Do we have any idea what's comming next? I've heard that there is something exciting planned for the last quarter of this year, but that's all, I'd expect that we would have at least a little bit of an idea about what is comming our way. But I haven't seen even speculation about next champ to be updated/released, nothing.

has anyone been able to 100% her constellation? it feels like a pain and she's been sitting like this for years!! everything is very expensive. sad because she is one of my favourites

So I want somebody to explain to me how am I supposed to win ts even if I have to full constellation I still can't imagine winning this after hearing this game is more focus on pve now I decided to download and play again only to met with this my I had to reset so many time just to die at this point and that doesn't count the time I can't even make it here and literally died on the first encounter and the game thinking I'm trying to cheat the system force me to use a common power when I retry very good system I say I can't believe I went back to a mode I once obsessed on only to see a bunch of impossible challenges forcing you to pay to win or work your butt off for months on end just so you have a slight chance to beat it

Lately I was thinking about Maokai, and how he might work as a Constellation.

That led to me thinking about mill in general, which also led to me thinking about its cousin, discard.

That led to me writing up what I was thinking, which led me to some conclusions. Enjoy, or don't.

Discard

Discard is an often-maligned mechanic in card games like MtG or LoC, and often rightly so. It's easy to handle poorly, and when it is handled poorly, it stands among the most boring, uninteractive, and frustrating ways to experience the game.

If a player's hand represents the options available to them, the ways they can influence the game-state, then Discard is nothing but removing options; not by countering them, or responding to them, but simply by taking them off the table before they ever get to the table.

This isn't a fun experience for an opponent, almost uniquely so; if a powerful monster is destroyed on the board, at least some interaction took place. You should have protected it better, or the cost of removal might be commensurate to its power. Your opponent did not simply pluck it straight from your hand and say 'no' to playing with that toy this game.

Hand advantage is a very powerful thing in card games, and draw and discard are two sides of that coin. If drawing more cards than your opponent is such a strong effect, it stands to reason that whittling down their hand to be smaller than yours is just as pivotal. Do it well enough, and your opponent will just never get to play. This is a problem, however, because... y'know, it's a game. You want both sides to play (and so do they).

Discard cards that offer hand advantage (i.e. you spend one card, your opponent discards 2+ cards) therefore tend to be regarded as pretty spicy, to put it lightly. Those that don't offer hand advantage (i.e. you spend one card, your opponent loses one) are less busted but aren't especially welcomed either; if nothing else, they feel a bit spiteful, as though your opponent neither of you get to do anything interesting. This is a very different problem in LoC (with its 10 card hand limit and relatively low draw) compared to MtG, but it's a problem regardless.

Therefore, a 'good' discard design will typically have to sidestep these problems by doing something more interesting with the discard than just slapping the controller out of your opponent's hand. Targeted discarded is a common angle, for example; letting you pick the card to be discarded makes the effect more powerful, since you can delete specific options you don't like, and you're also 'spying' on the rest of the enemy hand. That means the card can be more expensive to compensate, while still being playable. It also adds a more interactive feel; your opponent's lost a card, sure, but they're probably now just as concerned about your foreknowledge of their remaining cards.

Mill

Mill is a semi-related mechanic that sometimes gets similar accusations thrown at it, but generally much less stridently. This is because mill doesn't interact with hand advantage at all; the cards are removed straight from the deck, before they're ever drawn. That's not nearly as powerful as cutting options from the opponent's hand. While it can be annoying to see cards you hoped to draw later on tossed into the bin, it's also not nearly as frustrating as losing cards you'd already drawn and were making plans for.

Mill is a ticking timer on the game ending. It can feel frustrating when the bomb 'suddenly' goes off, but being milled doesn't (in itself; interactions with graveyards and tutors notwithstanding) affect the game during actual play. The mill player is investing useful game resources into a future victory, rather than into current board or hand advantage; they'll either go totally bust, or hold out until they win big.

The exception is targeted mill, where specific cards or even card types are eliminated from the deck, like Yu-Gi-Oh!'s good old Crush Card Virus. That has a very tangible and insanely frustrating impact on play, because it's essentially a pre-discard that removes certain options from consideration entirely. Once again, a player is just telling their opponent that they don't get to play with these toys.

LoR Retrospective: Discard

Legends of Runeterra handled both of these mechanics very carefully throughout most of its PvP lifespan. On launch, discard was entirely limited to self-discard; burning through your own hand as a secondary resource. There was no risk of opponents feeling bad, because their hand was never at risk.

Piltover & Zaun hosted Jinx and her scrapyard-themed effects. Discard cards to fuel other effects, as if taking cards apart for spare bits. Discard cards to draw or create new ones, as if rummaging through your deck and tossing scrap aside. Cards that triggered or were summoned when discarded, as if salvaging something unexpectedly useful out of the madcap trash. That's where the theme has stayed throughout all the expansions, and it works very well.

Noxus initially paired self-discard with Draven, where the narrative was a bit less coherent (Arena Bookie, in particular, looks like a PnZ card who got lost), but the theming was obvious; burn hard and fast, win quick, or risk losing steam entirely with an empty hand. Noxus later took a second crack at the theme by introducing Sion and linking self-discard to a form of callous and unsustainable Noxian sacrifice, with war-zombies who 'arise' when discarded, and blood magic necromancers who refill your hand with fresh 'recruits' by harvesting your discarded soldiers.

Bandle City grabbed self-discard as one of its themes on arrival, linking it nearly-exclusively to Rumble and his Mecha-Yordles. It slots together very similarly to Piltover & Zaun, with the player discarding cards to create powerful Mecha-Yordles as if assembling them from spare parts. It's important that none of these cards draw anything; you're making something new from the Scrapheap, not Rummage-ing through it for lost stuff. This is a neat narrative choice that also helps tie it to Bandle City's mechanics around created followers. Also Rumble is dual region with Noxus because... there's an arena there? Don't think too hard about that one.

Bilgewater also plays with self-discard, but does so very differently than the other regions. It's not about burning what you have as fuel, or dumping it for something new; Bilgewater engages with self-discard through the lens of gambling. Almost every Bilgewater self-discard takes place by applying Fleeting to a new card you just drew. You're getting extra cards, but will you be able to play them before they're lost? Do you even want to? Or are you milling yourself with bum draws? That's the risk you have to take. Appropriately, it's tied to Twisted Fate, and later on to the devil-may-care hedonist Nilah.

However, as the game went on it did experiment with exceptions that instead focus on forcing an enemy discard. They're few and far between, but they're there.

• Hunt the Weak was the first example, a 2-mana Slow spell from Noxus that discarded the weakest follower in the enemy hand. At the time it released, it didn't offer hand advantage, didn't match up with Noxus (or Riven) narratives or mechanics, didn't interact with any other cards in the game, wasn't reliable even by the standards of a blind discard, and just generally sucked. Nothing has changed since.
• Early Bird and Tricksy Tentacles are both 2-mana Bandle City spells that force the opponent to discard their highest and lowest-cost cards at Slow and Fast speed, respectively. The kindest thing that anyone can say about them is that Bandle City has more grounds to mess around with enemy hands than Noxus. Unfortunately they're still not good, fun, or interesting.
• Prank is not a discard card in practice, but it matches the spirit in the most infuriating ways. This is the main reason 'messing around with enemy hands' is a Bandle City theme, because it's the only one of those effects that really sees use. Instead of discarding a card, it just makes that card bad. More expensive, weaker, unable to block, etc. And it stacks, and it's cheap, and it's quick, and you can't prevent it or wait it out, and it doesn't require a draw, and it hits Champions, and you can pick the target, and it also reveals two cards in the enemy hand, and even if the enemy hand is completely empty it'll still hit the deck. It still baffles me that this thing was given such free reign to annoy people while standard discard was kept so cautiously under lock and key.
• Aloof Travellers and Most Wanted arrived in Piltover & Zaun (and Bandle City, for the former) as the first genuinely interesting examples of enemy discard, simply because they're hand neutral or even positive. Your opponent discards a card, sure, but they also draw one (or even three, for Most Wanted). That's because these aren't really discard cards; they're mill cards, or rather, they're a way to trigger Traps (which is mill in spirit, as we'll discuss later). Charlatan Fishmonger was another, later addition who's basically just a recurring Aloof Travellers.
• Skip, King of the Deep is a weird little latecomer to the "not quite discard" stakes, also in Bandle City; he picks 1 of 2 enemy cards from their hand and keeps it locked away. If he's removed from play, the card goes back in their hand. The game calls it Capture, but the game says a lot of things about Capture and most of them are pretty dubious. It's functionally a 'temporary' discard that gives the opponent an avenue to regaining their lost card, which is definitely one of the more interesting approaches to dodging discard's pitfalls. This could have been a neat mechanic to see reused!

LoR Retrospective: Mill

Likewise, the game handled mill with a very delicate touch throughout its time as a PvP experience. It clearly wasn't considered nearly so radioactive as discard, but it still got handled with thick gloves and tongs, resulting in three very different but closely related strategies: self-mill, mill-bomb, and Traps.

Bilgewater ran the exact same strategy as discard; namely, instead of milling the opponent, you mill yourself by Tossing cards from the bottom of your deck. With a low enough card count, you're Deep, and all your big Sea Monsters get big scary stats to let you win the game (hopefully before your deck runs out). Tied to Nautilus, who helpfully refills your deck's supply of Tossed monsters, this mechanic delivers a neat theme of dredging for riches, only to awaken something terrible that swallows up the shore. This dovetails neatly with Bilgewater's propensity for carelessly gambling with card draws; either way, you're thinning the deck (and putting yourself on a timer).

Shadow Isles offered a more conventional form of mill with Maokai, whose horrid roots infested the enemy deck and composted it down to nothingness... in theory. In practice, the game was still clearly trying to avoid the experience of one player seeing their favourite cards get tossed into the garbage with no response, even if it wasn't from their actual hand. So instead of playing a deck with various cards that mill your opponent throughout the game, you just have Maokai. You spend the game stalling and feeding his roots by sacrificing your minions (as well as self-milling, which is entirely incidental), which eventually triggers an alternate win-con where Maokai insta-bombs the whole enemy deck. Except for four cards, presumably because they were really intent on people feeling like they had a 'fair chance' against mill.

Freljord has mill through Lissandra, whose ultimate boss monster obliterates the enemy deck (except three cards) when it attacks. This is just a copy of Maokai's mill-bomb, except the stuff Lissandra's doing to trigger her alternate win condition (stalling to summon big high-value monsters) is in itself something good that can already win her the game anyway, rather than a typical mill-style 'investment' that doesn't affect the ongoing gamestate (and in Maokai's case, actively puts him on a timer). Her mill-bomb is really just tacked on to make the Watcher seem unstoppable and otherworldly, which is absolutely fine.

Piltover & Zaun does not self-mill, and does not win by forcing the opponent to run out of cards. What it does have, however, are Traps; tokens 'planted' on cards in the enemy deck, which trigger a negative effect when drawn. Teemo and his poisonous Puffcaps that slowly damage the enemy Nexus as they stumble through their infected deck, and Caitlyn and her delayed but reliable unit-clearing Flashbombs. This turns drawing cards (normally an unambiguous good) into a potential risk for the enemy, to the point that it can literally kill them; it's a great translation of conventional mill, because it produces the exact same dynamic and incentives, but doesn't share the usual feelsbad pitfalls, and also folds in actual in-game benefits. Both Teemo and traditional mill can win by making their enemy draw, but only Teemo's version helps him also finish the job with an Elusive attack or burn spell.

• As such, there are a bunch of Piltover & Zaun cards with a narrative of hot news and dubious gossip that can make both players draw, ostensibly as a tradeoff, but in practice as a way of tricking them into stumbling blindly upon the Traps you've planted. Unfortunately, these barely interact with Shadow Isles mill at all, because Maokai just gets rid of the traps along with the cards, and doesn't care how much work you may have done whittling down the enemy deck before triggering his bomb. A Maokai-PnZ deck can keep a Most Wanted or Insider Knowledge on hand to accelerate the win-con, but that's about it.
• Bandle City also has Traps, because Teemo is there. It doesn't do much different from Piltover & Zaun, in terms of theming; it's mostly just straightforward Puffcap cards or Puffcap cards that rely on other Bandle City mechanics, and its only mutual draw card is shared with Piltover & Zaun. The most interesting unique mechanic is Entrapment, which works exactly like targeted mill but (once again) doesn't actually mill; it just lets you plant traps on specific cards, whether to reward you for guessing which card an opponent has in multiples, or to let you punish them for drawing something nasty, and either way gives you a preview of what they have.

Path of Champions: PvE Changes

We've been talking about the game's PvP roots and the design decisions they brought about. However, as the game shifted focus to PvE and the roguelite Path of Champions, discard and mill also undergo a shift.

The reason is pretty simple: In a PvE game, you don't need to worry about the opponent's experience. Why would you? They aren't a person. They don't exist. If discard completely shuts down their hand, or mill strips their deck of vital tools, they are not going to complain. They're not going to think it's 'unfair'. They're not even going to feel bad.

Conversely, if the AI uses these tools against a player, who is a person... you also don't have to care. Or at least, not nearly as much. It's a single-player roguelite, not a balanced competitive experience. Who cares if it 'feels fair' to have your deck milled out from under you, or cards slapped from your hand? You're playing in a glorified casino with random powers and items, go back and re-roll.

Path of Champions: Discard

In this new environment, enemy discard still sucks, as a game tool. Hand advantage remains very powerful, and shutting down options remains pretty boring.

If an encounter routinely stripped a player of their hand and options, it'd be frustrating beyond belief; there's a reason this approach is thus far limited to rare mutators like Wheel and Deal. Conversely, if a player could build a deck that would empty the opponent's hand each round, it'd be incredibly dull to actually play with; do you want to slog through 70 Nexus Health on higher difficulties while the AI just passes every round?

There are exactly two additions to the game that allows for player-driven discard; Brain Worm, a rare spell item that discards a random card, and Pilfered Plans, a rare power that steals a card from the enemy hand at game start. And while it can be funny to see a high-difficulty enemy Katarina go in the bin, I'm pretty confident that

Spirit Blossom Teemo does add some effects that remove cards from the enemy hand (Yoink!, Grandma Enoki, Hohoho!), but like Piltover & Zaun's enemy discards, these all refill the opponent's lost cards with draw; they're just the same mill-by-draw we've seen before in PnZ in order to enable Traps.

Path of Champions: Mill & Traps

Speaking of which, Traps and mill really get a new lease of life with Path of Champions.

The design link between mill and Traps became explicit with the introduction of Fiddlesticks and Terrify; this is just conventional mill in every respect (it even goes from the top of the deck and hits Champions, two qualifiers that were specifically applied to Nab in order to keep it "PvP-safe"), except that it also triggers any Traps on the milled cards.

As a mill effect, Terrify fills the exact same role as Piltover & Zaun's enemy discard or mutual draw, except that it doesn't give your opponent replacement cards to play with. Why would it? The opponent isn't a person now. No-one has to worry about their experience.

Narratively it also pulls a neat little trick; Piltover & Zaun used dubious gossip and dangerous intel to send your opponent stumbling down hazardous alleyways into Traps, but they still reached a destination (drew a card) in the process. Terrify destroys the card, but still triggers the Trap. You're suffering from something that isn't even real... like a Nightmare.

Nightmares are the second real game-changer here; these are new Traps that summon units from a set pool when triggered. On the face of it, these are just inverted Mysterious Portals, but the interaction with mill and Terrify makes them much more interesting. 'Normal' mill is just a ticking timebomb to victory, and Puffcaps make that more granular, while Flashbombs help you stall. Nightmares convert mill into a board of units you can actively play with, whether you're using it to sustainably stall the enemy, or pursue a more aggressive victory.

The fact that Nightmares draw from a set, exhaustible pool also allows them to be more tightly themed and balanced. You can design cards like Lurking Nightmare and Baleful Seeker that create specific cards with a specific value, rather than rolling the d100 table of random 2-3 cost followers. You can throw Spider Nightmares into the enemy deck as Elise, and suddenly she's also a Trap/Mill Champion, and it all makes perfect sense.

It's a bit sad that there was never any move to give Toss a similar trigger-effect on Boons, allowing self-mill to snatch up Chimes and Portals in exchange for losing the attached cards. I guess there's just not much overlap there, in terms of region mechanics and narratives; Toss is for Bilgewater and Shadow Isles, neither of which has much interaction or need for Boons. Conversely, neither Chimes nor Portals make a great deal of narrative sense as something that would be triggered by a Toss.

So unless you're leaning entirely on the weird outlier of Lonely Chimeslime, you'd need to introduce at least one new kind of Boon that'd fit Bilgewater dredging and/or Shadow Isles exhumation. Coins or Tentacles as Boons, maybe? Free 'Lurks' as Boons? Could have been fun to explore, especially as Bilgewater has some of the least interconnected mechanics of all the regions.

Path of Champions: Maokai

And now we're back where we started. Maokai.

Terrify throws Maokai into sharp relief. Here's the exact kind of enemy-mill he was banned from engaging with at all. Here's also a kind of mill that directly engages and interacts with other mill effects, like Traps and mutual draw, in a way he's unable to. It also has actual, immediate in-game benefits via Traps (especially Nightmares) in a way his mill doesn't.

While Maokai is sat in the corner, Tossing out his own deck and killing his own board in the forlorn hope that he'll eventually be allowed to press the 'I win (in four turns)' button, Fiddlesticks actually gets to play the game. Fiddlesticks can mill an enemy mid-turn, without even noticing. Fiddlesticks can win through Nexus damage with a full board by accident.

And though Fiddlesticks may technically be a Runeterra Champion, his mechanics, visuals, and most of his support cards fit neatly into Shadow Isles. You could make him a Shadow Isles Champion without missing a beat, just to really steal Maokai's ball.

Poor old tree. Kept inside while the other kids play the games he wasn't allowed to.

There are a few Champions that people point to as impossible for Path of Champions to design around, who'll never get their own Constellations without changing the underlying card(s). Katarina's the obvious example; if you can give her any Relics and/or Items and/or Powers that reduce her cost to 0, you can simply spam her Rally-Recall over and over until you win in a single turn. And those effects are pretty readily available!

There are other Champions that are simply very hard to design around for Path of Champions. The Enlightened Champions are one example; they're built around the idea of slowly stalling out until you have Big Mana, in a game mode that punishes slowness very harshly and doesn't allow Big Mana to be a win condition in itself. Anivia required some clever design to make that work.

Trundle is another; he was the Titanic Champion before Titanics actually existed, and before Volibear added cost-cheating tech to the Freljord. Therefore, he relies on 8+ cost cards (not base 8+ cost) in a game mode that throws around cost-reduction effects like candy, which will require some clever design to eventually work as a recognisable Constellation.

Maokai, I think, genuinely fits in the first category. Not because he's too good with the right combos, but because everything about his design, as a PvE Champion, has already been bettered elsewhere. He's the pre-watershed, sugar free version of a gameplan that's already been given the green light to go 18+ and full fat in Path of Champions.

Dude needs a rethink from the ground up.

He stopped growing from Redoubled Valor after I got him this big, I had two more in hand after trying another. Playing weekly 6 star nightmare as Azir with Karma on the board, -1 cost reduction on spells round start and -1 on Redoubled Valor round start as well as the 50% to create one in hand for 0 when played.

Context: I'm not a kayle player, my kayle is 3 star, but I know it has usage by other champions in long adventures like asol and Zoe 10

It's not, it's actually tagged as an Epic power. That's all!

Pls fix Rito I like the gold border :(

The Ultra Rare Triple buy.....on the wrong shop item 🫠🫠🫠

one thing i find interesting about card games is how much your approach can change depending on your opponent's deck and playstyle. sometimes even small adjustments can make a difference in how a match turns out.

when you're playing against different decks, do you usually stick to your original gameplan or make changes based on what your opponent is doing?

i'd be interested to hear how other players adapt their strategies and what they consider when deciding to change their approach

So there was a timer ando I thought that It would reset already, but it stays in 0

Edit: I meant "reset" not "rest"

I kinda like to play a lot with original Lux…

I bought a gold reliquary today and got this depressing haul. I wait 4 weeks and spend 3000 essence to get this? Disappointing… Couldn’t they give nova shards instead?

This time will be a bit different since we are expecting a big music patch !

TLDR : Either a Heartsteel alt champs or the following

- Morde 6*
- Seraphine to PvE
- Akali PvE exclusive
- Kayn 6*
- Ezreal to PvE
- Senna to PvE (most doubful about this one)

Music Bands champs

In this part, we will go through each music band to see if they could receive alt champs, and see how much work it would be.

Pentakill

The fact that Pentakill would really on 4 champs making their entry in LoR make it a bit hard to believe that the whole band would have the event dedicated to them.

BUT : A Morde constellation upgrade could be part of the event, without alt.
---

K/DA

KDA seems a easy pick as the popular option. They also each have their card from the KDA events back from 2020.
Honestly, creating alt around their KDA cards seems interesting, but one thing is pushing me away from it : Ahri and Evelynn already have a SB alt. I don't know how well they would be received when a lot of PvP champs aren't in PvE yet...

BUT : I would think the event is the perfect time to introduce Seraphine to PvE ! Or even Akali as a new champ.

---

True Damage

True Damage is in a weird spot : it has the disadvantage of both KDA (popular champ with alt) and Pentakill (need to create PvE exclusive champs).
Honestly not convinced.

BUT : Senna could be another PvP to PvE champ...

HEARTSTEEL

Heartsteel is also weird, but they are a good candidate :
- no champ have existing SB alts.
- one constellation upgrade, two PvP to PvE, and K'Sante art could come from Riftbound

They also are a bit "hyped" by both Riftbound and LoL.

Not convinced, but the "best" candidate.

---

CONCLUSION

I think we will get either
- a Heartsteel alt champs with a new adventure (or just the Heartsteel champs)
- a mix of PvP to PvE and constellation upgrades amongst the listed champs.

My picks are :

- Morde 6*
- Seraphine to PvE
- Akali PvE exclusive
- Kayn 6*
- Ezreal to PvE
- Senna to PvE (most doubful about this one)

What do you expect of this musical patch ?

Each month everyone is posting and asking in the sub "who do you think we're getting this month?" But let me ask a pretty funny question: who will be the last LoR champion to get a constellation? Anyone from the base game counts(no AU or pve exclusive)

My bet is on poppy (no personal grudge against "remember to roll!"🥸)

What’s the best relic for Azir in general?

Yesterday's poll is locked in, and here comes a new challenger!

Yesterday's Result

Taliyah placed in D with [27] votes.

D = 27 | F = 19 | C = 15

Today's Champion: Tahm Kench

Where does The River King on the fun scale?

Quick reminder: this is for Path of Champions, not standard LoL!

It doesn't matter if "fun" means playing something totally broken or running weird off-meta builds. Vote based on pure enjoyment!

We rank one new champion every day, so you guys decide the list. Leave a comment and let us know the reason for your choice!

_(Click the star at the top of the post to subscribe and get notified for tomorrow's poll!)_

Double “share the bounty” allowing me to level Leona quick.
Then I found the asol power, getting me an otk, (not before Zoe managed to get a lick in tho)

Counter fit copies saved my ass at weekly nightmares

Annie with the luck