Everyone has their favorite genres of games, and one of my life-long loves has been collectible card games. I started with Magic the Gathering, and over time tried many others. My partner got me to try Yu Gi Oh, and I’ve wasted far too much money on Hearthstone. I’ve played more card games than I can remember, from the Pokemon CCG to the World of Warcraft physical CCG that was released before Hearthstone. Even today, I have local friends getting into the new hotness, Flesh and Blood. When the board game revolution happened and games about building decks became popular thanks to Dominion and similar releases I was overjoyed and started collecting those. The game that has taken hold of me for the last 2 years though, is Legends of Runeterra.
The modern gaming landscape may as well have infinite choices when it comes to what to play, but unfortunately a lot of the cheap or free options (or even AAA releases) are traps designed to abuse people who are prone to gambling addiction. Loot boxes and gatchapon (lucky pull) mechanics abuse human psychology to extract money from unaware players without offering anything of real value. It gets worse when these same games offer competitive advantages in exchange for real money, like most of the other the online multiplayer games offered on Android and iOS do. So, it was incredibly refreshing when I started playing Runeterra and realised that it doesn’t do any of that. Yes, it is free to play game with a mobile client, yes you can buy cards with real money, but, the key thing that sets it apart for me? You are never asked to pay money to gamble for in-game advantages.
If you’re a new player and you want to buy the cards to make a hot new meta-dominating deck, you can do that by directly purchasing Wild Cards that you can exchange for any cards of the same rarity as the Wild Card. This means the maximum price for the rarest cards in the game is $10 USD to get all 3 copies you need. Maybe that still sounds like a lot to you, but compared to other card games? This is a steal. A slightly newer game, Magic the Gathering: Arena also has a Wildcard system, but with a big catch. You have to buy packs of cards and gamble on getting something useful first before it will award you those Wildcards. Many, many packs of cards in fact, if you want to get enough Wildcards to just build a new deck from nothing. It can cost you hundreds of dollars as a new player to build more than one competitive deck.
But Sera, why are you going on and on about this? Because Runeterra isn’t just avoiding the temptation to get easy money by abusing its players, it also offers a generous amount of free cards just for playing. I’m at 91.4% of a complete collection as of this writing, and I’ve spent less than $100 on the game in total, most of that on cosmetic items, and none of it on gambling. I will easily complete my collection without buying any more cards just by continuing to play the game, despite taking a break for 9 months out of the last 2 years it was live. That is a great feeling, and even if I stop playing this game one day or it stops being supported by Riot, at least I don’t have to lose hundreds or thousands of dollars in virtual items that were required purchases in order to be a competitive player. Starting this series of articles off talking about the economics of the game before I even get into what the game itself plays like may seem like an odd approach, but I cannot overstate how much the economy of Runeterra matters to me. I could not in good conscience recommend it to anyone if it contained gambling for cards, and as a principled person I will never knowlingly send someone into that trap.
So, that wraps up the first and most important thing anyone interested in Legends of Runeterra should know about it. It won’t abuse you or your wallet, and you can build many fun and competitive decks for free just by playing the game and having a little patience. Even if you’re an impatient person, you can jump right into the competitive scene for a very small investment and it doesn’t ask you to gamble with that money before you are even allowed to play the game properly. If this by itself is different enough for you to be interested in playing Runeterra, please, go right ahead! I’m just getting started though, and the rest of this series will go into the innovative mechanics of the game, the gorgeous art, the fantastic voice work… There is so much to love about Legends of Runeterra!