LoR: These Decks Made People Quit the Game!

Today, we'll review Legends of Runeterra's competitive history and discuss a few lists that made players quit the game entirely.

This is a complicated subject. There were incredibly strong, toxic lists in every LoR meta, and many of these strong lists co-existed, which means comparing them is often unfair.

So, we'll focus on decks that changed the competitive ecosystem entirely, and were absurdly powerful in their time.

These decks aren't listed in any specific order.

This list was the main villain in one of the most polarized metas of all time. 90% of all strong competitive decks on the ranked queue brought the same cards at this time, besides, of course, Siren Song itself.

During the Heart of the Huntress Eternal competitive season, you had to either play Siren Song, or play something to beat it. The biggest issue was that most decks that beat this strategy were also Siren Song lists, similar to our recent issue with Elder Dragon.

This way, 6 out of 8 players in the top 8 of the Heart of the Huntress Eternal Open brought the same deck, and the other 2 players brought a "counter" version of this archetype. Finals were a mirror match featuring the deck above.

Furthermore, Riot Games had just taken their summer break when Siren Song was released, so they took a long time to nerf it. This resulted in a long period of time in LoR that was dominated by this type of deck (long, unbearable weeks of it). It was enough to drive many competitive players away from the game for good.

The Twisted Fate Fizz archetype is one of the most victorious archetypes of all time, to this day, if we consider how many times this type of list won an official LoR tournament.

From mid-April 2020 until Shurima was released in March 2021, this was the best list in the game by far. It even survived for a few months after Shurima was released, and was a viable option competitively until Bandle City came along.

Still in March 2021, Twisted Fate and his signature spell were nerfed, and some champions, like Aphelios and Jarvan IV were buffed in the same patch. This pushed Twisted Fate Fizz away from the spotlight for some time.

So, if you've been paying attention to the timeline, for around a year, this was the most powerful deck in the game.

This deck could be a lot stronger as well, but it was difficult to pilot, and many players couldn't get 100% out of this list when they played it. In fact, most win rates on data websites at the time didn't reflect this list's actual power.

If you didn't play LoR at this time, let me give you some context: it was difficult to find good card draw, and we had maybe half of the cards we have nowadays to play. So, when Bilgewater came along, with all its magnificent card draw, this deck, which specialized in drawing cards, became the most efficient list in the meta. Its win conditions also included everything a great LoR list needs: a great combo, strong units, and a lot of burn.

A great comparison for this list is the Janna Nilah archetype. The most significant difference, however, was that, at the time, we didn't have cards like Blocking Badgerbear to deal with Elusive units, or midrange strategies fast enough to deal with so much card draw.

As a result, for a long time, surviving patch after patch, nerf after nerf, and reinventing itself any time it had to, the Twisted Fate Fizz archetype spent a whole year as the best list in the game.

The Ahri Kennen archetype is the main character in one of the funniest stories in the entire game.

This deck came up during the Beyond the Bandlewood set, right after Bandle City as a whole was introduced to the game, in the Magic Misadventures expansion. The meta before this expansion was also one of the worst metas of all time (we'll discuss it soon), and, as a result, this expansion had some big shoes to fill: it needed to fix the game.

Unfortunately, this never happened. Early on, Ahri Kennen, a new archetype, became so strong that, even if you played 3 copies of the worst card in the game in it, Sunk Cost, it still had over 70% win rate. It was the best deck on the ranked queue by far.

However, what truly made people quit Legends of Runeterra altogether after this was the fact that we had just left a meta dominated by Ionia, and entered another that was also dominated by Ionia. This time we even had to deal with Elusive units as well, the most hated keyword in the entire game. This eventually wore down players, who were tired of seeing Pink decks in the ranked queue, and is one of the reasons why Ionia is still despised by many players (as well as Karma Sett).

There were no counters to this list, and it was incredibly difficult to remove its units, considering many of its protection spells were quite cheap and really fit its recall mechanic. You'd recall your units to your hand to protect them, which let you play them again and reactivate their abilities. This vicious cycle heavily punished your opponent for simply trying to interact with you. And, as LoR was designed around player interaction, the entire game just became too frustrating for most players.

Another factor that made this list annoying was how often it did anything in the game, which made it seem like only the Ahri Kennen player could play the game. Kennen's Mark of the Storms also made an annoying sound.

Buh!

To this day, this list is scary to many players. After all, it was the main character in one of the worst metas in the entire game (the one we mentioned above).

Right after Shurima was released, after the Twisted Fate Fizz meta, we got Azir Irelia. At the time, Lissandra Trundle was also one of the best and most popular lists in the competitive scene, and handled most of the meta decks really well. However, when Azir Irelia came along, this Lissandra deck, TLC, as it was called, went from one of the best options to one of the worst because it lost miserably to this Shurima archetype.

At the same time, Nasus Thresh came along as a great counter for Azir Irelia. And, guess what, Lissandra Trundle was one of the few decks that beat Nasus. That's how this competitive meta became a rock, paper, scissors meta.

All the decks outside this 3-list closed cycle were practically off meta and didn't perform well at all, save for a few exceptions.

However, even with a direct counter, Azir Irelia exploded in popularity because it heavily punishes any rising new list, or off meta deck. The reason behind this was that it attacked on defensive turns, and that's incredibly efficient to destabilize any control list, or just any slower list in general.

So, the meta couldn't move forward because Azir Irelia didn't "let" any deck work besides Nasus Thresh.

This was one of the worst, if not the worst, meta in the entire game. Because this list completely decimated any list outside the competitive ecosystem, many players quit LoR entirely at the time.

Right after the Ahri Kennen meta, we had, once again, a polarized meta, which made all the players who survived Ahri Kennen finally abandon LoR. That was the Mono-Kai'Sa meta.

In the Worldwalker set, we got Runeterra champions, as well as Kai'Sa, her own event-themed legendary skin and board skin.

Perhaps to sell these products, Riot got a bit heavy-handed with her, and thus made her a bit too strong. This originated one of the strongest decks of all time in LoR (the strongest, in my opinion).

Mono-Kai'Sa had no counters. There was no meta list that consistently beat this deck, and everything that came close to a good matchup against Kai'Sa was terrible against the rest of the meta.

This list was incredibly efficient and practically won the game on turn 6; each turn, you'd develop a strong unit on the board, and curve out perfectly. It was also incredibly difficult to remove these units because they had a lot of stats, and this deck's defense spells were extremely cheap and efficient.

Kai'Sa always entered the board well-protected, and, if your opponent didn't have any answer to her spell, Second Skin, which let you give her another unit's keywords, the game ended on the spot. You could give her Elusive or Scout easily, and that's what made her so strong.

The ranked queue was hell; soon everyone was playing this list, and nothing else. We quite possibly beat the record of most mirror matches on the ranked queue at this time. We'll never know if this is true, but it certainly seemed to be the case.

In any case, most players back then were quite frustrated with this deck and, because of all the past metas, even after all the nerfs, and Kai'Sa herself, many abandoned LoR entirely.

If you read this far, thank you! I hope you had fun and enjoyed reading this article.

Don't forget to share.

See you next time!