YMMV / Legends of Runeterra

• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • Viktor from the Path of Champions can be anticlimatic simply because the road contains mid-boss Azir who has a power that increases his sand soldiers' attack and each of them has an item granting them overwhelm, meaning that chump-blocking is no longer a viable option for protection against his emphemeral armies — and he summons a lot of them. In general, if you can make it past Azir, your deck is likely good enough to just punch a hole right through Viktor, since he builds up board presence much slower than the fights leading up to him.
  • This also applied to Viktor's Lab of Legends incarnation, which was preceded by Foundry (a bona-fide Goddamned Boss that loves spamming cheap units, burn spells, and mushrooms to whittle down your units and Nexus) and Guard Bots (That One Boss of the whole mode, which spawned free Heimerdinger turrets every turn - ramping up to a free T-Hex at each Round Start - and had a metric ton of removal). For bonus points, both of these return as Hextech Foundry and T-Hex in the very adventure that features Viktor; both in the Lab and in the Path, any deck broken enough to beat either of them would have no problem taking out Viktor.
• Awesome Art:
  • Courtesy of SIXMOREVODKA Studios and Kudos Productions, the card art is quite frankly awesome. Really lending gravitas and epicness to champs like Anivia◊ and making the Shadow Isles cards really pop. The level-up effects for the champions are amazingly flashy as well.
  • Malphite. The living mountain is infamous for his blocky, outdated in-game model, with his missing neck and sausage shaped head. LoR Malphite however finally gets the artwork to properly convey his sheer size and power.◊
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Basically enforced by the Daybreak mechanic and Leona, which is a very one-dimensional mechanic- if you play a Daybreak card as the first card each turn it triggers an extra effect, if you don't it's just an underpowered card, while Leona is a 4-drop champion who levels up when you trigger Daybreak 4 or more times. So playing a Leona deck you always want to play Solari Soldier first turn, a Solari Shieldbearer (or another Soldier) second turn, a Solari Priestess (or another Soldier/Shieldbearer) on the third turn, Leona on the 4th turn to level her up, then Rahvun, Daylight's Spear on turn 5 (who passively causes Daybreak cards to always trigger), and only after that do you actually get any choice in what you play. It's not a very popular archetype as a result- not because it's weak, but because it's boring (although it is also quite weak as most Daybreak cards have only temporary benefits, leaving the deck without a reliable finisher). Riot attempted to improve the mechanic with the rework of a number of Daybreak cards in the 3.16.0 patch, including Leona herself.
  • Similarly, there's exactly one way to make a Lurk deck- Bilgewater/Shurima with Pyke and Rek'Sai, which were designed to work together, and literally cannot work apart at all. Lurk is a mechanic that works better the more Lurk cards you have, so there is absolutely no other region or champion combination you can use if you want to succeed (and you have to use both, because neither region has enough Lurkers on their own). While the exact selection of support cards can vary, at least 80% of the cards in every single Lurk deck will be the same. It's still more popular than Daybreak because ripping the opponent apart with swarms of Lurkers (or a leveled-up Pyke replicating his kill-chaining ult from League) is rather fun when it works, even if that is largely dependant on your luck with the Lurk pulls.
  • Deep has marginally more variety than the previous two, but is still known for having exactly one overall build: Bilgewater/Shadow Isles with Nautilus and Maokai. Throw in some cheap early cards that Toss your own deck, add some Sea Monsters to round out the game once you go Deep, and add a few removal cards to help you survive. The Toss and Deep cards from both regions are all but designed to synergize with each other and nothing else (you need Tossing cards from both regions to go Deep as quickly as possible, and Tossing is either pointless or counterproductive for every other strategy in the game, whereas Deep followers tend to be pretty weak for their cost if you're not Deep and are thus less efficient for most builds) and are essential to both Champions' level-up conditions, so you can expect most Deep decks to look and play more or less the same.
  • Kayn has the gimmick of being the first Champion to have two possible Level 2 forms, but just like in League, expect Kayn players to always go for Rhaast over the Shadow Assassin. While Kayn's Shadow Assassin form is meant as a Glass Cannon to end games, he has the rather awkward combination of Elusive and Challenger (Elusive prevents units from blocking him while Challenger forces an enemy to block him, so he literally cannot use both effects at once) while losing his Level 1 form's self-healing, which makes him less desirable as a Challenger and isn't synergistic with his Champion Spell, and his Cultist support cards don't usually pressure enemies hard enough that he can reliably end games on his own. Rhaast on the other hand gets Overwhelm, which pairs much better with Challenger while still allowing him to damage the enemy's Nexus by crashing into weak units, and his healing and stat buffs synergize much better with Kayn's support cards and Champion Spell while offering more utility.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: A lot of the original Followers created for the game have become popular with the player base, in some cases enough that players are calling for them to be made into Champions in League of Legends as well.
  • Cithria is probably the most popular character to emerge from the game, largely because we get to watch her story unfold as she goes from a timid and naive young recruit all the way up to a bona-fide hero of Demacia. She even got some lore stories of her own such as "The Weight of Expectations" (from the lore book Realms of Runeterra) and "Turmoil", so even Riot consider her a significant character.
  • Commander Ledros already gained this status when he was introduced in the short story "The Echoes Left Behind", but his appearance in this game brought a large surge of player interest (a surge so drastic that many didn't even know of his existence beforehand), in part for his badass design and direct interactions with Kalista and Hecarim. The fact that he's an extraordinarily powerful unit who is often used as a finisher for Shadow Isles control decks helps too.
  • Following After Victory, the Trifarian Gloryseeker rapidly became another of these.
  • Dragon Chow became quite popular since its announcement. Many players have expressed their reluctance to use it as intended (summon it first, then a dragon follower to kill it, get one stack of Fury, and draw a card).
  • Chip received instant love for being an utterly adorable little golem creature, bolstered once it was revealed that he's one of Malphite's offspring.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Open attack" refers to starting a round where you are the attacking player by immediately attacking with your units on board so that the opponent does not have a chance to play units or Slow spells beforehand.
  • The Elder Dragon is often informally referred to as "Ed" or "Uncle Eddie".
• Game-Breaker: Enough of them to warrant a dedicated page.
• Goddamned Boss: The Foundry in Lab of Legends seems to be engineered to be as aggravating as possible, combining a power that makes it open with Hextech Foundry and get a 1-mana discount on all its cards with a deck stuffed with lots of weenies, cheap spells, and Poison Puffcaps to grind the player down over time with poke damage while stuffing the player's hand and forcing them to risk overdraw on every round. It's also hard to form an offense against it, as the cheap burn spells it packs can easily deal with early drops while Shady Character and Hextech Transmogulator can neuter stronger followers or turn them against the player, and its ability to flood the board easily means it can comfortably chump-block anything that doesn't have Overwhelm. While its lack of a proper end-game threat and low deck size (which, in turn, makes it impossible for the Foundry to win by deck out) make it unlikely for the Foundry to actually kill a player on its own, it's more than capable of chipping away half or more of the player's Nexus health and softening them up for Guard Bots and Viktor, especially with the AI's tendency to aim Mystic Shot at the player's Nexus just to spite them if it's losing or just bored.
• Good Bad Bugs: For some time, Yasuo would play his ability's "slash" animation even when striking things normally. Since it didn't affect gameplay at all and looked pretty cool, many players found it amusing more than anything and expressed disappointment when it was fixed.
• High-Tier Scrappy:
  • Ionia is home to some of the most frustrating cards in the game, between powerful combat tricks that can take players by surprise, Counterspells and Recall effects that can make players waste their mana and cards, and Elusive units that can chip away at your Nexus while being protected by the region's spells. Their selection of cheap but impactful spells and units as well as powerful Champions capitalizing on them also make it a prominent region for combo decks (Lee Sin and Irelia being two of the more notorious offenders) and unit-spamming aggro decks, which only adds on to their reputation as a region that's thoroughly unfun to play against.
  • Bandle City gets flak from some players for being too good at too many things. Because they were the first region to have dual-class cards, they essentially get to dip into the strengths of every other region to some degree, and their plethora of card-generation effects make them much harder to play around than most regions while also having discard and hand-tampering effects seemingly tailor-made to annoy players. They lack hard removal, but also have the rather infamous Minimorph, which transforms any unit on the board into a vanilla 3/3 at Burst speed, including Champions.
• Ho Yay:
  • Although Graves isn't in the game yet, when Vi is played alongside an allied Twisted Fate, she refers to him as TF's "better half".
  • Two of Vladimir's followers, the Crimson Aristocrat and the Crimson Disciple, seem to be in a rather kinky sadomasochistic relationship.
  • Miss Fortune flirts with multiple different girls from Bilgewater, and also with Vi.
    Miss Fortune: Am I under arrest?... again?
    Vi: Sometimes I think you like being in cuffs.
  • While they're still blatantly threatening each other, Quinn seems to flirt back.
    Miss Fortune: Cute bird. He bullet-proof?
    Quinn: Cute face. Talon-proof?
  • If Miss Fortunes is played on both sides of the board, she'll even flirt with herself.
    Miss Fortune: Hey there, red.
    Miss Fortune: Well, that's one fantasy come true.
  • To say Irelia's quotes with The Blossoming Blade are hinting at something is putting it mildly.
    Irelia: I wish I could give you silks, but I must give you steel.
    Blossoming Blade: Stay by my side. I cannot ask for more.
• Just Here for Godzilla:
  • The actual TCG aspects are well-loved by a wide audience, but there's also a significant fraction of Legends of Runeterra fans comprising of lore nerds whose attention toward the game mostly extends to its expansive worldbuilding on elements not present in League. This also applies to dedicated champion mains flocking to see their champion getting additional lore and interactions, especially for niche champions whom Riot had seemingly forgotten about.
  • Some fans play the Lab of Legends mode only while not caring much about regular or ranked PVP matches, or even the other experimental modes in the Laboratory. Acknowledged by Riot when they decided to create a separate subreddit just for that game mode.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Taliyah's deck is widely considered the weakest one to take on the Lab of Legends. This is because the passive powers and items the player can get have little to no synergy with her Landmark-based gameplay. She used to be a 2/4 unit for 5 mana before getting buffed to 3/5, which was really bad considering most enemies in the Lab will have developed their board well by the fifth. Still, without an overpowered power right off the bat, Taliyah struggles to get past the first few enemies because she's just so slow at building up board presence. Riot themselves acknowledged how weak she was and, in the same patch where Taliyah's stats were buffed, her Lab of Legends deck was also improved to make her better at fighting for the board. Same patch also introduced several Landmark-based powerups, giving her a couple of very nice synergies to roll with. Alongside her previous unique ability to cripple landmark-based bosses thanks to Desert Naturalist, she has moved up significantly.
  • Azir isn't particularly well-regarded, given that his starting deck is absolutely terrible against the early pressure put on by the first couple of enemies. Even though Spiders and Mistwraiths have only 10 Nexus health, it takes a long, long time for Azir to grind down their constant stream of weenies, and by that point, he'll probably be low on health himself for the fight against Thresh. That being said, he still fares better than Taliyah because he actually benefits from most items and powers, and if you can get a few decent champions and cards he can still pull through.
  • Lissandra is one of the most despised champions in Lab of Legends. Her build is centered entirely around stalling until her Frozen Thralls finish their countdown before using the big beatsticks with Overwhelm to plow through foes. However, while the Frozen Thrall playstyle in PVP does this by pairing them with Shurima cards to accelerate their awful 8-round Countdown and get the beaters out early, Lissandra has no access to those cards by default and is very unlikely to draft them, leaving her with no way to speed up the process beyond sticking Draklorn Inquisitor on the board and hoping he doesn't die, all while hoping that you don't die before the Thralls defrost. In a game mode where runs live and die by the early game, a playstyle that's this glacially slow instantly tanks her starting deck's viability (especially since it all but guarantees that Guard Bots will eat her alive unless she lucks out and gets some really overpowered support).
  • Outside of the Lab in the main game itself, a number of champions are considered undertuned and less powerful than others, varying from patch to patch, but it's generally agreed that Tryndamere is straight-up the worst champion in the game, due to his absolute lack of utility. He's just a very expensive beatstick who uses Overwhelm to try and finish the opponent off, with the added bonus that the first time he dies he only gets stronger, but he's overpriced, his Undying Rage ability can only happen once per game because it doubles as his level-up condition, and he's just not decisive enough to count as a proper win condition, compared to other top-level champions like Aurelion Sol. Even a similarly one-dimensional beatstick champion Darius is usually capable of reliably finishing the opponent off when he hits the board, thanks to his lower cost, but with Tryndamere you're simply paying a lot to really get very little. With the addition of Sion (who essentially does Tryndamere's own gimmick better) and Renekton (which comes online much sooner and hits about as hard), Tryndamere's niche has essentially been all but obliterated. However, he has since found a home in Feel the Rush control decks as one of the best champions to cheat out with its effect (due to his level-up providing a safety net against kill spells and having Overwhelm to finish off the opponent).
  • While Taliyah has her share of infamy in the old Lab of Legends, her release version was also notoriously terrible in regular play. Her initial 5-mana 2/4 statline was downright abysmal, especially since she's built to work with landmarks, which are an inherent tempo loss to begin with. Her level 2 wasn't much better at 3/5, and packing a very underwhelming ability to cast Threaded Volley (deal 2 damage to her blocker or the enemy Nexus if unblocked) when attacking, making her essentially a 5/5 which most decks have no problem with blocking. While her Threaded Volley casts 3 times if a landmark is in play, you won't always have one in play to take advantage of it. Taliyah was eventually salvaged by significant buffs, first by raising her stats to a 3/5 baseline and then making her Threaded Volley always cast 3 times, which was enough for her to see play in landmark-based decks alongside the likes of Ziggs and Lissandra.
  • Udyr quickly came under scrutiny for being just too slow to function. His initial version was a 5-mana 4/4, which is quite poor for the cost, his Stance Swaps being 3-cost Slow spells only further sets you behind in tempo and makes him very prone to removal, and his level up condition (damage the enemy Nexus 7 times) also required heavy investment to pull off. And to rub salt into the wound, his signature spell is also laughably weak, essentially being an Ice Shard that costs 2 more and is Slow speed while only compensating with a minor unit buff that doesn't come close to justifying the cost. When Udyr was eventually buffed, the only change to his stats was +1 Power (which still gives him a weaker baseline than Trundle) and his level up condition being changed to instead require casting 3 Stance Swaps, which wasn't enough of an improvement to make him fully viable.
  • Ryze became the worst performing Champion in the game immediately on release, with a winrate rarely rising above 30%. His playstyle involves shuffling Delve Into the Past spells into your deck to gather the five different World Runes on board, allowing him to level up and eventually win the game with his Level 2 form's effect. The fact that you need all five World Runes to make this work, though, is glacially slow considering that Delve Into the Past is shuffled into your deck by Ryze's effect and thus has to be drawn out, and even then you need to pay more mana to actually play the World Runes from your hand. His Origin lets you include Burst or Focus speed spells from any region, but only ones that do not target, limiting your ability to protect Ryze from threats and leaving you low on units. His playstyle is also very self-contained and doesn't really support any other strategy, forcing him to be played pure and resulting in a deck that easily folds against both aggro (because you die) and control (because Ryze dies).
  • Over time, Demacia has become one of the worst performing regions after sinking into Master of None territory. Their general playstyle revolves around pressuring the opponent with efficient units to win through tempo; however, their unit-centric playstyle suffered heavily from power creep, as they're not as good at ramping into big threats as Freljord, not as good at supporting them as Ionia, don't make large boards as efficiently as Shadow Isles, and don't hit as hard as Noxus. They're also very bad at stabilizing after their units fall behind or get wiped out, something that unit-centric decks from the other aforementioned regions have less trouble with, and they're not very versatile in general due to their cards being based almost entirely around having a board. In later formats, most of the time Demacia surfaces in the meta are when they get a particularly broken Champion (like Vayne or Morgana) rather than on the region's own merits.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Boat. ^ExplanationBecause the first three cards which explicitly drew a champion as part of their summon effects were released with the Bilgewater Expansion, these were all ships of various kinds. As a result, a champion getting their 'boat' became a synonym for them getting a card that drew them on summon. And perhaps as a Meme Acknowledgement, only 2 cards exists that draws a specific champion but isn't a boat.
  • "TELL THE PEEPO WHAT YOU HAVE SEEN TODAY!" ^ExplanationOne of Azir's level up quotes (with "people" humorously rendered as "peepo"), noted for being particularly hammy.
  • The Shurima movie ^ExplanationThrough the effects of the cards Ascended's Call and Buried Sun Disc, a player can end up chaining a bunch of level up animations for Ascended champions simultaneously. This causes a bunch of lengthy cutscenes to play, causing people to dub the phenomenon the "Shurima movie."
  • "There was a memo X. There was a memo!" ^ExplanationIn League of Legends, the parent game to Legends of Runeterra, Aatrox's rework heralded a new direction for the Darkin, and Varus was retconned into being one. This left him being an Odd Name Out as, according to Aatrox, Darkin were supposed to have a 'Double-A thing' going with their naming scheme - like himself and Rhaast, and there had supposedly been a memo for it. Come the Awakening expansion and a number of other Darkin were revealed - some of which also didn't adhere to the naming scheme. Cue people theorizing that the reason the Darkin fought a civil war wasn't because War Is Hell and There Are No Therapists, but simply because they didn't agree with Aatrox's memo. The phrase itself meanwhile became a humorous way of pointing to In-Universe Factoid Failures and creators not sticking with the Internal Consistency of their own setting.
  • "What's Updraft?"^ExplanationJanna's archetypal mechanic is Updraft, which shuffles cards back into your deck and discounts them by 1 mana. Because Updraft was a new mechanic at the time, it's not uncommon for players that didn't keep up with the reveals to ask what it is only to get responses along the lines of "Nothing much, what's up with you?" akin to the "Updog" joke. Ascended in Path of Champions, where Janna's first Star Power is named "What's Updraft?"
  • I CANNOT BE STOPPED^ExplanationThe Elder Dragon's levelled-up form is an expensive, but obscenely powerful 30/30 Champion card whose description only consists of the simultaneously badass and hilariously blunt "I CANNOT BE STOPPED". Rioters have made it very clear that they seriously mean it — the Elder Dragon is flat-out immune to stuns, blocks, transformations, silences, obliteration, etc. — and many a joke has resulted in portraying the Elder Dragon as a Memetic Badass who cannot be stopped by anything, from attempted Viego possessions, to Catastrophe, to traffic lights.
• Narm: Whenever Quinn sees Valor die, she reacts in a horrified way appropriate for a person seeing their best friend and partner die... but Quinn's gameplay, especially her level 2 version, revolves around constantly resummoning Valor and having him get into combat, and with his 1 health Valor is expected to die every time he enters combat.
• Nightmare Fuel: The game is fully of spooky characters, but The Stagehand manages to be one of the most conceptually dark followers in the game, partly by virtue of having little to no supernatural elements to her story: a young Ionian priestess, she unwittingly led Noxian invaders towards her temple, seemingly underestimating how violently they would pillage it. It's then implied that in her guilt-stricken state, Jhin manipulated her to "atone" by having her plant a disguised bomb inside a Noxian camp — it's strongly suggested that not only did she not survive the explosion, she knew she wouldn't survive, and was convinced to play her part as part of Jhin's sick machinations.
• Play-Along Meme: The moment Jarro Lightfeather was announced to be a proper Follower card in the game, everyone has played long with the idea that this is not Ezreal disguised in a fancy suit, mask, and ridiculous alias — this is Jarro Lightfeather, Sentinel of Light, 8th Order, and national hero.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Seraphine was probably the most intensely polarizing champion ever released in League of Legends history, but Legends of Runeterra reintroduced her in a way that received a vastly more positive reaction. Her League incarnation has been criticized for featuring an out-of-place idol aesthetic and nominal connection to the rest of Runeterra, with more cynical fans interpreting her as existing less for the benefit of League and more for cheap marketability. LoR addressed a great deal of this — Sera's "idol"-style of dress was given a retooling to tone down the kawaiiko flash to fit more in line with the grounded, yet pleasing fantasy aesthetics of Piltover, and her lore in this game also leans more into her previously-underexplored "tinkerer" side, which similarly put her more in line with the atmosphere of Piltover/Zaun as a city of craftsmen and scholars. While she's still more controversial in League due to not including her Costume Evolution presented here, these changes went over very well with the community, and more have come around to accepting Seraphine as a character, or at the very least less impatient to pick on her as a mistake (that being said, while her characterization was salvaged, she was still hated for entirely different reasons).
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • While a lot of people like it (because it's the kind of mechanic that's fun for the player using it, if not for the player on the receiving end), Bilgewater's Nab mechanic that lets them draw (non-Champion) cards from the opponent's deck (and in the case of Sleight of Hand, directly from their hand) has been criticised by a lot of players for being too RNG-dependent and too much like something out of Hearthstone, while other people dislike it for dabbling in the casual hand and deck destruction mechanics that even Hearthstone didn't mess with lightly. It doesn't help that the cards (particularly Pilfered Goods and Black Market Merchant) are a bit too much on the cost-effective side, with Plunder not managing to be nearly as significant of a requirement as the design team apparently anticipated. And being beaten by your own cards just feels really bad in general. Riot tweaked it slightly in the 1.4 patch by making it draw from the bottom of the opponent's deck, meaning it was only taking cards you almost certainly weren't going to draw anyway (and also slightly nerfed the Black Market Merchant), then later nerfed Pilfered Goods from 2 to 3 mana, but this didn't address the biggest issue people had with it, namely not knowing what cards your opponent has taken, meaning you need to play around every card in your own deck (that you haven't already drawn) as well as theirs.
  • The Reputation keyword added in "Empires of the Ascended" didn't really set the world on fire. Like Deep before it, it's a binary global effect that activates after you've struck 4 times with units that have 5+ power, but while it effectively requires you to build your deck around it (like Deep), the payoff for meeting it is extremely underwhelming, not giving you any real incentive to build your deck around it (unlike Deep). Reputation cards are mostly characterised by being perfectly mundane effects (like Sigil of Malice which does 2 damage to anything or Whispered Words which draws you 2 cards), but are horribly overpriced before you trigger Reputation (before being buffed by having its base cost reduced by 1 Sigil used to cost 4 mana, twice what the equally-effective Mystic Shot costs), and only somewhat underpriced afterwards (Sigil's cost drops to 1). Trying to build a "Reputation deck" means using a lot of badly-overpriced cards until you meet the requirement- and meeting it, especially early enough that it makes it worth the effort, is a lot harder than it sounds. There's currently only a single card that uses Reputation to trigger anything other than improved cost-effectiveness (Black Rose Spy), which suggests that the mechanic has potential, but the potential is currently going entirely unfulfilled. This had the unfortunate effect of making most of the cards Noxus received in "Empires of the Ascended" rather underwhelming for them, although most players did just use Whispered Words even when they aren't able to trigger Reputation, simply because Noxus is so starved for card draw that even an overpriced one is worth using.
• The Scrappy: Thorn of the Rose is disliked by the community because her Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism is perceived as a fantasy Worldbuilding cliché where females members of a race have to look exactly like human women. She particularily sticks out because Riot had already averted Sexy Dimorphism with the female troll follower Troll Ravager. Many people didn't even know she was supposed to be a female minotaur and assumed she was a human wearing a mask. Riot pulled an Author's Saving Throw with the release of the Ruined Reckoner, a female minotaur who looks much more like male ones, making it clear that it's just the Thorn who looks like that, not all female minotaurs (defying Only One Female Mold in the process).
• That One Boss:
  • Karma, the mid-boss of Ezreal's Path of Champions campaign, is so hilariously unfair that it's ridiculous. Being a Champion fight, the AI is guaranteed to start with a copy of her in its hand- and her stage power is that both players start with 10 mana gems. Which might seem fair enough, since you get to take advantage of it as well, but having 10 mana gems makes you Enlightened, which is Karma's level-up requirement! So what's going to happen is you're going to be dealing with a level 2 Karma (a late game win condition Champion) on the first turn of the match, guaranteed. It's even worse if the AI uses its other 5 mana to drop a Jeweled Protector first, buffing Karma up by a further +3/+3 before playing her, meaning she hits the board at 8/8 and immediately starts generating free value. And that's without mentioning all the value generation the enemy deck includes, such as Karma having a free item and Ezreal's campaign bonus causing the AI to start by drawing a free spell. Since it's still the first half of the campaign, you shouldn't have had a chance to get any really OP cards yet. If you're playing a weaker Champion like Kayn that lacks hard removal to deal with Karma immediately, or you simply don't draw any, your run is all but guaranteed to end on the spot without you even having a hypothetical chance of victory.
  • Aurelion Sol's campaign has a powerup that doubles a champion's stat when they're summoned and when they level up, which makes killing certain value engines extremely difficult unless you have removal. Every fight node on the campaign is a miniboss fight with its respective champion's power and an additional legendary one, whose worst effects include making the enemy gain a mana gem each round start or letting the enemy place ten level 2 champions into his deck. Aurelion Sol himself summons a random level 2 champion whenever the round ends for free, one of which can be Viego, who will either steal your best unit or kill your champion at Round Start. Afterwards, you have to face a 20/20 Aurelion Sol, who can sling the immensely powerful celestial cards at no cost and summon more champions, including another Aurelion Sol.
  • Galio's first mini-boss, Zoe, can be a exceedingly frustrating boss fight due to a single item in her possesion: Focusing Crystal, which grants her +1/+1 whenever a spell is played. Because of that, unless you manage to shut her down on the first rounds, she's going to snowball out of control very quickly. The end result is an unit with massive stats that hits like a truck and that cannot be blocked unless you have a way to deal with Elusive, along with a wide variety of spells to protect herself at her disposal, which also continuously buff her into ridiculous numbers.
  • Regardless of where she's encountered, Poppy is an utter pain due to her encounters always featuring a power that gives her strongest unit +1/+1 for each unit on her board. Nine times out of ten, this buff goes straight to Poppy herself, allowing her to snowball to ludicrous degrees when paired with her own ability to buff allies whenever she attacks. If you can't kill Poppy as soon as she hits the board, you're screwed.
• That One Level:
  • The Guard Bots stage in Lab of Legends is by a monumental level the hardest level in the entire campaign (which definitely contributes to Viktor looking like a joke right after it). Several opponents can be quite tough, but the Guard Bots is quite openly and undisguisedly unfair, with the enemy generating a free one of Heimerdinger's Turrets every stage, starting with the 0-mana 0/1 Challenger as a chump blocker and nuisance and eventually scaling up to getting a free T-Hex, every single turn. Making matters worse, despite starting with the 0-mana turret on turn 1, it skips the 7-mana Mk.7 Armored Stomper (the 7/1 Turret with Barrier) so the T-Hexes still start raining down from turn 8 on. The deck will also spam out 8/4 Quick Attack Unstable Volticians and 6/6 Quick Attack Plaza Guardians at about the same time, so if you haven't almost won by that stage, you're deader than last Sunday's roast. And it's not like the deck just rolls over and dies in the turns leading up to that point either; the free turrets vary from annoying chump blockers against any initial rush you may make, to legitimate threats in their own right from turn 4 on, and the deck's use of Progress Day means it can easily develop a nauseating card advantage over you while gleefully blowing up your early board with spells like Trueshot Barrage and Thermogenic Beam. Finally, this seems to be the point where the AI often just decides to rig your deck to give you the worst draw it can possibly come up with, starting you off with all your expensive and useless cards and none of your early game, and denying you the champions you've build your entire strategy around. It's a good thing Lab of Legends is about building the most OP and exploitative deck possible, because you have to be incredibly OP to beat the Guard Bots, even on Normal. Oh, and Guard Bots are back in Path of Champions as T-Hex in Viktor's campaign, and like all other encounters in it, their units with keywords get +1/+1 so the turrets are even stronger. Have fun.
  • While on average not nearly as dangerous as the Guard Bots, the Scars deck you have to face as the second opponent in the Freljord can be an overwhelming obstacle to certain decks- if you mainly have small, weenie units or low-damage "pings" for removal, the fact that the deck starts with The Scargrounds in play can just be too much to overcome, especially with the number of health-buffing spells the deck includes to keep its units alive. No deck has reliable access to Landmark removal cards (except, ironically, Taliyah, who starts with the Desert Naturalist in her deck) and you have to be very lucky to get your hands on any (such as Scorched Earth) once the run is underway. If you don't have a hard removal spell available for Tarkaz the Tribeless when he almost inevitably hits the board on round 5 (followed by Scarmother Vrynna on round 6), you're in for a savage beating. Decks that can rapidly deploy very large units of their own can easily run roughshod over it (and if you can remove The Scargrounds it's a walkover), but if your deck doesn't have the right tools available then your run will end at the half-way point. Miss Fortune in particular practically becomes a liability to her own deck, her Love Tap and even her Bullet Time damage completely negated by the enemies' Tough and only serving to buff up their power to nauseating levels.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Around April 2020, the voices of a few cards (namely Academy Prodigy, Greenglade Caretaker, Scarmaiden Reaver, and Vanguard Redeemer) were re-recorded, with the main consensus that it was done to make them sound less intense and more natural. However, a significant portion of fans have lamented this change in direction as many saw these characters' enthusiasm lending significant charm, with the new voiceovers being seen as more palatable, but significantly more bland.
  • Not all players were enthusiastic about changing the location for the region icon on cards. Although Riot claims it was necessary to make room for the Champion Mastery icons (between the Power and Health numbers), the official subreddit became flooded with suggestions for card redesigns.
  • The reveal of Taliyah got hit with this instantly, as fans were less than pleased with her new, very Lux-like voice, smaller eyebrows and lighter skin tone. Riot was quick to correct the visuals and had her fixed back up within a patch, but her higher-pitched voice still remains controversial.
  • Jhin's introduction to the game caused a stir when it was revealed that Quinton Flynn — considered by many to be the definitive English voice of the character — was not brought back in light of his sexual harassment allegations from 2020, with the role recast to a new actor. On top of the decision to not bring Flynn back being disputed due to the controversial nature of the scandal, Brian T. Delaney's take on the character has been criticized as providing a weak imitation of Flynn's original performance.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: LeBlanc's abilities were criticized on reveal for making her much more of a straightforward Glass Cannon with only a Self-Duplication mechanic, a decidedly simplified direction to the design of "The Deceiver" that fans were expecting. Part of the backlash comes from how the game had previously done admirable jobs translating champions' League gameplay elements and integrating aspects of their abilities in lore, so having nothing that capitalizes on her famed Confusion Fu or her ancient conspiratorial chessmaster archetype was seen as a greatly missed opportunity.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: No matter how related they are in League, dialogue interactions between cards (especially champions) introduced in different waves are very rarely unique to each other, usually consisting of the newer character only giving a one-sided remark to a recycled, generic voice line by the other. While this is just a natural consequence of how Riot scripts and records dialogue for the game (being for each wave as they come out, limiting the ability to continuously recall actors for new lines), many fans lament the lost storytelling potential in fleshing out relationships through these exchanges. Some of the most noted include Taliyah and Yasuo, Azir and Xerath, and Lucian and Senna (at least for the latter as a champion).
• Ugly Cute: Several of the Guardians can be this, such as the Scaled Snapper and Lunar Beast.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Upon her reveal, Lulu's original card art drew many comparisons to the original LoliPoppy◊ splash in terms of looking off-putting. With her oddly realistic face and over-sized head just looking off. Her card art has since been changed do deal with most of these issues.
• Unexpected Character:
  • With the release of Beyond The Bandlewood and its numerous Yordle champs, many were of course expecting the Noxian themed Yordle spot to go to Kled. Instead it was Rumble, a character with no previous story ties to Noxus, who got the spot instead.
  • Considering his VGU for League was still being developed at the time, a lot of people were caught off guard by Udyr making it into LoR, with a visual design unique to that game to boot.
  • Nobody expected Norra to be released as the game's first exclusive non-LoL Champion card, especially since the fact that Norra has gone missing is the defining element of Yuumi's entire story.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The Shadow Isles cinematic "None Escape" is supposed to be the tragic story of a young and well-intentioned acolyte who is killed by the monstrous Thresh right in front of his mother's eyes... but as the comments on the video express, it's hard to be sympathetic when the boy was as Genre Blind and Too Dumb to Live as the protagonist of any slasher movie, wandering away from the wards he'd come to place to follow the shade of his dead father (implied to have been killed doing the same task he was here for) right into Thresh's lair. A lot of people even compared him to a noob LoL player blundering into the fog of war on his own and getting caught out and killed by the enemy team.
  Comment: They clearly want this to be scary, but the boy is so dumb I can't help but cheer for Thresh as natural selection takes place

---