I used to play a little bit of kitchen MtG and got into MtG:Arena a couple years ago, but got frustrated with playing the same four decks after several months. That game isn't very welcoming to us free-to-play plebs.
A couple of weeks ago I've found out you can play Arena on an Android phone and decided to give a try. My phone is too old to run it though, so I had to download it from a shady site and sideload. It freezes for like five minutes before it starts, these fps drops, the UI is too clunky for the phone, but it's playable.
The people on reddit who were discussing sideloading Arena where also hyping up Legends of Runeterra. Supposedly the game is very generous to free-to-play players, so I downloaded it too.
LoR is a much better mobile experience for sure, but I've played through the whole prologue, won a bunch of games against the bots, tried all the seven newbie decks several times and I don't think I'm having fun yet. Like I boot up Arena, play a couple of my old "historic" decks against Arena's shitty AI, get my combos and it's still fun. LoR leaves me cold. I don't get it.
Should I dive dipper into it and learn the minutia mechanic and strategies? Maybe it becomes fun when you get you cool big boy decks? Am I ruined my MtG and forever unable to enjoy other collectable card games?
I really like LoR. You can very realistically get every single card within a couple months as a F2P player and if you really want a specific deck you can spend money and buy it without gambling. I've been playing it on and off for almost a year and I have every single champion card as a full set and enough shards to craft like 5 more when they come out. At my peak I came up with new deck concepts literally every single day and it was super fun to be able to just try stuff.
The art and voice acting are really good and it has many of the advantages of a digital card games without the insane RNG that Hearthstone does. It's not as intuitive as some other games but it has a ton, a ton of depth and I do think it's the best digital card game out there right now. What kind of deck are you looking to play?
I think I'd be interested in galaxybrain "all according to keikaku" bullshit it vain of blue in MtG. As far as I understand I have to chose a "region" when I grind daily quest, each of them representing a sort of strategy archetype. Which one is blue?
Hmm, Ionia has the most cards that stop your opponents from playing the game (stuns, counterspells, bouncing back to hand etc). It is also quite strong right now and has several high-tier meta decks, including some midrange and aggro decks so you really can't go wrong with it right now.
Perhaps you'd enjoy Lee Sin/Zoe, it's a combo-deck involving Ionia and Targon. It revolves around leveling up Lee Sin and giving him Overwhelm so that he effectively hits the enemy Nexus twice when he attacks. It involves a lot of denial-bullshit and is quite aggravating to play against. https://lor.mobalytics.gg/decks/bu0idhca30q1d5sa5l70
Other decks here: https://www.swimstrim.com/runeterra/decks-and-meta If you wanna know how things work feel free to ask