Odyssey Augments as runes

(EDIT: Since people like to jump to conclusions and not bother reading into anything, no, these wouldn't be as broken as actual Odyssey augments. Those were SUPPOSED to be op, these wouldn't. I simply have nothing else in league of legends to compare these to.) TL;DR : Having Odyssey augments replace the rune system would be incredibly fun and interesting, and probably more balanced than the current rune system. This is a long ass thread so buckle up

Alright, so I imagine a good number of you probably remember the Odyssey event. In my opinion, one of the most fun things about that event was the augment system. Yes, the PvE design, skins, and overall event were stellar (heh), but the thing that REALLY sold it for me were the augments. When I first played the gamemode I say 4 of the champs and said "Man, I hate all of those, I'm literally never going to play them." But when I kept getting augments and missions, and started trying out different builds, it was a blast. The amount of depth you could have was really fun and interesting, which is what leads me to my topic today: Replacing the mastery/rune system with augments.

Long story short, imagine instead of having the rune system, each champion had a few slots for "augment" type changes to certain abilities. In my opinion, this would be a very interesting change and it would add a lot of extra depth to each individual champion. Now, this does have both pros and cons in my opinion, and I'll go over those in a second, but first I want to talk about why I thought this: Battlerite. I don't know how many of you played the game, I don't really remember it being a huge hit or anything. To sum it up though, it's basically a moba style game with league pov, smite controls, and a focus on pvp rather than objectives. Instead of a general rune system like league's though, each character had specific ability changes they could assign before a match. While I never played enough to give a 100% answer, I can say that from the 40 hours or so I did play they didn't FEEL busted, and they also didn't feel over complicated. When I saw them I didn't say "Oh my godddd I have to learn all these abilities to learn my champion ughhh.", it was more like "Oh holy shit there's so much stuff, I can't wait to mess with it!".

Explanations aside, let's go into the pros and cons.

Pros:

1. They'd add a lot of depth and exploration to each champion.
2. They'd add more variety to the out of game options for champions.
3. They'd be easier to balance than Runes.

Cons:

1. There's a LOT of champions compared to Battlerite, meaning having a system like this would take a LOT of work to implement.
2. Some abilities might require extra particles, meaning even more work because of skins.
3. Could be overwhelming for newer players (I don't think so, but I could see how it could be)
4. Would make fighting enemy champions really risky at first, as these would be more game changing than most runes.

So now that I've laid out some pros and cons, let's discuss them:

As far as pros go, I don't think 1. needs to be explained too much, it's what's on the tin. The second two are kind of interwoven though and it all points back to the problems for the rune system. Starting with 2. , one of the biggest problem with the rune system is lack of variety. Let's be honest, most champions (hell, most of the rune paths) have pretty much a set keystone and mini runes you take. Sure, based on matchup or certain builds you can mix things up, but more often than not there are meta rune pages that you just take every game, with a little tinkering here and there. Playing an assassing? Take Electrocute. Playing a bruiser or juggernaut? Grab conquerer. Playing an adc? Actually, adc pages use most of the runes so I can't say much. Either way, you get my point. It gets very stale. Properly balanced "augments" though would most likely be much more universally balanced and fun to use. Hell, even if you didn't use all of them and still only ran one page, it'd be a much more interesting page because of how it affected the gameplay. And as far as 3. goes, it also stems from the fact that not every rune took every champ into consideration. Some runes will just be busted on certain champs, leading for nerfs for either the champ or the rune, which isn't fun. Augments though would be self contained, and if some kind of augment combo was too strong they could hit the parts of the champ that mattered every time without gutting it or shaking up every user of that rune.

Onto the cons, I'll bundle 1. and 2. together since they are pretty much the same issue. Yes, implementing this would be a HEFTY task. This is honestly a big reason against it, just the sheer volume of work that would need to be done, it would probably take an entire season of behind the scenes work to finish. Onto 3. , you could just limit the progression like summoner spells, but even if you didn't I still don't think it would be THAT hard to grasp. And 4 could actually be a pro and a con. As far as it being a semi pro, the strategy of having to play cautiously and feel your opponent out because you have to find out what they are packing could be an interesting dynamic. On the semi con side it every champion had augments, knowing all their options would be nearly impossible with 140 ish champions. This could be circumvented by the augments being impactful, but not SUPER crazy, that way you wouldn't be fucked over by not memorizing all of them, as seeing them in action would pretty much let you know. Basically, the changes would be very easy to notice the difference.

All of that said, it has it's ups and downs. I personally think it would be an amazing addition to the game, and would also be cool with events having their own custom abilities to match the event. I'm not saying it would be perfect, as I said above it has cons, and probably more so than I was able to come up with. However, I feel it would be a more balanced and fun system than what we currently have.