(WIP) Tips for Building Runeterra Decks

Are you someone who:

• Takes pride in playing a deck they built themselves rather than just playing something from the internet? 
• Is tight on resources and would really like to build something from your existing collection rather than craft new cards? 
• Excited about some newly revealed cards and want to theorycraft some new decks?
• Think Card X + Card Y is an undiscovered gem, but you can't seem to find any existing decks that do it justice? 

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this guide is for you! We're going to discuss some general guidelines for building your own Legends of Runeterra decks.

Curve of a Midrange Deck

Let's start by looking a few popular midrange decks. The term "midrange" is somewhat ambiguous; for the purpose of this discussion let's define it as a deck which isn't committed to winning as quickly as possible (i.e., not aggro or burn) but also lacks the inevitability of a control or combo deck. Specifically, we're going to compare Fiora + Shen, Ashe Yetis Noxus, Swain + TF, and Soraka + TK.

Notice the patterns in this table. On average, these decks try to incorporate six 1-cost units, six 2-cost units, six 3-cost units, six 4-cost units, three 5-cost units, and very few units above 5 mana. But equally significant is the fact none of the decks exactly follow that formula: for instance, Ashe Yetis's only 1 mana units are 3x Omen Hawk and Fiora + Shen's only 2 mana unit is 3x Brightsteel Protector. This is due largely to evolution -- older players might recall earlier versions of Ashe Yetis that included 3x Yeti Yearling or 3x pre-nerf War Chefs in Fiora + Shen decks. This is largely the product of the natural crowd-sourcing that occurs when an archetype becomes popular and individual users try to optimize it. If you're building a deck from scratch, the 6/6/6/6/3 frame is a fantastic target to start with.

Next, let's take a minute to appreciate the large number of 1-3 mana spells that we're referring to as "disruption spells". These might be burst-speed buffs like Sharpsight and Pale Cascade, fast-speed removal like Culling Strike and Death's Hand, debuffs like Hush and Flash Freeze, or a combination of effects like Troll Chant or Single Combat. These cards all have 2 things in common: they have the potential for a serious tempo swing (e.g., turning what would be a bad block into a good one, negating a spell your opponent played, killing a unit your opponent just over-invested in, etc), and they can all be played with spell mana. These decks average around 10 spots for such cards -- roughly 25% of the deck. This is one of the major differences between deckbuilding in Legends of Runeterra versus other CCGs: while in other games any unused mana is essentially permanent tempo loss, in LoR your banked spells mana has the potential to make an even bigger tempo swing than if you had just played a unit on curve. In other words: you can build in "insurance" for missing the perfect 1-2-3-4 curve if you include the right spells.

Perhaps you are now thinking, "OK that's fine for midrange, but I want to build an aggro / control / combo deck." Those decks tend to have very comparable frameworks to the midrange deck. For example: