Legends of Runeterra – Unlocking lots of Champions!

I’ve been playing a bunch of LoR as of late and I’ve been super excited about the new addition of Seraphine… and thus, I want to create a few decks with her, including a Victor-Sera deck as well as a Teemo-Sera deck (maybe?). Could be a lot of fun.

But as it’s always the case in these online card games, getting the materials necessary to create your favourite decks or desired archetypes is a bit of a challenge. In fact, a lot of it can feel grindy but it’s not as frustrating as it’s in other games since you can’t pay money for cards, meaning that Legends of Runeterra stays free-to-play, effectively.

Anyway, I’ve been playing a lot as of late and wanted to write a little bit on a few things I’m doing to unlock all (or most of) the champions. Figured this might be useful to other people.

Legends of Runeterra’s Crafting System explained

For starters, to craft cards, you’ll either need “shards” or wild cards.

These can be found in the chest you gain through the battle passes or the weekly vault (more on both of these later) and they essentially allow you to create any card you don’t have a full set of.

A full set of cards consists of three cards, meaning that you can only have three of them in total… and each of your decks can only feature three copies of any given card.

Either way, wilds cards are the easy way to create cards while shards are a bit more grindy/expensive, thus here is a list of the rarities:

Common Cards (Green): You’ll find these the most in your vaults, loot and region passes. Common cards require 100 shards to be crafted.
Rare Cards (Blue): These are less common but more powerful than the green ones and cost 300 shards to be crafted.
Epic Cards (Purple): These are even rarer and often more powerful than other cards but they also cost 1200 shards.
Champion Cards (Orange): Champions determine the main mechanics of the game and have unique mechanics based on what archetype you’re playing. You can only have a total of six of these in your deck of 40 cards, meaning you can run two full sets of champions or mix it up. Either way, these cost 3000 shards to be crafted.

To craft cards, you’ll simply head into the “Collection” tab of your game. If you import a deck, you can also use the cards you’re missing as a guide to what you’re needing next.

Progression in Legends of Runeterra

As previously mentioned, you have these “battle passes” in the game, one for each region. These are available for free to anyone in the game and can be checked out in the game’s “Rewards” tab. There you need to activate any given region’s pass to get level it up.

By levelling up your different regions, you’ll unlock a bunch of wild cards, shards and even specific cards. The catch here is that if you already own a full set of a card that you would have gotten, you instead gain shards appropriate to its value – which is incredibly neat!

Hence, I’ve been doing these two things as of late and they helped me a lot in terms of unlocking new cards:

Level up each region to at least Level 8.
Craft up a lot of Common cards.

The Importance of Level <8

So, by levelling up each region to level 8, you gain a lot of goodies already… but the reason you stop at Level 8 is that it gets harder and harder to progress as you move on… and Level 8 awards you champions, already, so that’s pretty great.

Furthermore, you have a 50% experience boost to the first 50-ish levels of each pass, meaning that once you levelled every region to level 8, you can simply focus on one region whose archetype you’ve enjoyed the most and get that maxed out or to a decent level… and then you switch it up later.

Shard Manipulation Shenanigans

By crafting up a lot of Common cards, though, I can sort of guarantee that I’ll get shards in any given region’s pass. The important bit here is that I use Wild Cards to craft the Common ones I’m using and shards to craft Champions.

Thus, I can bank up on shards rather quickly… ever since I’ve been doing this, I’ve gotten two Norras, two Victors, and three Seraphines, rather easily.

Events

During events, there is an extra “Event Pass” that you can buy in theory to gain even more experience… but this one’s a paid battle pass that costs roughly ten bucks and it’s mostly good for cosmetics and stuff… and only if you play a lot of LoR.

There are some free tiers here and there, though, that can give you extra materials and cards from time to time, so I’d recommend checking in whenever you have something available for claiming in there.

The Weekly Vault

The Weekly Vault is another mechanic that further incentivises the player to play more Legends of Runeterra by rewarding them weekly with ever-increasing rewards!

Simply play the game and get experience towards both your passes and your weekly vault. On Thursdays, the Vault then opens up, meaning you can grab even more Wild Cards, Cards and Shards through it! Neat!

As you gather experience, your vault opens up, increasing the rewards included within, meaning that you can get a whole lot of very great resources as you move on and simply play the game!

Daily Rewards: Quests and Bonus Experience

Every day, you also gain quests and rerolls. These will grant you a whole lot of experience on completion, meaning that you, again, can level up your passes and weekly vaults faster, again, gaining more rewards.

What’s important here is that you don’t have to do specific quests if you don’t want to. Utilize your rerolls! Holding on to them never really pays off. It’s much better if you play something that you’re good at or have fun with to then complete the missions with.

So, reroll stuff you don’t like and do the quests or pay attention to what your decks demand.

The other system here is your daily experience bonus: Every day, your first three wins award you more experience.

Your first win yields +400 experience, your second one +200 exp, and your third one grants you another 100 extra experience. Afterwards, you only gain 100 experience per win.

Similarly, you get some amount of extra experience when you lose… but if you go on a losing streak, you won’t gain any experience really quickly. This prevents people from spamming the surrender button “to cheat the system”. At the same time, the quality of the game increases this way, which is frankly great.

The point here is that there isn’t much benefit to playing past those few extra wins.

I mean, it’s good to play more but three wins here paired with the quests are plenty to level up your weekly vault to level 10 in no time each week.

Path of Champions, Gauntlets, Challenges and other Modes

At last, this one’s an odd one but… you can gain experience through all sorts of different modes in the game.

Primarily, I’d recommend playing the “Challenges”. These explain the game mechanics and pretty darn great for game knowledge… but also experience. They’re quick and award you an extra 100 experience points, once, on completion – which is really great!

The Gauntlets are sort of like tournaments and can be a fun time. Similarly, there is the Lab as well where you play with new rules… Drafting allows you to try a new deck after building it out randomly out of a few options.

But I highly recommend also checking out the “Path of Champions” mode. It’s basically the same as Legends of Runeterra but as a roguelike… Select a champion, create cool synergies, draft cards, and win the game! It’s a lot of fun and honestly, incredibly insane in terms of synergies that are possible and whatnot. Also, you gain experience through it. Yay!

Conclusion

Legends of Runeterra is a free-to-play title through and through. At times, it can feel grindy but once you know what you’re doing, you can gain lots and lots of cards in no time at all, which is amazing!

I hope this post helps any newcomers and returning players alike! I’ve returned somewhat recently to LoR myself… and frankly, I’ve never enjoyed myself more with an online card game.

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.