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So i play a lot of MTG, and I’ve felt especially recently that LOR’s design space has been somewhat limited in terms of what kind of effects they can attach to units, resulting in a problem where aggro disproportionately wins out due to there not being enough interactive spells to remove every single creature. I also think champion design has been limited by the fact that if you want them to be interactive, they need to attack to trigger their skills, meaning that unless they have quick attack/some form of protection to get those attacks off.

My solution? Give some units and champs activated abilities like in mtg, where usually you need to “tap” a unit to use their ability. This could translate to units stunning themselves or paying another cost to activate an ability. I’m sure this would be difficult with the UI, but something like dragging the unit to a special part of the board that only pops up when you drag that unit could possibly work? they could also function by having their own spell speeds, so some abilities can be burst, fast, slow, etc. I also feel like this could be a better character design going forward for some “artillery” champs like kogmaw for example, where their gameplay in league necessitates them never putting themselves in danger.

Anyways, that was my idea, lemme know what y’all think or if my idea is actually bad, i’d love to hear about it.

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over 1 year ago - /u/Dan_Felder - Direct link

Originally posted by SadFish132

Um we already have activated abilities in practice. Creating specific cards (not random) in hand mechanically accomplishes this. Aphelios practically is a mtg card with 5 different activated abilities. The isn't a mechanical implementation issue but rather an issue that they haven't designed more cards in this vein. For instance, if they wanted to make a unit that had an Ice manipulator Activated Ability they could create a unit with the effect "Round Start: create a fleeting Guile."

Fleeting card generation is great, it just takes a lot more words and hand clutter to do certain things with fleeting cards than it does in a game with activated abilities on the cards themselves. So similar functionality but a lot more cumbersome which limits what we can do without it feeling overwhelming. Also, fleeting cards have other synergies involved since you can discard fleeting cards to other effects.

over 1 year ago - /u/Dan_Felder - Direct link

Originally posted by SadFish132

First off, thank you for the reply. Secondly, I guess similar functionality would be the key aspect I was looking at here. There are things MTG has a much easier time of doing than LOR and the reverse is true also. For example making a card such as Thorn of the Rose is much more cumbersome to make in MTG than in LOR. That Said, if I were to try and create Morphling from MTG in LOR it would probably require 7 cards in total to recreate it and it'd be just as or more confusing than Aphelios as their is no way in LOR to concisely explain that it just has 5 repeatedly usable activated abilities (not to mention the 7 card arts it would require to make or the large number of issues that ensue if it uses pre-existing cards to conserve art resources).

To this end, each game is designed in a way that gives them unique strengths and weaknesses with what their cards can do mechanically in a non-cumbersome way. I personally don't see units generating fleeting/created cards as more cumbersome as much as having very different and significant limitations to a conventional activated abilities (such as the ones you already listed in your reply). That said, I don't work on the LOR Design Team and do defer to your internal knowledge on the matter (to which I assume internal playtests and player data show what you have already said).

I think you sum it up really well actually. Fleeting cards are better at some things, and activated abilities are better at some things; particularly, like you mentioned, cards with multiple simple abilities.