More than a year ago, Riot Games announced that changes were coming to Legends of Runeterra, their digital collectible card game. Simply put, the move was a near-total pivot away from the game’s player vs. player battles in favor of doubling down on its single player offerings, namely a roguelike-inspired mode called Path of Champions. Since then, no new cards have been added to multiplayer and many PvP features have been removed, including ranked rewards, the game’s official tournament circuit, and Gauntlet mode, where players used to compete in a multi-match competition for items. This announcement came shortly after Riot laid off over 500 of its employees, with the Legends of Runeterra team being hit particularly hard.
Riot justified the move by saying that they “found the significant majority of LoR players” played its the Path of Champions mode (they didn’t mention this may have been the case because this was the easiest place to work towards new PvP cards) and that they “would need many, many multiples of revenue” beyond what they were currently making off the game to justify things continuing as they were.
It goes without saying, but its community was devastated by the news. Considering that most card game enthusiasts associate trading card games like this one with battling other players, the pivot to a decent, but somewhat unremarkable, roguelike mode felt like a stab in the back. Also, the fact that Legends of Runeterra is arguably one of the best digital CCGs ever made probably didn’t help either.
As for what makes the game stand out compared to its peers, it nails balancing the slightly shorter playtime you would want from a mobile game with the intricacies of trading card heavyweights like Magic: The Gathering (MTG). Matches can be as quick as five minutes, with most in the 10-minute range (although they can admittedly go much longer against a specific set of demonically constructed decks). But despite the quick matches, there is also plenty of depth thanks to the many keywords and unique abilities spread across hundreds of cards.
Additionally, one of the most interesting elements of the game is how deeply interactive each match is. Compared to a game like Magic, where players can perform long, involved turns as their foe’s eyes begin to glaze over, in Legends of Runeterra, you can usually only play one card at a time (with a lot of exceptions), giving time to react to what your rival is doing. It makes for a very strategic experience, where the order you do things very much matters; sometimes it’s better to strike immediately at the beginning of the round when you receive the attack token so your opponent doesn’t have time to build their defenses, while at others you want to wait until you can get out a momentum shifting ability.
On top of this, you also have to factor in Champions, which are deck-defining cards modeled after their League of Legends counterparts. Since each Champion transforms into an even more powerful form by fulfilling certain conditions, this creates sub-win conditions in every match, introducing even more tactical considerations. Add in an incredibly fair resource system, where both players get an additional mana crystal each round, and you have a game that builds on its many predecessors.
However, perhaps the standout element of the game for many has more to do with its monetization, because compared to almost any other CCG, this one felt relatively reasonable; you could unlock new cards at a sensible pace by simply playing the game. There were certainly microtransactions, alongside a controversial (and quickly walked-back) attempt to pivot towards loot boxes at one point, but compared to the admittedly very low bar set by its competitors, progression isn’t a grind.
One of the best ideas here is the concept of “wildcards,” an in-game currency which you can trade in for any card of its corresponding rarity—for instance, if you have a common wildcard, you can use it to obtain one copy of any common card in the game. Compared to many other digital CCGs, which require you to pull countless booster packs in hopes of getting lucky enough to get multiple copies of the precise cards you want, the far more guaranteed nature of this system, combined with the two separate tracks to unlock these, erases most of these gambling elements.
To put it all into context, if you want to craft one of the most popular and powerful decks from the current patch, like an Annie and Gwen combo, you could probably do so after playing the game for around 15 minutes a day for a week or two—I’m aware that weeks of grinding may sound a bit nightmarish, especially to those who don’t play these kinds of games, but being able to consistently build a new deck every week or so without paying anything is a better deal than most CCGs out there, physical or otherwise. Again, I don’t want to be too effusive in my praise because the bar is rock bottom; I would prefer a world where, instead of microtransactions, I could just pay a flat rate. But still, Legends of Runeterra is a significant improvement over almost any other game in this style that I’ve played. And now, its PvP modes are dead. Or, well, sort of.
Even though the only real updates to the multiplayer are that existing Champion cards are occasionally shuffled in and out of its “Standard” mode, the servers are still running, and there are still plenty of players on them. In a live-service era where games frequently either thrive from having a gajillion active players or crash and burn before being swiftly taken offline, Legends of Runeterra exists in an odd limbo where it’s still playable, but frozen in time.
It’s in this context that I played it for the first time. And honestly, it being in this state has made me realize how damn freeing it is to play a multiplayer game that doesn’t have me on the endless “content” treadmill that defines most live-service releases. While I intended to very briefly check out the game to get some context for Riot’s upcoming physical TCG, Riftbound, and to satisfy a longstanding curiosity about why it has received so much praise over the years, I quickly found myself sucked in.
And it wasn’t the “I’m somehow playing another new gacha game, may God have mercy on my soul” type of sucked in, where daily quests and an endless rollout of new characters who power creep the old ones attempt to keep you on the hook. Instead, it was engaging in the way that less overtly manipulative games keep you coming back: by being fun. While the first week or so, when I had to use one of the pre-made decks when playing online, involved racking up more losses than wins, the moment I had my first “real” deck allowed me to fully engage with the push and pull of a match, as me and my opponents formed impressive stacks of spells and matches were decided more based on our decision making than who happened to draw the cards they needed. While I’m sure the queue times to get a game are much longer than they used to be, I could still find another player within a minute or so, making this a relatively minor issue.
However, maybe the real test came later when I went a few days without playing at all. Sometimes it only takes a brief separation from this kind of game to realize how deeply it has monopolized your free time, which (hopefully) eventually has me deleting them from my phone for good. However, instead of feeling anxious about “falling behind” or missing out on some Battle Pass incentive or some other form of FOMO, I didn’t feel anything. And then a bit later, when I had time, I jumped back in without a trace of guilt over not doing things “optimally.”
Basically, because there will most likely never be another PvP card added to the game, I can take as long as I want to collect the hundreds of cards released over four or so years of expansions. Because the ranked mode seems also to be frozen, I don’t need to worry about climbing quickly, and can take things at my own pace. And due to all this (and the lack of a PvP Battle Pass or other ingenious means to get you to spend five dollars here and there), I’ve felt no real temptation to spend money on the game, because there isn’t that initial race after a new booster pack comes out to get the cards you need to stay “meta relevant.” Another low-key benefit is that with the competitive league off the table, this game won’t be caught up in Riot’s misguided push towards making eSports betting partnerships.
To be clear, there are obviously massive downsides to the state of the game, the most obvious being that the people who worked on it were, in the best case, shuffled to another team, and in the worst case, laid off at a time when a historically large number of developers are looking for work. For the people who have been playing Legends of Runeterra since it came out, many of them probably don’t have many more cards to collect, leaving them battling against decks they’ve already seen with cards they’re probably too familiar with. And for myself, part of me is a little sad to think that I’ll probably eventually reach that same point where there’s nothing new to see, and I have to go back to playing the many other nightmare CCGs that probably have much slower progression and aren’t as elegantly designed.
But even still, Legends of Runeterra’s life-support state unintentionally works as a nice throwback to a time when online games weren’t quite so adamant in trapping you in a hamster wheel of new stuff, trying to coerce you into staying put with various shareholder-approved forms of psychological manipulation. It’s a bit of a bummer that I’ll never see a new batch of cards, bringing fresh strategies, keywords, and meta shakeups with it. But honestly, the freedom from the grind is worth it.
Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.
