What is Legends of Runeterra?

This immage is a screenshot from while I was playing, I couldn't find any free to use picture fromt the game

I'm sure every one of you at least once in your life has heard about League of Legends, well, it looks like this year there will be many games based on the League of Legends universe. This universe is pretty big, every champion in League of Legends has a very unique story behind, so Riot, (the company that developed League of Legends), after becoming the king of MOBA games with League of legends, decided to co-work with other developers and try to become an important player in the other categories of games as well. One of those is the card games category and Riot's "champion" for this category is already out in Open beta and is called Legends of Runeterra.
I played many games from this category but this one, even if still in beta, looks like the one that could dominate the scene and be the most played card game of the year.
I know you are not convinced to start playing yet, and that's why I will give you 4 reasons why I think this is one of the best card-based games till now:

1) Really Free-to-Play

Image source
If you are like the guy in the photo, you can still be a top player.

Legends of Runeterra is completely free to play, or at least for now, I do not know what will happen in the future, maybe Riot will change its mind, but for now, they want to make the game completely free to play.
Every card that exists in the game can be acquired through missions and leveling up "regions".
The regions are the place where a champion comes from, every region has a total number of cards and when you are making your deck you can combine a maximum of 2 regions, and all the cards you include in the deck must be from one of those regions.
At any moment you can change the region that you want to level up and all the experience points that you earn will go to that region.
Every region has a maximum of 20 levels and every time you reach a level you will earn new cards, shards(used to craft cards) or chests (containing cards or shards).
So just by completing the quests and playing, you can get any card in the game.
There are no expansions or cards that you can get only if you pay, you don't need a penny in order to have fun and be competitive, all you need is time and patience.

2) No pay to win

Image source
You better spare your money

The problem with many games is that you always find players that will win against you not because they are a better player or they played more but simply because they spent more money on the game. This is not the case with Legends of Runeterra. Riot used a unique strategy in order to be sure that the game will not start to be a pay to win, they have limited the amount of things that you can purchase each week. For example, you can purchase a maximum of 3 champion cards per week. In a week just by playing the game, you can get more than 3 champion cards and investing money won't be of much help for you.
With money, you can also purchase expeditions entry, but the maximum number of expeditions you can make in a week is 3 and one comes from your weekly vault, so spending your money on expeditions is kinda useless.
So basically, even if you want to spend some money on the game, this won't make you a better player, and you will still have to wait in order to get all the cards.
Another thing that you can buy with real money is the look of your Poro and of your board but those are just visual effects and don't have anything to do with the gameplay.

3) Mobile Version Coming Soon

Image source

According to Tech Jury in 2019 there were 2.1 billion mobile gamers worldwide and a game like Candy Crush had a revenue of 1.5 billion dollars, while Fortnite had a revenue of 2.4 billion. Some years ago the mobile gaming industry was not a big deal but as technology advances and our smartphones are becoming more and more like a computer, more and more people are turning to mobile gaming. There are multiple reasons for that:
Your phone is always with you.
You can play from everywhere: while going to work, or to some other place, while you lay on your bed or even on the toilet(as many people do).
Well, Riot is aware of all those informations so, they decided to invest in the mobile industry and make their games playable on mobile as well. While for League of Legends(You read well, a mobile version of League of Legends is coming soon) there will be no cross-platform so who plays from the computer won't play against a mobile player because that would not be fair, Legends of Runeterra is a turn-based card game so the difference between playing from computer or playing from mobile won't be as big as in a MOBA game. So basically, soon you could beat your friends playing from their computer even when you are sitting on the toilet.

4) Hard to get bored

Image source

The problem with many games is that at first, you have a lot of fun, but after a while they become monotonous and you get bored of doing the same things again and again.
Well, this is not the case with Legends of Runeterra. There are new missions every day (those missions help you to acquire cards by giving xp for the various regions and for the weekly chest).
With 6 regions, each having 53 different cards, your deck could be built in so many different ways.
If you see that your opponent is beating you because you loose health to fast, you could put in some more defensive or healing cards. If your opponent is beating you because he always has more monsters on the board, you could consider adding some removals to your deck. In each deck you can add a maximum of 3 copies for each card and a deck is composed of 40 cards so you can always change something in your deck based on what your opponents are playing.
If you ever get bored of ranking, even if it is kinda hard, you can play Expeditions.
In expedition you get to create your deck with random cards (if you ever played Hearthstone, Expeditions are the equivalent of Arena), You will have to choose one set of two cards out of three sets. You will have to do that fourteen times, the fifteenth time you get the chance to exchange a card for another card. After that your deck will be complete and you will be ready to challenge the other players. In Expedition, you can get a maximum of 7 wins but if you lose two times in a row you are out.

If you are not convinced to play yet, I will be posting more content about Legends of Runeterra soon.