I hit Master rank in Legends of Runeterra today, signalling me being in roughly the top 1000 players in the Europe region. It never crossed my mind to write about it since I don't usually do that for games with no clear end, but I'm not sure why. Anyways, as I feel reaching Master rank is sort of the "end" of my journey, being the highest rank one can achieve, I figured I might as well give my thoughts on the game, now that I'm "qualified" to do so.
This post will be a little longer, as I also wish to explore some other card games I've played.
Card games are something I played more as a child. They tend to be pretty exclusively PvP-based, and as I've gotten older, all PvP games have become inherently competitive for me. Sometimes I wish I could enjoy the games without caring about the outcome, but the mindset of improving has been ingrained too deep in me to not try to learn from losses and get better. This sadly involves a degree of beating myself up over losing as a form of discipline, increasing the frustration these games supply me with.
I started off playing Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh as those card games first came out and my brother bought the cards. He needed people to play against, I needed something to do with my life back before I had unlimited computer access. So he would always make the decks, hand me one, and we'd play, me losing like... 80% of the time, I guess, but it didn't bother me back then. I had no competitive drive, I just had fun.
I think a lot of my attitude from that point onwards towards card games can be derived from that last paragraph.
Making the decks has never been the fun part of card games for me. There's an incredible amount of cards in most card games. Even just reading them all (and you do have to read them all, lest you don't know what you're not putting in your deck) can be a daunting task, let alone thinking of all the combinations they could be used together in. Normally, I would praise that kind of complexity and depth, but there's a huge problem here. The problem is known as netdecking, and unless you're willing to spend an ungodly amount of time considering all the options available to you and have the skills to actually make the right conclusions from considering those options, you're just not going to make a better deck than somebody else has. You can play for fun and maybe feel like you've "earned" the victories by making your own decks, but that's no proof to others. Besides, where do you draw the line? Can you ask for advice? Can you look at what other people are playing and try to guess what decks they're running to imitate them? At some point, you'll gravitate towards playing what other people are playing, whether it's blatantly copying a deck online 1:1, or indirectly doing so by copying ideas and cards from the decks you play against (many of whom blatantly copied a deck online). There's nothing wrong with copying though. It's adapting, and not adapting is begging to lose, so you might as well not lie to yourself and take one of the good decks straight away. Of note are game modes like Arena (I think it was called that) in Hearthstone, or Expedition in Legends of Runeterra, where you can't just copy a deck, because you have highly limited choices what you can use. These bring back the skill of constructing a deck, but sadly have another caveat, which is the focus of the next paragraph.
That problem is luck. Games are so much based on the luck of the draw, in Expeditions the luck of the draft, and even the luck of the matchup, as the odds are heavily tilted right at the start, depending on what deck archetypes are facing up against each other. I think luck is both one of card games' greatest strengths and weaknesses. I could experience it back in the day when I was playing against my brother. I can be sure he was a far better player than I was. He also knew the decks we were both playing, since he put them together. And on top of that, I would wager he more often than not gave me the worse deck. But I still won a significant amount of games - something impossible in 1-on-1 games based on skill. I was so far behind, I should have lost every time, like I did in chess. But unlike chess, I didn't refuse to keep playing against him, probably because I had a chance to win. And I think that's the strength of card games, that luck can offset everything else and give you the perfect cards to win an otherwise doomed match. Sadly, it can also do the opposite, causing frustration at your inability to do anything.
Now, combining those two elements, what's left for you, the player? Making your deck is (mostly) not up to you. What cards you draw are not up to you. All you can do is play them. While I will admit that it's exactly this skill that differentiates great players from good ones, namely knowing the cards and thus the possible futures, how likely they are to occur, and accordingly, when you should play which cards, it's still not a large portion of what decides the outcome. I don't really feel like I've ever outplayed my opponent. Best I can feel about myself is relieved that I made the right decision in hoping they couldn't react to something I did, or that my stalling allowed me to counter their actions, instead of the other way around. But it still is mostly luck, not skills like aiming a gun in a shooter, nor psychology (or whatever their special term for this is) like predicting the enemy's next action in a fighting game.
I think a lot of card games since Hearthstone haven't been all that different. The constantly increasing mana curve has been the main difference from older card games, instead of being able to play almost whatever you got in hand. Runeterra mianly differs from Hearthstone in that the blocker can, for the most part, decide who fights whom. However, like many other card games that resemble Hearthstone, the differences are minor enough that they don't usually change the essence of what a game is. They all feel the same, looking from the outside, even if the new mechanics are a breath of fresh air to the player who has grided a single game for too long. The reason Runeterra is the first card game I've gotten so far in, is that it's the first card game that has given me the resources to build the decks I wanted. I'd argue that most other card games, while not having a technical paywall, released new cards too fast, and gave too few away for free to allow for people to be competitive while playing a reasonable amount of time.
Maybe it comes as no surprise, based on what I've already told you, that I don't really like card games. I don't like building my decks, I don't like netdecking, I don't like losing to luck (and don't care enough for winning due to it). There have been some better attempts at card games, but sadly they've died off. One I quite liked was Duelyst, which also introduced a board to the game, bringing a new aspect of non-luck-based gameplay. I think that is a massive improvement to shifting games away from being luck-based and increasing depth. They also had an amazing feature allowing to swap one card from your hand every turn, lessening the effect of the luck of the draw on the game. Why they scrapped the latter later on is beyond me. Sadly, it was also plagued by stuff costing a bit too much, especially as they started to run out of money before finally closing up.
I think the only card game I can truly say I think is good, is Prismata. It has no luck, no making of decks whatsoever, and no imbalance of matchups since you're playing the same deck. It's a game purely based on skill, yet it feels every bit as fun as the other card games I've played. (Okay, I actually really enjoyed the board mechanics in Duelyst and related board-based card games, but that's not important right now.) It also has an amazing AI, providing a challenging game to all but the very best of players, yet hitting that sweet spot of allowing you to feel good about yourself by letting you win more than 50% of the games. It's also dead. Not that it was ever alive. I don't think it ever hit even 100 simultaneous players, and is at maybe around 10 right now. And that's sad, because it also means there's no development resources to keep the game fresh and going.
So I didn't explain what Legends of Runeterra is actually about, but should I really? I think a lot of people have played at least one card game with attackers, blockers, and spells. They're all so very similar. Hearthstone mainly brought in the constant mana curve which gates playing cards, and Runeterra mainly switches it up with the blocking player deciding who fights whom, alternating turns letting both players play within the same "mana turn" with the attacker alternating between "mana turns", and maybe the 3 mana that can be left over each turn to go into a reserve for spells only. Draw a card, play your units and spells, attack, end your turn. They're all the same, and if I had to recommend one card game, I would indeed recommend Legends of Runeterra right now. It's got a big company backing it financially. It is very generous with cards, allowing anyone to be competitive, and it's still fresh right now, with promised changes bringing a lot of variety. Personally though, I don't think I'll be playing it much anymore, and I wouldn't recommend it (nor any other card game) to someone who doesn't already know they like card games. As explained, I don't like that so much is decided by just copying the best decks and being lucky. I feel the losses aggrevating because they're undeserved, and the victories meaningless, because they too are undeserved.
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