What does Riot get out of making Runes so expensive?
At best, it creates an imbalance between players of one role and players of another. In my mind, a Mark is a Mark, a Quintessence is a Quintessence and so on and so forth.
I don't get the whole 'let's just randomly make this Mark 50% or 150% the standard cost for Marks' logic that Riot comes up with.
I mean, at this point I'm collecting runes for the mere sake of it, but it is something that has always confused me.