Welcome to our Path of Champions Starter Guide for Legends of Runeterra! Path of Champions has been out for about a week now, and we have managed to compile some of the best strategies to kickstart your journey.

If this is your first encounter with Path of Champions, you might want to watch this quick video guide to get you up to speed on Patch 2.19.

Your First Steps on the Path

Featured Champions for Path of Champions

Firstly, we would recommend climbing the Path of Champions with one of the Featured Champions. There are two reasons we recommend playing them. Firstly, each Champion’s deck in Path of Champions requires at least two copies of their Champion card to play it. Meanwhile, the first time you complete the starter adventure of a Featured Champion (except Jayce), you’ll be given two free Champion cards for the next Featured Champion. Specifically, the play order is Jinx, Vi, Ekko, then Caitlyn. Once you’ve done Caitlyn’s starter adventure and unlocked Jayce, you’ll have gotten all the free Champion cards. Since Jinx is part of the starter deck that all accounts receive from the tutorial, you’ll be able to collect all of these goodies even as a new player.

Ekko’s Starter Adventure

Secondly, these Featured Champions will be able to grind easy Reputation from their starter adventures. This is important because each Reputation Rank can give you a minor bonus and these bonuses can start to pile up quickly. Not only that, you’ll get infinite revives in the starter adventure so you’ll be able to get a steady stream of Reputation with no risk of failure.

If you would rather play a different Champion over one of the Featured Champions, feel free to do so. However, non-Featured Champions will have to start with The Fae Sorceress adventure which can be quite tough. Therefore, this might result in more failed runs compared to running a Featured Champion’s starter adventure.

Revving Up With Rep

Once you’ve gotten a few Reputation Ranks under your belt, you can move on to the next adventures. The major goal of this Path of Champions starter guide is for you to be powerful enough to consistently beat Gangplank in The Saltwater Scourge adventure. Every time you beat Gangplank, you’ll get a random Common Relic.

Reputation Rank 8 will unlock your Champions Starting Power

We recommend moving on to Gangplank once you’ve gotten a significant power spike from a Reputation Rank reward. You should move on once you’ve gotten to one of these stopping points.

• Rank 4: +2 Rerolls
  • Having some rerolls will give you a better chance to get relevant upgrades. You’ll get the most bang for your buck by spending rerolls on Powers. If you have spares towards the end of a run, you could do rerolls in a shop to fish for usable upgrades.
• Rank 5: Random Starting Item
  • This will give a random Common rarity item on a random card in your starting deck. Most times you’ll get a dud, but once in a while, you’ll get a great combo to build around.
• Rank 8: New Starting Power
  • Probably the biggest power spike you’ll get on the whole Reputation Rank track. Unlocking your power does wonders for getting successful runs.

The reason we don’t care about Rank 6 (Unlock a Relic Slot) or Rank 7 (Can now cut cards at the Healer) is because the Relic slot is pointless without any actual Relics in your collection. Meanwhile, the Saltwater Scourge adventure has a lot of burn decks and aggressive enemies. More often than not, you’re going to need the healing and won’t have the opportunity to cut cards anyway.

Fae Enchantress Boss Guide

The Fae Sorceress Adventure

For the Fae Enchantress adventure, the toughest encounter you’ll have to go up against is going to be Poppy. (Lulu is actually a pushover in comparison). Poppy has a Power that gives her strongest ally +1/+1 for each other ally on the field. She will try to go wide with her board and then drown you in value with her Power. If that wasn’t bad enough, she can finish the game with Poppy or Scout Ranger if she managed to flood the board.

The best strategy is actually to have the Power called Hold Them Off, which Frostbites the strongest enemy at the start of each round. This would keep Poppy’s strongest unit rendered useless turn after turn, which makes her overall strategy a lot less intimidating. Drafting this at the start of the Adventure would likely be able to carry you through the Poppy encounter and give you a successful run.

However, drafting one specific Power from the whole pool isn’t very reliable. The second best strategy when facing her is to keep her board clear at all times, trading for her low cost weaker units with your own. Once you’ve bought enough time, you can then fight back with higher value cards. You should also keep your burn or removal spells for Poppy or Scout Ranger if they do enter the battlefield.

Once you get past Poppy, the rest should be smooth sailing and you should be in the clear.

Saltwater Scourge Adventure Guide

The Saltwater Scourge Adventure

Most of the encounters in this adventure will have some form of burn that will chip away at your life. This can add up really quickly so conserving your life and drafting cards to recover life is vital to getting through this adventure successfully. There is also a random event that lets you pick up a copy of Tasty Faefolk, which has 4 Power and Lifesteal. If it pops up, I highly suggest going for it.

The two main encounters for this adventure to look out for is Swain, the miniboss, and Gangplank, the final boss of the Adventure.

Swain Mini-Boss Guide

Your success against Swain is dependent on two factors: your life total when you encounter him and having some means to defend against Swain. This is because he has a power that deals 1 damage to your Nexus directly at the start of the round. Not only does this enable him to level up faster, it puts you on a clock that’s entirely dependent on your life total.

Swain’s Passive Power

Swain is a 5 cost 3/6  with Fearsome (4/7 if he’s leveled up). We suggest having a couple of bodies with 3+ Power to defend against him as well as a couple of burn spells to take him off the field as soon as possible. If a leveled up Swain manages to connect with your Nexus, you’ll likely lose your board and the game so it is vital that you prevent that from happening.

The last thing to look out for is that there is also a few copies of Savage Reckoner in the deck. Savage Reckoner is a 7 cost 7/4 with Challenger and Overwhelm. If he drops onto the board, he’ll likely Challenge your lowest health unit to deal as much Nexus damage as he can. This can easily kill you or put you within burn range so make sure to keep something in hand to remove it once you’ve approached the 7 mana range.

If you manage to keep Swain and Savage Reckoner in check, you should be able to close out the game before dying to burn. Also, keep in mind that you will fully heal your life total after a mini-boss, so you only need to worry about getting the win.

Gangplank Boss Guide

While making your way towards Gangplank, hopefully you’ve found some extra means of removal. The fight against Gangplank is actually a war of attrition. As long as you can take out his threats while building up your board, you’ll be fine. In this fight, there are three things to look out for.

The Final Fight Against Gangplank

Firstly, you want to be able to remove Gangplank from the field. He is a 5-cost 5/5 with Challenger and Overwhelm. Secondly, he has a couple copies of Dreadway, an 8-cost 4/6 with Fearsome that also doubles all sources of damage the enemy deals to you. With these two points in mind, you would want to be able to either burn for 6 damage or have a 6 power Challenger unit lying around to take out his two main threats throughout the game.

Lastly, you want to take this fight slowly. The first time Gangplank starts the round with less than 20 life, he’ll get a free Dreadway (which then draws him a Gangplank). With a couple of barrels and a leveled-up Gangplank, he could wipe out your whole board in one turn. What’s worse is that he’ll likely be able to repeat that every turn after.

Therefore, we want to slowly build up our board while controlling Gangplanks board in turn. Take out his barrels whenever you can so that he doesn’t get any value from them. Meanwhile, chip away at his life until he’s close to 20. Do not assume that Gangplank will chump block if an attack will take him under 20 life. The AI will gladly take a hit that’ll take him under 20 life as that is its win condition. If you’re going to take him below 20 life, it HAS to be lethal or within range of killing him with burn spells.

Relic Hunting

Hopefully you’ve followed our Path of Champions starter guide and beaten Gangplank at this point. Which would net you your first Relic, making future Gangplank runs easier. At this point you’ve gotten past the early game of Path of Champions. Now it’s a matter of building up your Relic collection to find the best synergy with your chosen Champion.

A relic showing up in the reward screen after beating Gangplank

Happy hunting for your relics everyone! If you liked this Path of Champions starter guide, be sure to keep your eye out for more Legends of Runeterra or Path of Champions guides in the future.