An Observation of Pokemon vs. Legends of Runeterra
It’s interesting that when I was growing up it was all about Magic the Gathering and the creation of the perfect deck (I always aimed for what I liked to call a Chess Deck (Black and White)). I used to pour over every word that the card held hoping to find something that no one else had discovered so I’d have an advantage over them. Since then I’ve dabbled in Legends of the Five Rings, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Middle Earth, Dominion, Pokemon, Hearthstone, and now Legends of Runeterra. The biggest hurdle that I’ve had to overcome, almost every single time, is that it's hard to find people to play against. Sure with the advent of online gaming it definitely can make things a bit easier, but there’s still the learning curve.
That right there, the learning curve, is something I’ve really noticed as of late. The reason is that my son is starting to play. He’s taken an interest in The Pokemon Trading Card Game as well as Legends of Runeterra. I would immediately assume that Pokemon would be the easier of the two for him to pick up, you know because of the cartoon and the fact that he already owns physical pokemon cards, but I would be wrong, dead wrong.
Let’s start off with the cards themselves. Most of the Pokemon cards, not the actual creatures, but all the other cards, seem to have a short story’s worth of text shoved onto it. This, of course, is to make sure they have completely described what the card is, what it can do, and what effects it has on the game at large. You then look at the Legends of Runeterra cards and discover that there are very few cards with very lengthy descriptions on it, and they basically cover all of the bases (what can it do, what effects on the game at large, etc). This difference, at least in my mind (and watching my son), makes Legends of Runeterra easier to pick up, especially since reading is still a little bit of a struggle for him, and then trying to interpret what he read in regards to the game just leads to frustration.
There are several layers of strategy in both games, and to try to compare the two and declaring which one is easier to play would be damn near impossible. It really depends on the player, how their brain works, and the time commitment of learning EVERYTHING about the card. If you can memorize the Pokemon cards and what they do, I’m sure that the game becomes much easier to play, but at the same time you could say that about Legends of Runeterra as well. It, of course, boils down to time commitment on learning every little thing about the game, but honestly I feel that you can grasp most of the concepts in Legends of Runeterra faster.
In any collectable card game there is the prospect of deck building, one of the biggest draws to a game. This is the action of creating your own personalized deck, hopefully to destroy your enemies to piles of smoking rubble, but sometimes it's to test out a strategy you wanted to see in action. In Pokemon you’re going to be confronted with creating a deck that has requirements to be “legal” in certain instances, and each of those instances aren’t described very well. In Legends of Runeterra you will see a card count ( ___ out of 40), and you’ll also see that once you’ve selected up to two different regions all cards not of those regions are grayed out, making it a bit easier to see what you can and cannot add to your deck. I will freely admit that there’s more to deck building in each of these games, but at a quick glance I feel that Legends of Runeterra deck building, on an introductory level, is easier to accomplish.
In the end, and at a quick glance I just find it interesting that you have two very popular games and after playing both Legends of Runeterra, for me and my son, is the game we end up playing. There are different levels of complexity, especially when it comes to the way my son plays and the way I play, but because of the way the cards are quick and easy to at least get the gist and the flow of the game isn’t constantly interrupted by needing to read what your opponents cards are doing.