Trading card games have been around far before online gaming. Most veteran gamers are likely to have experience with card games from their childhood, and assembling the best decks possible was an essential part of playing those games.
Despite their popularity, card games were absent from modern gaming due to their cost of entry. The genre finally found itself a place after the release of Hearthstone. The game’s accessible nature, familiar lore, and fun graphics drew the attention of many gamers around the world, but the honeymoon period eventually came to an end—only to re-emerge in Legends of Runeterra.
Hearthstone slowly built an entry barrier, forcing players to purchase card packs with each expansion to keep up with the meta. Not buying selected cards also meant that players had to rely on their luck to unlock the card they wanted unless they decided to craft those cards with materials.
There are no card packs in LoR, and players can unlock all the cards separately. The Wildcard system reduces the luck factor to a minimum, and all of these quality-of-life changes make building a collection more fun.
If you’re returning or a new player, wondering how you can catch up with the new cards is only natural. The simple answer to this question might be “just play the game,” but there is more to it. While players who get to play LoR for more than four hours a day will have a full collection within a couple of months, players with a tight schedule will need to look for the fastest way to unlock cards in LoR.
Here’s how you can get up to speed and get cards in the fastest way possible in LoR.
Use the XP boost in each region
LoR allows all players to explore each region in a battle pass-ish style. Each tier of a region unlocks more rewards. If you’ve been gone for a while or just starting to play, there will be XP boosts waiting for you, and they’ll help with the catch-up process.
As of now, most of the regions in the game will have a 50-percent XP boost. Most players may feel like they need to max out a region before moving to another, but the most time-efficient strategy will be getting each region with an XP boost to level 12 before leveling any of them further.
Once you get each region to level 12, you can then decide which region you’d like to max out depending on the cards and champions from that region.
Make the most out of your time in LoR
Staying free-to-play in most games requires excessive hours of grinding. That doesn’t seem to be the case with LoR, however, since the game’s most important daily bonuses and rewards often require players to dedicate only an hour or two of their time.
Most daily quests can be completed during this time, and players will also receive bonus XP for their first three PvP wins.
- First PvP win: 400 XP
- Second PvP win: 200 XP
- Third PvP win: 100 XP
Each win until you get 11 victories will reward you with 200 XP, but after that point the XP rewards will start diminishing until players get zero XP after 31 wins.
While there isn’t that much of an incentive to lose in LoR, the XP rewards are also nice enough to compensate for your time. The base PvP loss XP reward sits at 100 XP, but it’ll get reduced by half at five losses, and players will start receiving zero XP after hitting 10 losses.
To efficiently use your time, you can start by collecting your daily win bonuses while trying to complete your challenges. Once that’s done, you can queue into 10 normal matches and surrender in the beginning to collect your daily XP from losses.
Use the reroll tokens
Though LoR has a system in place that ensures all players get the same average XP from daily challenges, it never hurts to try your luck to see if you can secure a 1,500 XP challenge.
Combining these daily quest rewards with the regions you have an XP boost for will allow you to get that level 12 as fast as possible, so you’ll be able to move on to a different region or continue to level up the remainder of that region.
Don’t sleep on the Weekly Vault
The Weekly Vault is potentially the biggest source for new cards or materials for all players. This chest resets every Thursday and levels up based on regular XP.
Completing your daily challenges every day and collecting your daily bonus XPs should allow you to get to at least level 10 every week. From Wildcards to shards, the Weekly Vault always packs decent rewards, which make leveling it up more than worth your time.
Complete event passes
Though they aren’t available all the time, just like League of Legends, LoR also gets its own event passes where players can unlock tier rewards by collecting XP.
Players will also have the option to purchase a premium path for their event pass, which mostly unlocks more cosmetic rewards. If you’re only interested in Wildcards and similar rewards, the free version will suffice.
Unlock all the common cards if you can
The second way to craft cards is by using shards. Finding shards can be more difficult than finding Wildcards, however, and unlocking all commons in the game will allow you to have a constant income of shards.
Once you unlock all the commons in the game using Wildcards or any other method, you’ll start receiving shards for every common card you receive. Before you can unlock the whole collection, you should have access to all commons in the game. This will make it even easier for you to unlock the rest of your collection.
Expeditions
The draft mode, Expeditions, has been the go-to place for deck builders in most card games with a similar feature. It’s also one of the best ways of building a card collection in LoR if you can constantly average high win runs.
Players will need to use coins, shards, or Expedition tokens to enter the game mode. While the entrance fee is a bit costly, doing expeditions is more than worth it since you’ll be rewarded with a random champion even if you get no wins. The rewards will only increase as you keep winning, and at some point, you’ll start profiting from your Expedition runs since you can get your entry token back and unlock two champions and shards.
Players will also receive bonus XP based on the number of wins in their run, making Expeditions the best game mode to farm XP and build a collection.
If you have a limited amount of time, however, you should still focus on making the most XP possible in the shortest amount of time, meaning you may need to stay away from the Expeditions game mode. This game mode will require players to craft decks from scratch. Most Expeditions matches tend to play out relatively slower than ranked or normal matches since both players will often want to make sure that they’re making the best move. With higher stakes and longer matches, the game mode can also come off as relatively more stressful.
While you can always purchase the entire collection with money, Riot Games has also left an open door for free-to-play players to keep up with the cards and even get ahead of the curve with time. Once you complete your collection, you can save the rest of your resources for the next expansion.
