf: "One of my personal favorites is the champion Skye. I feel that out of all the champions I created, Skye had the best resemblance to her in-game counterpart. In game, Skye’s basic attacks marked an enemy with the Target Lock. Her first skill, Forward Barrage, which plays very similarly to Lucian’s R, dealt more damage to heroes who were marked with the Target Lock. Her ultimate, Death From Above, also assumed two different patterns of stunning artillery fire depending on whether we aimed the skill directly on the marked target, or away from it. Hence, I feel like I was able to properly capture that feeling onto LoR. Proper reenactment aside, I also personally feel that Skye’s region package (PnZ) felt the most cohesive to me, because a large majority of the cards had clear synergistic or thematic relations to Skye herself. Cards like Junk Trader capitalized on Skye churning out a lot of created cards, and most of the Exosuit crew offered direct support to Skye in forms of fleeting or spell synergies (to add, since I decided to slot in Skye as an Exosuit, she fits in as the 2 mana unit, while the other Exosuits are 1, 3, 4 and 5 mana).

Another card I’d like to give extra attention to is Unstoppable. It’s not a particularly eventful card, but I do wish that cards with effects similar to Unstoppable were actually printed in the LoR game itself. We’ve experienced multiple metas where Hush as a card was egregiously unfun to play against, and I think cleansing effects could’ve helped tremendously during that period of time.

Overall, I think I achieved the level of standard quality that I aspired to have with all of my cards. The art was one thing (to this day, my friends and I still can’t stop gushing over how great some of the skin splash arts are, they even look great in-game as well!), but I’d say I mostly accomplished in creating effects that were properly captured by the appearance of the card itself."

Do you have anything behind the scenes that you wish to share?

FenrirWulf: "I had help making this set with a friend. He sometimes offered ideas for effects and names for cards. He’s also the one who told me to write a proper response to this interview pepeLaugh. Unfortunately, he doesn't want to take credit for himself, but I will say that the visual posters that I posted were his idea and creation. (Probably need to make those more readable, though.)

I really enjoyed creating these cards together. Thinking out of our usual game-constrained boundaries was fun, and dedicating our passion for Vainglory as an incredible mobile MOBA game fueled our drive to create a truly well fleshed-out set."

How long have you been making your own cards? What design philosophies do you have that you wish to share and spread to new creators?

FenrirWulf: "I've been designing cards around Scholomance Academy in Hearthstone. So that makes it... around a year? I really like to make simplistic cards that are interesting or flavorful enough to create since they are easier to balance around as well. I personally do not like cards that have effects that are too outlandish or overly complex. As a personal rule of thumb, if the cards require additional in-depth explaining beyond what their text implies, then I think the card would be too complicated to be printed realistically."

Do you have anything else to share?

FenrirWulf: "This might seem like me trying to get others into playing this obscure MOBA, but it's really just something I wanted to do to thank the game. Vainglory was something that I played a lot with my friends before when I was younger, tallying up my ranking career in Vainglory, I was able to reach the middle bracket of the 2nd best rank in this game with my friends. I mained Phinn at the time (the showcased hero in Bilgewater) who played out as a roam/support. Phinn was one of the slowest heroes in the game, albeit being completely immune to crowd control skills (which we depicted in his passive aura), so while my friends who often played very aggressive heroes loved jumping in and initiating teamfights all on their own, I’d often shout back at them to “stop going in everytime!”, all of these combined with so much more made up very dear memories of my time playing this game during my younger years.

Sadly, Vainglory is no longer in development, a lot of problems came up with regards to how the game failed to properly monetize its revenue model (skins were too easy to get for F2P players, and there wasn’t enough drive to invest lots of money into the game when the base game was already very accessible for a non-spending player), which resulted in a declining inability to maintain the high quality game engine that allowed for such smooth and fun gameplay. More problems ensued with the game which would take ages to discuss at this point, but to put long story short, the game ultimately had to have close to 90% of its original features shutdown to preserve its state. There are hardly any running servers anymore, a lot of their features got removed like skins, party system, and so much more. By literal definition, the game was essentially dead to the public eye. The game is still playable, but it’s definitely understandable if someone were to be put off by the game’s current complete lack of features that it used to have, so I’d at the very least suggest people to check it out when they have the time. Ultimately, I just wanted to share my appreciation for it when I was playing the game and nothing else.

Oh, and also, I'm probably going to be doing another set based in Vainglory, maybe when the meta in LoR has turned undesirable once again (I want to play as the giant flying rock that literally does nothing pls Rito). I wanted to do one for each Champion at the very least, and it seems like there are still 48 Champions left for me to pick from :) (Ok, maybe not that much, but I will do one or two sets still). Now if only I can find more card art this time around…"

That will do it for this week on Fan Community Spotlight. Fan-made Runeterra creations are still quite rare on the site, so if you needed some inspiration to get to doing it, here it is. Go out there and make some Runeterra cards! If you're interested in seeing more of the set, then you can click the banner down below to go to the entire set. As it will also be Independence Day in the United States when this comes out, I wish a happy Independence Day to all of our American readers, and a happy day to everyone in general.