Legends of Runeterra, How can I, the Common person, play this game? Don’t worry I have you covered with this intro tutorial faq and whatnot, part 1, general game stuff and region brekadown

Howdy gang, this time around we are going with a “Digital Card Game” primer.

Legends of runeterra is a pretty fun game that is a little hard to wrap your brain around until you play it a bit. For those of you whomst have played other card games or digital cards games in the past here are the main things. Now I am going to use other games as examples for starting points but honestly dont just think of them as that, that is reductive thinking and you should check out the game proper to get a real feel.

main things to know

you attack every other round (weird and i can think of no precedent)

You can attack at any point in the round (this is especially useful to keep your opponent from doing anything sorcery speed before your attack, knowing when to build your board out vs keeping the opponents down is quite a strategy)

damage stays after the round ends (like in hearthstone)

You do not attack enemies directly, instead you declare your attackers and then the defender sets up blocks how they see fit (magic, umm, f whats the other one, eternal)

three copy max on cards

Card types:

Followers: Your run of the mill type creatures, haven’t really seen any with flash so it is all on the fair

Champions: the real beefy characters that all have a league of legends equivalent and they do a good job of translating the, champs can level up after you meet certain conditions and if you have a dupe champ in your hand while you have the same one out it turns into their signature spell which when you cast it actually puts another copy of the champ in your deck, you are limited to 6 champion cards total and are restricted to constructing your deck via the regions these champs represent

Slow: sorcery speed spells

Fast : instant speed spells, able to be cast in combat as well, but don’t resolve until actual attacks start

Burst :Interrupts! I enjoy that they did interrupts right in this, basically a spell that kills the stack except for other burst spells, these resolve immediately when cast.

Landmarks : global enchantments with a countdown similar to how havencraft ran in shadowverse, there are a smattering of them throughout the regions

Focus : I cant figure these out, they are weird.

Once really nifty thing is they do not have a base set that any region can use, so they are able to completely craft how they want the region to operate without having to worry about unintended reactions with a base set. This also means they dont have to ban out base set cards later that were proven to be too powerful for what theyd like to do.

So instead of colors or like, factions, or like, classes, in this game here we have something new called “Regions” here I shall describe each one in detail with terms you can understand if you are a player of other games but have no idea what to expect when you’re expecting, I gotchu, oh I got sick of typing so i pasted and it looks like it gave some nifty wiki links and images, I have removed the wiki links so that you aren’t swayed by bad information and can only have my pure facts. Also I shall include the best “champions” for each region with a helpful description.

Bilgewater- Pirates and sea creatures, they like to do direct damage and their folks get better if you hit it first. They also like to do things like, pitch away your own deck to make fishes bigger like that movie big fish starring john goodman (at least he only had to act like he was married to roseanne on tv instead of tom arnold whomst actually was, also man tom arnold really wasted a tim curry acting role with his damn mchales navy remake, it really didnt capture the feel of the original tv show unlike the movie dragnet starring dan aykroyd [ghostbusters,coneheads,blues bros,blues bros 2000,that episode of according to jim where he reprised a blues brothers role with jim belushi since john belushi was dead, actually you know what it is probably time that we say jim was the superior belushi, what did john do besides get high {actually john did get it so that the band “Fear” [best known for covering the hit Animals song{eric burdon really tried to relive the glory with his eric burdon and the animals thing but it really didnt work} “we gotta get outta this place” |man the live version is so much better, but the problem is that the Fear Live album Live for the record was obviously known to be recorded for like tv or an album or something so lead singer Lee Ving (a take on the word leaving) would slur or outright not say cusses so it is missing the root of the band which is some cusses in songs (for example one of their tracks is “f*** Chrismas (just like fear this is a family article site where I refuse to use swears, honestly leaning on swears is something I do too much to be funny so it is nice to try to keep them out of my articles so that I can really work to be more creative, as maro said restriction breeds creativity )}meanwhile Jim Belushi gave us year after year of his tv show that John never managed to do so yeah jim>john] honestly the only real thing mchales navy /the movie starring tom arnold not the tv show/ gave us was another role by bruce campbell (maniac cop, ash in evil dead,evil dead 2, army of darkness, and the evil dead tv show [which unlike this blog really leaned heavily on swears, honestly I was unsure if the show was gonna be good but once the show opened with the Deep Purple Song [smoke on the water, perfect strangers]”Space Truckin|nothing to do with the movie space truckers|” I knew it was going to be a good show]the wrestling announcer in spiderman 1, the snooty ticket salesman in spiderman 2, the waiter in spiderman 3, burn notice where he played the former spy[the reason burn notice was so great is it was basically macgyver with spies [did you know macgyvers middle name was angus?{makes sense considering the scottishness of his last name}]]).

Best Champs: TWISTED FATE:my favorite ab(ability power) carry mid in league of legends, in league you pick between 3 cards to chuck and in lor you get to chuck cards too he is a good time.

MISS FORTUNE: babies first adc (attack damage carry) in league gets the lor treatment as a CAVALCADE OF CALAMITY

DeMacia — I enjoy demacia it is the typical make small folks and then attack with these folks but also really foddering those folks to make their main dude lucian level up and really start beating behinds.

Best Champs:

Lucian!- out here pounding it out, dont do the level up which you get from just offing his lady the special animation that has is heartbreaking, literally.

• Freljord- Icy dudes, really based on being tough and purposely taking damage. Also has a lot of cards that freeze your champs and reduce their attack to zero this turn, it is extremely tilting.
• Best Champ: wow how did I forget his name, the one where after he dies he comes back to life, really annoying, oh tryndamere

• Ionia — I forget this one, is this the awful stun barrier yasuo one?

• Noxus — I love this one, about being a kingly emperor and doing direct damage to your benefit.
• Best Champ : SWAIN, he is especially good cuz all he cares about is beating the enemy nexus and then comes out gloriously levelled up and is an unstoppable force.

• Piltover & Zaun: Think izzet/u(blue)/r(red) where you puke out a bunch of spells and do a good bit of damage, there is also a cool pitching your cards mechanic, one of the champs wants you to have an empty hand, that is a lot o f fun.
• best champ: VI, especially good since she “sees” the stuff you need to do to level her up

• Shadow Isles: man oh man this is my bread and butter, really based a lot around a keyword called Ephemeral which means that the folks only last til the end of the round or if they attack and then bish bam boom they blow up. Also a lot of killing your own folks. I really detest that red black in magic has really moved towards an aristocats style of play but I don’t mind it as much here.
• Best Champ: hrrm , I like em all, but probably Kalista, she wants your folks to die and then when she attacks after levelled up brings out your best dead one to attack that turn and that one ends up being the gideon and taking all the damage instead of her.

• Shurima- the ugh one, really based around the fact that their champs can hit level 3 which is one level higher than all the others but also requires you to use this stupid suns disc landmark and it just bores me to tears
• best champ- rankenton the gator hator

• Targon. — a cool one based around support and healing and also conjuring out a lot of celestial cards that are usually big spells for big beefy effects and is a good time
• best champ: probably zoe because she spews out some quick spells quick being cheap and has a wonderful you should run a singleton deck levelup requirement.

Ok gang, I think that is a good part to cut this off now, so next time we will get into maybe some keywords and then general deck construction and my approved topdecks.

Until then hope to see you on the legends of runeterra pitch.