Welcome to another guide in our series on Legends of Runeterra (LoR). To recap: I'm a Masters player on the EUW ladder in Runeterra and I want to help the community improve. This guide requires a basic knowledge of the game mechanics, but hopefully it will be accessible to everyone.
As I discussed at the end of my previous LoR open attack guide, one of the most important decision factors in a card game is whether you're ahead or behind.
Simply put: when you play from behind, you want to take more risks.
In the same way, when you are ahead of your opponent, you have to play more carefully. These are pretty sweeping generalizations, of course, and strictly speaking, the “ideal” game is never that simple. But it's a good starting point.
But what do we mean front and back?
When we use these terms, we are describing our odds of winning given the current state of the board and each player's hand. This constantly varies with the matches, draws and cards each player decides to play, but you can get a pretty good idea of ​​your probability of winning once you get some decent experience.
In other words, we assess whether we are closer to meeting our victory condition than the opponent is to meeting theirs.
Aggro decks, for example, win by killing the opponent quickly - usually before turn 7 or turn 8 - but they quickly run out of steam and struggle to defeat decks that can heal and grind parts.
Above is an example of a fairly popular Aggro deck, and you can see that a single card costs over 3 mana to play.
If you're playing against an Aggro deck that removed 15 HP from your Nexus on turn 4, then you're pretty far behind. If you still have 10 HP on turn 10 and they only have two cards in hand with an empty field, it's safe to say you're probably ahead.
In general, however, you normally lag behind when playing against an Aggro deck. The game becomes a race to stabilize your board before you die.
How should this affect our game and what do we mean by risks? Well, let's look at some examples of how to play front and back to get a better idea of ​​what we mean.
Risky business
In this first example, we are ahead playing a mirror match of Corina Control in Masters. For context: when playing against decks (like ours) that don't summon many units, playing Commander Ledros on turn 9 is almost always better than playing Corina Veraza.
Our opponent played Corina in the last turn, indicating that he had no Ledros in hand. We played ours in response, putting ourselves firmly in the lead. Our Nexus has higher HP than our opponent, we probably have a better hand than them and we have better ground.
In this position, we could use Statikk Shock to dig in for more burn damage or attacks to force them to swap and then replay our Ledros. However, the safest game here is to summon our very own Corina. This poses the biggest initial threat by summoning another attacker and dealing direct burn damage in the process.
A good answer to that would be my opponent playing The Ruination, but we don't particularly mind that. We get the burn damage and we have more in hand to end the match.
In the second example, below, I'm playing the same deck against a Yasuo deck.
I'm pretty far behind in this game, with less Nexus HP than my opponent, worse field, and their Yasuo is almost level. If I can't kill their units or summon more of my own, they will most likely kill me on their next attack.
With the hand I have, playing Commander Ledros feels like a safe play, as I know my opponent probably has Deny and the alternative (The Ruination) would leave me with no units if countered.
It's probably the wrong call, though, and I should risk ruining it. Why? Simply put, Ledros isn't enough to turn this game in my favor, and I've choked off my next spins.
In the position I'm in, hoping my opponent doesn't have a denial is definitely a big risk, but the payoff for the game and the successful death of their board will be a huge swing in my favor.
My opponent ended up using Deny like I feared, so playing Ruination on my turn is also less valuable because my opponent will have the mana to reestablish a plateau and finish me off with an open attack when I return to them.
If I played these two cards in reverse order, I would have a better chance of winning than in the screenshot above.
Don't worry if these examples aren't immediately useful, as they are very specific. The main takeaway from this guide is that when you're ahead, you have to be careful of what cards your opponent might have.
Think about what they might do to counter you, and play the less engaging cards that still help you get your win condition.
When you are late, you may have to take risks and hope your opponent has no answer to your cards. Think about whether you can still win without taking these risks, and remember that you can't win every game.
Sometimes your opponent will have the perfect hand to beat you, but that's okay. Dust yourself off and move on to the next game. That's the nature of card games!
If this guide was helpful to you, why not check out our dedicated Legends of Runeterra page – we've got plenty of guides already, and more are coming very soon!
