The Problem with Katarina in Legends of Runeterra

hey guys sunny here when you think aggro in runeterra the first region that often comes to mind is noxus cars like decimate noxion fervor legion saboteur all staples for smart decks since game launch you look at that noxus card pool and most of them look pretty angry with big weapons big muscles and big attack stats all followers and champions build large weapons and spells often have some kind of weapon on them some of the noxus champions for example have axes other champions actually use those axes to fight so noxus gets the job done by saying unga bunga and smashing face darius uses a big axe to pentakill my team in league with awesome animations and when you hear that buzzer go off you know it's time to run because he will kill you and your team and your nexus sion is usually a tank in league unless you're trying to solo bolo so as a tank all he really does is kill himself and your turrets there are some other champions that use blood magic or throw axes instead of holding them original and a girl that throws her weapons on the ground to pentacle your team when katarina kills me i don't really feel fear or dread like when the darius is about to run my team down i just feel like i lost the game to ionia uninteractive boring and it makes me question my life decisions on why i even queued up for a game i dislike katarina in league of legends but in runeterra c is the biggest meme card you can possibly put in your deck oh wait my bad she's one of the biggest meme cards in the game ah i really wonder when people are going to find out i only make these videos to rag on ionia whenever i get the chance stupid ninjas i would feel bad for all the katarina mains because their champion is nothing like cs in league of legends but that would imply katarina players can understand emotion so in leagues he's an assassin that penta kills your team jumps all over the place has a passive that reduces her cooldown so she can keep killing stuff blah blah blah but in ruined terra she hits something and then instead of killing more stuff she returns to your hand why does a card from noxus need a safe space where nobody can hurt them red cars are about combat doing a lot of damage and not being afraid if you're weak you get destroyed that's what their whole identity as a region is about you have less than 3 attack death you have less than 5 attack death you are damaged death your nexus has four health death all of those things make katarina a weird champion to be part of noxus card collection and sees the biggest flavor miss among the legends of router champion cards oh wait she is one of the biggest flavor misses katarina was released when the game came out so instead of having a dedicated card package that supports the way she wants to be played her car package was this random mix of aggro control and mid-range supposedly she was meant to go in the deck with yasuo since her recalls would work well to level up yasuo but unfortunately for our assassin turns out swain is just a much better partner for the samurai and let's be honest you can't really be too mad because swain allows you to make plays like this with yasuo oh my god yo on the bright side katarina is one of the easiest champions to level so clearly the supports he needed came from shirima with cards like destin poro and thrombic swarm so katarina really wants to develop a big board so rallying is actually good but that's pretty difficult with an ability that removes you from the board huh 3 mana 3 2 throw me back into your hand basically giving you the middle finger for even spending that three mana to play her because he's not going to stay a unit that's actually on the board anyway it's like playing a full game against ionia you know you're investing your time to play you know you're going to get screwed by stuns denies and recalls and you know you're going to end the game with a bad taste in your mouth regardless of winner loss katarina gives you that same feeling you're spending three mana for close to nothing i'm sorry felios a part of me wants you back in the game too but no no you know what katarina is actually good when you get her from the howling abyss you got the cat from abraham i i bet he did he must have he must have some kind of rally there's no other way just wait for it watch him rally right now cat it's a cat so after relentless pursuit finally got nerfed to four men a while ago you think that makes the case for katarina a little better too all the relevant rallies are now at 4 mana just like katarina is a 4 mana rally that costs unit mana and leaves the board faster than i can click surrender when lee sin is about to kill me from 20 hp [Applause] no no no come on not again to really understand just how bad it is let's try to transform her into a spell pike style 4 mana slow speed spell from noxus summon an ephemeral katarina after striking create a copy of me in hand can only be played with unit mana rally all of this honestly doesn't sound too bad a cheap rally in noxus is just good enough because all of their available rallies are either expensive conditional or both but then you realize you can't use spell mana to rally so if you have 5 regular mana and 3 spell mana you'd normally be able to play 2 2 drops and then rally with a spell like relentless or golden aegis you develop your board before you attack again noxus isn't nearly as good at protecting their units as the mafia you can't pop one of them good 2 mana combat tricks in noxus and make things okay we got no sharp side of troll chant here so using katarina for the rally or her synergy with a card like yaso just isn't good enough to give her a champ slot in your deck so let's look at the other text on her card that got added in a patch later on in her level 1 form and only in her level 1 form when she summoned create a fleeting blade's edge in hand blade's edge is a very underrated spell when you find it from conchologist you need to do one damage at fast speed and even then it's still almost always worse than something like group shot and that brings us to another pretty bad spell attached to katarina her champion spell death lotus is completely opposite to our game plan units and noxus and katarina decks in general aren't known for their big health pools except this precious baby please make her viable death lotus usually kills more of your followers than your opponents you could say you could use it in defense but that would require you to have katarina on the board which she rarely is because of the whole recall me thing this also makes it so that additional copies of her often don't do anything in your hand they are just dead draws one of the coolest things you can actually do with katarina is changing her skin mid game by playing the god willow seedling on her whoa wait she changed clothes that's epic i will be completely honest and say that katarina getting the one mana throw dagger spell feels like katarina and so does death lotus throw a bunch of daggers at everybody in combat but it doesn't fit with what the champion in the card game is trying to do this is why designs like zoe and aurelian soul are so impressive to me aurelian soul in league of legends is supposed to be this galactic enormous space dragon you look at him in game and he is a salamander with a hula hoop in roontera you can fulfill that fantasy and make him an actual galactic space dragon by making him 10 mana and 10 10 instead on top of giving him an awesome ability that displays how incredibly powerful he really is on the other hand you have zoe this giddy long range nuke mage that uses portals to go from place to place it's beyond annoying to play against her and die from three screens away in legal legends and in runterra she's still annoying and giddy as she uses her portals to summon her celestial friends onto the field the voice lines the animations it feels like zoe from league and what about a champion like zillion who have just translated very well from how they play in league old man with time bombs the time bombs are landmarks because they need to count down before they explode but just like in league if you double bomb something one of the landmark bombs explode instantly so just like aurelian soul zoe and zelia whoa buddy zillion what the hell happened here about due for that rework huh anyway katarina tries to feel like these champions but her abilities are all over the place that she can't find a deck to function in a 3-2 quick attacker that removes herself from the board so you can rally later can be pretty good if you had any other card that supports that playstyle what if every time you recall katarina you discount another minion in your hand so you don't lose as much tempo what if the spells he generates was a jailbreak so you can leave a minion behind whence he recalls so many options but you can't build your deck around katarina and her blade's edge and death lotus because they do completely different things her payoff is misaligned with her synergies she takes aggro cards that attack once and deal damage but their hp is too low to consistently get another attack in having the option to play for value or tempo sounds great but katarina isn't strong or consistent enough herself to make that a real possibility sadly the rune terror deaths have mentioned multiple times that they are reluctant to buff katarina because her rally effect is incredibly strong as he could very easily become problematic and i agree i'd prefer a rework over any kind of buff while doing research i actually found this very interesting piece of information katarina used to shuffle more death lotuses into your deck on summon that would deal increasing damage and casting 3 would re-summon her so you're telling me katarina used to be a cool card what happened here okay instead of getting upset i had a better idea i asked the creative minds of the custom card channel in the sony discord to work this concept into an actual level 1 and level 2 katarina i'm about to show you my favorite design but obviously i can't do that here i need to be in my trusty builds water tavern when i review custom cards much better out of all the submissions that were sent my favorite one was made by remny level 1 katarina creates a fleeting death lotus in hand and katarina cannot take damage from the spell level up is that lotus has been cast three plus times and level two is when katarina summoned rally attack create a zero cost death load is in hand for each time i've attacked this turn when three death loaders have been played summon an ephemeral copy of me and i cannot take damage from death lotus i love this concept because it'll make katarina feel much more like she does in league which is attacking with a storm of daggers surrounding her and the more katarina attacks the more daggers she gets to throw which will also work with that thermal copy that she summons so it'll feel much more like her passive in league where her cooldowns reset on kill and i also like how remny decided to just get rid of the entire meme recall thing attached to katarina entirely but then again we're at a point in the game where meme and recall no longer really fit in the same sentence because with the newly highly interactive ahri and canon deck recalling actually seems pretty good i mean recalling canon and droplet gives you some pretty good value an elusive deck with cheap units that draws you cards and denies your opponent from playing anything really because of palm homecoming deny and nopefy it's funny how runtera praises itself for being the card game with the most interaction yet it's always the decks with the least amount of interaction that do well having cheap elusive that you can recall to safety is good because replaying something for one mana isn't such a big deal ahri's recall payoff is just once again being able to kill you with a board full of elusives but it's much flashier now with one of riot's marketable poster girls but there's actually a very easy fix for that let me explain it to you sunny style are you afraid of combat shivering at the thought of having to make a trade with another unit play elusives are you a chat who wants to show off how big you are by smashing your opponent then the keyword for you might be overwhelmed this video though is about a champion that has neither of those keywords we got to see that recall can actually be good if there are powerful payoffs that don't require more combos or setup to work a recurring rally is good but not if that's literally the only payoff you get and you still have to do all the work of setting up a board followers and noxus that benefit from having a big board or attacking a lot are cards like big boy battering ram legion marauders legion saboteurs legion drummers okay hold on i'm sensing a pattern here it's a little strange to have the sinister blade be in a car package with these in-your-face aggressive followers you'd expect an assassin like katarina to have more sneaky and subtle cards much like leblanc with thorns of the rose and the black rose spy so can we talk about the elephant in the room how is the big frost troll a 4 6 instead and the skinny master schemer a 5 2. i am confusion this is 5 attack this is 4 attack rito explain explain i thought i was a troll reputation was a huge miss leblanc could have been so cool but instead riot made the black rose the face of reputation when clearly it should have been samira katarina is neither an assassin nor an in-your-face damage dealer like samira but there are numerous ways to fix that yet it's unlikely a change will ever see the light of day rallies are annoying to play against so i don't really want katarina to be buffed but i also don't want her to be left in her current state especially after taking a closer look at some of the missed potential who knows maybe katarina's time will come when we start getting skins as different champion cards battle queen katarina anyone so there it is you didn't need a full video to know that katarina sucks but you got one anyway and honestly her win rate isn't even the lowest among the rune tower champions because at the end of the day rallying is just a powerful thing to do her issues are much more complicated than somebody like aphelios though felios is bad because his weapons simply cost too much he has followers he has a theme and he generates a ton of value but that value is simply too expensive katarina on the other hand has no followers has no theme and has no identity anyway those are my thoughts what would you do to fix katarina make sure to let me know down in the comments before i end this video i wanted to show one game of my favorite way to play katarina no big boards required no degeneracy just good old swarm with everyone's favorite emperor all right sorry about that there was also a spider on my wall that i had to catch elise gank yeah yeah i ate it are you sure you know spider-man how does he do it like this yeah no nothing's coming out mama's home stop proud and loud men die but sharima lives forever i should make a speech where's my speech pops in your hand i put it in your hat this morning okay um yeah let's do this strength is yours luck a thing elf that's not ours could be worse we're getting some fat attacks in now let's see i think it's like leveling up katarina early is so good because you can just rally on like important turns but she recalls herself so you really have to wait until much later what is this deck sand soldier rally obviously with destin poro because we have katarina the level easily that's a meme but it's a fun meme sandcrafter would have been really good this turns i think you could just run one cat and play two of the zero mana twitter what do you think no i don't really i don't know i mean i there's not really that many things you want to kill like straight up i don't think we care if rumble levels we're just going to try to win with sense over here [Music] we'll probably have to use this because the point will block something with rumble shall we bully off okay really okay that either means opponent found a stun that makes me wonder if it's correct a rally here because if we rally we can still summon two cents holders three sensors i mean yeah i think actually maybe rallying is just good enough yeah let's do it actually [Music] six yeah that's right no going back i could get on there that actually matters a lot i think i was just scared of being uh being stunned here but this being zero is a big deal and rumble doesn't love him tell the people what you have seen today all right rally again this thick is it's kind of nasty when it goes off dude what the hell it's just non-stop attacks when you have these sense hold your engines on the field this is the project for adding mecha caster i was i was thinking that like when i made the deck i was thinking that [Music] i ended up not doing it but i don't think it's that bad without mercy i think we only need the azir right yeah i mean he's dead in attack now all right we go with we just stack with us here all right if one goes through he's dead this is a viewer dick this is freshly brewed by sunny it is not a viewer deck oh did you hey thank you for watching this video previously called deck quest is what the future of this channel is going to look like there will still be gameplay videos but i'll occasionally upload a big scripted video like this which i created a playlist for so you won't lose track of them also i sprinkled some hints about what my next big project is going to be about if something looks out of place in this katarina video there's probably a reason for it if you have anything you'd like to see or something that i could be doing better please drop a comment or reach out to me i'm grateful for all the support you've showed me and the future of runeterra and this channel is looking bright stay awesome and i'll see you in the next video you

Channel: Snnuy

Views: 190,606

Keywords: Runeterra, legends of runeterra, snnuy, sunny lor, snnuy lor, best region, LoR, meta, tier 1, mogwai, grapplr, swim, The best region in Runeterra, nickyboi, necrit, Katarina lore, the Problem with Katarina, The worst champion in Legends of Runeterra, lor katarina deck, yasuo katarina, LeBlanc, black rose lore, lore, what is the story of Katarina in league of legends, league of legends montage, best katarina deck, lor best deck, Runeterra's worst champion, kat deck lor, katarina

Id: fFoZ3M5R14I

Length: 20min 40sec (1240 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 18 2022