February 11th, 20202
I’m a big fan of card games, having grown up playing Yu-Gi-Oh! and spending the last five years playing Hearthstone, Magic the Gathering: Arena, and Gwent. Even so I wasn’t immediately on board with the idea of a League of Legends card game, after all the market has become saturated since Hearthstone’s success, with worthy competitors, disastrous failures, and some games you probably don’t even know exist (there’s one for Lord of the Rings). But hey, it’s a free-to play-card game in open beta, so I gave it a shot and found a pretty fair and engaging experience with a potentially problematic design philosophy. Which, really, is the best sort of thing to review. As a warning there will no doubt be multiple references to other card games in this piece, including Hearthstone, Magic, and Gwent.
Liked
The Card Art: I’m a big fan of Gwent, which if nothing else has a reputation for great card art. Legends of Runeterra’s card art is equally fantastic, though much cleaner than Gwent’s, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The best part is that every single champion and follower card (your “creature” cards, for those that prefer the Magic lingo) have full-sized wallpaper as their card art that you can look at throughout the game. I have ignored numerous turns while hungrily clicking through cards I don’t know to see their various pieces of art, and while they all aren’t winners there’s certainly enough here to fill a few wallpaper folders.
Strategy: There are two key differences between Runeterra and other card games. The first is that, as a general rule, only one player can attack every round but both players can play cards. This differs from games like Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh! where when it’s your turn it’s YOUR TURN and your opponent can only play Instants or Traps/Quick-play cards to do things until you end your turn. In Runeterra the player whose “turn” it is generally is defined by a marker that says who gets to declare an attack that turn, but after one player takes an action the other player can choose to respond or pass. This goes back and forth until both players have passed, and then it’s the other players “turn.” This can take a while to get used to, but the strategy of the game changing based on which mana numbers you get to attack on is significant, as you sometimes find yourself battling mana efficiency versus not letting your opponent prepare for your plans. This strategy gets even deeper with Runeterra’s second major gameplay feature: a “spell mana” pool, which is a reserve of up to three mana that is stored if you don’t spend all your mana on a previous turn and means that if you don’t play any cards on turn one or turn two you could play a six mana spell turn three. This kind of strategy isn’t one that can be easily ignored, though most spells seem balanced for such a scenario, which unfortunately means many spells feel rather weak.
Celebration of Champions: Champions are the stars of League of Legends, and Runeterra certainly gives them their due. Riot has fully embraced all the bells and whistles of being a fully digital card game and has added all sorts of cool features that make champion cards really shine. This includes voice lines that the champions say when cards related to them are played, a level up mechanic, and having cool animations play when a champion does level up. It’s not a perfect system, which we’ll get into later, but it’s nice to see some amount of attention paid to the universe that Runeterra is based within.
Expeditions: Unique gameplay modes can help keep a digital card game fresh, and while Gwent and Hearthstone have their “Arena” modes, Runeterra has Expeditions. If you’ve played either of the aforementioned games you know what you’re in for: a mode where you either redeem free tokens or spend currency to play a special draft mode where you pick one card from a selection of three to five cards at a time until you have a playable deck, and then you play with that deck until you win or lose a certain number of times. It’s all very standard to the point where it’s almost expected in digital card games these days, but Runeterra does several different things that make its Expedition mode very unique. For starters one ticket/upfront payment nets you TWO playthroughs with two different decks, which gives you a lot more bang for your buck. Secondly you only lose a playthrough if you lose two games in a row, so your final score at the end of the game could be 7-6 and you’d still get out with max rewards, which is far more generous than Gwent’s 9-2 or Hearthstone’s 12-2. You’re also guaranteed a random champion card regardless of how much you win or lose, which makes Expeditions a fine investment for in-game resources if you don’t know what to craft and just want to unlock everything (EDIT: this is no longer the case, it was changed in a patch in Spring 2020). And most important and unique of all: Expeditions let you gain more cards and swap out cards you don’t like as you play. This is a great mechanic that lets a mediocre deck improve and a great deck refine itself, and prevents the Expedition from getting stale, which I know from experience can happen around halfway through Arena runs in other games.
Don’t Spend Too Much!: I don’t like spending money in free-to-play games, and Riot doesn’t want you to spend money either. Runeterra is based around a rather unique rotational system where players get rewards every Tuesday, and alongside that the shop only has a limited stock that you can purchase with cash every week. This means that players with money to burn (typically called “whales”) don’t have a huge advantage against those who would rather stay free-to-play, which is fantastic. So many card games like Hearthstone suffer from “pay-to-win” disease where the people with the most money always do the best, and while Runeterra will, inevitably, fall victim to the same formula it’s nice to see that Riot’s heart is in the right place when it comes to balancing the starting player experience.
Neutral
The Vault: There are no card packs that you can purchase in Runeterra. Let me say that again. There are NO card packs that you can purchase in Runeterra. Instead there are two primary ways to get cards: the Vault and rewards. As you play games and complete daily challenges you will earn experience points that go towards the Vault, a collection of three chests that contain Runeterra’s equivalent to card packs as well as some in-game currency. These chests improve as you earn more experience over a week, and on Tuesday everyone unlocks their Vaults and gets the sweet, sweet chests within. This ties into what I said before about the store limiting what you can buy every week, as most players will get their biggest infusion of cards every Tuesday, and thus the meta will only really shift once a week. This sounds like a fun and fair way to make sure that players have a consistent power level, but it becomes more problematic the more you think about it. Consider two players: one that started on the day of the open beta and one that starts in two months. The first player will inherently be two months ahead of the second, but the second player will have no way to catch up to the first player, assuming they both play the same amount. The second player’s only real hope is that it’s easy enough to collect all the cards that eventually the first player will stop getting new cards and then the second player can catch up, but with no way to grind for additional resources to purchase more cards (like you might find in Gwent or Magic the Gathering: Arena) then the second player can’t really catch up to the first. Similarly this is a system that DEMANDS that you grind as much as possible to stay in the loop (at least 2-3 wins per day), since there’s no way to catch back up once you’re behind. Granted, this system currently feels so anti-pay-to-win that we’re all basking in the joy of it, but it’s going to seem a lot less fair to people who pick up the game later. There’s also…
Rewards: In addition to the Vault there is also a reward tree system based on Runeterra’s various “regions.” There are six regions that make up the Magic equivalent of Colors in Runeterra, and while you play you can earn experience points for each region that will unlock region-based rewards. These include card packs, chests like you find in the Vault, and other things that equate to free cards, but these are also a poor substitute for traditional card packs because all the rewards are based in that particular region. So sure, it’s great that you can invest time in one region that you prefer over another but when Lady Luck rolls up with her random chance and suddenly you have three Lux and three Garen instead of cards you might actually want to use because you hit your RNG numbers on the Demacia reward tree…it’s not a great feeling. A simple solution to this would be a nice neutral option for card rewards, but that only exists in the Vault at the moment.
Champions?: While Runeterra does offer all sorts of fancy art, voice lines, and level up animations for its champions, the cards themselves can be rather lackluster. In some ways they’re a lot like Magic’s planeswalkers: iconic, powerful characters that can be hit or miss in terms of cards, and you probably shouldn’t build a deck that relies on them completely. This is especially obvious when you look at meta reports, as there have been a few tier-one decks in the meta that use no champions at all, which sounds very counterintuitive. While I don’t believe that champions should be the be-all end-all like the heroes were in Artifact, I think there’s a middle ground that Runeterra doesn’t quite grasp. Or maybe I’m just mad that Shen’s card is lame in this game.
Disliked
Consistency: The hardest thing for me to understand when it came to Runeterra was when certain keywords were active and when they weren’t. People coming over from Magic might be used to things like First Strike being active on a card all the time, but Runeterra takes the term “attackers advantage” to a whole other level by having many keywords only work when you’re attacking. This means that an offensive character like Zed can only get the Runeterra equivalent of First Strike (Quick Attack) to work while he’s attacking, while strangely enough the Support keyword also only works on attack. It’s clear enough when you read the keyword’s description but it’s hard to get over when you’re so used to how keywords work in things like Magic.
The Vocal Players: There are a percentage of whiny players that have been complaining for a while now about the Ionia region over their singular counterspell card (pictured) and their Elusive keyword, which is essentially Runeterra’s equivalent to Flying in Magic. Now, I’m not going to pretend that Runeterra is far enough along that there are enough answers to all of these region identities, but I am going to throw a massive amount of shade over anyone that thinks a three mana counterspell that doesn’t even counter 25% of the card types is overpowered. Seriously, play against any Blue deck in Magic and then come tell me about how overpowered Deny is. Obviously everyone is allowed their own opinions, but since we’re still in beta and Riot can be rather impressionable when it comes to the whining masses…I just don’t want another competitive game with its mechanics nerfed into the ground because players don’t know how to think strategically or about what cards their opponents might be holding. Hell, a few of the top decks every week aren’t even Ionia based, which shows that while Ionia may be annoying it’s not the bane of the game that everyone with a loud voice wants you to think it is.
Legends of Runeterra is unique enough to stand on its own while player-friendly enough to put competitors like Hearthstone and Magic the Gathering Arena to shame. I’d recommend it to anyone that likes card games, especially since they’re working on getting a mobile version out “soon.” That being said, for the reasons I stated above in the Neutral section I’d suggest you start sooner rather than later, otherwise the experience could be as frustrating as many other digital card games on the market.
