Following the incredible success of League of Legends, Riot Games are expanding the world of their MOBA with Legends of Runeterra, a brand new card-based strategy game.
While I wasn’t fortunate enough to get into the closed beta, I’ve been playing LoR since the open beta began on January 23rd. The game combines gameplay elements from both Magic the Gathering and Hearthstone with Riot’s established characters, lore, and some unique ideas of their own.
The good
The game is showing a lot of promise so far, already striking me as having done away with many of the shortcomings Hearthstone has. It finds a nice balance between the complexity of MTG and the simplicity of of HS.
Engaging but welcoming gameplay
Having quite a bit of experience with Hearthstone, it’s immediately clear LoR delivers much more engaging gameplay. Rounds take place with an attacker and defender role, dictated by an ‘attack token’ that changes hands with each round. Unlike Hearthstone, LoR has active units on a bench until placed into battle — either proactively on attack, or reactively on defence. Unlike MTG, summoned units can be used immediately, with no summoning sickness.
When the attacker initiates a battle, the defender chooses which attacking units to block. This prevents damage to the player’s nexus (player health points) which, like MTG, has 20 points of life. ‘Going for face’ like Hearthstone is not nearly as simple a plan in LoR, so there’s no need to stack taunts for your sanity.
Battles involve turns between players, where spells can be cast to influence the outcome of the battle. Spells come in slow, fast, and burst forms. Slow spells cannot be played once a battle starts. Fast spells, however, resolve as the battle plays out, and burst spells resolve instantly, leaving the player able to commit to additional actions. In this way, a unit that may seem doomed to die to its defender can be saved with a well-placed spell, adding extra depth to each round.
Spells are cast using mana, though first draw from a pool of up to 3 spell mana. Spell mana is distinct from regular mana, and is replenished by any unspent mana at the end of a turn. Spells can be cast by combining the two mana types, making expensive spells available sooner if mana is strategically managed. It’s quite a clever mechanic.
The Oracle’s Eye
The Oracle’s Eye is an icon on the left of the play area that will show you the outcome of the ongoing battle when hovered over. Players can see nexus health, unit health and status, and the results of any queued spells using this.
As there is almost no randomly generated outcomes for effects in this game, this tool is very reliable, and very welcome. I’d go so far as to call it one of the unsung heroes of the game.
Creative deck options with faction mixing
Decks in LoR can be built from up to two different factions of the currently available six.
Demacia features a lot of ‘tough’ units, which take one less damage from enemy hits, and ‘challenger’ cards, which can choose which opposing unit will block them. They also specialise in buffing allies and giving them barriers that negate the first damage applied that turn.
Freljord has many means of elongating the game. Many Freljord units and spells can ‘frostbite’ an opposing unit, dropping their damage to 0 for the round. Freljord also has a decent selection of units that permanently buff if they survive damage. Freljord has a good selection of ways to heal damage too.
Ionia specialises in ‘elusive’ cards, which cannot be blocked directly. These must be dealt with by spell or skill damage, other elusive units, or by challenging them. Ionia also brings ‘ephemeral’ units that last only one turn, and ‘recall’ which brings units back to hand from the field.
Noxus relies on brute strength and direct nexus damage. It brings a lot of ‘overwhelm’ effect, which deals any overkill damage dealt to a defender to the enemy nexus. Noxus also has a lot of ‘stun’ effects, which stop an enemy participating in battle for the round.
Piltover & Zaun brings together two regions from LoL lore with a similar technological theme. P&Z bring a lot of spell cards, many of which have conditions and costs such as discard to play. This faction has high draw.
Shadow Isles is a faction that can bring a lot of cheap, sticky units (hard to remove from play) to the field. Shadow Isles also has ‘ephemeral’ units to a far greater degree than Ionia. It also brings a lot of ‘fearsome’ units that must be blocked by units with 3 or greater attack. Lastly, many Shadow Isles units have an on-death effect tag called ‘last breath’.
Those familiar with Magic the Gathering likely see the similarity to the colours system and flavours here.
As only two factions can be used per deck, finding a suitable combination that maximises your intended playstyle and covers any weaknesses well is a good deal of fun.
Free-to-play is a valid option
LoR is a free-to-play game. Naturally, a business needs to make money, so there are real money purchases to be made within the game’s store. Players can purchase boards, which change the look of the play-space on their side of the board during gameplay; these are cosmetic only, and add some flavour and variety. There are also mascots called ‘guardians’ that sit beside the player’s deck and hand. Guardians react when clicked on by the owning player, and add a little extra customisation, but don’t impact gameplay.
On top of the expected cosmetic purchases, the game does offer advantages for deck building. Fortunately, there are no elements of randomness in these purchases, as players buy a ‘wildcard’ of the rarity of choice (normal, rare, epic, champion) and use that to craft whichever card of that tier they desire.
The advantage of purchasing these wildcards is throttled as players can only purchase a limited amount before needing to wait for a store restock, which takes several days.
All cards can be unlocked by simply playing the game for free. Cards unlocked this way come from a variety of means, such as reward checkpoints for each region, prizes from draft mode performances, and from weekly loot boxes that increase in value with more games played that week. It’s admirable to see a company not stoop to real money gambling mechanics or extreme levels of pay-to-win in a free game model.
Great art
The artwork in the game was outsourced to SixMoreVodka studios, an eminent art studio based in Berlin. The art used on the cards is stunning, with many featuring a view of a scene that’s reused several times across other cards from different perspectives; this really helps the build the world.
If you’re interested, you can check out SixMoreVodka here.
The bad
Being an open beta, the game isn’t yet all it can be. Some aspects of the game can be pretty off-putting if I’m honest. Let’s take a look at some of the greater offenders.
Champion imbalance
I’ve not yet gone into detail on champion cards. Champions are units that have a strong impact on the flow of the game. Champions also have certain conditions that, when met, ‘level up’ the unit to a stronger version of itself. The level ups usually bring a point in both attack and defence, as well as an additional effect for the unit.
Garen, for example, will level up once he’s dealt damage to an enemy unit or nexus twice. Once he has, the ‘rally’ effect will trigger at the start of every turn as long as Garen is still active, granting the controlling player the ability to attack — even on a defending round. He also has the ‘regeneration’ tag, meaning all damage that does not kill him will be healed at the end of each round, similar to how toughness works in MTG.
Garen is pretty well balanced as far as champions go. Some other cards, however, such as Hecarim…well, not so much. Hecarim is commonly agreed to be extreme in terms of power, while Kallista, another champion, is presently underwhelming.
Unfortunately the official stance from Riot is not to balance champions until the end of the life-cycle of a current release (Lux getting a buff being the only exception since open beta started). It’s unlikely Hecarim or other offenders will see changes until the first expansion set is on the horizon. As the game is still in beta, that may yet be some time.
Faction imbalances
While Riot have been far more liberal with balance changes to non-champion cards, the overall flavour of the Shadow Isles faction seems to be ‘Ace of all trades’.
The isles, as mentioned earlier, bring a lot of cheap, sticky units to the board. Many of these are sticky because their death only results in the spawning of another; often this new unit is stronger than the one that died to summon it.
What’s more, many spells and units from this faction benefit from the deaths of other units, triggering effects such as damage to the enemy nexus, draw, or an increase in power as allies fall. This is a particular point of contention as many of the units played by Shadow Isles are ephemeral, and die at the end of a round by design.
To top this off, I’ll mention that SI also has a good deal of healing and unit removal options available to them. This makes reaching the end-game relatively easy, where SI has many of the most powerful end game cards that quickly turn the tide in their favour.
The list above shows the top performing decks from the recent EU Creators Invitational. The green icons on the left represents a Shadow Isles deck, while the pink ones represents Ionia. Ionia is also a very high win-rate faction, though usually because of its strong support abilities such as ‘Deny’, which cancels an enemy slow or fast spell, and ‘Will of Ionia’, which recalls an opposing or friendly unit to hand.
Other minor concerns
There are a few places in the UX where LoR could use some love. In particular, the deck building area of the UI could use some additional features and search filters.
There also exists some instance in which the player is unable to intuitively tell how far they are from unlocking their next reward. This information can be found, but requires changing to another screen rather than being directly presented where most relevant.
The ugly
Let me preface this section by reminding you that this game is still in open beta, so additional bug fixes are bound to take place before official launch. That said, here are a few unfinished things that detract from the game experience at present.
Visual bugs
There have been a good number of visual bugs I’ve encountered playing through the game so far. Most are largely harmless, but some impact the player’s ability to engage with or properly understand the game.
Take the above screen. It shows the unfortunate persistent particle effect gone wild that takes place when cloning a particular card during play. The ribbons of pink obscure critical information for the remainder of the match, lowering one’s chance of victory.
This is but one of a good many visual bugs that have been talked about in communities so far.
Gameplay bugs
I’ve also had instances where gameplay events resolve poorly, resulting in a situation that shouldn’t take place. These have ranged from damaging spells and effects actually healing the enemy, to enemy units temporarily becoming untargetable for a round, and other unexpected behaviour that hurts the experience.
Some champions NEED to pair with particular factions
I’m looking at you Yasuo!
What this basically comes down to is that there are certain champion cards with level up conditions that are very hard to meet. Yasuo relies on stuns and recalls to level up and also to trigger his effect, which damages stunned and recalled units. Recalls are quite limited in availability, so it really comes down to stuns. Stuns are highly concentrated in the Noxus faction. This will no doubt improve as more cards get released, but for now it’s a pain.
This guy!
Seriously, this emote is the most aggravating thing you could hope to see. Sadly, he is the LoR equivalent of tea-bagging, so unless you’re playing against AI opponents all the time, expect to find those players who just can’t help themselves! Thankfully opponents can be muted.
The verdict
While it’s not quite there yet in terms of polish, bug fixes, balance tweaks, and UX improvements will almost certainly put LoR over the line from good to great.
Expansions to the card pool are expected in the future, per Riot’s buffing/nerfing process announcement (scroll down some to read). There are a lot of lore elements and characters to draw on for this game, so I assume Riot intends to support Legends of Runeterra for a long time to come; and just as well, as I see this replacing Hearthstone for me wholesale from now on.
If you’re one for strategy games with a lot of variety and very little RNG, I’d strongly suggest taking a look at Legends of Runeterra. The game is free to play, so there’s nothing to lose in giving it a whirl.
