(LOR:Grasp of the Void) Lissandra, the Ice Witch
Greetings!
Glad to have some time to make another post!
We're a team of two working on a set around the Void Faction. We're doing extensive articles into our design process, starting with the non-void champions we planned for the first release. This time I bring you our first draft for the Freljord faction, Lissandra The Ice Witch:
WAIT, WHY ARE THERE SO MANY LVL1 LISSANDRAS??
Sorry about that, one of our biggest problems came with the format of the card. We knew what we wanted to do with her, but haven't been able to put our finger down on how to express it yet.
What we want her to do is to Infiltrate the first enemy summoned. As we discussed the wording, we noticed that the way it's presented can lead to confusion, making people think that a follower will be infiltrated as long as it's its first time hitting the board in a round ([chronicler of ruin] and recall effects would technically go around this restriction).
To try to be straightforward, we consulted many cards. The first one has the skill fully explained (very verbose, further explanation down the line), as it was the first concept. The second one is based on Inviolus Vox's text, the third one is based on Maokai's, and we came up with the third, trying to solve the issue. Tell us what you think about this or how it can be better expressed!
Onto the champion.
A Summary
Lissandra is a powerful stall tool in a new deck that mixes up things a bit on the Freljord with the introduction of the FrostGuard. Playing Lissandra should appeal to players who like to mess with their opponent's creatures.
Designing Concerns: Our Worries
With Lissandra we took a rather different approach than with other champions we made, we knew we wanted to stray from what existed previously in the faction and try to open Freljord a bit to new collaborations between regions. Ultimately this proved hard and I think we misstepped a bit around some of her aspects.
-Is this really Lissandra?
Doing a LOR champion based on lore is a bit of a risk since most people know the original character's abilities, but not all of them delve into the lore. When we thought and read about the Frostguard and what it could do, some things struck me as interesting. Mainly the fact that the Frostguard takes many different groups in, and that they have a custom of infiltrating priests in other communities to ensure the old demi-gods are out of the equation.
This brought out the idea that the Frostguard oversees the control of enemy groups to keep them in check, and lead us to create the Infiltrate keyword. As you can see from the tooltip, it doesn't do much without seeing other cards (more on that later), but it's clear that Legends of Runeterra might end up doing a MARK keyword, and that MARK keyword could take many forms (given that there are many types of marks in the original game).
A similar problem will appear with the apparition of Poison as a DPS mechanic (singed's poison is not very similar to Darius' (or any similar character) bleeding). Only time will tell
It's true that she might not fulfill her fantasy of being an ice witch, but I'd say our intention of leading her towards the mastermind character she has was not a mistake, although it might result strange to some.
-This actually looks like a pretty closed champion
You would be right if you were to say this. Reading Lissandra it would seem that she would only go into an Infiltrate deck, which right now would only go into Freljord? So it's like Nautilus, in the sense that it's the centerpiece of its own deck. We like it that way, but it goes in a different direction than what we originally planned.
We've seen Freljord wander off a bit for some time, they found some footing during Rising Tides with Sejuani, but they have eventually pivoted into more self-centered decks with Trundle and ramp tools. They Who Endure has been played for more time than that but, for the purposes of simplicity, we'll count that as an SI-focus deck.
So how do we give Lissandra something to work with, in harmony with another region? We had two ideas:
-Include LeBlanc/Talon and a sub-set of infiltrators on Noxus representing the Black Rose, which we liked, but didn't fit with the direction we wanted for Noxus (based on our expectations on Riven)
-Mix her with one of our planned identities for the Void faction, adaptation, and interaction with abilities both on allies and on enemies, which would give the benefit of giving abilities to enemies into a rather useful tool.
She would fit around there until the Infiltrated keyword is consolidated (hypothetically)
-The skill is weird
It's true that skills in the game aren't usually long since their text has to fit into the card that creates them (Riptide Rex is the notable outlier), but we wanted to include some of her identity as a champion through her q and passive. Takedown is a keyword present in more cards on the set, first shown in our first draft for Jhin.
We could include it as a slow fleeting spell that goes into the hand, but skill helped give the champion a sense of immediate board presence
Where does Lissandra fall in the game?
She's supposed to be a non-aggressive, but non-ramp focused deck in Freljord, slower than something like Sejuani. This means that she most likely won't be played leveled-up, but she won't be the only thing to infiltrate enemies
Lissandra fits within a group of cards that interact with Infiltrated enemies. This means cards that give the keyword (we thought that they could trap units on the enemies deck with the keyword (only once if possible) or directly) and followers that care about the word (for instance, a rather big minion that is allowed to challenge Infiltrated enemies).
As mentioned before, our intention is for her to fit the best as a champion in a Freljord - Void deck revolving around cards having abilities.
As always, take everything here with a grain of salt, since we haven't seen everything left and in which direction her followers go.
Champion Spell: Frozen Tomb
This was a handful. There's a reason for everything here, I promise.
-Cost: Single round protection is valued around 3-4 (barriers and bastion). This doesn't prevent an ally from dying from a destroy effect and it negates any damage it could deal.
-Speed: Most protection is burst, but this'd be insane if it was burst given that Unyielding is slow, there has to be some room for interaction when you negate all damage on a unit and also offer counterplay with spell shield when using it on enemy champions.
-The effect: In the end, this is a stall tool, which is very Freljordian, but with the added flexibility. We didn't want to do just another Frostbite effect. This will stop some of the bigger enemy champions from putting as much pressure(while not being effective against large enemy followers), but it doubles as protection for your champion. Ezreal (who with the changes to his lvl up now works better with Freljord than he used to) likes this spell as protection. And Lissandra, who doesn't have any integrated protection, also likes this as an option to keep the setup going.
No example questions in this article, but feel free to ask anything you're worried about!
We're very keen on feedback and we're always looking for better ways to make this be more professional, even if we're just getting started. We hope that this was a good read and that you enjoyed it. If there's information about anything I didn't touch on, I invite you to tell and I'll try to make the format better. Feel free to comment or ask, I'll try to answer hastily.
In the last post, we didn't do too well on feedback, so we'd really appreciate it if you could take a brief look at our Illaoi article and leave your thoughts. Much appreciated.
Next is PnZ!