I'm tired of pretending that Crystal Rune is ok and I am sick of it.
"Oh its complex" therefore it deserves to be tier 1 is the most widespread propaganda I've heard when the gameplay boils down to you/the opponent playing Solitaire and you have no good ways to interact with it other than sit and wait as they chain card after card within the same turn. This is then followed by "oh, but other decks are also uninteractive" but at least those decks have counterplay to them. Yeah dragon's highroll is bs, but you can aggress them into panicing an out, and more often than nought because its so reliant on highroll, half of the games with dragon won't also pan out the same. Sometimes you'll get unlucky, the dragon will get unlucky and so on. Sword (and to an extent Portal) is board slop and can put down good pressure but its countered by its little to no healing, so when pressure is applied to them they can't, as easily, bounce back.
Really, my main issue with Crystal Rune is this: What are its weaknesses?
Out of all of the matchups I've seen for it, their worst ones are at least even, and never even slightly unfavored. Pressure them through aggression, they have Crystalspawns to combat small minions and mitigate their damage. Go wide with a bunch of followers, Behemoth General. Bait them to use and waste their evo points, out comes Olivia to bail them. Play the long game by healing above their damage "thresholds", how? Not only is it randomized but they can keep building and building stacks until it gets out of hand allowing them to hit for plenty or heal for just as much. And they can do it back to back to back with so much consistency it makes me convinced that someone higher up in the dev team is in love with Kaori/Isabelle. In conclusion, the next time they design a new/add to an archetpye for Rune, give it a weakness, or at least a blatant one. Because I cannot for the life of me figure out what it is that isn't just luck based.