Riot Games made quite a splash during its ten year anniversary celebration, announcing – among many other things Legends of Runeterra , a CCG based on the League of Legends universe. As anyone who was able to go hands-on during its initial five day “Preview Patch” would likely attest, the game is impressive: clever gameplay mechanics, iconic champions, slick presentation, and some of the best art you’re going to find in the world of video games.

Legends of Runeterra’s inception

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Early feedback from a Magic pro

The early designs of Teemo

Teemo's Cards in Legends of Runeterra 8 IMAGES

Ensuring Teemo’s death is satisfying

Levelling up the level up animations

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Commissioning level 2 art for all the champions

Champion Art in Legends of Runeterra 45 IMAGES

Which champions to include?

“ “Choosing which champions were going to be in our first set was incredibly difficult. I think that we probably changed the starting roster 10, 20 times." - Jeff Jew

Working with art studio Sixmorevodka

Incredible Art in Legends of Runeterra 84 IMAGES

Foils, golden cards, alternate art?

Storytelling and Legends of Runeterra’s Incredible VO System

“ "We have… somewhere upwards of 3,800 dialogue lines within the game." - Mel Li

The need for living victims in the Shadow Isles

Shadow Isles Art in Legends of Runeterra 18 IMAGES

Deck building

Neutral cards?

Redefining what terms like aggro, midrange and control mean

“ "It’s more about ‘pick your tag team’ in our game versus ‘pick your single champion’ in League.” - Andrew Yip

The response to the back and forth gameplay

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How spell mana makes a bad draw more bearable

How spell mana impacts gameplay

How spell mana impacts game design

Spell Keywords in Legends of Runeterra 5 IMAGES

Deciding on the champion spell system

Champions and Their Champion Spells in Legends of Runeterra 42 IMAGES

Removal is a little more scarce than in some card games

What makes Legends of Runeterra Different?

On how prominent net decking will be

“ "If you want to bounce between decks and just throw your wallet on the table and kind of say, ‘Hey, I have this deck now,’ it's going to be a lot harder in our game." - Steve Rubin

How many viable decks is the team aiming for?

On iterative game design

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Ensuring cards are playable

Keeping the meta fresh

Champions by Region - Legends of Runeterra 6 IMAGES

The weekly limit of wildcards players can buy

You'll only be able to buy so many wildcards a week.

The plan for the next few months

What’s ranked ladder going to be like?

Keeping an eye on things

The live balance plan

“ "If we find that a certain champion is underplayed and it's not able to compete in the meta, we'll definitely see and step in and make a change - sort of like a mini champion rework." - Steve Rubin

Adding new sets

Now that Legends of Runeterra is offline again and the community is looking forward to the next Preview Patch in mid-November, it’s a good time to take a look at where the game has come from – it’s been in development for several years, after all - not to mention how it got to where it is now, and what’s coming up. To do that, I’ve pulled together an extensive set of quotes from the interviews I did with the development team ahead of the announcement.The cast below includes Executive Producer Jeff Jew, Design Director Andrew Yip, Narrative Lead Mel Li, Game Designer Steve Rubin, Gameplay Designer Alexzandros Lee, Art Director for Realisation Magnus Lehmann and Gameplay Design Lead Dave Guskin. Big thanks to all of you for your time.Oh, and if you're not up to speed on the game, check out my hands-on impressions , which cover off the core gameplay, game structure and free-to-play model, and this 40 things you need to know about Legends of Runeterra feature, which lays out a whole lot more.“I’ve been playing card games since… ’94, obviously starting with Magic [the Gathering] and physical card games. I personally have a really long background with card games and have loved playing them. I think a lot of that love is seen beyond myself, at Riot at large, too, where we have a lot of people who love card games, digital and physical alike. Jeff Jew, the Executive Producer, and myself have always talked about – what are some of the opportunities left in this space? What are we excited about? What would Riot’s interpretation and version of a card game be? And that was really the inception of our project, where we felt we could identify opportunities and connect them to actual ideas that we could execute on and deliver...”“Playing card games has been a part of Riot history since all the way back in the beginning. Even when we were building League of Legends originally, we had basically a weekly card game night, and so nearly the whole company would play card games together on a weekly basis, and that tradition continued all the way for many, many years. And as we made League of Legends, we've found that many of our players love playing these games too - all over the world. It was basically like a phenomenon. If you play League, you probably have played card games at some point in your life. Since we've continued that tradition, we decided to look into, ‘Hey, what would it take to make a card game of our own?’ And at that time, digital card games were actually emerging, and they've become very popular now.“Even when we looked at digital card games as a whole genre, we noticed a bunch of ways that we felt like we could over-serve our players, both across the IP aspect, from bringing League of Legends to life in another game, to also the business model, to live balance and a number of different aspects that I think we hope to deliver on [for] our players in the future.“[We’ve been working on this project] for maybe three, four years, something like that. The first couple of years were kind of early prototype stage. Most of the things that we made were actually in paper. We prototyped everything in paper first because it was kind of the easiest... then eventually we made them digital prototypes.”“My background is in playing competitive card games, like Magic: The Gathering… A while back, I was offered a contractor position at Riot as a play tester… and then after about a year after that contract, Riot contacted me to become a full time play tester. And from then, I transitioned into game design and that's how I am where I am today…“At the time [in January 2017], I actually didn't like Legends of Runeterra that much. I felt like it was very, very tense and while it was skill intensive, which was very enticing for me and the other kind of Magic pros that came in, we found it to just be a little bit too spiky, which kind of meant like if you make one mistake, that could've been really detrimental to you. Over time, I think the game has gotten a lot better and since I re-joined the team, I like it a lot more…“The big changes were - the first thing was we introduced an interleaved combat system, which is kind of a fancy word, but it means you're attacking every other turn. When I first played Legends of Runeterra, you actually could attack every turn, which is a big difference because it meant that once you got a little bit ahead, you essentially just kind of stopped taking actions and forced your opponents to come to you... But since then, that additional construct of - oh, I have a defensive turn and an offensive turn - is much easier to understand. It's much easier to play in that system.“The other big thing that we changed is champion level up. Believe it or not, champions early in development did not level up, which is a big gameplay differentiator in Legends of Runeterra, where you have a champion and you get to pursue their quest, which not only was exciting in gameplay, but it was exciting in deck building as well, because you got to say, ‘Hey, I have this champion Teemo and I just want to put a million mushrooms into their deck.’ Before that, you really didn't have that extra level. So those were the two things that really pushed the game into a super fun place for me.”“Since the beginning of time Teemo’s always had some amount of ‘mushrooms in the enemy deck’ [design] because we were trying to figure out – what’s the Teemo experience? And it’s making your opponent really sad with a bunch of mushrooms. Initially it was - we will shuffle in a small number and then all the Teemo followers or other guys would move them up or somehow get them to the top of your deck when you would strike or something along those lines. So it was smaller numbers but a little bit bigger damage. It turns out that was problematic for a couple of reasons. One was - in order for it to be meaningful they basically had to put it right at the top of your deck, and that was frustrating for its own set of problems because you would just, like, draw one and take five damage. And then we realised through play testing that shuffling a lot of mushrooms in was the cool, nice thing. ‘Oh, I could get an infinite number of Teemo mushrooms in my opponent’s deck!’ And then we had the interesting question of – how do we make that balanceable?”“Teemo was a very polarising character for League of Legends fans, so it was a real joy to get to work with him in our game. Teemo comes with this mushroom deck and… Teemo was a lot of fun to write for because we knew how annoying that deck is to play against. So I think that one of the behaviours that has the most possible VO lines is when you put a mushroom in someone else's deck or when those mushrooms explode. And there's also a lot of lines when Teemo dies so that your opponent at least gets some kind of payoff out of that.”“I think our first level up was Teemo’s level up, and it was just the card spinning and turning [into] level two, and over the last two years we’ve evolved it more and more. Zed is a great example; we’re flying through an Ionian forest, we have him rising from the shadows and creating this card slicing the screen in half, and then being level two. We see so much potential in telling these stories. Like, the things that players love about these champions, and I’ve been working on League for so long, and all of a sudden you get the whole screen to show what Zed is like! We get the whole screen to form Ashe’s arrow in the Ultimate? It’s a dream come true for anyone that works on League of Legends or likes League of Legends to go – you get the whole screen now.”“It felt odd actually, only having one piece of art, because you have this very dramatic level up animation and everybody’s all excited, but it’s still the same piece there. And we also wanted to make it clear to players that this is a more powerful version… we’d gotten some of those [champion art] pieces three, maybe four years ago, so a long time before we even locked the set mechanics, and so it was really exciting for us because that fantasy of – now you’ve got this whole other medium that you can work with and try to tell stories that have come up along the way or we have head canon about what some of the scenes might mean and now we can actually have the A and the B and it’s almost like seeing two frames of an animation, so the storytelling in there can be so much more than just a single frame.”“Choosing which champions were going to be in our first set was incredibly difficult. I think that we probably changed the starting roster 10, 20 times. We did a combination of resonance - which champions are really popular across the world, plus which champions are a really good match for the mechanics of this game in the starting set. Ultimately, champions made their cut or didn't based on how they played and if actually they felt like the League of Legends champion, because we really wanted to make sure people felt paid off, like, ‘My favourite champ is in this game. Let's see what it can do.’”“We’ve been working with them now for I think seven years and they’ve done so many amazing projects too. They worked on Arkham Asylum, they worked on Horizon: Zero Dawn, so we’re really lucky to have them working with us for so long. And the length of that relationship has also been really meaningful too, because they’ve really learned the IP inside and out, and they’re not only involved in the final illustrations, they’re involved in the concepting, and they know the champions and the world incredibly well.“And that’s not something that you can normally build up with any old outsourcer. People can have the talent, but having the passion for the world and the understanding of the IP is a totally different beast. We’ve worked with them for long enough that I think we have a great understanding between us.“When I first got on the team, three years ago… some of the stuff that we do that’s core to narrative is we write out art descriptions to say, like ‘Darius is in an abandoned town, he’s holding his axe, it’s a pensive moment, it’s before a raid.’ You have to have a really good relationship with the artist to have them really internalise – you’re just writing out words; it’s their job to really think about the world. And we give them references and stuff like that, but composing a scene and putting expression into faces, that’s a whole other level of communication. I think we’ve just built up a relationship where we’ve gotten so good at understanding each other. And that understanding is just priceless for us.”“And their love for Runeterra is genuine. They worked back in the day on League of Legends… for us, making a card game, we knew that we owe to our players some of the best art in the world. And so, for that, you need the best artists in the world, and that’s why Sixmorevodka was the partner where we’re going – we’ve got to work with these guys, because they are crushing it, consistently, each and every time. And they have a very similar way [of working]… they have a team mentality when they create the art, and they like to work with us in a team environment, so it was the perfect partnership.”“Every card in Legends of Runeterra can be expanded to see the full art. That does actually make us really interested in doing foils, alternate versions and alternate versions of even the champion moments that you see when your champion levels up. That stuff we've kind of experimented internally, nothing to talk about yet. Right now the customisation we have in the game is in the pet, which is your guardian, your companion on the board that you can interact with, as well as each player bringing their half of the game board. We hope that you can build out a really, really cool customisation between the deck you're playing, the board, which might be themed to your champion or the region, and then your pet, and in the future hopefully card styles, foils and even potentially champion moments that change. So, a lot of space to play in there.”“When a lot of people play card games, we're actually kind of making up stories for ourselves as we go along. The example that I like to give is, for example, in Hearthstone, you're like - okay, great, I'm going to play the coin and after the coin, I'm going to play Defias Ringleader, and so I get another bandit. And the story I always like to tell myself is, oh, I had this extra coin on the side. I gave it to this ring leader and he found his bandit friend. He was like, ‘Hey, man. Here's a coin. Come along and we can fight together.’“So a lot of what we were thinking of is, wouldn't it be cool if we could make a game that really made those moments into actual story moments? And the League of Legends IP is just one that is full of really cool potential story moments like that and has just this incredible rich diversity of characters. So that was kind of what we came into the project with - this really exciting foundation to start working with and a lot of ideas about how we wanted to make that come together in a game.“We were also looking at the VO system. For a lot of card games, like Hearthstone, you have the basic beats of - I'm going to come into play and I'm going to attack, and also death grunts. We wanted to take that foundation and build on it and say - well, our game really cares about specific card synergies. So it's like I played this one card and then I played this other combo card with it, and they play really well together. Again, we wanted to highlight that player story of - I just did a cool thing.“We decided that what we wanted to do was have cards be able to interact with each other when they entered onto the board. So for example, when Lux is on the board and her brother, Garen comes in, they'll greet each other and they'll say things to each other.“So we wanted to see what is the breadth of expression that this character has to all different other characters in the game. And also, how does that interaction relate to the interactions of the cards themselves? So we're really excited about the VO system that we're bringing along with the characters. And we have… somewhere upwards of 3,800 dialogue lines within the game. So it's been a labour of love and it's something that we really, really hope that players enjoy.”“Which region did we find the most difficult to world build for? I would probably say that’s Shadow Isles because Shadow Isles has this interesting characteristic where it's kind of like Chernobyl at this stage. It's this place that's only filled with the undead. And one of the interesting things about writing for a horror genre is that you need to show people who are afraid to show people who are looking at the thing that a thing is scary. And when there's not many things that are alive, it's actually kind of difficult to put that feeling into the imagery or into the storytelling. So that was an interesting experience.“One of the champions that we have in the Shadow Isles is Elise, the Spider Queen, and Elise has this history where she goes to the Shadow Isles to visit the spider god, Vilemaw, and along with her, she brings these suitors who are interested in her and they think that they're going to be involved with Elise's quest. And what they don't realise is that her quest is actually to sacrifice them to the spider god in exchange for immortal youth. So that was actually a way that we were able to get more humans into Shadow Isles and more kind of victims of the scary things that were there.”“A lot of the appeal of the genre has always been this allure of – there’s always a new play pattern or a new deck waiting around the corner for you or somebody else to discover. We really want to recapture that notion and that’s why we spent so much time trying to create deep deck building experiences where players can mix and match cards from different regions, because we want to recapture that [feeling that] I could just spend all day looking in my collection, trying to theorycraft and find that new play pattern. So it really is an approach that’s intended to be very broad and inclusive in terms of the different personalities and play style that we incorporate.”“I think our game is hopefully great for players that want to just tinker and brew crazy stuff, because any two cards can be in the same deck. You're going to see a lot of what we call ‘lovable jank,’ which is, ‘I found these weird card interactions. It may not be the best deck, but I put all this crazy stuff in one deck.’ Especially as we release new regions in the future, that kind of endless experimentation will hopefully go for many, many years.”“We actually tried neutral cards for a very long time and we found that we were seeing some cards had too high a prevalence across all decks. Card games are fun because of the variance they bring. You know, there's a lot of variance in the card draw, in what you see, but if you're seeing the same card in every single deck, it ends up being a problem. So, we removed neutral cards and then we added the ‘any two cards in the set can exist in the same deck,’ which gives you the mix and match, but hopefully lessens the amount of time you're playing against that same card every single time.“Right now you can combine any two cards from any two regions. We've actually play tested with more than that - any three regions together. We've play tested with cards that were split between two regions. I think that's a really fun space for us to play in the future, but for now we've just kept it at two.”“Our hope is that players discover that there’s actually different vocabulary of play styles that we can talk about in our game because of the conversational nature [of the gameplay], where control may not be somebody who just sits back and blows up all the opponent’s plays and then sweeps the board every time. It might look more like a player who’s just willing to hang back and save his mana towards the end of a round and wait for you to spend your mana, and then he surprises you with plays that you weren’t expecting. They won’t necessarily be board sweeps, it could just be a giant unit that’s going to smash you next turn.“So those are some of the things that are exciting to us, but a lot of it is starting from that inspiration point of the huge diversity of play styles that champions in League of Legends offer - capture that feeling that there’s a play style for everyone. I think the difference is in our game, we’re trying to bake that in and have it be more emergent, where players might discover it through mixing and matching, as opposed to seeing a singular character concept and saying, like, ‘that’s the character for me’… It’s more about ‘pick your tag team’ in our game versus ‘pick your single champion’ in League.”“The response we had to bringing back that kind of interactive gameplay has been really positive, mainly because you feel like you're really playing against a human opponent. You feel like you're having to pay attention and read signals that are meta to the game. You can't just check out, let your opponent take their turn and then come back. You're kind of reading into, ‘Oh, they saved this much spell mana. Oh, they didn't attack on this certain turn. What does that actually mean?’ And so throughout the game, you're not only learning about the strategy of what their deck is as the cards get unfolded, but you're getting to learn the play style of your opponent.“Are they the kind of person that wants to go all in even if you have spell mana up, or are they going to play more conservatively? And if they're playing conservatively, do they have cards or are they just pretending? So, there's a lot of psychological games you play with your opponent in this game. I think that that's one aspect that is quite unique to this game, especially in the digital space.”“One of the reasons that we have something like spell mana is the player experience of – yeah, you just lost out on that [unspent] resource because of bad luck, basically. It’s really unfun.”“When we initially tested spell mana that was kind of the reason why. I think as a design team, way back in the day, we don’t like the idea of non-games, or a game that was basically over at mulligan because one of us just couldn’t do anything, so it was born out of that.”“It’s interesting to see how the texture of the game changes as I get more spell mana than you, which means I can interact a little bit better because I have access to more cool spells, or maybe you have more than me and I have to worry about – am I safe to attack here? It’s interesting, especially with a very symmetrical game like Legends of Runeterra, where we both get mana at the same time, we both get cards at the same time - this really breaks the symmetry in a way that players have a little bit more control over. It gets at having deep interactive moments.”“And I think one of the interesting things we’ve seen… is how much it changes your evaluation of, like, a spell. Seeing a three mana spell versus a four mana spell is a big deal in some cases because it’s like – oh, this one kind of requires the ‘real’ mana, this one is just kind of free, which is cool! And it’s not free, but you’re able to do that evaluation in such a way that I can now play a spell and a unit at the same cost and it feels awesome.”“When you build a set, first you’re thinking about the units: what’s the experience of me playing units and trying to interact in combat, like, am I going to have a one drop, a two drop, a three drop, when am I expecting the game to end? And then you can look for where the gaps are in that or where the common gaps would be. ‘Well this deck doesn’t have a lot of things it might do on three mana, but that’s fine, because then I’ll have three spell mana banked. What does that mean for rounds four forward? It means I’ll have access to some cool combat tricks’ and things like that.“So a lot of it has to do with – normally you would think about what’s the evolution of the game in units but now you get to think about where could we put gaps intentionally, or maybe through variety, where you get that spell spike. I mean, the spells tend to look worse on the surface, because they’re secretly powerful because you don’t have to pay mana for them, but overall, it doesn’t usually look that bad when you take a look at them compared to the units.”“…it was later in the process than I think would have been expected… at the time, the only difference between a champion and a unit was really just its stats and the fact that it had a name. And that just wasn’t enough for us, and so we started to iterate on – what are ways we can make champions feel cool? And level up was one of the obvious ones that pulls from League, and then there was always the big question of, well, what do you do when you have two Garens? Do you play the second Garen? Is that weird? And it forced us to get a little creative on – how do we handle the uniqueness of a champion?“The idea of the spell came from this concept of – well, champions have quests and they have to do things for those quests. Wouldn’t it be cool if I draw another copy of that champion, that that spell [they become] kind of helps them do the quest? So Elise cares about having a lot of spiders in play, if Elise’s spell helps her get more spiders out that feels good and you don’t feel as bad about not being able to play that second card. And it shuffles another copy into your deck so you don’t lose it…“We wanted champions to be… powerful, and if you can start to double up on those very easily it naturally shrinks it [- how powerful they can be], and so – yeah, at the time… it required an entire redesign of basically every champion, as well as all the other cards around them, so it was one of those - we were going to burn the set down and then build up from there.”“In a lot of card games, there's a lot of different spot removal, but in Legends of Runeterra, we really define it by region and it's a little bit less universally [available]... removal in Legends of Runeterra is a little bit scarcer. We value the ability for people to play with their champions and be able to level them up. So there aren't as many, as we call them, ‘Doom Blade effects,’ which are just, if you're familiar with Magic, it's a removal spell that’ll just kill anything - even your best card can be killed with a two mana spell. We definitely have some leeway for champions to live healthily and play for a few turns before they're dealt with.”“The biggest thing for me, honestly, is accessibility. I feel like players have been very adverse to playing in the card game genre because decks are $150 or for instance, for the last Pro Tour I played, I didn't have a resource system to borrow cards. So I had to buy a $700 deck just to play in the highest competition of a tournament. And I think for me, there should be an even playing field and the [other] developers on Legends of Runeterra agree and we really think that the genre would appeal to more players if it was a true free-to-play game. I'm really excited about bringing in those new players. And another way we're doing that is actually by launching on mobile - we just really want people to be able to play the game the way they want to play. So that includes with mobile and that includes with just the ability to be on a level playing field with other players.”“Net decking is definitely going to be a thing in terms of people being able to see a deck list and say, ‘Hey, my favourite streamer played this deck. They're doing really well with it. Let me try it out.’ In terms of acquisition though, we really have a fair playing field where you can maybe build one or two decks, but if you want to bounce between decks and just throw your wallet on the table and kind of say, ‘Hey, I have this deck now,’ it's going to be a lot harder in our game. So if you want to make that investment to build that net deck, you might be a bit more constrained. We think that while there will be some meta decks, in general, it's a more slow process of going from deck to deck. So if you're a brand new player, you won't necessarily be terribly punished by net decks because they won't be as abundantly tuneable or… interchangeable, I guess, I would say.”“We're aiming for a large number of competitive decks… I would say that maybe even something like five to 10 decks that are top decks. One of the things on Legends of Runeterra that we focus heavily on is making sure that every region and every champion within those regions to be playable archetypes. And with that, one of our aspirations as the live balance lead, our mantra, is that every champion's dream is realisable. So we're hoping that every champion can be at least played to the extent where you can kind of do their thing and be at least somewhat competitively viable, which actually means that with six regions, we have 21 different combinations. We're hoping that all of them are decks that you can play.”“I think from the design side our team in general is very feedback heavy and iterative heavy… we understand that the design you start with today is, like, lottery odds that it’s going to remain that way until the time that you ship, or even in the next week, because card design by nature is very like putting puzzle pieces together, and if you change one puzzle piece, that actually changes the two puzzle pieces next to it, which changes the next two puzzle pieces. And so, when sets are in active iteration or in initial design, they’ll be entirely different from week to week…”“That was probably one of the most surprising things for me and many others that came to the team – how incredibly complex card games are to build. They seem innocuous from an art perspective – make beautiful art and put it on it, but it’s intrinsically difficult to layer visual effects on top of visual effects on top of visual effects and keep the consistency and make sure that it is clear, explaining the gameplay, adjusting to design changes that happen frequently because there are so many dependencies. And it’s what Alex said – you take one piece of the puzzle out and all of a sudden it’s a new puzzle. And the same happens to visuals. We go – okay, we’ve got to rethink how we do this. Where do we park this on the play mat? What UI space do we have? It's inherently complex!“…but here’s the thing – art will always get out of the way of design… because we’re game developers first and artists second. We’re game developers and we use art to make games, and not the other way around. It’s not like we’re serving beautiful art and in the end the gameplay has to serve us...”“We really wanted to make sure that most cards are actually playable. What's interesting is that a lot of card games, there's just a lot of junk because they have random packs. But opening those packs, they give you those exciting moments and they give you the kind of dud moments - it's important to balance out. Since we don't have that, we're pretty excited about the idea of just developing cards to be usable in a certain use case. So there's a lot of cards in set one and we've worked with our play test team to be like, ‘Hey, hold us accountable. Make sure that cards that you can open or you can craft are cards that can go into a deck,’ which I'm really excited about because that just means that there's a lot of possibilities.”“One of our core philosophies when we started this game was - what causes the meta in card games to end up how it does? And what I mean by that is meta games - meaning the balance of card games - often remain stable for a very long time in pretty much all current card games. And we thought to ourselves, why is that? Because I think the most fun time for players is when a new set drops or a new patch drops and there's that grace period where people have speculated what the meta is going to be, but you're really getting to try new things, and the feeling of you breaking the meta or finding a new deck that nobody's ever found before is so powerful. We wanted to recreate that as much as possible.“So when we unwound that - because there's so many things that go into creating that situation - one of the first things was, ‘Oh, it feels like cards are really expensive.’ And because of that, you can't balance the game very effectively, because players have worked really hard to get this card, and once it's really powerful, you feel bad if you make the card worse. And so we said, ‘How can we fight this stale meta situation?’ So, what we wanted to bring back is the feeling of building your collection and not having you run into those super strong meta decks right away.“In Legends of Runeterra, you'll start on your progression track and you can pick any region you like, which is pretty exciting. So, whether you're a fan of Garen or Katarina or whatever, you can pick the region that fits you best. As you progress along that track, you're guaranteed to get cards from that region that you want. In addition, you can buy wildcards, which are basically a copy of card… at a fixed rate per week. And so you can't just go buy that meta deck right away. You kind of have to go along this experimentation journey and hopefully find a deck that fits well for you.“Ultimately what I think this lets us do is actually balance the game more consistently, where players have more access to cards. If we actually balance their card because one card is too prevalent or one deck is too prevalent, we'll have given them so many cards they can switch onto another deck or make the necessary changes they need to in order to keep up with their deck. So, by kind of guaranteeing more access to more players, we can effectively live balance the game without ruining people's collections or feeling like ‘Oh, I invested everything into one deck and now I have nothing to play.’“And [in] this philosophy, we honestly took inspiration from League of Legends, which shares a similar one. Being able to get the champions you want directly, having a broad collection so that we can introduce those balance patches more frequently. Putting people back in that really fun new meta feeling where anything is possible more frequently, and also hoping to lessen the amount of bad feelings they get when their cards get touched.”“Our goal is that each week you can try a different deck style that you haven't tried before. The weekly limit is meant to help you do that. By limiting the rate of wildcards that you can buy or earn, we're trying to protect players from just getting smashed by that new meta deck every single time, but also still feeling like their collection has value, like, I earned or got these cards. And so we're going to try things. We're going to see - does the limit we set right now work for players through closed beta? Are they actually feeling like they can switch decks? And if they don't feel like they can switch decks, we'll play with it and listen to their feedback.”“We know that both constructed… and draft are both powerful features that everybody wants. It's kind of the core game loop of a card game, and so we're really excited to have both of those features available by the end of the year. Then through the holidays we'll incorporate the feedback we've heard from players and come back with the always-on closed beta in the new year.”“I think the initial version of ranked and ladder is going to be pretty similar to what you’ve seen in some other card games, but there’s a lot of plans for how can we apply that to the limited experience - to Expeditions, how can we apply ranked as we release new sets, there’s seasons, a lot of that is still work in progress.”“We have a dedicated play test team, which is very similar to the League play test team, which, on League of Legends, for those of you who don't know, we have, I think it's either 13 or 14 professional level players that help test patches. On Legends of Runeterra, while we have a smaller team, we do have a play test team that's dedicated to helping out designers whenever we're changing cards. They're actually integrated on our team so if we change a card that day, the play testers are playing with it and giving us feedback. We also have metrics set up to kind of gauge how powerful champions are, how often are they winning the game when they level up, how often are they winning when you draw them. So we definitely have that resource system as a balance lead to look at to determine when something is too good.”“Our current plan is to do balance changes every month. We're definitely treating this as a live service and we're interested in making sure that there's fair gameplay across the board. We want to make sure that every champion’s gameplay dream is realisable. And if we find that a certain champion is underplayed and it's not able to compete in the meta, we'll definitely see and step in and make a change - sort of like a mini champion rework.“Another thing that we're doing is we're treating no change as a change, which, if you see in a lot of card games, oftentimes, there's very obviously cards that people consider to be over[powered], players consider to be over[powered] that are not changed for long periods of time. So if we would ever get in a situation where we had something like that and didn't make a change, we would definitely, as developers, come out and state why.“It's going to be - at least at the start - like clockwork because that's our current plan. We're pretty excited about it because we know that from other card games, people get really excited about, for instance, in Magic: The Gathering, they have the banned and restricted list announcement, which is really awesome for content creators and people that are just in love with the game to see, oh, what's going to happen on this date? So we really like the idea of having a set time where this thing happens so that players can get ready for it.”“We're starting with six regions. When we add our seventh, the funny thing is that might be one of the smaller sets, because every time we add a set, we add new cards to all the regions that have existed and bring the new one up to parity. So, honestly as we add more regions and there are more champions, the sets actually grow in size over time. At steady state, once we have the number of regions that we are hoping to be in the game long term, I think that's kind of your steady state - here's how many cards will be in each block of play. But in that first new set, you'll start small and then they'll grow and grow and grow. It's going to be very exciting.”

Cam Shea is Editor in Chief for IGN's Australian content team and plays a lot of CCGs. Check out his hands-on impressions of Legends of Runeterra and this 40 things you need to know feature. He's on Twitter