New Idea for Items: Cursed Items

So all of a sudden I had a thought, which has never happened before. I thought that it would be cool if there were items with stat penalties. But why would anybody buy an item with stat penalties you ask? Because they would give you a lot of power in a different area, and they would be cheap!

So I think a big problem with the new league which focuses teamwork and counter-play is that you can't counter-play a huge gold deficit. You have to simply wait until the enemy team makes a mistake somewhere, and at lower levels of play you most likely can't capitalize on their mistakes. But if you could buy a full tier Item for 1000-1500 gold cheaper, you can make up that item difference if you are getting stomped in lane.

Now, there are a lot of problems with making an item so powerful for so little gold, and that's where the penalties come in. Say you buy a cursed item that increases your attack damage by 40 or 50, it could have a stat penalty on attack speed or movement speed to balance it out. But that might still be considered overpowered and would only help people already ahead snowball more. The solution? Make the items completely undesirable for anybody other than people who have no other options. My solution would be that you could only buy one cursed item per game and you are unable to sell it. You would be stuck with a penalty the rest of the game and lose out on an optimized build late game, in exchange for a power spike that might help you or your team get back into the game. If that doesn't work I'm sure that you are all creative enough to find something that does, or you could just make the items and not care if they help the team with the large gold lead as well. New items = more diversity and fun!

(Note that the penalties don't have to be stat penalties either. They could increase the death timer, reduce gold earned from kills and assists, or any other number of things.)

Now the easiest way to incorporate Cursed Items is to just make them "unfinished items." For example, you could immediately upgrade to a cursed infinity edge using just 2 of the items instead of 3 and make the combine cost dependent on which items you buy. 1300 + 875 + combine cost 225 = 2400 gold; or 875 + 800 + combine cost 725 = 2400 gold. As for the penalty? How should I know what would balance that out?

However, you could make entirely new items with the same mindset. Cheap, strong, and risky; unlike all of the current items which have literally no risk (except ) unless you pick the wrong item or you don't have enough gold. There are so many possibilities with champion builds if you start adding penalties to items. For example, a super strong ap item that gives like 140-160 ap at the exchange of 500 maximum mana. (I have no idea if that is balanced or not... ) The main problem with this line of thought would be balancing the items, especially if you used the more obscure penalties and not stat penalties which already have somewhat fixed values.

Closing out, you people at riot should consider adding some high risk/high reward type items. Not like that just lets you snowball, but items that could help you comeback from losing or in turn could completely cost you the game.. and here i thought elo hell couldn't get any worse. Well I still think it's a good idea.