New Expansion – Rise of the Underworld
What lurks in the depths of Legends of Runeterra’s newest expansion? Let’s hope you don’t find out the hard way… Rise of the Underworlds introduces a new keyword – Lurk – as well as 43 new cards, including three new champions – Ekko, Pyke, and Rek’sai.
Rise of the Underworlds arrives in patch 2.11.0, which will be playable at approximately 11AM PT, June 30.
New Cards
Over the past week, we’ve been revealing all of the cards being added in Rise of the Underworlds. Head to one of the galleries below to get the full list of new cards, and start your theorycrafting!
New Keyword – Lurk
In Rise of the Underworlds, you’ll encounter creatures unlike anything seen in Runeterra as you know it. Our newest keyword – Lurk – powers up new Lurker followers anywhere with +1|+0 if you attack with allies while one lurks on top of your deck. Some Lurkers have powerful bonus effects when Lurk activates for them as well. If you plan on playing with Lurkers, think ahead; you’ll need to be able to predict what’s on top of your deck to use them effectively…
New Challenges
A new challenge – Beneath the Surface – has been added to introduce Lurkers and the new Lurk keyword.
Card Updates
Hi everyone,
With the release of Rise of the Underworlds, we are also including a large list of live card updates. The scope of changes in this update is much larger than past live design updates, because we’ve packaged together a number of live design opportunities that we’ve identified over time. The changes below will provide us with a better foundation to make live changes in the future. We’ll be back as soon as we have an updated philosophy of how we’re going to make these changes in a way that is sustainable, true to our values, and will hopefully keep the metagame fresh. We’ll share our plans as they develop to give everyone a solid understanding of the cadence and size of future balance updates. Legends of Runeterra has changed and grown quite a lot since we launched, so please bear with us while we continue to develop and iterate on live design!
Note for 2.11.0 live updates:
Due to the large number of changes, we won’t be providing context for each change like we usually do. Instead, we’ll share our goals and philosophies that guided us leading to these changes.
- Targeting the top – Irelia/Azir, Nasus/Thresh, Trundle/Lissandra, and Draven decks:
Any changes we consider for other cards would be largely overshadowed with the current power level of the top decks. We want to tone down each of these decks to allow room for other strategies, but not go so far to completely remove them from the metagame. We want the decks to exist without dominating. - Considering what’s next:
Similar to the first goal, we want to consider what decks are currently strong, but maybe not popular that would likely replace the current top decks. We want to avoid simply replacing one dominant strategy with another. There will always be decks that perform better than others, but we want there to be a high variety in popular decks and ensure the gap between the best decks isn’t too large. - Focusing on region identities:
We want these changes to help emphasize the identity, strengths, and weaknesses we target for each region. Some regions have drifted away from their intended strengths and weaknesses over time. For example, buffing Ionia’s flexibility with combat tricks and recall, buffing Bilgewater’s incidental damage or big bets with bigger payoffs, and some nerfs to Targon to have more pronounced weaknesses rather than being good at everything. - All regions can perform:
As the popular decks evolve and change there will naturally be some regions that are more popular than others. However, we don’t want any region to feel far less fun or powerful than the others. Specifically, we wanted to buff at least 1 champion in each region and ensure all regions had at least 3 cards receive a buff.
The future:
We have several releases of new cards coming in a short amount of time.
- 2.11.0 – Rise of the Underworlds
- 2.12.0 – Summer Event release
- 2.14.0 – Next Set release
New card releases tend to have a big impact on deck popularity. In general, we try to avoid doing many live design updates alongside new cards, because the changes are usually overshadowed by the new cards. Due to the size of this live design update with Rise of the Underworlds, we will be closely monitoring the impact of our changes and try to respond very quickly if we aren’t hitting our goals. If we aren’t seeing the desired outcome from the changes in 2.11, then we may introduce more changes in 2.12, but our hope is that further changes won’t be needed quite so quickly to maintain a fun, diverse, and healthy meta.
Our game is constantly changing and the landscape of popular decks is always evolving. We are making this game together with you all and value your feedback to help us make the game as fun as possible. We hope that you are as excited as we are about the future of Legends of Runeterra!
- Dovagedys, Davetron, Bokurp, Careless Whisper, and RubinZoo
Champions
Followers, Spells, and Landmarks
Region Road Updates
- Shurima, Piltover & Zaun, and Bilgewater’s Region Roads have been extended by 4 levels each to coincide with the release of their new champions.
Labs Updates
Lab of Legends has been updated with new selectable champions:
- Ekko, Pyke, Rek’sai, Swain, and Shyvana have been added as selectable champions in Lab of Legends.
Prologue Update
This patch brings a big update to the prologue – the part of a new player’s journey that happens after the first 4 tutorial games and guides them until they unlock the region reward roads.
A lot has been added to Legends of Runeterra in the year since launch, and even before then the early game could be tough for people not familiar with card games. To help new players find the fun of LoR, we’ve updated the prologue with three guiding principles:
- Unlocking modes step by step – there are a lot of modes in LOR now, many of them expecting a more advanced understanding of the game (I wouldn’t suggest Ultra Rapid Draw for your 2nd game ever). The new prologue introduces the modes in a more structured way, so players can practice VS AI, use Challenges to learn, then unlock PVP before finishing with the rest of the competitive and advanced modes. It’s still a quick journey to unlock everything, but it’s not all at once right from the start.
Current players who’ve already completed at least step 2 of the prior prologue will have every mode unlocked, so you won’t see any changes! - Improve the pace of progress – The update utilizes introductory quests that award XP, win or lose, so everyone makes progress and keeps a good pace towards the next reward.
- More deck rewards – LoR has a lot more cards now than it did at launch, and we want new players to be able to try a variety of playstyles early on to find what they enjoy. We’ve added 4 additional complete decks as rewards into the prologue, and fewer random card capsules, so players will end the prologue with a total of 7 different starter decks. A discounted A Watery Grave deck is also available in the Store designed for new players who want to explore more options.
Current players will also get all of the new decks in their Loot inbox, if you don’t have the cards already. If you already own 3 copies of each card, you’ll still get the decklists in your deck collection (if you have the space for them against the 50 deck limit).
Personalization
The following personalization items are available in the Store.
Champion Skins
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Sandstorm Ekko
Alternate art
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Sand Wraith Pyke
Alternate art
Boards
Sunken Shipyard
For legends who hunger for vengeance.
This board has special visual effects and music.
Card Backs
The Bloodharbor Ripper
The Void Burrower
Emotes
Unlucky
“Can I get a do-over?”
This Right Here
Absolutely.
None of That
Just… no.
Bundles
The Curse of the Deep bundle is available in the Store for 2403 Coins, prorated for any items you already own. Bundle includes:
- Sunken Shipyard Board
- The Bloodharbor Ripper Card Back
- Unlucky Emote
- Sand Wraith Pyke Champion Skin
- Pyke Champion Card
- Exclusive The Bloodharbor Ripper Icon
Deck Bundles
The Dueling Timelines deck bundle is available in the Store for 3173 Coins, prorated for any items you already own. Bundle includes:
- A premade deck centering around Ekko and Zilean, as well as the Sandstorm Ekko champion skin and Ekko emotes! who take the future into their own hands. Double down on Predict and set up combos, examining all the possible timelines before making your move.
Expeditions
For the release of Rise of the Underworlds, we’re adding seven new archetypes to the Expeditions pool, featuring the new champions and strategies highlighted in this expansion, and new cards have been added to existing archetypes as well. Additionally, all archetypes from Empires of the Ascended and Guardian of the Ancients have had their offering bonuses normalized:
- TIME LORDS: Zilean and Ekko manipulate the future with Predict to enable big combos.
- PREDICT LURKERS: Manipulate your deck with Ekko and Predict to enable Pyke and Lurker combos.
- LURKERS: Rek’Sai, Pyke, and sharks lurking in you deck grow increasingly deadly with each attack.
- OPPORTUNITY ATTACKS: Use Irelia and Blade Dance along with Miss Fortune to trigger Plunder effects.
- SAND AND ASHES: Azir and Hecarim swam your enemy with ephemeral units.
- BRUTALITY: Kindred and LeBlanc use strikes and kill effects to decimate your foe!
- VULNERABLE: Renekton and Miss Fortune use Vulnerable to enable devastating attacks!
Rise of the Underworlds archetypes will temporarily be four times as likely as they would otherwise be to appear in the initial Champion Picks. We’ll even out these chances in a later patch
Bugfixes
- Fixed a bug where players were unable to select a unit when summoning a Predict unit from Concurrent Timeline’s effect & skipping that prediction.
- Fixed a bug where “everywhere” buffs wouldn’t apply to captured units.
- Shadowshift should now summon a Living Shadow in the correct combat slot.
- Fixed a bug where Taric would infinitely copy Golden Aegis’ Rally effect on allies.
- Chirean Sumpworker’s transform ability should now affect Chirean Sumpworkers that have been discarded, are on the board, or have been killed.
- Casting Iterative Improvement on an enemy Chirean Sumpworker should now create a Chirean Sumpworker in hand.
- Champion spells should no longer appear as their unit cards in the action log.
- Chief Mechanist Zevi should no longer give herself Fleeting when drawn from the player’s deck.
- Fixed an issue that caused players to be incorrectly flagged as AFK after summoning a unit immediately before the turn timer ends.
- Rimefang Wolf should now trigger Siphoning Strike’s buff effect when killing an enemy with its ability.
- Fixed an issue that enabled Rimefang Wolf’s strike ability to kill Tryndamere twice.