Empires of the Ascended LoR Card Impressions: (Ascendants, Advance, and More)

The First Reveals for Shurima, The Newest LoR Region

Jordan “WhatAmI” Abronson here with your weather forecast from sunny Shurima.

The next couple of weeks we are looking to be in for an absolute storm of hype so get out those raincoats and let’s dive into what we’ve got up first.

The new Empires of the Ascended cards will be revealed every morning at Mobalytics so be sure to keep up with the latest cards.

In this guide we will break down the new Shurima cards:

• Destined Poro (follower)
• Exalted Poro (follower)
• Buried Sun Disc (Landmark)
• Restored Sun Disc (Landmark)
• Esteemed Hierophant (follower)
• Devoted Council (follower)
• Golden Ambassador (follower)
• Voice of the Risen (follower)
• Ascended’s Rise (spell)

For more impressions and insights on the new cards, check out Swim’s video!

Destined/Exalted Poro

• Destined Poro
  • 1 mana 1|1 follower
  • Text: Round Start: If you’ve leveled a champion, transform me into Exalted Poro.

• Exalted Poro
  • 1 mana 2|2 Follower
  • Text: I have three random keywords

Why let ascending gods and heroes have all the fun?

This little fluffball says that anyone can level up if they just try hard and believe in themselves.

This little guy looks at first glance like he’s not worth the investment, but if Shurima comes with some early, easy-to-level, low-impact champions, watch out for this cuddly beat stick to get unleashed.

Buried Sun Disc/Restored Sun Disc

• Buried Sun Disc
  • 1 mana Landmark
  • Text: Start of game: Draw 1 of me if all your cards are Shuriman. Countdown 25: Restore the Sun disc. When an ascended ally levels up, advance me ten rounds.
• Restored Sun Disc
  • 0 mana Landmark
  • Text: Immediately draw 1 of all your Ascendants. For the rest of the game, your level 2 ascendants are level 3.

Hooooooly sun gods people, can you say combo enabler? The countdown seems pretty self-explanatory.

Reduce it by one each turn start. But if you do the math all you really need to do to flip the Sun Disc is to level up two ascended allies.

Depending on what level up conditions we can find this could easily happen as early as turn six or seven.

From there the fun starts.

It looks like we are getting champions with not two, but three levels and those level threes have got to be absolutely bonkers.

It’ll depend on the ascended themselves if this is a meme or dream but don’t sleep on the power this card promises.

Esteemed Hierophant

• Esteemed Hierophant
  • 3 mana 3|4 follower
  • Text: When I’m summoned, advance your Buried Sun Disc 2 rounds.

Immediately we are seeing well-stated support for the theoretical Sun Disc combo deck.

This guy will clog up the ground and get you closer to that flipped Disc win condition.

He’s not amazing, but Badger Bear with a little bit of an added bonus seems extremely unlikely to be a bad card to me.

Devoted Council

• Devoted Council
  • 3 mana 1|6 follower
  • Text: Round Start: If you’ve leveled a champion, heal your champions and Nexus 2.

I feel like I am saying this a lot but this card’s viability is going to have a lot to do with whether we get quick-leveling champions as part of our Shurima package.

If we do, then this will be another extremely powerful stall card for that deck’s package to take advantage of.

That said, even if we don’t find easy-to-level champs lying around in the sun, I know that seeing this alongside Soraka has already got me a little bit afraid of our Star Spring overlords.

Golden Ambassador

• Golden Ambassador
  • 4 mana 3|2
  • Text: Allegiance: Draw a champion and grant it +2|+2.

So you know everything you heard me say about how I don’t like Written In Stars because it does nothing for four mana?

Well apparently Riot did too and they decided that effect was cool, so here comes Golden Ambassador to shut me up.

Stapling a 3|2 on to that effect might not seem like much but it will make an absolute world of difference.

Thankfully this is an Allegiance-based card so its power will mostly be confined to the sunny side of things as opposed to say, tutoring giant Fioras.

But I would not be surprised to see Golden Ambassador summon forth some serious competition.

Voice of the Risen

• Voice of the Risen
  • 4 mana 3|4
  • If you’ve leveled a champion, allies have +2|+0

Ohhhh man.

I don’t know about you guys, but to me, this card absolutely screams about some sort of tiny champion aggro archetype looking to be made.

Maybe with Voice of the Risen and Jinx at the top of its curve.

Anyone who has played against the current build of discard aggro knows how absolutely backbreaking a single Vision can be, and if you can make this card work it comes with two stapled right to the back of a 5|4 beater.

Ascended’s Rise

• Ascended’s Rise
  • 7 mana Slow spell
  • Text: Level up all level 1 Ascendended allies.

Ok, so before we all lose our collective minds I would like to remind the peanut gallery that seven is an awful lot of mana.

I would also like to point out the existence of spells like Deny and Vengeance.

That said….

What in the absolute nonsense is this?!

If there is a large Ascended threat anywhere near the level of Maokai, Aurelion Sol, or even Nautilus, and given the picture of my main man Azir standing up there praising the Sun, you had better bet there will be, then this card could be nuts.

Even if there isn’t a single game-ending threat, if you have two champions in play on turn five or six alongside a Sun Disc you can be looking at two level three champions and a refilled hand.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a pretty good way to win a game to me.

Like everything else we’re going to have to wait to see what the actual ascended cards’ powers are before we really evaluate this card’s place in life, but it definitely earns its spot on the list of brew I want to try as soon as Shurima drops.

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, feel free to ask WhatAmI during his streams (around 10AM PST basically every day).

WhatAmI streams at twitch.tv/xxwhatamixx around 10AM PST every day