Riot Games celebrated the recent tenth birthday of League of Legends by announcing a bunch of spin-off projects based on the long-standing MOBA. Among them is Arcane, an animated series, a mobile version of Teamfight Tactics, Riot’s autobattler, and Legends of Runeterra, a free-to-play digital card game.
With the expansive lore and fanbase of League of Legends, a card game is a no-brainer. Unfortunately, it being digital mean fans won’t get to collect the cards of their favourite heroes. As we’ve seen many card games successfully make the jump to digital, we asked design director Andrew Yip, and associate art director Andrew Silver if the reverse, a physical edition of Legends of Runeterra, is possible at some point. Sadly, it isn’t likely.
“My gut intuition is maybe as a one-off, but probably not as a sustained separate thing. Part of the reason is that because we’ve started digital a lot of the experience is built and designed deliberately to be great in a digital format,” Yip told us in a wider Legends of Runeterra interview. “We didn’t really create a lot of something for it to translate easily to a physical experience. It might, but we’d be lucky, not because we’re brilliant and were extremely thoughtful about what that experience would be like physically.”
Silver elaborated on Yip’s answer, adding that part of the problem is Riot’s position as a company. “I think also given the strengths of the studio currently, we’re not really positioned well to support a physical card game without doing some massive pivots,” He said. “We really want to do the best that we can to leverage the strengths of the studio and bring the best experience that we can. Right now that’s digital.”
Legends of Runeterra has received positive feedback so far, demonstrating distinction among its peers and promising intense gameplay that stays interesting.
You can sign up now to see for yourself when the beta launches in early 2020.