Today, I wanted to share a deck that I’ve really been enjoying as of late in Legends of Runeterra: Tempo Landmarks!
So, first, I’ll get into what the cards do and what you want to try to accomplish with this deck. Then I’ll explain different win-conditions. Then I’ll get into the weaknesses that this deck has. Hope you enjoy this one!
Credit
Having only somewhat recently gotten back into Runeterra, I naturally haven’t had the chance yet to build too many decks myself. This deck in particular is amazing – which means that I didn’t come up with it.
I actually found this deck on an amazing LoR channel on YouTube named Snnuy! Snnuy knows a lot of things about the game, has been playing it for ages, and is a lot of fun to watch overall, so I’d highly recommend checking him out if you haven’t yet!
Here’s the video on this particular deck:
Tempo-whatnow?
A “tempo deck” in card games like Legends of Runeterra is a deck that is all about building up momentum/tempo by creating an impactful board, outpacing enemies by stopping their more powerful cards, or by creating a mana advantage.
When you play 4 mana to deal with a 5-mana card, you essentially end up at an advantage. By playing cards that further your deck-mechanics (in this case, summoning and destroying landmarks) while also dealing with the enemy’s board, you basically build up steam as you move on before you eventually burst down the enemies with strong units and lots of ways to deal with whatever they throw your way.
One of the issues that this deck has is that when you don’t draw your cards or when you don’t get to outpace the enemy, you’re screwed. As easy as that… but I still managed to get some incredibly satisfying wins out of this one, so I’m happy to share it with others!
The Deck
Ziggs-Taliyah is a great combo that synergizes incredibly well with each other. Ziggs needs to level by destroying (4) landmarks. Taliyah levels up by summoning (5) landmarks. Taliyah herself also is able to copy one landmark on the board, giving you a bunch of options to further increase your tempo!
As for landmarks, this deck runs one “Ancient Preparations”, two “Hexplosive Minefields” and 3 “Preservariums”.
Ancient Preparations is a 1-mana landmark that lets you predict (place one of three cards on top of your draw pile). On top of that, it summons a Clockling (2/2) after two turns and gets destroyed.
Hexplosive Minefield stuns the strongest enemy when summoned or when it’s destroyed.
The Preservarium lets you draw a card when it’s summoned and another one after two turns after which it’s destroyed.
As per the units, the deck is a bit on the cheaper side with not all that many high-cost units.
The Inventive Chemist (2/1) summons a Scrappy Bomb (deal 1 damage to the enemy nexus after 3 turns) landmark when it’s summoned.
The Rock Hopper (3/1) summons a Roiling Sands (When an enemy unit is summoned, give it Vulnerable and destroy me) landmark upon summon.
The Endless Devout (3/3) summons a Sarcophagus when it dies aka another landmark that after three turns (or when destroyed) summons a 5/3 Fearsome unit.
The other units are sort of part of your win conditions…
Herald of the Magus (4/4) grants all champions (everywhere) +2/+2 and Overwhelm when it’s summoned if you’ve destroyed 4+ allied landmarks. This makes it so that your Ziggs and Taliyah can close out games a lot better, especially with an Absolver or Unleashed Energy in hand!
The Safety Inspectors (5/5) create “Inspection Passed!” in hands whenever a round starts, meaning you can destroy an allied landmark to deal damage to anything.
The Arsenal (9/7) gains a random keyword for each allied landmark that was destroyed or is destroyed this game. This one can become a huge power house, especially when it gets Fury, Elusive, Regeneration, Augment, Overwhelm or Scout. It’s a strong unit but it can also brick your han quite badly.
And well, the spells are mostly there to negate strength from enemies while also creating strength on your board.
Drop the Bomb summons a Scrappy Bomb and deals 2 damage to a unit. Pokey Stick lets you draw a card and deal 1 damage to anything. Ancient Hourglass summons a landmark with one of your units saved inside which can be incredibly useful to preserve units and even more powerful when you copy it with Taliyah. At the same time, Quicksand, Rite of the Arcane and Rite of Negation allow you to control the battlefield. Unraveled Earth lets you draw cards and summon Roiling Sands.
The important bits here are The Absolver as well as Unleashed Energy! These cards are incredibly powerful to finish fights very quickly, creating practically burst-speed lethals with Ziggs and Taliyah!
Speaking of which:
Ziggs deals damage to the enemy nexus and his blocker when attacking – and also deals damage to the enemy nexus when a landmark is destroyed.
Taliyah, on the other hand, does something similar to that in that she deals 2 damage to her blocker three times – if the blocker is dead/gone, she does it to the nexus instead.
Pair these abilities with Overwhelm from Herald of the Magus and the bonus stats from Unleashed Energy, The Absolver, and other effects… and you’re looking at a great win right there!
Deck Code
CQBQEBIKJGRQCAQFA4DQWAYEA4GSMSIDAEDAUJYCAQDSLCQBAMCQUG5GAHKACAYBAUFAMAQFA4CBCBAEA4ODWTDN
How do you play this deck?
Generally speaking, you’ll want to have a steady curve early on. Inventive Chemists, Rock Hoppers and Endless Devouts help a lot with that, giving you lots of strength for relatively low mana costs. Levelling Ziggs and Taliyah goes really easily if you have these three in your hand.
Using the landmarks and spells like Unraveled Earth and Drop the Bomb, you can easily create and destroy enough landmarks to level your champions – but you also run the risk of flooding your board and missing out on more strength. Hence, be patient and aware of this issue. You don’t want to toss the landmark that Taliyah copies into the void.
Also, you want Endless Devout to die. That will spawn the Sarcophagus – which then results in a fearsome unit with 5 attack relatively early on… It’s great! This can give you some fast wins, especially with Taliyah who (again) copies landmarks.
The safest way to win is by getting Absolver active. When you’ve leveled up at least one of your champions, Absolver gives you two spells on activation that add a lot of stats to your units at burst speed and overwhelm! This means that you can deal A LOT of damage in one single attack with Taliyah, Ziggs and maybe another unit (i.e. Arsenal).
Weaknesses
As mentioned earlier, you have to be aware of your board space and how many units and landmarks you summon.
The other thing is that your Inventive Chemists and Rock Hoppers are quite frail. You may end up with a hard time against Shadow Isles or Bandle City decks. Yes, you can use Rite of Negation to block a spell or you may use Unleashed Energy or The Absolver to deal with immediate threats but these three spells sort of are your safety net if other win conditions don’t work, so I’d suggest really wagering whether or not saving a unit is worth it in some instances.
Apart from that, your hand can brick quite easily with Unleashed Energy (a card that doesn’t really do much until late into the game), the Rites, Safety Inspector, Herald, or The Arsenal. You really want to get a good mulligan early on if you don’t see your 1-drops, 2-drops or 3-drops in hand.
It’s all about the pacing and tempo, building up an advantage. This isn’t aggro but it can deal quite well with aggro in my experience.
Conclusion
Tempo Landmarks is a fun deck that I’ve been enjoying a lot, particularly because of how reactive the combos are and how many options you have to play specific match-ups or rounds. You can consistently level your champions and I haven’t had too many games where early bricks mattered.
I hope you enjoyed this small “deck guide”. I like making posts like this. If you’d like to see more like this, let me know!
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.
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