The nature of a collectible card game is that developers usually try their best to pull money out of players' pockets with microtransactions. People know that it's very consuming, but they can't help but become addicted to buying more and more packages to pull out the cards they need.
However, Riot Games will not take benefits from this hobby with their upcoming deck-building game - Legends of Runettera. Even better, as the game will still give us the satisfaction of pulling random cards out of packs, but not by buying them with real money, but by grinding the game.
Before getting into the details, let's see how this game look below:
Grind Legends of Runeterra for regional rewards!
To clarify this mechanic, Riot Games has explained all of the kinds of rewards that could grant you cards. To be more specific, they are Wildcards, Chests, and Capsules.
First thing first, Wildcards is a package with specific rarity levels, which will give you into a random card lying in those rarity levels or higher. This is the only thing you can buy with real money in Legends of Runeterra, which you can try your luck on.
The two other things are the ones that you can only get by completing certain missions. The Capsules are basically the traditional card packs, which will give you several cards randomly each Capsule. And based on the kind of Capsules you own, they will open up for cards with higher or lower rarity levels.
The biggest one - the Chests will give players several cards, but it also has chances to give the whole capsule as well. Furthermore, opening Chests will grant you Shards as well, which you can use them to upgrade to your wanted cards in the deck builder.
Now, Legends of Runeterra has completed its first testing phase, and it's opening up for more players to join the second phase. This is also the chance to get the Chests and Capsules, and what you'll need to do is very simple. There are several ways to earn those, but all of them are via playing the game.
The first one and also the easiest one is to gain XP for your region. You and potentially thousands of players in the same region will contribute the XP for the region by playing, and the more XP you earn, the more rewards you can get. There are 12 levels now, which means there are also 12 rewards for all players in the region. To get XP, you can simply just playing games, either winning or losing gives a bunch of XP. To make it quicker, you can fulfill some quests that will refresh every day to push the progress.
You can see the list of rewards for each level down here:
The second way to pull out some cards is through a weekly reward system called the Vault. This has nothing to do with the server but it only depends on how much XP you earned. The more XP you gained per week, the more rewards you can get after the specific gifting day of the week.
All of the rewards in the Vault are the Chests that vary in rarity levels, and if you manage to get to level 10, you'll get a random Champion card (the rarest card in Legends of Runeterra) extra. The Vault's rewards are specified here:
Don't worry about duplication!
Riot Games has predicted that players will start grinding for cards as quickly as possible, so they've implemented this feature to prevent card duplications. Specifically, if you pull out a card that you've maxed out in your deck, you'll get Shards instead. The numbers of Shards varies for each type of cards - 25 for a normal one, 75 for a rare one.
The rarest ones - the Epic and Champion cards will give out 300 Shards if you've owned every card with this rarity levels. But if you haven't, it will be replaced by a random one with the same rarity instead.
In conclusion, Riot Games want to create a healthy game for dedicated players, allowing them to have a respectable collection without having to pay a fortune. They've estimated that hard-grinding players will need to play from 8 to 10 games per day to unlock the whole set, and even lazier players can unlock around 75% of the deck before a new set come out.
It's the tradition of Riot Games to deliver a game where the amount of money a player paid doesn't decide how good they are, and it seems that they'll keep it with Legends of Runeterra!