Mordekaiser is a character of contradictions
One of the reasons I'm looking forward to Morde's inevitable update is how Riot will handle him, because the way I see it, he's a being of contradictions that isn't easily reconciled.
Okay, Mordekaiser's huge, inhabits a nasty-looking suit of plate armor, and carries a huge mace. Common sense would point to him being a slow, tanky, physical damage-dealer. But he's actually kind of squishy (albeit with some survivability) and deals mostly magic damage... but he's about as slow as one would expect a character of his physique. Trying to reconcile that is going to be a challenge in itself. What's the point of being huge and burly if you're not tanky or hit really hard with your weapon? At the same time, if you made Mordekaiser smaller to befit his sorcerous powers, he loses that part of his identity as a towering warlord clad in steel who can crush you with his bare hands. Like, the concept of Mordekaiser is awesome. Someone who's as physically imposing as he is magically skilled. Boom, you have a terrifying force to reckon with. But League's gameplay kinda enforces either one or the other. Mixed damage is becoming rarer (although Akali is keeping hers in her update), and Riot's visual updates have focused on cleaning up the visual language of LOL's characters, so that you can easily identify what they do at a glance. It's like the concept of Mordekaiser is too powerful to balance. Maybe he can be tanky and deal crap tons of physical and magic damage at the cost of mobility, but that'd be a tough line to balance.
Then there's his character. Since the beginning, Morde's been a walking metal reference and it's been a big part of how the playerbase views him. He makes awful (good) puns, his abilities are all references to metal songs, etc. But his current lore paints him as a terrifying warlord that no one would dare make light of (which I like). I think he has the potential to be one of the most vile characters in LOL. A lot of the game's previous clear-cut villains have been given shades of grey (e.g. Swain, Warwick, etc.), and while there are still plenty of champions that are evil in the sense that they're dangerous to human life (e.g. Voidborn), Mordekaiser is interesting in the sense that, while an ancient evil, he's still human at his core. He chooses to be what he is, unlike Voidborn and similarly inherently destructive characters where it's in their nature. That's scary to me. That he chooses to punish and enslave and torment, when he has the potential to do anything else, no higher power swaying him or leading him on (like Pyke). I hope they don't make Mordekaiser like Swain, in that he wants to conquer the world because "only he can properly lead it against the horrors that await Runeterra". No, I want Mordekaiser to conquer and destroy because he can and it amuses him. Granted, this sort of character is really hard to pull off without coming across as cliche or one-dimensional, but sometimes you get really scary examples that are played straight, like the Party in 1984. In fact, so many quotes from 1984 can fit Morde. "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever", "In the face of pain there are no heroes", "Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing", etc. You can really make a truly evil and fascinating character with that. But trying to reconcile that with his inherently cheesy (and I like cheesy from time to time) origins would be a real hard line to walk. What do you keep, what do you throw away, what do you change? Do you embrace the cheese or leave it behind?
I'm interested in seeing what happens.
