Riftbound Meta

Long post abt purple bc ppl dramatically misunderstand the color balance in Riftbound To start, purple is the color of options. It contains a variety of situational tricks that are very strong in specific situations and useless in others. Need a big unit off a battlefield? Rebuke is the best option in the game. Need a small unit off a battlefield? Rebuke makes you want to throw up. All purple combat tricks are like this. Switcheroo/Gust/Rtw/flash/star cross/etc are situationally either game winning or entirely useless. Their best tricks are also heavily costed to counterbalance their impact. Switcheroo/Rebuke/Star Cross are very expensive. This makes them even more painful when they aren't relevant. If an opponent pushes 3 might into your 2 might, switcheroo or rebuke technically can win that combat, but they're hilariously inefficient compared to something like discipline or stupefy. What this leads to is a color with extremely variable combat strength. If they have the correct trick at the correct time, they probably win. If they don't, they probably lose. So naturally card selection becomes a premium. Riot likely agrees with this, as they printed cards like scrap heap/called shot/stacked deck/traveling merchant/etc as ways to filter your hand in purple. Thus when legends with purple consistently overperformed, such as set 1 Annie, set 2 draven/ezreal, set 3 Diana/ezreal/irelia, this set with Kennen, Riot decided to start hitting consistency tools in an effort to reduce the ability for purple decks to hit the correct card so frequently. The problem with the fix they went with (banning stacked deck) is that it killed consistency for purple decks without ability to significantly card filter, while leaving the ones that could regardless basically untouched. Red/Purple and Orange/Purple lack good card draw options and consistent ways to protect their units. They relied on stacked deck to find correct cards at the correct time. Blue/Purple has decent options to protect units, but has bad units and relied on stacked deck to find the correct units (watcher/researchers/hwei) or the correct removal spells for a given situation. All of these decks got dramatically worse by banning stacked deck. Then we have Kennen and Green/Purple. Kennen and Green/Purple have access to absurd card selection AND unit quality. Green went from having bad units to Heron which is one of the best units in the entire game. It also deletes the cost of the free purple spells. Green/Purple was predictably one of the best color pairings post bans because Stellacorn and Vex legend allow for enough draw to find correct answers consistently. They also have good cheap tricks like Zhonya/Discipline/Defy to fill tricks until the big purple blow outs are needed. Kennen is a further abomination. Kennen is now the only purple deck with a stacked deck, one that he can play 6+ times! Combined with Fizz and CC flow Kennen can almost guarantee he hits certain tricks as he sees his entire deck in 5 turns. Riots approach to nerfing purple has just made half the purple decks utterly terrible, while leaving Irelia/Kennen as basically walking demigods with 100% winrates into half the legends in the game. That is not an exaggeration. The solution here is that Riot needs to do some combination of the following: 1. Ban high roll cards like Elder Dragon/Star Spring/Pack/Star Cross that demand specific answers immediately from decks that lack card selection capabilities. These cards just create total non games and disable entire decks and strategies. They also encourage not actually playing the game (Aurora, pack ezreal, k6/rengar 8-0ing you, etc) 2. Look further into banning oppressive cards like Brynhir+Breach, Faefolk, Ride the Wind, Stellacorn, etc. I don't believe this is necessary but it would help deck balance. 3. Release better Red and Orange interaction and Blue units. Yellow needs both. Purple also needs good units so it's less trick reliant Kisses