Long post about why current Aurora decks are objectively unhealthy for Riftbounds game design So currently one of the most prominent decks is Dazzling Aurora Jayce centered around Elder Dragon. Combined with Bellows Breath and Flurry of Blades, the deck presents continuous cheap instant kills and infinite unit recursion with garbage grabber. Currently I've been working on Rengar and Irelia. When I sideboard against Aurora, I am legitimately swapping 8-10 cards in these decks. There are portions of my side board entirely present for this singular deck to not be an automatic loss That is not true for any other deck in the game. Sideboarding in Riftbound has effectively become how generalized can you make your Aurora hate? Star crossed is a great example because it's good into any big unit. Sabotage is another because it hits other spells/gear. Brittle steel is objectively just horrible and the general consensus is that it simply isn't worth playing. The strength of a deck ends up being capped by how well it can do into Aurora. Many colors simply do not have any viable option for dealing with an Elder dragon, while also dealing with the instant kill spells, while also dealing with the gear. And all of this is further compounded by the fact that the Jayce deck is allowed to play more draw spells than any normal deck. So in essence you have to figure out how to deal with like 3-4 different things that instantly lose you the game while seeing less cards and having fewer runes. And you have to stuff all of those answers into your side board because the gameplay vs Jayce is not Riftbound, it is point racing. If you actually built a deck around beating jayce you will simply lose to everything else. This further exacerbates the fact that some decks are terrible. If it weren't for Aurora the "bad decks" could have more sideboard freedom. Shen for example is a bad legend. Maybe he'd be a marginally better legend if he didn't have to spit half his sideboard into Aurora hate to have a fractional chance at winning? Some decks to do far as to say that it simply isn't worth sideboarding for Aurora, they will simply automatically lose if they face them. This is the current Akali strategy as making the deck playable into Aurora simply isn't viable even with 10 slots. Another downstream impact of all the aurora hate is that any other gear deck is simply unplayable. Try making an Endless Riches Zed Deck in a meta where people main deck 2 gear kills. Try playing Mech Jayce with all the empower gears. Try playing Bottled Constellation (lol) The absurd auto win condition of Elder Dragon+Aurora means that gear kill must be ABSURDLY efficient in comparison. It also means that any other gear based strategy must be similarly absurdly efficient as aurora. It also means unit bounce and kills must be absurdly efficient in comparison. If Star Crossed was banned any deck with cheated Elder becomes strictly tier 0. This makes high end units effectively unplayable if they aren't similar in impact (watcher/heron/everything else is awful) As these bounce and kills and efficient gear kills are not evenly distributed between colors, we just end up in a spot where decks like Nasus or Akali simply cannot function into Jayce or other Elder decks. Nobody wants to show up to events where their deck doesn't function event post 10 sb swaps. It simply isn't fun I really hope we get an Elder Dragon ban after LA and Riot more seriously considers downstream impacts of their changes. The resulting meta was VERY easy to predict.