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?
Yeah I really like LoR, but I do think the beginner decks don't do it just as much. Part of the fun is just how creative the mechanics are they really make use of it being a video game as well. Like the lurk and predict mechanic, lurk gives bonus attack when you attack with a lurk on the top of your deck and predict you pick a card from your deck and put it on the top.
What makes it cool though is there are cards that keep track when they are seen in a prediction and power up, you can't really do that too well in a normal card game.