Legends of Runeterra Best Starter Deck

The new card game by Riot, Legends of Runeterra, is available for open beta today. A lot of players like to try and put together a great budget deck in the beginning of any card game. Good starter decks will be low budget and good for getting a decent amount of wins early on in the release.

This guide will focus on a good starter deck you can use early on that will help you progress through the game so you can build some better decks.

Legends of Runeterra Best Starter Deck

All players will be in a similar situation on Day 1 of Legends of Runeterra. With no way to buy packs and expand your collection outside of playing and winning games, everyone will be stuck with the same cards. The cards come in a form of three starter decks that become available after completing the prologue.

The three starting games are not completely terrible and they do their job. However, it does seems like the Jinx and Zed deck is the weakest. The starter decks will also not be able to hold their own against a well thought out constructed deck. There are definitely some cards in each of these decks we can use to build a solid starter deck.

The Elise deck has a ton of core cards we will need to construct a good spiders deck. This deck is very easy to play as long as you understand the base mechanics of the game. Your main goal will be to fill the board with spider cards and deal as much damage to your opponent as possible.

The main card in this deck is Elise, a 2 mana Champion with Fearsome. This ability means she can only be blocked by enemies with 3 or more attack, making her extremely powerful in the early game. Her attack also spawns a 1/1 Spiderling to her right. Not only is this spiderling annoying to opponents, but once there are three of them Elise will meet her level up condition and turn into Spider Queen Elise.

Spider Queen Elise gives all other Spider allies Challenger and Fearsome. Since the goal of this deck is to fill the board with as many spiders as possible, having access to these buffs will be a huge advantage.

Let’s take a look at some of the other units we’ll be including in this deck:

Low Tier – Hapless Aristocrat, House Spider, Arachnoid Horror

The normal early game value units are House Spiders and Hapless Aristocrat, both of which spawn spiders and swarm the board with units. Arachnoid Horror is useful to kill stronger 3HP+ units.

Mid-High Tier – Frenzied Skitterer, Arachnoid Host, Brood Awakening

On the higher end of the curve there is Frenzied Skitterer and Arachnoid Host, both of which buff all other spiders on the board. This allows your weaker units to still have some value later on in the game.

The final card is Brood Awakening, a super powerful six mana spell summoning 3 spiderlings and buffing all other spider allies. This is a great card if you fall behind or need a quick way to get ahead.

Queen Elise Spider Army Strategy

One downfall of this deck at first glance is there are a lot of weak units that will die often. To turn this potential weakness into a strength, we want to utilize cards that do something when units die. One example of this is Phantom Prankster, which deals 1 damage to the enemy nexus whenever an allied unit dies.

Other than that, we want to use some value spells like Crawling Sensation and Black Spear. Finally, Fresh Offerings is a card we’ll want to include for the powerful 6/6 summon.

The deck wouldn’t be complete without having a card that can trigger all these abilities. For that reason we want to include Ravenous Butcher in our deck. This card allows you to kill an ally and costs 0. Glimpse Beyond is another card that allows us to kill one of our units and also draw two cards which is also quite useful.

We also have Vile Feast to drain health from enemies and summon Spiderlings. This has good synergy with Noxian Guillotine, which allows you to destroy a damaged creature. If you are up against a massive creature, you can utilize these two cards to get rid of them.

Arachnoid Sentry is another spider creature that stuns an enemy creature when summoned. Finally, we have The Undying who doesn’t necessarily do too much in this deck but he’s a nice addition regardless.