5 star tips

For Lissandra, buying cards in the first shop is a VERY good idea. I always spend some rerolls there to get some new cards in my deck with broken epic items that patch a key weakness of the champion or give me a key win condition.

In previous adventures, buying cards from the shop is underwhelming due to higher prices and worse items. In Lissandra, it's very powerful because the items are stronger and the cost is cheaper. The focus is much more on building a powerful deck than anything else.

I don't recommend automatically going top path and hoping to get lucky on ethereal remitter, I reccomend picking a path based on the enemies you have to beat on that path. Many encounters are brutal for certain champions while other encounters are easy for them. There's a huge emphasis on variety in encounter type and random bonus power to encourage not playing the adventure the same way every time, with the same character every time.

Also, don't assume you need to rush to deal as much damage as possible int he first few turns. The adventure gives enemies a lot of health and strong initial spikes, but often - unlike the Asol adventure - once you've stabalized you can be very comfortable and work for a win. Slower decks that can defend themselves and build long-term gameplans tend to perform better than in other adventures, while fast champions that try to burst their opponent down struggle more.

Lissandra herself has 4 things you need to be able to deal with in order to win:

1. A steady onslaught of 9/9 Overwhelm units.
   
2. A single massive unit with a terrifying attack trigger (the watcher)
   
3. Buried in Ice (locks enemies in frozen tombs for 2 turns) and Triple Ice-Shards (deal 1 damage to everything).
   
4. A win condition that can eventually get through 99 Nexus Health.

Your champion and relics should deal with some of these naturally. For example, Kindred with the 2x Everfrost and 1x Guardian Angel relic build can handle points 1 and 2 easily since she can infinitely stun Lissandra's board at fast speed. The Guardian Angel also provides resilience to the 3x Ice Shards. This means all you need to worry about during your adventure is picking up a win condition since her deck doesn't have a good one for that amount of health, and something to handle the Buried in Ice situation (or just play around it, which is quite possible with this build, as Buried in Ice demands so much mana).

I never use rerolls on the first shop as it is a waste of rerolls and has too much spread. If there is a great upgrade right away, I will buy it otherwise I will move on. It is SO MUCH better to save rerolls for the last shop as you already went through MM and have a lot of gold, thus the chances of getting extras for your key cards is extremely high and if you managed to aggressively cut with MM you can even get strong buffs for curve-fillers.

You can also take this approach, but it will kneecap you early on (espescially if you're burning a lot of health in cutting cards at MM) and often isn't necessary to try and stack items on existing cards in deck to win the adventure; you can consistently pick up powerful cards in the very first shop and use them to inform your other decisions during the run. Otherwise you'll end up having to restart repeatedly.

IMO it makes more sense to restart a run around encounter 3-4 than to frontload your rerolls and expenses just to fall short at the end because you cannot properly utilize ER, MM or the extra power nodes/last shop in the latter half of the run

Exactly, this is the natural consequence of this approach. It would be one thing if the power offered by the first shop couldn't give you enough strength to beat Lissandra, but it definitely can. I often end up going bottom path after buying some broken cards from the shop to shore up my weaknesses and give me new powerful interactions. That lets me get a whole bonus power and not need to hope remitter highrolls. All depends on the champion in question and whic of the 4 aspects of the lissandra fight I still need to shore up with upgrade.

It's worth noting I'm not trying to get more items on my existing cards through the shop, I'm looking for new powerful tools that fill in for my weaknesses. Lissandra is more about dealing with specific threats rather than needing to break the curve with overwhelming power. If you have tools to deal with her Thralls, Watcher, and Sweepers then you can actually win a war of attrition quite comfortably. She runs out of cards and stops scaling.

I mean its restarting early vs restarting late. It is not like rolling early will guarantee a finished run. it just makes it easier to beat the first ~2-3 encounters.

Other way around. You die early more frequently if you forgo early advantages and so need to restart more often, but you can still choose to restart if you miss anything useful in the first shop. You'll be able to comfortably finish out the first few encounters and try again. Then you also know early if you're on track for a good run, and what remaining tools you need to pick up along the way (which can inform your routing choices).

This is rarely an issue though, since I draft to ensure I have the tools to deal with Lissandra rather than for raw power, I have a pretty consistent win rate. I had a pretty consistent win rate on her even when the adventure was harder too (pre-release). I know what I need to pick up for each champion in order to deal with her 3 types of threats, and can proactively do so during the run. There's no need to try and brute force the adventure by hoarding rerolls.

Asol encourages creating an overwhelming force because he scales powerfully and can outvalue nearly any champion, but it's Lissandra was designed to be possiblle to out-value and harder to rush down. She was designed to be opposite to Asol in many ways. The adventures are quite different.