Announcing Legends of Runeterra

A few weeks ago, Riot Games, creators of the megahit League of Legends, announced their new card game, Legends of Runeterra as a part of their 10-year anniversary announcement (read: Riot's 7 new games are a declaration of war against Blizzard). Riot combined a full-blown media blitz with a Twitch integration that awarded beta keys to people viewing Runeterra streams to secure approximately a zillion eyeballs on their new game for a few days. Now, the window for the announcement preview beta has closed, and Riot will be back on November 14th to showcase Runeterra again. So, in the meantime, what do we know?

Legends of Runeterra is Riot’s new card game. It is built for mobile but will first debut on PC. The closed beta will start in Q1 of next year, with the game fully launching sometime later in 2020. For the rest of this blog post, we’ll be giving you an in-depth look at Runeterra’s design and innovations as well as discussing the unique monetization strategy Riot has announced for Runeterra - which places hard spending caps on content acquisition - and the implications of that strategy.

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Executive Summary

Riot is marketing Runeterra as a mastery-focused game that emphasizes in-game player skill. Unlike most card games, Runeterra does not have booster packs. Players acquire random cards mostly through a free-to-play grind-for-XP system with daily and weekly rewards. Players can also acquire specific cards directly via soft and hard currency. However, Runeterra is also taking a novel approach to card acquisition by limiting the rate at which players can acquire cards. Players will only be able to purchase approximately half a deck per week, for about $13-$14. Riot believes that this will increase the number of time players spend exploring the metagame, which will, in turn, make the game more fun.

Riot is willing to limit spend depth on card acquisitions because they believe it will make Runeterra more fun. Riot believes that by making Runeterra more fun, they’ll retain players longer and make more cosmetic sales. However, Riot should be concerned about audience mismatch between gamers motivated by in-game mastery who want to buy access to all of the game content, and gamers motivated by creativity and discovery who will enjoy the deckbuilding challenges that Runeterra is mandating for its audience.

Runeterra’s Design

Lots of cards means lots of opportunity for skill

Runeterra is a card game drawing on inspiration from several other card games, particularly Gwent, Magic: the Gathering, and Hearthstone. Everyone should be familiar with the broad strokes of card games by now. Players collect cards, which they use to build decks, which they use to compete with one another. A rough metaphor would be like party-building in an RPG, except instead of customizing the characters in your party, you customize which characters go in your party, and you can choose from among hundreds of characters to do so.

Runeterra 101

In Runeterra, decks are 40 cards and may contain no more than three copies of any individual card. Additionally, decks may contain no more than six champions - a special unit type discussed more below. The obvious comp is to Hearthstone, which has 30 card decks, with a maximum of two copies of any card. Hearthstone’s highest-rarity cards, Legendaries, are limited to a maximum of one copy in any deck, but a Hearthstone deck may contain any number of legendaries. A Runeterra deck may play at most six champions, with a maximum of three copies of any individual champion. We should note that most Hearthstone decks don’t play six legendaries, but every serious Runeterra decklist we’ve ever seen contains six champions.

In Runeterra, both players begin the game with a Nexus that has 20 health. Players lose when their Nexus runs out of Health. Usually, a Nexus runs out of health because its owner couldn’t stop enemy characters from attacking it.

Both players have 6 mana. It’s your opponent’s turn

In Runeterra, the primary in-game resource is mana. Players gain one maximum mana each turn, up to ten, and mana refills at the end of each turn. (There are some wonky bits with leftover mana that we’ll get to below) Playing cards costs mana. Some cards are spells; once played, they have an effect and then are over with. Other cards are characters, which enter play and stick around until destroyed. Emergent interaction between characters and spells drives the gameplay.

Players take turns playing characters and spells. Attacking in Runeterra is closer to Magic: the Gathering than to Hearthstone. Instead of attacking enemy characters directly, players attack their opponent, who may then choose to block attacking characters with the defending player’s own characters. Unblocked characters damage the opponent’s Nexus. Again, players lose when their Nexus - which starts with 20 health - is reduced to 0 health.

Braum and Poros vs. a bunch of Spiderlings

Unlike Magic, damage to characters is persistent - in this way, Runeterra is more like Hearthstone. Because characters don’t heal, characters usually are destroyed after a few turns of combat, which keeps the game moving quickly.

Champions

Words don’t do the level-up animations justice. Check out Fiora and the rest of the champions in this video from Disguised Toast

When a player has a champion in play and the second copy of that champion in their hand, the second champion transforms into a special spell with a unique effect. Those duplicate spells also shuffle a new copy of the champion into the player’s deck. So, the fiction is never broken by having two copies of the same champion in play, but players can always play three champions in a given game.

If you control Braum, other copies of Braum in your hand become Braum’s Take Heart.

Spell Mana

Runeterra’s other big gameplay innovation is ‘spell mana’. Like Hearthstone, players gain 1 mana each turn, up to a maximum of ten. In Runeterra, players gain ‘spell mana’ when they don’t spend all of their regular mana. Spell mana remains in the player’s pool until it is spent, and may only be spent on spells. A player may have up to three spell mana.

(So, for example, if you start a turn with four mana and spend two of it when the turns end you gain two spell mana. Next turn, you’ll have five regular mana and two spell mana. If you wish, you could then play a seven-mana spell.)

Runeterra’s Genre Innovations

In their introductory trailer, design director Andrew Yip and executive producer Jeff Jew discussed the following problems Riot believes are endemic to many card games:

The collection is too expensive
In-game randomness is too high
Metagames stagnate too quickly
Balance updates are too infrequent

We’ll get into the ‘collection’ piece of this below when we talk about Runeterra’s monetization, but it’s worth discussing Runeterra’s other stakes in the ground, because they have implications for Runeterra as a business - reducing in-game randomness increases the returns to skill in Runeterra, which attracts a certain type of player who may not be as desirous of Runeterra’s card acquisition cap.

Randomness In Card Games

Hearthstone had to nerf Yogg-Saron because players felt it was too random. Riot is avoiding randomness in Runeterra.

A complaint often leveled at Hearthstone, particularly from members of Hearthstone’s professional/esports scene, is that overtly random effects are too powerful, which sometimes leads to weaker players defeating more skilled players. Hearthstone has made a conscious choice to embrace this because it fits with one of Hearthstone’s design pillars, which is to ‘surprise and delight’ players. It makes sense for Runeterra to embrace more skill-oriented gameplay as a competitive differentiator; plenty of players want to feel skillful.

There are limits to how much the in-game randomness of a game based around a deck of cards can be reduced - let’s be honest, the first step of the game is ‘shuffle a deck of cards’ - but Runeterra rewards skill more than either Magic or Hearthstone. Runeterra offers more decisions per turn, and those decisions add up quickly.

The order of a Runeterra turn is useful for framing how lots of small decisions matter in the game as well as some of its complexities:

The previous turn ends
Spell mana carries over
Mana refreshes
Each player draws a card
Player A designated as ‘attacking player’
Player A chooses to attack or to play a card
- If they play a spell, Player B may then also play a card
- Player A can keep playing cards before attacking, and Player B may play their own card after each one.
Eventually, Player A decides whether or not to attack.
- Attacking isn’t mandatory; if Player A hasn’t attacked yet and passed, Player B can also pass and the turn will end.
- If Player A attacks, Player B then chooses blockers.
  - Then Player A may play a reaction.
  - Then Player B may play a reaction.
  - This continues until either player stops reacting.
After combat, Players A and B may keep playing cards.
Once both players decline to play a card, the turn ends

Riot G-Mang posted this helpful flowchart to Reddit.

Riot is emphasizing skill-based gameplay in Runeterra’s marketing. Runeterra isn’t chess.

It is challenging to be concise about how a Runeterra turn works. If you’re familiar with Gwent, the turn structure is very similar. Basically, Player A can attack whenever they like, but Player B gets to play a card for every card Player A plays. Characters can attack immediately, but because Player B has the opportunity to play a blocker every time Player A plays a new attacker, going first isn’t exceptionally strong.

Katarina makes timing opportunities even more intricate - playing her changes the rules about when you get to attack

The implications of this get complicated. Sometimes it is correct to attack immediately on your turn so that your opponent can’t play new blockers, and sometimes you want to develop your board more before you attack. And in general, the order in which players play their characters and decide when to reserve mana for spells has a huge impact on who ultimately wins.

The goal of the back-and-forth of I-do-something-now-you-do-something is an overt attempt to make the game feel more social, but making the order in which one plays their cards this important necessarily makes what the cards do relatively less important as opposed to if order-of-playing-cards mattered less. These shifts focus away from Runeterra’s champion mechanics, which also reduces focus on maximizing those champions through deckbuilding. Still, it achieves Runeterra’s goals of reducing in-game variance and making sure that strong players always defeat weak players.

Fiora, the Grand Duelist, is pleased that the more skilled player always wins.)]

Metagame Stagnation And Balance Patching

Yip and Jew also spoke to concerns around metagame stagnation in other games. It’s a good criticism: both Hearthstone and Magic: the Gathering tend to have their metagames ‘solved’ relatively quickly after new content drops. Once a month or so has passed after the release of new cards, players typically figure out all of the strong decks, and the metagame begins to ossify because there are no new edges in deckbuilding left to uncover.

Hearthstone’s metagame at equilibrium. Solved metagames are boring.

Runeterra is solving this problem with a few methods: first, they’re placing sharp limits on the rate at which cards can be acquired, including by spending real money, second, by committing to frequent balance patching to ensure metagames change before they are solved, and third, by making sure that virtually every card that players can acquire is playable. We’re still waiting for the monetization section to discuss the limits on card acquisition, but we can address the other two methods here.

Crafting Metagames

Heimerdinger hard at work solving the metagame.

Frequent balance patching can be a double-edged sword, particularly in the context of capping the rate at which players can acquire decks. It is easy to say ‘Runeterra is a digital game and if Riot pushes cards too far, they will just nerf cards until the metagame is dynamic again’ but that approach can create a lot of second-order problems.

It’s the problems you don’t see coming that get you.

When you’ve crafted a card game’s environment, but Deck A is more powerful than you expected and you nerf it, the environment often changes in unpredictable ways. Deck A was a pillar of the format, keeping various other decks from outsized metagame share (otherwise, you wouldn’t have had to nerf Deck A in the first place) and by nerfing Deck A, other decks become relatively more powerful in ways that were definitionally unforeseen when you were creating your environment in the first place (because in your environment, Deck A existed, but at a lower power level). This ripple effect can cause a new deck, Deck B, to become more powerful, and require nerfs, and so on. Creating environments by pushing lots of cards to be powerful - which it seems like Riot trying to do with Runeterra - both makes their environments more likely to break, and more likely to break into worse pieces. It is also likely to reduce emergence in deckbuilding.

Scientific approaches to game balance, by nerfnow.com.

This problem isn’t insurmountable - Riot does, after all, intend to balance patch Runeterra often - but it makes it challenging for Runeterra’s designers to create content that will behave and shape the metagame in ways that those designers can predict and make maximally fun. Further, it makes it more challenging for players to know which decks to aspire to if they can’t acquire entire decks at once and the metagame is continually changing. If Katarina is on top one week, and a player acquires some Katarina cards but Katarina is nerfed before the player got the chance to play with her, even if the player is refunded for the Katarina change, it’s discouraging because the player lost the opportunity to craft some cards for a deck that wasn’t nerfed.

Who This Approach Appeals To

Everyone has their own reasons for playing games.

The gold standard for understanding gamer motivations is Quantic Foundry, who surveyed a few hundred thousand folks to understand why people play games. The bird’s-eye view of their model shows that, broadly, there are three distinct groups of motivations that drive gamers:

Action-Social motivations, driven by excitement and competition - these folks play games like Clash Royale or League of Legends itself.
Mastery-Achievement motivations, driven by strategy and progression - these folks play games like AFK Arena, Magic, and Hearthstone, and are the most likely folks to enjoy Legends of Runeterra.
Creativity-Immersion motivations, driven by discovery, story, and fantasy - these folks enjoy games like Love Nikki and Minecraft.

Quantic Foundry’s model of gaming motivation.

In general, the deckbuilding elements of card games appeal to creativity-immersive gamers. Such gamers enjoy analyzing the metagame and crafting new strategies to attack it. Other creativity gamers simply enjoy building new decks that showcase their innovation, and others enjoy building decks featuring their favorite cards or characters. Riot presumably expects many folks who play a particular character in League of Legends to explore deckbuilding with that character in Legends of Runeterra.

However, because the gameplay of Runeterra is so focused around maximizing small decisions, the gameplay isn’t particularly motivating for these discovery-based gamers. If in-game decisions mattered less, deckbuilding would matter relatively more. This is more reminiscent of most mid-core mobile RPGs, where winning and losing are typically a function of a player’s team composition, not by the order in which the player uses their team’s abilities.

In AFK Arena, team composition and stats matter much more than moment-to-moment gameplay execution.

Runeterra’s gameplay appeals primarily to mastery-achievement gamers. And for those players, the deckbuilding challenges Riot is presenting by limiting the rate at which players can acquire cards are actively frustrating. Mastery-based gamers don’t want their strategic options to have hard limits

they want every tool in the box available to them. Further, because decklists are frequently and easily copied in card games, mastery-based gamers don’t spend much effort cultivating skill in deckbuilding
they can always source their decks from the internet, and if they create a strong enough deck themselves, others will copy it, so they don’t perceive much value in making the effort.

Quantic Foundry has mapped motivations using cluster analysis as you can see here:

Quantic Foundry’s visual motivation map, showing how closely aligned the three primary groups of motivations are. This is from Quantic Foundry’s excellent presentation from GDC 2016: https://quanticfoundry.com/2016/04/07/gdc-talk/)

You can see the three broad groups - creativity-motivated gamers in the lower left, achievement-motivated gamers in the upper right, and action-social gamers in the lower right. It’s clear each segment is distinct. Quantic Foundry does suggest leveraging discovery to bridge players between creativity- and mastery-based motivations, but Runeterra isn’t using discovery as a bridge to the deeper lore of the League of Legends IP. Runeterra is using discovery as an end unto itself on a separate axis from discovery. Further, the closer they get to discovery, the further they get from community and competition - the lifebloods of mobile gaming.

Riot should select an audience to appeal to - either mastery-oriented gamers, which would imply doubling down on in-game micro-optimizations - or discovery-oriented gamers, putting more emphasis on deck construction and optimizing for the metagame.

Okay Let’s Talk About Monetization Now

User acquisition is an expensive business. If your game can’t monetize, you can’t afford to acquire users.

Recall from above that Riot believes that most card games are too expensive. Riot also believes the metagames of other card games stagnate too quickly. Riot believes these problems go together - that by allowing players to acquire any cards they want by spending money, players quickly evaluate which strategies are the strongest. Once the strong strategies have been identified, players stop building new decks, and the metagame stagnates.

Players may only purchase eighteen cards per week. Only three of those cards may be champions, which are the rarest cards. All eighteen cards costs a player about $13 per week.

So, Riot has decided that Runeterra will be more fun if players cannot spend money to acquire an unlimited number of cards they want. Runeterra has a free-to-play way to grind new cards. Playing games rewards you with XP, which you can apply towards a faction’s region rewards. Region rewards are like a free battle pass, which rewards you with new cards from that faction. This is smart - cards are cheap content rewards, and breaking the region rewards up across all six factions keeps Riot’s content furnace at a manageable level. It’s not quite a traditional battle pass, though. Region rewards are not seasonal and do not seem to be purchasable.

Region Rewards are basically Runeterra’s free battlepass system.

Each day, the player also receives a single quest, which also rewards XP. Every week, players receive Vaults to open, and the rewards are scaled with the amount of XP the player earned that week. It’s tough to tease out exact numbers here - they’re obviously subject to change either way - but Riot’s stated intention is for players to feel like their progression on their card collection is always meaningful, even for free-to-play players.

After a game, the player has earned 100 XP towards both their Freljord region rewards and their Vault.

Acquiring Single Cards

The other ways to acquire cards are by spending currencies: shards and wildcards. Shards work like arcane dust from Hearthstone - every card has a shards cost, and a player may pay that cost to craft the card. Higher rarities cost more shards. Unlike Hearthstone, cards may not be disenchanted for shards. If you would open the fourth copy of a common or rare, instead you get 25 shards (for commons) or 75 shards (for rares). If you would open the fourth copy of a champion or an epic, instead you open a random card of the same rarity that you don’t have four copies of. If you’ve managed to collect all the cards of that rarity, you’ll instead get 300 shards for a fourth epic, and 1000 shards for a fourth champion. Wildcards work like wildcards from Magic: the Gathering Arena - wildcards have rarities, and a wildcard may be redeemed for any card of its rarity.

Players will earn some shards and wildcards through grinding, but it seems as though only wildcards can be accessed through real-money purchase. However, the shop only offers three champion wildcards and three epic wildcards per week, in addition to six rare wildcards and six common wildcards. Technically, players purchase coins with real money, and coins purchase wildcards, so it is possible to purchase $100 worth of coins and only be able to spend $13 of them each week. The coin-per-dollar rate improves the more dollars one spends, of course, so much a purchase might not be wholly unreasonable, but this came as a rude shock to some players. Players who purchase coins in $20 lots will pay about $14 per week instead.

Riot GameS

Branding Runeterra as the League of Legends card game is a clear cross-promotional play.

Riot can expect to cross-promote millions of players from League to Runeterra, and it stands to reason that if they can convert a sizable fraction of those players to spenders that $13/week/player would represent substantial revenue - as long as they don’t stop spending on League. Still, maximizing spend depth is key for most mobile games maximizing revenue, as long as players perceive value in the spend. Riot would presumably make more revenue with a monetization system that allowed players to spend more than $13/week on game content. Indeed, Riot has been very candid that they believe a traditional card pack model would be more lucrative, but they seem committed to Runeterra’s approach. Likely they see that Magic and Hearthstone are among a very few games that can measure retention curves by years, and presumably, they believe Runeterra is in for the long haul.

While on the subject of cross-promotion, it should be noted that Riot recently released Teamfight Tactics as a new game inside the League of Legends client. Teamfight Tactics is very much a mastery-achievement game, and cross-promoting Tactics players to Runeterra is likely to be lucrative for Riot.

Cosmetics

Riot is also planning to sell cosmetics in Runeterra. Each player gets a Poro to play within their corner of the board for free, but Riot has announced plans to sell game boards - essentially backgrounds - as well as card backs, other pets, and so on. Most card games offer similar cosmetics, including animated cards, but to the best of our knowledge, no card games are driving substantial revenue from their cosmetic offerings.

The default Poro, and the default card back.

It’s important here to note that League is one of the very few games that derive substantial revenue both from cosmetic items and game content items. Most games sell both cosmetics and content, but usually, their revenue comes from mostly one or the other - Fortnite mostly skins, Clash Royale is mostly content, and so on. It’s rare for games to be making nine figures from both. Riot probably believes that they’ll get substantial spend depth on Runeterra cosmetics the same way that they get spend depth on League cosmetics, but we note that League cosmetics are necessarily unique to each League champion. Players cannot purchase a single League skin to display for their entire League experience in the same way that they only need to purchase a single Runeterra board, pet, or card back to display forever.

Conclusion

It’s no secret that Runeterra is a card game drawing inspiration from several other card games, particularly Gwent, Magic: the Gathering, and Hearthstone. In many ways, Runeterra is positioned against Blizzard’s Hearthstone. It promises to fix the expensive collecting, decrease gameplay randomness and offer much more frequent updates to keep the meta-game from stagnating. All issues raised by the Hearthstone community.

But while Runeterra focuses on fixing some of the holes Hearthstone has, it creates possibly some very critical mistakes of its own.

#1 Issue: Audience Mismatch

While the changes Riot is making can be justified on paper the game team should be concerned about audience mismatch between gamers motivated by in-game mastery who want to buy access to all of the game content, and gamers motivated by creativity and discovery who will enjoy the deck-building challenges that Runeterra is mandating for its audience.

Runeterra’s gameplay appeals primarily to mastery-achievement gamers. And for those players, the deck-building challenges Riot is presenting by limiting the rate at which players can acquire cards are simply frustrating. Mastery-based gamers don’t want their strategic options to have hard limits

Riot should select an audience to appeal to - either mastery-oriented gamers, which would imply doubling down on in-game micro-optimisations - or discovery-oriented gamers, putting more emphasis on deck construction and optimising for the meta-game.

On the other hand, you could argue that Runeterra will actually grow Riot’s player base significantly catering to players who are maybe not even that interested in League of Legends as well as those who have churned from the game but are familiar with the lore.

#2 Issue: Self-regulated Monetization

Riot argues that most card games are too expensive. Riot also believes the meta-games of other card games stagnate too quickly. According to Riot these problems go together and that by allowing players to acquire any cards they want by spending money, players quickly find the strongest strategies and stop building new decks causing the meta-game to stagnate.

So, Riot has decided that Runeterra will be more fun if players cannot spend money to acquire an unlimited number of cards they want. Players will only be able to purchase approximately half a deck per week, for about $13.

Riot can expect to cross-promote millions of players from League to Runeterra and Teamfight Tactics, and it stands to reason that if they can convert a sizeable fraction of those players to spenders that $13 a week per player would represent substantial revenue - as long as they don’t stop spending on League. Still, maximising spend depth is key for most mobile games maximising revenue, as long as players perceive value in the spend.

Purposefully capping monetisation to appeal to a small and vocal minority is either a good idea - or a really bad one. The risk is that millions of Riot’s players will spend more time on Runeterra and less time on League of Legends, resulting in decline of revenues due to poor monetisation of the game.

A similar decline has happened to Supercell, another Tencent portfolio company, which took a much more lighter approach to monetization with its couple of latest games. A decision that has likely impacted the downward revenue trend of both Brawl Stars and Clash Royale.

Supercell’s Brawl Stars is in many ways a good example of a player-first approach all the way from community management to monetisation. Based on the rapid decline of the game’s run-rate compared to other Supercell titles, one could make an assumpti… — Supercell’s Brawl Stars is in many ways a good example of a player-first approach all the way from community management to monetisation. Based on the rapid decline of the game’s run-rate compared to other Supercell titles, one could make an assumption that the chosen light monetization approach has not been optimal.

It is challenging to evaluate if Riot’s stance on monetization will prove correct. Riot bills itself as a player-focused company, and reducing player spend is, of course, friendly to players, but only time will tell if their bets on Runeterra monetization will pan out.

Whichever the case may be, we remain forever fans of Riot and will be playing this game from the moment it launches.

XOXO

Deconstructor of Fun Crew

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Nov 7 Riot's Runeterra Declares War Against Blizzard's Hearthstone

Executive Summary