Hey everyone, Shadawx here with the Weekly Watch. This week we got a new Fervor Face video, front page masters of the new season, Mastering Runeterra Pros vs Writers competition and more coming up.
Community & Dev Watch
Riot has made the decision to sunset the Expedition game mode in patch 3.8.0 in order to focus their resources into other areas like future expansions. They do mention that there is room for an LoR competitive draft experience, but Expeditions just wasn’t it. So cash in your Expedition tokens while you can now that they’ve removed the cap, and be on the lookout for news about another draft type mode next year sometime.
Making their return, Fervor Face has made a new music video for Ahri Kennen featuring Manittas. Sung to the tune of Shivers by Ed Sherran, they deliver another banger LoR parody and ended up getting the deck nerfed as a result. Check out their other videos too if you enjoyed this one!
The Mastering Runeterra Writing team decided to issue a challenge to the Pro team in a King of the Hill-esque 5v5. It was MajiinBae, Jasensational, Aikado, Kevor, and Henneky vs SirTurmmond, MonteXristo, Leer, Maybenxtime, and myself. In the end it was a 4-1 for the Writers team with Jasensational taking the only win for his team with Leona Yasuo.
Speaking of Maybenextime, he has a small write up on his thoughts about entry fee tournaments for LoR. He essentially says that paid entry should pretty much be the norm, paid entry would incentivise Tournament Organizers to host them, and it would incentivise players to play their best since something is at stake. Do you agree with what Maybenextime has to say about paid entry? Feel free to let me know in the comments!
Ladder Watch
Start of the new season! A Curious Journey’s ranked season has started and we already have a handful of Masters players. Take a look at the front page of Americas Ladder. From the 8 players we see here, the decks we got are Papercraft Gnar Akshan, Scouts, Lurk, Draven Sion, Gnar Fizz Yordle in Arms, Bandle Tree, Gnar Sejuani, and Sivir Akshan. Quite a slew of new decks and old decks. Also interesting to note that the 4 new decks here are all running Gnar…quite interesting.
Tournament Watch
Runeterra Academy had grand finals to conclude the first team league series…and Beautiful Gamers 6-0’d Stromboli Gaming to win the tournament and take home $1,500! It was some hard fought matches with myself, Shadawx, being the one to take it home for the team. Be on the lookout for information about the next edition of Runeterra Academy’s team league soon!
The RuneterraLife $1,000 Showdown happened this past weekend. With it being the first big event of the new patch, we got all kinds of decks showing up. After the first day of Swiss, the top 8 ended up with Sergi2Vamos, Ez2Win, Dudu De Nunu, Painas, Wasrusso, FloppyMudkip, Phansora, and myself, Shadawx! The top 8 lists consisted of: 3x Darkness, 4x Bandle Tree, 2x Gnar Trundlelines, 3x Scouts, 3x Bandle PnZ YiA, Ahri Lulu, 2x Zoe Lee Sin, Yuumi Pantheon, Ziggs Gnar Burn, Zoe Lux Aphelios, Braum Galio, Sejuani Gnar, and Tristana Poppy Fae swarm. In the end it was Phansora taking it home with their lineup of Tree/Darkness/Zoe Lee Sin. So while a lot of different decks have shown themselves in top 8, it looks like the good ol classic of Lee + Darkness + X still proves to be the top dog.
Upcoming Tournaments
So we have our usual weekly tournaments: Giant Slayer’s Fight Night Invite only – Americas Monday, Brazil Thursday, and EMEA Friday. Mystic Shot Podcast on Tuesday at 8:30pm EST for Americas, but this time with an expanded prize pool of $210. And finally RuneterraLife’s Runeterra Rumble on Thursday at 6pm EST.
This week the Wednesday Night Runeterra tournament by Mastering Runeterra is taking a break in order to bring you a new batch of tournaments, the Mastering Runeterra $100 Daily! For this week each day from Monday to Friday, there will be a guaranteed $100 prize pool tournament for the Americas region. It’ll have an entry fee of $6.50, and if they reach over 20 participants, each one over 20 will add $5 to the prizing! It starts at 7 pm EST, will be 4 rounds of swiss cut to top 8, and award prizing to top 4.
This week on the 26th and 27th we have another APAC tournament: APACalypse! $150 prize pool being paid out to top 8. It’ll be swiss rounds on day 1 starting at 12:00 PM GMT+8 and top cut on day 2 starting at 3 PM GMT+8.
Fanmail
Once again we got the legend Eniamor, sending in something for the show, and this time is some fanart! It’s a great sketch of not a G-nelf, not a G-noblin, it’s a G-NAR! And you got G-NARRRR’D!
That’ll wrap it up for this week’s LoR Weekly Watch. This week is one of the more exciting ones with the arrival of the new season and expansion, so we’ll have to see how things settle down as the meta shapes. We’re also hopefully expecting some news this week on the future plans of LoR.
Thanks for watching.