Haven`t seen a lot of people running tortuns, are they unplayable in their current state or just niche in the meta?
They're getting there, but aren't quite meta yet. The biggest problem they have is that their tankiness and brute force is supposed to make up for their lack of speed and mobility, but it isn't. Their drawbacks are currently too much of a drawback while their redeeming features aren't redeeming enough to make up for that. There's also the issue of several Tortuns filling the same spot in a deck with no real differentiation between them. Their champions aren't unique enough and are somewhat linear in design. Lastly, there's the problem of their racial; the current version of Tortun's Trade is fine IMO, but it needs to be splashed around on a few more Tortuns to increase the benefits of running them as a theme.
Though that said, there are still a few decent Torts to consider for out of theme use. Tortun Hawker, Privateer Captain, Tortun Fishkisser, Tortun Grenadier, etc. But there's not much reason to run them as a theme outside of, I suppose, Tremir Craghide. And Tremir Craghide has not seem much use... well, ever.
You run tortuns for Eriluun's Favor, Tortun's Trade, Mangleshell and Tremir. They're not reasons as strong as Surge, but they're far from being bad reasons to run torts.
To be honest I wouldn't particularly care to run Torts specifically for the sake of Mangleshell. Vindictive is good but so are Frightful Blows (Treasure is usually a non-issue, or provides enough without going crazy on Torts anyway). Favor is a good point though.
