Legends of Runeterra Wiki

Completely free to play. You can buy cards with real money, but waiting a week or two of gameplay will get you 3 copies of a champion and plenty of lesser cards. I’ve never seen a game more generous with rewards, a deck is 40 cards and you can build one from no cards in about a week, slightly more if you want 6 new champion cards. That’s if you rely only on wildcards, there’s plenty of random rewards alongside them. The card arts and descriptions add so much to the world of Runeterra that started with league, telling stories of their own. Babbling Bjerg, those weird ocean friends, the sumprats gang and the crimsons, they’ve all never been mentioned before, yet they all have 5+ cards that tie together a story. We get to see things only briefly mentioned in the universe tab fleshed out and breathing, Elnuks, Cithria, Elise’s victims, Heimer’s inventions. It’s not just a game, it’s an addition to the lore universe, and a huge one at that. Hardcore Heathstone and Magic fans probably won’t come over, but I truly believe that majority of new card game players who hear of this game should primarily play LoR. It’s incredibly well put together, new player friendly, and the world behind it feels alive and believable.

This game gives you lots of options for deck building and it’s always fun customizing and testing out new builds. Cards don’t take long to acquire and there’s a nice system that lets you choose which ones you want to unlock using in game currency. I personally went all in and payed for copies of each card soon after buying it because I knew I would be playing this far into the future. There’s no single deck build that will win you every game. Like every card game there’s always the luck of the draw, but as you play and build your experience you will begin to see which cards matter most for the approach you are going for. Things like starting units, buffs, counters, champions, spells, and how you play them will make or break you. It’s turn based so you and your opponent will each take a turn to attack and defend. Cards are summoned with mana and each turn your mana is refilled and given a plus 1. Ranked matchmaking will put you against people of similar skill level and each victory ads points towards a weekly unlock that gets a boost every time you go up in level. There are also daily challenges that boosts your points after completion.

I’ll tell you now, it’s a decent card game, has an amazing turn system is the best part. But to people who want to pretend like there’s no luck they don’t play card games. You still need to draw the card you need when you need it and sometimes you do just get unlucky, it’s not chess, and that’s fine. The top review talks about hearthstone being pay to win, same here, you can spend in game currency to buy stuff, some champs are broken and combining champs is fun but expensive, you can grind out game after game to eventually grind enough to get your champs for free, or you can pay roughly $3 per champ card. Where it’s different from hearthstone is you can buy individual cards, you’re not forced to buy card packs (thank god, it’s about time). This makes it more like magic or any other traditional card game. Point being, you like card games? Great! But this is still a card game and has those inherit issues some don’t like, still a mix of skill (plenty) and luck, and still a pay to win game; not that either of those are inherently bad, I love card games, I just see reviews and the app describing itself inaccurately.

This review is similar to those that said the release was unexpectedly better than teamfight tactics - in that the iPad Pro support on initial release was a pleasant surprise. I expected this to go the same way as TFT where I have to wait for an update or something, but instead this app is loaded with cursor support, customizable graphics settings, etc. While this is all very nice, I have yet to see anything on refresh rate support for the iPad Pro. I think the only thing that could’ve made this release better is support for the iPads 120hz display. I’m hoping that in the near future we will see something in the settings allowing you to change the framerate of the game - especially considering how it has such short, snappy animations. Enclosing I’m pleased with the way this release went. We all know how riot usually does things, especially how their league client acts and how their users look at the company - but this is a pleasantly clean and polished release for a change. I hope riot will make note of this and start doing things this way all the time. Good job riot.

I am not embellishing at all when I say you can earn a massive amount of cards for this game without spending a dime. Daily quests and bonus experience up to certain levels on reward tracks mean you’re getting a new bundle of cards, wildcards, and shards every day or two. It slows down after but it’s always generous. Different from the dust system in Hearthstone, you have shards which can buy any card directly, wildcards which can be traded in for any card of the same rarity, then the premium currency can also buy cards outright. NO cards packs, NO guessing, and NO praying you get what you want. It’s all centered around getting exact cards outside of FREE rewards from your chosen region and the weekly cache you build up by earning experience. It’s important to note: aside from refunding a card or cards you made or bought (with any currency btw) before using them, there’s NO way to lose cards like dusting for meta decks and good or buffed legendary cards in Hearthstone. Here, you keep it all and can’t ever lose cards trying to get currency for new cards.

While it can be daunting for someone who has never played any card games, LoR is by far the best fresh-player TcG out there. Synergy and flavor are packed into each card, and each game always feels like a strategic battle. The monetization in this game is almost TOO good. I’ve played a couple months since launch and already have every card. Period. No spending money. No insane win rate with “pay to enter” game modes. Just a dude that plays daily can get a full collection in no time. Compare that with hearthstones model: about 60 packs per 4 months can unlock the new expansion, but will require constant play time and lucky pulls on legendaries. Not to mention with hearthstone, it is extremely unforgiving with time. I’ve spend $150 over the course of 2 years, but still feel poor with every new expansion. The devs really care about this game too, every 2 WEEKS is a balance patch to keep things fresh, and about every 2 months new cards drop. We’ve also got new game modes, cosmetics, and battle-pass events in that time frame.

I’ve always been a big fan of card games and before runeterra I played a lot of hearthstone. Playing runeterra completely blows hearthstone out of the water. The game feels really balanced, there’s not one deck that everyone plays and wins with, and it seems riot is working hard to keep it that way. Being free to play is completely fine and hasn’t limited my experience in any way. The focus seems to be on buying cool cosmetics than forcing players to buy endless cards just to make one deck. If you’re familiar with league, it’s cool to see the same characters and learn more about them through the flavour text. Overall the gameplay is focused around strategy, not random chance making it more competitive. It feels like riot cares about this game and the people that play it, I highly recommend it to anyone who likes card games or is interested in learning one.

I love the game. In fact, I’m addicted to it. I love constructing decks and testing them. There are no pre-decks on sale which forces players to assemble a deck of their own. The game is also generous in rewards that gives free-to-play players a chance to fight virtually anyone even against players who spends a lot of money on the game. It is a game of luck and a game where you use your brain after all. It is a really good pastime, but it is all over the place and so imbalance in my opinion. There are regions that are too powerful. Some can end the game in less than 5 rounds. Regions that shine late game have no chance of beating them or showing off their special abilities and combos. I do not write reviews often, and I am most certainly not great at giving an objective feedback for I do not know how the developers measure the fairness of the game . In playing the game, I spend most of my time making decks than playing, but when I play, I lose most of the time because of the “imbalances” of the game. It is really discouraging for those players that I lost to have similar decks. There will come a time when all players will just use the winning deck, and they will all end up fighting with that very same deck, disregarding other potential deck combos.

I love League of Legends and find this to be a simpler card game I can possibly grasp, in aim to enjoy a card game with a lover of playing this type of stuff- To add, we’re both lovers of League of Legends too. The thing is- The tutorial isn’t noob friendly, especially for those like me who have a hard time grasping understanding for card mechanics on its own. At first it’s fine, it makes you play the certain cards in order and tells you about them, but then after that it just gives you the cards to read with mechanics you never heard of and leaves you to figure it out. I sat here having to go through ‘try again’ after ‘try again’, slowly feeling more and more like an idiot unable to do it on my own to instead ask my friend to hand hold me what to do. Now this was for certain challenges understanding the hook mechanic and scout and so on so forth. It would have been much better for these tutorial challenges, because they are tutorials for various different cards, to be a bit more hand holding or have an optional setting to turn on for hand holding on what to do. You can say, sit and figure it out- Which I can do, but I need to grasp how things work before I can start thinking on my own. This review mainly applies to those who can relate to me on this, having a hard time in general grasping card games and just want a better tutorial. I shouldn’t have to be spending more than two or five minutes trying to figure out how to play the cards...

The game is fun, and as far as TCG games go riot is quite generous in giving you what you need to make a decent deck early. Whales still get a bit of an advantage but you can definitely make due if you are not wanting to drop a wad of cash. Okay, so now my beef: I’ve been running into a very frustraiting and annoying glitch where the cards will get stuck when moving them into play (either from my deck to the bench or from my bench into play), most of the time tapping on another card will free it up, but on several occasions when the timer is ticking down I’ve missed being able to commit the card to play or I’ve been unsuccessful in being able to unlock the card at all and it remained stuck (and therefor unusable) for the entirety of the game. I’m running a late 2018 IPad Pro so I doubt it’s the device. I’d be happy to change my rating to a higher one once this gets fixxed but it is so frustraiting to lose games because I can’t commit a card to play rather than just losing because the other player is better. I do hope Riot Games will look into this and remedy it. I do very much like this game and would like to see it become a staple in the TCG genre.

What I don’t understand is how the game designers are absolutely clueless as to how to fix their own NPE issues in this game. What kind of a game revolving around champions requires you to draw them? When you play an exhibition, it’s not fun to have a strong deck, only to run into two games in a row on game 6 where you don’t draw any of your win conditions and your opponents are dropping 3 champions on you. It’s not fun to get so close to master tier and realize there are only 3 decks up there and they are all identical copies of eachother. It’s not fun when your opponent gets 3 obliterates in a row with their invokes against your last breath champions. It’s not fun when Targons peak causes you to auto lose on turn 6. It’s just not fun, and no amount of new cards are going to fix the reasons that this is not fun. And Riot you guys don’t seem to care at all about the negative play experience. I quit TFT and I should have known better than to hope in this one- I enjoyed it for a while but the more I get to know you, the more I see the ugly inside. Same bad company, same issues. We’re breaking up- after over a decade of playing your games, after playing league of legends since season 2, I’m done with all of it. It’s just a shame that all your players end up divorcing you years later.

So I’ve been playing this game since it came out earlier this year and it really is a lot of fun (I’ve unlocked virtually every card), but I’ve found since the two most recent updates, which added landmarks and the K/DA spells the game has become completely unbalanced and I find probably 1 out of every 3 games I play involve the other player just cheesing the game’s mechanics to win. A good example of this is the 12-cost card “feel the rush” and the landmark “howling abyss”, which, while interesting game-ending cards can be used early in the game due to items such as targon’s peak and spells that increase mana gems. I’ve seen too often a game where I’m actually playing units and battling and the opposing player just uses a ton of mechanical cards to make them able to afford feel the rush around round 5 or 6, which, unless you’re running the same deck, is virtually unbeatable. Sadly as much as I have enjoyed the game (and for a long time even daily), these broken cards have ruined my playing experience entirely. I understand the need to spice things up as a growing game and the desire to use the K/DA IP, but these new additions were clearly not sufficiently thought out and have ended my enjoyment of the game.

The only good part about this game is presentation. Other than that you can expect to be winning one round, and all the sudden the enemy has wiped your field and has two enemies with 30/30 and overwhelm. What that means is that you no longer have anything to defend your nexus, and you have to take 60 damage to your nexus with 20 hp when they attack. There are cards that do that. There are cards that make you cast every spell twice. That means you can have an ally with 30 attack attack ALL enemies twice. Or deal 5 damage to the nexus through a spell. TWICE. There are cards that combine all effects you have into one giant card with 40/40 and then DOUBLE THAT. Now you have to take 80 damage because in one turn the enemy just yeeted your winning strategy into no I win because I want to and I payed to win. There is no balance between cards, or takes hours of awful and slow gameplay to any good cards. It has another loot crate system to get new cards. They are sorted into factions which it cool, but still just cards from random crates. You can get cards from wildcards that let you get any card you want, but people who pay to win get them faster and have multiple copies so I mean, why bother playing. No balence, pay to win, awful gameplay, ok presentation, and slow, slow progression.

Love the game, the concept, the art, the animations. But I ran into a huge issue while trying to climb the ranked ladder. And it was a single card. Unyielding spirit. This card makes the ally you play it on unkillable. They can’t take damage or die. If you put this on a Flora they can win a game so easily and there is nothing you can do about it. I’ve had so many matches where I’ve played near flawlessly, but even if I’m on 20 health and they have 1.... ONE. As long as they get this card and play it on a fiora it’s game over. There are like 2 or 3 counters to this. However, they all recruiter either Ionia or bilgewater. I do not like the play style of either of these regions. I prefer freljord and demacia. I shouldn’t have to rebuild all of my decks and change the way I want to play because of a single cars. I’ve lost at least 20 games against that horribly broken card. It stalled my progress and it’s extremely frustrating and I question whoever on the balancing team allowed it into the game. Seriously what were you guys thinking. I turned to game forums and reddit to see I was not alone, there’s people from silver to challenger complaining about it. After I lost 2 ranks due to so many players using this OP combo, i uninstalled. Will not be playing again until this card is balanced or removed.