Repost alert! We’re answering this one more in depth after we saw that players had a lot of follow up questions on our last answer. : )

Our goal is to give players the relevant runes information we expect you to play around at a given time. This may take slightly different forms for different runes, since they’re unique enough to warrant individual treatment as opposed to a “one size fits all” approach.

Some of the ways we communicate runes may be things you’ve seen before—we’re explicitly showing the strategic choices of keystone and the secondary path for every player joining the game in the loading screen for example (you’ll be able to make an educated playstyle guess if you see a Meteor/Domination Sona coming for you in bot lane). We’re also leaning far more heavily on timely VFX and SFX to communicate relevant tactical information than we have for systems like the old masteries. If a rune gives a shield, we want you to know an opponent has that shield by seeing it on the buff bar and then seeing the shield breaking VFX/SFX. If a rune gives out stats, we’re showing those stats to players in the places you’re already used to looking for them (champion stats).

We’re committed to iterating to get all runes to the right level of visibility and we recognize we may not get it right for every single rune on the first try. So we will be listening to player feedback here and making iterations to make sure rune users, allies and enemies have the correct level of visibility for all runes.

We don’t want you to feel you need to look at an opponent’s runes at the beginning of the game and try to memorize them all and then spend the whole game trying to predict/remember everything that person picked. We do want to present the information you need to play around a rune when and where you need to play around it.

For the specific runes you mentioned, we’re actually using some new channels (hah): Channel-Blink has an icon that replaces Flash’s when it’s on cooldown. For Unsealed Spellbook, we’re testing out showing a global in-chat message for all swaps. Also for both runes, you’ll see the swapped summoner spell icons on the scoreboard.

TL;DR We will work to make all players aware of relevant rune information WHEN and WHERE they need it, but it may not necessarily be through UI alone.