[2022] An ex-Hearthstone player's perspective on LoR and Rotation.

Thanks for the detailed thoughts. I think there's some confusion about the specific design challenges we're talking about, because it's hard to know all the cards we don't make unless you're the ones not making them.

I understand you've been a player in both Hearthstone and LoR. Glad to have you! I've been a designer on both Hearthstone and LoR too, so this is a great chance to talk about the differences of each. I don't mean to write this as a 'takedown' or a rejection of your feedback, we all want the best for the game and I genuinely appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts on how to get there.

We likely won't know for sure until we have tried rotation for a little while if it's ultimately a good approach to building the game. I could definitely be wrong. I just want to provide some clarifications about the current reasoning.

Currently, the reasoning behind rotations is mainly to ensure that they don't have to release overtuned cards every time an expansion unveils just to make sure their newer cards get some measure of playtime.

This has in my experience been provably false. Most of the problematic cards they have recently released are strong in their own right, regardless of existing synergy with older cards.

I think this is a misunderstanding, because the first paragraph talks about having to release extremely powerful new cards to compete with old ones, and the second paragraph talks about us doing exactly that.

To ensure that new cards are powerful enough to compete with the strongest existing cards and synergies we often need to release extremely powerful stand-alone cards.

The problems that come from broken synergies with old cards are different - and usually get caught before you see them. We end up making cards less synergistic and more linear, harder to play outside their archetypes, to avoid the breaks. This represents a large portion of dev time and results in a lot of cool designs being cut before you get to see them.

A good example of this is Malygos from Hearthstone. I lost track of how many cool designs got cut because they'd be broken with Malygos. I think I lost 4 alone to Malygos decks breaking them in testing. Because Malygos was part of the Classic set then, there was no way to wait for it to rotate out - so ultimately it had to be banished to the Hall of Fame.

Wild has a higher power level than standard, so malygos decks that might be too strong for standard would be reasonable in wild. This increased the design space for new cards. Now we could print cards that worked well with malygos as long as they weren't too powerful for *wild*. Before we could only print them if they weren't too powerful for *standard*.

WARNING: Dan is about to geek out about multiformat balance theory! Feel free to skip.

Making up numbers, imagine if standard decks have a power level of 5 and wild had a power level of 9. If Malygos is standard-legal, the combos need to result in decks that are ~5 as well.

If a card was good with lots of stuff but much better with malygos (say a +3 power boost in malygos decks), there was no way to make the card fair with both. If it was a healthy 5 when used without Malygos, it would be an 8 when used with Malygos.

If Malygos is standard-legal, then we couldn't print these cards at a satisfying power level. We might have a dream of dropping big cool dragons and attacking with them slowly, but the best way to play it would be to cheat Malygos out and OTK your opponent with spell damage.

A balance designer might say to me, "If we ship this card, we're going to have to balance it assuming they play it with Malygos. For the Malygos version to be a healthy 5/10, that means your fun big dragons decks would be like... A 2/10. Are you okay with the cool new decks you were working on being basically unplayable?"

If Malygos is rotated to wild via hall of fame though, it's totally fine to print these cards. We could balance their decks at 5s for the fun uses while the malygos deck being an 8 was perfectly reasonable for wild.

So on Hearthstone we ran into some of the same problems and eventually had to do similar solutions for their non-rotating sets. When I learned that LoR was planning a similar approach to rotation, it made sense to me because of that experience.

TLDR: Hearthstone also ran into the same problem with cards in never-rotating sets and had to use the same solution. This expanded the potential design space. If standard is a 5/10 power level format and eternal is a 9/10 power level format, it becomes possible to print cards that are good with some decks (5/10) but MUCH better with some eternal-only decks (9/10).

Note: Some players assume that we'd be happy to print synergies that totally break eternal, more like a 13/10 than a 9/10. I know I don't. Two formats allows us to expand the space by rotating outlier synergies rather than meganerfing them or power-leaping past them.

I gotta run (dog needs a walk) but I hope that the added context is somewhat interesting. I could be wrong and I could be missing big things, but I know one thing: if rotation starts causing more problems than it solves I'll push hard to revert it or change it so solve those problems. We're all here because we want to make a great game that we also want to play ourselves. I joined this team because I wanted an excuse to keep playing LoR and thinking about it all the time. I don't plan to stop anytime soon.

Unfortunately you don't need to really worry about that since the article that just came out really did the job rejecting all our feedback for you :(

I get that it probably feels like that, and I admit that seeing comments like this is pretty discouraging. It makes me feel like all the time we spent pouring over feedback and talking with fans is wasted, if people assume that we aren't doing it anyway.

We genuinely believe this approach is going to help make the game better for everyone overall. We might be wrong, but if we thought it was a better approach to just not do rotation it'd be the easiest decision in the world. It's much scarier to risk angering your most dedicated players in the short term. The only reason we're doing this is because we genuinely think it's going to help us make a better game for everyone.

But doesn't that just rotate them into Eternals and then the problem is there now? It's already a slow balance cycle, and Eternals is getting even LESS balance so it's just kicking the issues at the people over there.

This is a really common assumption, and it's why I used the malygos example. The problem with a lot of synergies is not that the synergy is too powerful *for the game overall* but rather that it crowds out other ways to use the cards.

Often designers like to create cool new synergies that work well with fun but overlooked cards. Maybe on Hearthstone I was working on a "summon big dragons" deck that would reduce the cost of the next big dragon you played. There were lots of cool dragons like Ysera and Onyxia that players loved playing with but weren't very good anymore. Creating new cards to support them would be awesome.

A "Summon big, goofy dragons" deck designed like that might be a 5/10 in power level. However, if you took the same cards designed to summon big, goofy dragons and used them to summon Malygos instead, that deck was MUCH stronger. It was more like an 8/10. Balance testers would tell me something like, "If you want to ship this card, just know we're going to have to balance it assuming players are using it with malygos - and that's going to make your Ysera/Onyxia deck like a 2/10 insted. Would you still want to do it?"

By rotating Malygos to the hall of fame (wild only), that solved the problem. Because standard's power target was like 5/10, and wild's was like 9/10, the malygos deck that would be too good for standard was just fine in wild. It was okay to have the theoretical dragon-summoning card tuned to be a 5/10 deck with big goofy dragons, because it was no longer competing in standard against Malygos. The standard deck could shine in standard, and the more powerful malygos version might be a tier 2 deck in wild.

MTG is another good example. There is a lot of room between the strongest stuff in an eternal format like Legacy and the strongest stuff in Standard. Cards that may be broken in standard often have no problems at all in older formats. This is why Counterspell is considered too strong for standard but perfectly fine for Vintage.

Meanwhile I bet every tier 2 or tier 3 deck in vintage would destroy the best decks of standard. That's why MTG has so many formats over these years, to give people difference chances to shine.

The competitive Poke'mon community adopted a similar approach. To ensure people could play with lots of different poke'mon, they created multiple eternal formats. More powerful poke'mon are banned from the lower tiers, to make room for weaker fan favorites. You can almost never play Pikachu in an Ubers format, there are just too many powerful legendary pokemon. It's hard to choose Pikachu when you could choose Raichu or Raikou. However, Pikachu is a good choice in the NFE (not fully evolved) format. That format only allows pokemon that can still evolve, which means Raichu and Raikou can't participate.

How long would we have to wait for any sort of fix/revert? I know the team wants it to succeed, but are we looking more at a Dynamic Queue or a Chemdrake?

It'll likely depend on the severity of the given issue. Whenever we have any problem with the game, whether a bug or a balance issue or a quality of life element (like wild fragment cap increasing to 50), we triage it against other issues. We always try to focus on the tasks that'll make the biggest impact for players as quickly as possible. Sometimes this results in obvious good changes that make a minor impact being delayed for a while (we first planned to increase the wild shard cap to 50 a month or so before we found time to do it, because other stuff took priority).

I'm very torn on that myself. There are big advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. We've talked about them back and forth internally for a lot of meetings, and I've often flipped opinions on this. I don't think I could begin to lay out all the thinking on this one question outside of a whole dev blog.

The simplest answer is that we want to build the best competitive metagame in the world. We think that focusing on standard as the premiere competitive format most of the time will let us do that.

This answer isn't sufficient on its own, and there are a LOT more factors involved in the discussion. It's possible we may eventually move to both having ranked ladders in the future based on how players end up engaging with both modes, but I think it makes sense to start by focusing on standard and see how things go. Some formats are more fun when people don't feel pressured to try-hard them (Commander in MTG is one example).

It's also worth noting that ranked ladders don't have to be the only place to play eternal competitively. Gauntlets and Tournaments may open up new options too. We just tried out a foundations gauntlet after all, we're interested in using gauntlets to introduce variety formats to the standard ranked ladder.

Sorry that it's discouraging, but don't you think it's also really discouraging for us?

Absolutely. I was a game player long before I was also a game designer. I remember how frustrating it is to feel like obvious mistakes are being made when you love the game and want it to succeed, and that your feedback is being ignored even when it's asked for. It's deeply weird to be on the other end of it, and it never really gets less weird.

The issue with rotation is that it's a solution to tactical design problems that the community often never sees. You can't see all the cards we cut over the months because of problems like the ones I'm referring to. You have to be in the room to know about them.

It's also hard because many players want very different things. Some players would rather have a larger format where massive buffs and nerfs happen all the time to all the cards. It keeps things fresh and continually interesting.

Other players come back to see 20 cards have changed and get discouraged, confused, frustrated that their decks need to be updated and the guides they're reading online are based on older versions of cards that no longer exist.

The former group would be happy to see devs mega-buff and mega-nerf things as needed within a single format to give new archetypes a chance to shine.

The latter group often wants a sense of stability. Seeing their decks become unrecognizable or completely unplayable to make room for a new champion feels incredibly frustrating.

This is just one example of many of two different players being concerned about rotation (neither wants a new standard mode introduced that not all champions can play in) but their proposed solutions are the opposite.

The variety-focused player wants constant buffs and nerfs to everything to accomplish the variety goals that variety players care about, which rotation helps with. The stability-focused player would probably hate the results of this.

I've largely been a spectator when it comes to the exact design of Rotation, as it was in motion long before I became a lead. However, when I investigated it and other proposed solutions with the team - the overwhelming consensus has been that it's the best solution for a tough problem.

It affects a lot of things players don't see, so it's very hard for player feedback to factor in the stuff that they can't know about. We've also gamed out various alternative solutions people have proposed and felt the costs would outweigh the benefits.

We can be absolutely wrong though, and we'll be paying very close attention to how rotation exists in practice. It can be easy to imagine the worst case scenario until you see it in action. Of course, for devs it's easy to imagine the best case scenario instead. I try to season my natural optimism with a healthy dose of paranoia. :)

But again, that just seems to kick the issue to eternal format? Like you said, it's balanced in standard now because malygos is gone, but he's still there in wild with all the cards that make this synergy op. Am I interpreting that wrong? Please correct me because it looks like you said it being a 9/10 on wild is fine.

Yes, this is the key distinction. The goal is not to have both formats be of the exact same power level. The goal is not to make all standard-legal decks equally powerful to all eternal-legal decks. If it was, this would just be kicking the can down the road. But that's not the goal.

The goal is to establish two formats, one of which can be aimed at a higher power level. It's like different "weight classes" in boxing, or different leagues in football or different power tiers in pokemon's community formats. The worst heavyweight fighter might be able to beat a lot of fighters from lower weight classes. The worst premier league team can probably destroy the best national league teams. A tier 3 team in the Ubers format will destroy the best PU team (PU is a format that stands for pokemon so weak it's almost disgusting).

Bringing it back to cardgames, Legacy vs Pioneer is a good example. Pioneer only allows MTG cards from the last 10 years (starting with Return to Ravnica). Legacy allows nearly all cards from the last 30 years (banning only the very strongest). Vintage allows some of the cards too strong for even Legacy.

Legacy has a higher power level than Pioneer, and Vintage has a higher power level than legacy. If we say Pioneer is a 5/10 in power level, Legacy is 9/10 and Vintage is 10/10.

This means that if a card released today lets you build an 8/10 deck when you combo it with a card that is ONLY legal in legacy and vintage... Nothing goes wrong. The combo can't be used in Pioneer. It can be used in Legacy and Vintage but those formats already have even more powerful options. The problem isn't shifted to Legacy, it's eliminated. Pioneer decks can't compete with the combo, but they don't have to. Legacy decks have to compete with it, and they absolutely can.

In this case, neither format has a problem. Pioneer is fine, Legacy is fine. The problem is gone.

If the combo led to the creation of an 11/10 deck, we'd expect to see bannings or nerfs in legacy and vintage. But that's a MUCH higher bar to clear and happens very rarely. This dramatically expands the game's design space, because different formats can have different power levels.

Consider the card Underworld Breach in MTG. The card is banned from both Pioneer and Legacy. However. you can play four copies of it in Vintage right now. Underworld Breach produces 10/10 decks and so is not acceptable in anything but the Vintage format. Just because Legacy has a higher power ceiling than Pioneer doesn't mean it's an infinite power ceiling.

In this case banning Underworld Breach in JUST pioneer WOULD be shifting the problem to Legacy. The card would need a nerf to be acceptable in at least one of the formats. It wouldn't be okay to just leave it in their Legacy format and shrug.

Let's say in this case, eternal format isn't balanced enough/regularly? How long would we have to suffer till you get to look at it again? Or does that depend on playmate? If not a lot of people play it we're just doomed then?

I can never predict the future like this, It'll surely depend on how bad the problem is and what else we need to do with the time. All game design is about opportunity cost, no matter how many people you have it's always a question of what the best use of that time is to make players happy.

This is always what I answer to questions like this, whether I'm being asked about path of champs updates, new gauntlets, labs, balance for standard, anything. It's the only honest answer to speculative futures: we'll always try to do the best we can with our time to make the game better.

However, it's worth noting that a good eternal experience is also good for the game. Players will feel better about collecting cards if they know they'll always be legal in a cool mode, and they'll also feel better about crafting eternal ones they don't have yet. Throwing Eternal away would waste so much potential and trust.

I'm excited about having two cool formats that can focus on different power levels and appeals to different playstyles; offering a meaningfully different experience so we can serve more players in more ways. I would not be excited about a dumpster ground mode where we throw cards we want to forget.

Can we get that dev blog then?

It's possible, but I feel like talk is cheap. We need to prove it. Once rotation is live we'll know for sure whether it's working and where it can be improved. We can keep making posts about why we think rotation is good for the game despite the understandable anxiety of many players, but if we're wrong then none of that matters and if we're right then the proof will be in the gameplay.

It's also worth noting that almost no decision in game design is unanimous. The fact I flipped opinions on a ranked ladder multiple times isn't uncommon, I often change my mind on design questions based on new and compelling arguments or various other factors. We can't discuss all factors all the time anyway, because some stuff isn't announced yet.

For example, we knew about new gauntlets for months - and that they'd also be introducing variety formats to contrast with whatever the ranked ladder was. But we couldn't talk about them until they were announced. Creating a focused main competitive format and introducing variety formats in competitive micro-tournaments (may include some eternal and other fancy stuff that doesn't normally have a ranked ladder) is exciting to me as a player. Without being able to talk about daily gauntlets I can't draw that connection.

I expect we'll learn a lot after launching rotation. We might learn it's pretty good but needs some changes. We might discover that eternal should have a permanent ranked mode. We might discover it works great without one and lets us focus on one exceptional competitive meta at a time. We might discover we rotated too few cards or too many. We might discover we need a faster cadence of rotation or a slower one. Or we might discover it's always worse when we rotate cards and we should undo rotation entirely.

All I know for sure is that we need to find out. Talk is cheap. Fun is what matters.

the more i read this the more i think "why not just nerf myalgos"? it seems to me like he poses a threat to design sustainability.

He does, and you can absolutely nerf Malygos. The question is which is better for players - and whether you want to let Muhammad Ali go to the Heavyweight division or break his arm to even the odds against the lower weightclass fighters. :)

Malygos decks were pretty fun for a lot of players and an iconic part of the game. I'm glad they still exist in a higher power format. I like being able to change formats and experience different metagames myself. Vintage is like my desert when I play MTG for example, I wouldn't want to grind it every day but I love being able to play with black lotus sometimes as a treat.

The nice thing about rotation is that cards don't have to exist in the same format as other cards forever. Malygos opened up some really cool design space for cheap spell damage effects being good! He enabled unique decks that many players loved. But eventually he overstayed his welcome and his existence was preventing far more cards/decks from exiting than he was enabling.

Unfortunately the only way to nerf Malygos to be acceptable for standard would be to shatter its identity. The card already costs near mana cap (costs 9, max is 10) and its stats don't matter much (it won't be fighting, it'll enable a combo kill). You can drastically reduce the spell damage boost it gives, but that'd make it far less unique. Malygos is the dragon of magic in wow lore, and having a huge spell damage boost to enable unique OTKs is what makes his extremely simple card special and worthy of legendary status.

By moving Malygos to the heavyweight division of hearthstone, the card still kept its identity in a format based more around extreme power and wild combos. To me this seems better for Malygos fans than creating a significantly nerfed version for standard.

Other cards are better to nerf because they don't remove as much design space and have more meaningful balance levers. A huge benefit of rotation is that it provides more tools, it doesn't remove existing ones. When we think nerfing a card will be better for players we can still nerf instead of rotate.

A good comparison from MTG is Vampire Hexmage. This card provides a cheap way to remove all "counters" from another card. It's a cool way to deal with certain types of cards like planeswalkers, which need counters for power. It can also be used to remove bad counters from your own cards, enabling some neat synergies.

However, as long as it exists it means you can't print any cards that would be broken if you could quickly remove all their counters. Dark Depths was an example from MTG. This land started with 10 counters and you had to pay 3 to remove each one. Once you'd removed all 10 for about 30 mana over various turns you got a 20/20 flying (elusive) indestructible creature.

Vampire Hexmage only cost 2 mana. With that combo you could pay 2 for that 20/20 instead.

Dark Depths/Vampire Hexmage became a powerhouse combo in many eternal formats but never caused any issues in standard. Why? Because the cards didn't exist within it at the same time. They both were minor curiosities in standard, letting them be used with the weaker synergies they were intended for, then form a cool new combo that could be played in the more powerful formats without breaking those formats. Older formats had access to powerful ways to answer the 20/20 that got around indestructible for just 1 mana. This kept it in check there.

I love the combo and I love that I got to play with it fairly in older formats rather than see Dark Depths nerfed once Hexmage came out.

Um, no. Malygos posed a threat to design sustainability in standard's lower power level - not wild's higher power level.

Any LoR cards that pose a threat to sustainability in all formats will need to be nerfed or reworked. We can and will still nerf, buff, and rework cards.

When I can preserve decks players enjoy I try to, even if it'd be easier for me to just nerf or rework them until they aren't something I need to worry about. :)

My pleasure. I know everyone here cares about the game and wants the best for it. We do too. I'm on vacation right now so I have extra time. :)

Thanks. I'm glad people care so much about LoR, I know the concerns come from a good place.

I think the point about some archetypes feeling as meaningful as rotating out a whole hearthstone class is a great point. It's easy to think of archetypes as fragments of classes, but because they're often based around champions they have a deeper identity than Hearthstone's archetypes do.

This is actually one reason I bring up Azir/Irelia so much. A lot of people love that deck (even though many others don't love playing against it) but it's problematic for restricting design space. If we need to free up room, how do we preserve the deck for players that love it? Would it be better to meganerf Irelia and her support cards until the deck isn't competitively viable, but keep it technically possible to play it on a standard ranked ladder? Or would it be better to keep the cards very similar but move it out of the standard format? Or better to redesign irelia so she no longer combos with Azir?

None of these solutions are perfect, but I think in this specific case rotating Irelia is the least disruptive. The other solutions threaten to break up the deck in both formats Rotating Irelia preserves it in one of the formats.

If this works well, we'll be able to create formats of two different power levels that give us more flexibility in preserving archetypes people enjoy without crowding out the other archetypes that others enjoy. It's easy to say that though. We'll have to see how it works in practice.

It's getting late and I want to make sure I can respond to some others too, so I just want to hit one part here: the assumption that Eternal is being set up to be abandoned. People in the community told me many times that Path of Champions was dead and never going to get anything more the moment we announced we were refocusing on pvp. So far we've more than doubled the number of new champions, run several path events, added procedural weekly adventures, new world adventures, and we aren't done yet.

Seeing the positive responses to each has encouraged us to do more whenever we find the time. And Path of Champions started because the original Lab of Legends got a lot of attention from players too. It was a small thing that grew big because players liked it.

If players play something and care about it, we notice.

Yes, this was a top point of feedback in the responses. We have a lot of tools at our disposal. Some people wrote that they'd love to see new versions of champions, such as version of Pyke that wasn't tied to Lurk and could be played in more decks. Some people said they wanted to visit their favorite champions in competitive occasionally, but didn't need to play with them all the time. Some people said they cared the most about the playstyle and mechanics, that the champion itself wasn't as big a deal. Some people said they were hyped to see new champions and original champions even more than one specific one.

This is a fantastic example. What game was this? I've seen similar things in many games but the nemesis region component makes me think I don't know this one.

It's worth noting that things do change tiers in Poke'mon too, and that there are many examples of competitive formats in Poke'mon happening focusing on different tiers!

I... May have been watching a lot of poke'mon competitive lately. It's so relaxing to do while I work on designs.

So far I've been focusing on the reasons that we can benefit from having two formats instead of one, which is largely about the differences in power level. However, we can absolutely rotate and unrotate things - and we will when we think that'll be the most fun.

I can't tell you exactly what the frequency of un-rotating will be though, because we'll be paying attention to what works best once we're live. It's a valuable tool in the toolbox but we're still planning to buff/nerf/rework alongside it as we always have; and we'll want to pay attention to what works best when it's live. I know I'll also be paying attention to how things go when eternal ranked mode is live vs when it isn't. Nothing is written in stone.

Part of our mission is to release things and iterate based on the gameplay data we get when it's live, as well as other feedback.

Sure thing. Vlad's problems are diving into a whole other wrinkle in all this, the tension of power related to region identity goals for standard vs more fluid region identity in eternal. Vlad's mechanical identity is awkward for our current vision for his region in standard and making him strong would cause problems within standard for that reason. Rotating him means we could buff him without causing problems to standard's region identity divisions.

Basically, Vlad isn't being rotated because he's too powerful. He's being rotated because making him strong would mess with region identity in his current design. We're interested in finding a new version for him (as discussed in part 1 of the article).

yes, absolutely this, for dedicated irelia players her current position of being "playable in ranked but on the weak side" is ABSOLUTELY preferable to "literally unplayable in standard ranked but maybe stronger in an unsupported format".

Just to be clear, her current position hasn't been mega-nerfed. She's just been nerfed, but is still a potential consideration in the format. She is still sharply restricting design space for token decks.

She would have to be nerfed way, way more to make her truly irrelevant in the competitive metagame. That's the point of mega-nerfing, to make something so weak it might as well not exist when it comes to competitive balance; so that the card is no longer restricting design space.

Eternal is definitely a place where stuff can be crazier than Standard, and I think it's better when two formats feel meaningfully different; so people that prefer different metagames can focus on their favorites. Can't comment on those cards specifically but the general style of "fun, exciting, unique engines that maybe are too swingy for the main competitive format" sounds like a good place for eternal to me. There's a lot of ways to approach it though, that's just one.

It's definitely subjective, and it matters on a card by card basis. I believe Malygos made more sense to rotate than significantly nerf (I didn't make the decision btw, I just agree with it) because by significantly nerfing him to solve the standard problems it no longer felt like Malygos.

It'd be like nerfing Black Lotus to be playable in standard MTG, it'd no longer feel like Black Lotus. Better to keep that in Vintage and make a new card.

Malygos was the big OTK dragon. Players using him would build up a hand of 0 cost spells that dealt tiny amounts of damage (like Moonfire, which cost 0 and dealt 1) then unleash them in a flurry the turn they played Malygos (+5 spell damage meant Moonfire now dealt 6!).

If he was nerfed from +5 spell damage to +2, or maybe +3 and 10 mana, then all the decks built around him would stop working; because they relied on his big spell damage to deliver crushing combo-kills. Nerfing him significantly would likely make him irrelevant in every format, undermine his identity, and break all the existing combo decks (since killing an opponent is key, half-killing them doesn't win the game).

That's just one example though. Other cards are better to nerf than rotate, when they can still preserve their identity and don't create big problems for the rest of the meta or other design values (for example we haven't talked about region identity or complexity bloat much, those are other topics but totally different).

We'll still nerf and rework problematic cards and keep them in standard when we think that's the better option. This is absolutely subjective but we'll do our best.

Great summary.

Just support self harm strategies in Noxus. Not like aggro can easily abuse them.

That's the problem. Supporting them in Noxus would mean either wildly overtuning Vladmir to work in ways that are weird for its region identity (which you mentioned being frustrating). It causes issues when we support self-harm strategies in Noxus.

Vladmir is a very awkward fit for Noxus and probably wouldn't be designed this way with the benefit of hindsight. Rotating and buffing to a more permissive eternal environment lets us solve the region identity issues by moving Vlad to a place where he can be stronger without causing the same problems. We're also considering new takes on Vlad (as mentioned in the first article) because of this for the future.

Thanks. I often like jumping around eternal formats in other games I've played for exactly this reason.

Severe nerfs can also break patterns you remember, such as heavily disrupting the mana curve. The Malygos example is actually great here, because significantly nerfing Malygos' spell damage would make the combo decks that people used to play with him non-functional. They'd no longer deal enough damage to kill the opponent. Heavily nerfing him so he was no longer competitively relevant in standard would mean massacring the decks his fans enjoyed.

why dont you make the lower power format secondary?

Very reasonable question. The main reason is because eternal is aimed at being a place to preserve the greatest hits and standard is a place to make room for cool new stuff. If the new stuff has to compete with the old stuff, that's the very problem we're trying to solve with rotation. We have to either powercreep the new or heavily nerf the old to make the new cards able to compete. This results in disrupting the old decks instead of preserving them and making synergy breaks happen more often because the new cards are ecalating in power level.

Yugioh's metagame over the years is an example of what happens. The game has changed to massive complexity and power spikes as players summon huge boards on turn 1 to try and lock their opponent out of destroying everything and insta-killing them on their own first turn.

We can also look at Modern Horizons sets for an example: many players of the Modern eternal format hate these sets that were designed to print new cards specifically for the Modern format; meaning they could be of higher power level. Most new sets of MTG barely affect modern because they're designed for standrd's lower power level. These were aimed specifically at affecting modern, not playable in standard. Many players thought they were cool but many more players hated them, they heavily disrupted the format's classic decks and resulted in extreme swings.

What's interesting is if you look at people complaining about the worst sets of various games in history, people complain about the super power-creep stuff for sure but they also complain about the sets that were incredibly weak (Homelands for example in mtg).

When people see new cards released, they want to play with them. They want those new cards to be worth playing competitively too, giving them new decks to try out while competing. Standard is a way to make room for the new because they don't have to compete with the old. By focusing on eternal as the main competitive mode, new cards would still have to compete directly with the old; which would put us back to square 1.

Thanks. I'm really excited too. I can't wait to make more cards to explore all the new design space that'll get freed up with rotation. :)

I believe Duelyst had quite a few other challenges and implemented rotation differently. Based on what they posted at the time, their issue was primarily a smaller population largely moving to unranked mode and making queue times on ranked too long. We're in a much healthier place.

It's also worth noting that many, many, many cardgames have introduced some form of rotation without the game dying. Players are always, and rightly, concerned when it's announced. I don't mean to say it's silly to be concerned, this is a big deal and it's about when and how you get to play your favorite cards. That matters a lot. I'm just noting that it's more like a routine surgery - things can go wrong but often the wisdom teeth come out and things go on well.

Duelyst implemented rotation in essentially the same way.

Their rotation was purely based on time in the meta, like MTG's and Hearthstone's, and involved different UI/UX that made a lot of people very confused. Duelyst was also dealing with such a low population that splitting queues was a much, much bigger problem. They couldn't support multiple formats in the same way.

There have been a lot of other card games with rotation, but they're all dead.

I'm not sure how to respond to this, because it seems you're assuming any cardgame that was discontinued after introducing a form of rotation as being *because* of rotation. That just doesn't match the stuff I know from talking to the companies and looking at the data. Lots of card games that didn't introduce rotation were also cancelled.

But you already are saying that youre gonna support eternal. And that its not an issue if there are stronger interactions in Eternal because its a higher power format. That suggests that doing cool new stuff is entirely possible in Eternal, because otherwise you cant solve the problem rotation is claiming to solve without making Eternal unsupported, no?

It's totally possible to make the new cards we print better than the old cards, but it eventually requires power creeping them a lot like Yugioh does, or mega-nerfing old stuff so it might as well not exist when it comes to the metagame.

While it might be easier for us as devs, we think the power creep version would warp the competitive metagame while the mega-nerf version would make past decks effectively unplayable everywhere - instead of having a dedicated format.

Eternal is already the focused competitive mode. We're already playing eternal. Eternal is what's legal in the game right now. If you go play ranked ladder, you're playing Eternal. All cards are legal, there's no rotation list.

We know the problems that designing for Eternal causes because that's the only format we've designed for this whole time. This isn't speculative, it's the current state of design.

TLDR: Eternal is currently the main competitive format, because all cards are legal in the game right now. This makes it harder and harder with each release to make new cards meta-relevant, and players generally like it when new cards are worth playing competitively. There's only so much room at the top of the meta, so new cards being meta-relevant means they need to seriously power-creep or we need to nerf old stuff into irrelvance.
If we keep eternal the main format we don't actually solve those problems. By introducing standard as the main competitive format, we can remove cards that restrict design space in standard. Eternal will likely change more slowly in the future, which is fine - because new decks don't have to shake up its metagame.

Yeah I suppose the pool selection thing is fair. The UI was not the issue though. And splitting the queues was ... not exactly an issue? They undid rotation nearly immediately, so the queues were unsplit, but the game still died.

I saw a ton of people confused about the UI at the time, it wasn't a deal-breaker but it's worth noting. A lot of people didn't know how to make standard decks in the first place, people frequently got rewards they couldn't use in standard when they didn't have many standard options already (we're taking steps to ensure new players build up reasonable standard collections quickly), and the devs did list the queue-splitting as the major concern if I recall correctly. I wan't a big duelyst player though, just going off my general knowledge - I try to keep track of most games.

The queue issue is almost always a big concern with smaller indie titles though, when working on Faeria (an indie pvp cardgame that was also played on a board) we had a lot of cool ideas for alternate modes but we always ran into the issue of splitting the queues with our small population.

Games with populations over a certain size don't run into the issue. Games without it get into a death spiral because waiting too long for a good match means fewer people queue up. To use extreme examples: Going from 5 seconds to 10 seconds is not a big deal. Pretty much nobody minds, most barely notice.

Going from 1 minute to 2 minutes becomes a bigger deal and some quit. This makes the quees go to 2:30, then more quit. Then 3 and... You get the idea. We did a lot of analysis on queue times based on our population and we don't think we'll run into this problem. Our population is much healthier.

We could always be wrong, I can't predict the future, but if we didn't strongly believe that rotation was going to be a net positive for the long term sustainability of the game it'd be the easiest decision in the world not to do it. It's much scarier to risk angering your most dedicated players because you believe it's ultimately the best direction.

We all want LoR to be a great game for years to come. It matters to players for obvious reasons, and I hope it's also obvious why we care about it as devs. We play as well of course, I joined LoR because I wanted to keep thinking about it all day. Now it's not just my hobby, it's also my job to be a good steward of the game. It matters to me on every level.

Oh certainly, but the key difference is, I cant name a single card game with rotation that didn't die that was made since 2000. I can name like 10 without rotation.

Which ones are you thinking of? I can name a few but most of them have very different circumstances or accept different tradeoffs that we think are net negative for players.

It's also worth noting that most games have some form of ban-list over time. Our rotation format works more like a ban-list in an eternal format than an automated rotation based on time. Yugioh also has a banlist for example, and things rotate on and off it. We're planning on rotating larger numbers of cards than most ban-lists though to clean up various design issues, so calling it a banlist felt a bit misleading.

My issue with the Tl;Dr, is that if that logic was true, you could apply it to rotation as well, and it would lead to the same outcome. If you have to powercreep without rotation, you have to powercreep withrotation just as much.

I'm not sure how else to explain why this isn't the case, because the reason you need to power creep is to make sure new stuff can compete against the best stuff across the history of the game. If you aren't competing against that stuff because it's rotated out, you don't need to power creep.

Compare MTG to Yugioh. In yugioh the community created older formats that banned *newer* cards because the older decks and playstyles they enjoyed couldn't compete with the escalating power creep of new stuff. GOAT format is an example.

Let's say you're a designer for MTG. You need to make cards that are competitive-worthy in standard. This means you can print burn spells that aren't as strong as lightning bolt and counterspells that aren't as strong as mana drain or force of will and expect that players might play them.

These cards and decks often don't show up at all in Legacy and Vintage. If you wanted to make decks that were as powerful as the strongest decks from the history of the game, able to disrupt the vintage and legacy metagames, you'd have to power-creep and make stuff worth playing *instead* of force of will, mana drain, lightning bolt, etc.

If you print a worse lightning bolt, I'm just going to play lightning bolt. You need to make a card that I'd rather play instead of lightning bolt if you want me to play it in vintage or legacy. Assuming I care about winning a competitive mode, as many competitive players do.

To do this: You can either release cards/archetypes that are stronger than lightning bolt, or you can retroactively nerf cards that people already invested in until they're no longer meta relevant. Both result in power creep, but the nerf version is like a retroactive power creep (retroactively making old cards weaker than new cards, which is what power creep results in). The mass nerfs are more sustainable overall, but they also mean people can't play their old decks in any format in a way they remember.

Nerfs are sometimes the best tool but using them as the main tool for solving rotation problems is often not a good idea. The Malygos example from Hearthstone shows why, because mega-nerfing that card would destroy its identity and stop decks built around it from working entirely (they need to do a certain amount of spell damage to win). It was better for players to move it to a higher power format and free up room for lower power synergies in standard.

This is why yugioh players created older formats that banned new cards, because they wanted to resist the power creep that becomes necessary when the average new deck has to be as strong as the best decks ever in order to be worth playing on the competitive ladder.

But thats the thing. If this logic was true, the stuff that rotates out would already long have been powercrept.

No, it wouldn't - because power creeping is a tactic to accomplish a goal given a specific problem. If the goal is to make the average new deck better than the best decks from the whole game; you end up power creeping.

If you have a 9/10 eternal format the new cards need to be 9.1 on average to be playable. This rasises the average of the entire game over time. The next cards need to be 9.2 to outdo the previous 9.1 cards.

If you rotate, things are more sustainable. The best cards or the ones that restrict the most future design space can be rotated out of standard, meaning that the power level stays relatively stable. It fluctuates certainly but it can be brought down when it starts to get out of control.

Basically, it's much easier to create a diverse metagame where everything new has a niche in the compeittive ecosystem when there aren't as many cards. This is why games don't usually launch with rotation, they aren't needed until there's a certain amount of cards in the game. Until then you can often diversify with ecosystem archetypes.

In ecosystems there are predators and prey. Introducing a new predator can undermine a healthy ecosystem. In Faeria for example, some decks were good and fun against most decks but got destroyed by the very popular decks that benefitted whenever an opponent's creature died. If the "sadist" deck (benefits from killing enemies) were tier 1 or even tier 2, the self-sacrifice decks couldn't be. We'd have to buff them so much to be good against the tier 1 sadist decks that they'd destroy other decks that weren't hard-countering them.

This would severely narrow the metagame; because the sacrifice deck would be so powerful overall to compete with its predator that it'd be the best deck against everything else. Sadist decks would still be played because they could barely beat the sacrifice decks, but not so much that the deck was unplayable. Another deck that was good against Sadist decks would emerge for a RPS relationship of three major decks.

Sadist decks are fun to play for many players in faeria, and so re sacrifice decks. However, having both be tier 1 in the meta would be extremely problematic and format warping. They restrict each-other's space. The more decks you create, the more you run into this issue. Just like new prey species can't survive in ecosystems with certain predators, and introducing a new predator species can overrun an existing ecosystem (hence harsh rules on international animal import laws).

Rotation is a way to ensure different archetypes have time to shine. Many archetypes have no niche in eternal formats but can absolutely carve one out in a smaller format. Don't take my word for it, look at how different the decks are in MTG's standard vs legacy.

Also shoutout to awesome youtube channel tierzoo which takes this metaphor and runs with it.

Thats ... not why those formats exist. Im sorry to say, but it sounds like youre not familiar with YGO at all, and are basically speaking from the stuff you hear around in the public conversation which is usually extremely far from accurate.

Yes, all fan-created formats exist because some players like the formats. The question is why. Some players like it because they want to play an older metagame without disruption from powerful new cards that change that metagame. They often prefer it to the pace of modern yugioh. Some prefer it out of nostalgia. Some prefer the pace of the old game more than the new power-crept game.

The point is that they create a format where people are not allowed to play with some of the cards. No one has to play with or against link summons because link summons are not legal in that format. The cards don't have to compete against the new decks.

No example is going to be identical to LoR, but the point is the same: Yugioh's addition of new cards severely changed the game over time and many players find the modern game unrecognizable compared to the style they liked growing up. Yugioh doesn't have rotation so it uses extreme power creep. This led to the community exploring their own lower power formats, or preserving time capsules of older formats they preferred.

I think I've made my point as clear as I can. It seems like there's a miscommunication somewhere and I don't know how to fix it. It seems like you keep saying that new cards have to compete against rotated cards in the standard format no matter what - but I don't understand why.

They technically have to compete in eternal formats but they don't have to *win* the competition in eternal formats.

Standard gives them a place to shine, so they don't all need to shine in eternal. The creation of a standard format means that standard cards don't have to be playable in eternal in order to be competitively relevant. That's the point, giving them a place to be competitively relevant without demanding they be relevant everywhere.

MTG designers don't have to make new burn spells compete with lightning bolt, or new standard decks compete against legacy's best decks. This solves a whole lot of problems. Making Eternal the main focus of competition would mean that the problems don't get solved, because new cards would still have to *win* the competition with old cards to be competitivelyrelevant.

I feel like I've already spent a lot of time trying to explain this, and it's okay if you don't agree but I feel like I keep repeating the same points. I'm giving examples from games I've worked on, tried iterations on, and playtested different meta environments. I feel like you're often telling me that things I experienced can't possibly have happened because of flaws in theory, but it's not just theory - it's drawn from games I've worked on and games my co-workers have too.

We also have people on our team, both now and when standard was first proposed, that were WOTC veterans as well as veteran designers or pro players of various cardgames.

That doesn't mean we're always going to be right, we definitely won't be, designers make mistakes all the time, but we have the benefit of seeing some more data and trying to solve the design and balance problems that we're talking about both with and without rotation. It's not hypothetical to us, we've designed within these environments.

It's hard for players because you don't see the many designs we kill because of these issues. You don't see the problems behind the scenes that come from them, or the nerfs we believe would be required to kill older archetypes like sadist in faeria.

There are reasons that a rotating pool of cards can be kept more sustainable overall while still ensuring new cards are competitively relevant, without power-creepign the game overall. This is largely due to a complex balance of the competitive ecosystem, as a deck might be weaker overall but strong if it performs a valuable meta-role. There are also techniques like the "endless staircase" where certain effects get stronger over multiple releases then rotate out, shifting the strength to different things at different times. But going through all that would require writing half a dozen articles at least. A lot of it requires doing the design work to really see the ripple effects in action too.

I've tried my best to explain the core, and I hope it's clear that the only reason we'd risk doing something that seems as unpopular as rotation is because we genuinely believe it's the best solution for the long term health of the game, to make the best competitive experience in any card game out there. We don't just want to make a competitive cardgame that limps along without breaking too hard, we want to build the best possible environment.

If we thought that not doing rotation was better, then not doing rotation would be the easiest thing in the world. We wouldn't have to do the engineering or UI work to build it. We wouldn't have to upset passionate and dedicated players at the prospect of it. I wouldn't be spending hours answering questions about it during my vacation either.

I understand you don't agree, and I respect that. Hopefully it's clear that we aren't doing this just because we're lazy or don't care about the game's success. We're taking a less popular approach because we have repeatedly run into problems that we haven't run into when working on games with rotating pools, and have run into when working on games that don't rotate.

First of all, YGOs powercreep doesnt even hold a candle to HS' powercreep.

I was going to make my last reply my, well, last reply but this caught my eye and may explain some of the reasons we have such different perspectives. I think we might have very definitions of power creep.

The standard-legal decks from Hearthstone today seem much more similar in power level than the best decks from 2014 when it launched than the best decks in Yugioh do to the best decks from 2014.

If we compare the first 8 years of each game, comparing the decks of 2010 yugioh to the 2002 release is also a substantial differnece. Gladiator beasts, synchros, etc are huge spikes in power compared to summoned skull beatdown.

This doesn't factor in occasional broken outliers in various formats when some deck is WAY stronger than intended, as opposed to intentional and necessary power creep in eternal-focused competitive environments. Accidents are accidents, we're talking about necessities. Accidents lead to bans or nerfs, because something was much stronger than *intended*. It's not the same thing as power creep. After all, every standard MTG format for about 20 years has been weaker than the insanity of the Urza's Saga block - during which people joked that turn 1 was the "midgame". Likewise, pot of greed was going to have to get put on the banned, limited, or semi-limited list for the eternal format in yugioh even if it had rotation.

In any case, I'm going to have to stop here. It's been an engaging conversation and I hope I provided some new context.

I always like checking out new cardgames. I'll see if I can dig up some info on it. Thanks. :)

Hearthstone’s wild format has some similarities but because that game is designed differently and the rotation mostly happens automatically based on time the results are very different. Malygos from hearthstone is just a good example because it was rotated manually from the non rotating clsssic set to the wild format which is a similar situation.

I’m not sure which eternal formal will be the closest to LoR’s from another game? Because the unique cards and properties of each change things a lot.