Agilio Macabasco
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7 Min read Legends of Runeterra is taking a new approach to card acquisition in comparison to most other TCGs out there. It’s much more generous in terms of allowing you to build competitive decks without investing a ton of IRL money.
In this article, we’ll teach you the basic ways to get cards and as well as how to do so efficiently to help you understand how to get the cards you want ASAP.
To scout out your next crafted card or see which decks you want to create next, check out our Card Gallery or Deck Builder!
In Legends of Runeterra, you can use shards or wildcards to craft any card within the Collection tab.
Every card has a value based on its rarity – the four types of rarities (in order of shard cost) are Common, Rare, Epic, and Champion.
In its current state, every LoR region has the same amount of these rarities:
As such there are four types of wildcards that allow you to craft a ccard of that rarity. If you have a purple wildcard you can create an Epic card, an orange wildcard lets you craft a Champion card and so on. Below, you can see how you can craft a card using either shards or wildcards.
Both shards and coins can can be earned through playing while wildcards can also be purchased with coins (with real money).
If you’re a League of Legends player, you can think of shards as being similar to blue essence and coins being similar to RP. Coins are also the only way that you can purchase cosmetics like board skins and guardians (you can replace your little Poro with other creatures).
Here’s the exchange rate (American $ to coins) to give you a general idea of the value of coins:
As we alluded to earlier, Riot is taking a different approach to card acquisition. Although you can certainly get cards faster with money than without, it’s hard to have a huge advantage because the amount of cards you can get with this method is limited and reset each week.
Here’s the total amount of cards you can get per week:
Note that the number of cards in stock does not roll over to future weeks. So if you don’t buy 3 orange wildcards this week, you’ll still only be able to get 3 orange cards next week.
Outside of crafting cards with shards and wildcards, you also naturally collect cards in LoR by just playing! As you play, you build up experience which unlocks rewards in various places. In this section, we’ll cover where these places are and how to maximize them.
Below, you can see a infographic breakdown from Riot Polybius on what is included in the different rewards you can get from playing.
You can get the capsules and chests shown above by opening your weekly vault, doing your daily quests, and through region progression.
Every week, you get a vault that you can open three chests that contain rewards. The contents of your three chests are determined by how much experience you earn from playing and doing daily quests.
The three chests individually progress from bronze to silver to gold to platinum to diamond, basically mirroring to the ranked tiers fom League of Legends. At 13,000 experience you’ll also actually receive a free Expedition token (more on Expeditions later).
Here’s another infographic from Riot Polybius that shows weekly vault progression and rewards.
You can grow your vault reward to a maximum threshold of 25,000 experience from which you’ll reach three Diamond Chests and one Expedition Token. Once the week is over, you’ll have three bronze chests again.
If you want the specific values for experience gain in constructed matches, here’s how it breaks down (from Riot’s Open Beta Economy updates):
Every day, you’ll have the opportunity to have bursts of experience gain through daily quests.
Daily quests offer missions ranging from winning with a deck that has a certain champion to spending a particular amount of mana.
By completing a mission you receive 1000 or 1500 experience. You’ll get two rerolls per day so we recommend trying to get a 1500 XP quest to maximize your time.
If you don’t complete your quests, you’ll bank up to three total quests that will remain there until you complete or reroll them. If you take a break, be sure to clear your quests before the fourth day or you’ll be missing out on quest experience.
The days of opening random packs hoping you get the class or color you want are over! In Legends of Runeterra, you can influence which cards you earn by using region tracks.
This feature becomes available after you finish the prologue. Just head to the Rewards tab and you can set a region to “Active”. Doing so will allow you to collect rewards for cards only from that region as you collect experience and you can change the region at any time.
Note that the same experience that applies to your weekly vault applies to your region track, you do not have to collect experience for them separately.
The progression for a region track is as follows:
A pro tip from our expert, EG Swim, is to level up a region (the one you want cards for most) until level 4 (which is when you get a wildcard capsule) and then switching to another region. You’ll level that one up until four and then repeat until all of the regions are level four.
Next, level up a region to level eight (which is when you unlock a champion capsule) and then repeat the process of switching until all the regions are at eight.
This will give you the best bang for your buck in terms of time commitment and being able to expand your collection as fast as possible.
Even if you aren’t interested in playing every region, it’s still helpful to get all the possible wildcards to craft the cards that you want for your preferred regions. At this time, there is a maximum of level 20 for every region track but that may be expanded in the future.
The last method for collecting cards is through Expeditions, LoR’s draft mode. As we mentioned earlier, you can get an Expedition token from your weekly vault.
If you don’t have a token, you can also spend 300 coins or 3000 shards. Now, you may be thinking that this is an expensive fee since 3000 shards are equivalent to crafting a champion card.
The thing is, even if you have an absolutely horrible Expedition run and get 0 wins, you’re guaranteed a random champion. Anything more than 0 wins and you’ll receive shards in addition to the champion up to a maximum of 3500 shards for a 7 win run (the highest amount of wins possible).
So if you’re a good Expedition player, you can get a two champions + 500 shards or one champion + another Expedition entry + 500 shards.
There are also other benefits to playing Expeditions! Since it’s a draft mode, you can play and try out cards that you don’t own. You’ll also gain experience from play Expeditions.
Here’s a breakdown of your experience gain:
Finally, the last thing you should know about is duplicate protection. Since you can have a maximum of 3 copies of every card in LoR, so what happens if you get a fourth copy? Riot explains:
“Legends of Runeterra has systems in place to make sure you don’t gain unnecessary extra copies of any card. Since each deck can only have three copies of a card, you’ll never open a fourth.
If you roll a fourth copy of an Epic or Champion, it will automatically convert into an Epic or Champion card that you don’t yet own! If you get a fourth copy of a Common or Rare card, it will be converted into Shards.”
Pretty sweet right? Riot’s generosity for card-collecting continues. Here are the rates that you’ll be refunded if you open duplicates (assuming you have all the Epics and Champions):
Thanks for reading! We hope you found this article on LoR card collecting to be helpful. To explore all the cards in LoR to see what to craft next, check out our Card Gallery. See you next time.
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