![]() ![]() Aside from Ionia, Shadow Isles is generally considered the faction closest to being "OP", and a lot of the blame for that is laid at the feet of Elise.Call of the Mountain also saw the first instance of a "Reach"-equivalent effect in the buff spell Sharpsight, although it hasn't been given its own formal keyword yet. The Rising Tide expansion further mitigated issues with the Ionian stranglehold on Elusive, with Bilgewater containing a considerable number of Elusive units of their own, and giving players another choice of region to use to fight Elusives other than running Ionia.Riot responded by nerfing the stats of several of Ionia's Elusive units quite severely, reducing their ability to kill so you incredibly quickly and making some of them a bit easier to remove. ![]() The ability is supposed to function like Flying, but it's so lopsidedly distributed that for all intents and purposes it might as well be "Unblockable". Meanwhile, Ionia has ten Elusive units, several of which are exceedingly deadly. Outside of Ionia, there were only five Followers ( Daring Poro, Amateur Aeronaut, the pre-rework version of Jae Medarda, Silverwing Diver and Heimerdinger's Mk3: Floor-B-Gone Turret) and two Champions ( Teemo and Ezreal, neither of which are really combat units) with Elusive, two ways to give a unit Elusive ( Intrepid Mariner, which can't be used defensively, and Sumpworks Map - you might notice that all but one of the non-Ionian Elusive cards are from Piltover & Zaun) and no cards designed specifically to punish Elusive units (like, say, Hurricane from Magic) or equivalent ability to Reach (a creature ability from Magic that allowed a creature to block Flyers without actually Flying itself). To elaborate on Elusive a bit, it's basically exactly like Flying from Magic: The Gathering with one significant difference: in Magic every faction had at least some access to Flying creatures note Green usually doesn't, but this color has plenty of creatures with Reach (can block creatures with Flying) or spells like Plummet (kill any creature with Flying), while in LoR it's a very rare ability almost exclusively concentrated in the Ionia faction.Many players often say the true game against Ionia (or Ionia-splashing) decks doesn't start until the first Deny is played. Challenger Units are easily dealt with by just buffing out of range and are rare in their own right, so that leaves spells for most decks to deal with Elusive units but Deny will stop you cold. Generally you cannot block Elusive units without some of your own so the best way to deal with them are either Challenger Units or Spells. Now add to the fact that the Ionia Faction is home to the very frustrating "Elusive" mechanic and it's a lot of pain. It brings in a small risk of missing Allegiance triggers (Allegiance works when the top card of your deck matches the faction of the card being used) but ultimately having Deny is far too useful to give up. You know it's bad when the few "mono-faction" decks floating around in the early days of the Open Beta meta often find themselves splashing Ionia for nothing more than Deny.In the first major balance patch for the game after the release of the open beta they increased its cost to 4 mana so it can't be cast entirely with stored spell mana. While it's limited by its inability to stop Burst spells, which resolve instantly (including almost all buff spells, up to and including the awesome Battle Fury, which are a common "gotcha!" tactic) Deny is still considered far too versatile for its cost and possibly the single best reason to use the entire Ionia faction, as well as a big roadblock to the viable use of expensive top-level spells like The Ruination (if you spend all your mana casting The Ruination only for your opponent to completely nullify it for only 3 mana of their own, you've basically lost on the spot, since you'd only cast The Ruination when it's what you have to do to save the game). A lot of the game's strategy is rooted in spell counterplay as players can use strategies heavily dependent on timely use of spells which can then be negated by other spells (such as using Vengeance to kill a powerful enemy unit, only for its controller to use Recall to bounce it to safety back in their hand) but Deny can cut through all that guff simply by cancelling any Slow or Fast spell or even the spell-like abilities of allies such as Anivia's Glacial Storm. One of the biggest points of concern to the balance team is the Simple, yet Awesome spell Deny. ![]()
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