Riot’s upcomingLeague of Legendstrading card game, Riftbound, came together unbelievably fast. The original pitch was presented at the beginning of last year, and at the time, it was intended to be released exclusively in China. But thanks to the enthusiasm of League fans around the world and overwhelmingly positive feedback about the game, Riot decided Riftbound had what it takes to compete, and succeed, in the global TCG market. The first Riftbound set, Origins, will release in China this August, with a worldwide launch to follow in October, less than two years from the start of development.
Naturally, some skepticism is warranted. TCGs are notoriously difficult to produce, and very few survive beyond their first few years on the market. With the resurgence in popularity ofPokemonandMagic: The Gathering, as well as a new crop of popular games like One Piece,Disney Lorcana, and Star Wars Unlimited releasing over the last few years, the TCG market is more competitive than ever.
Riot is one of the most successful studios in the industry with a proven track record of producing beloved live-service games, but a physical card game is a different beast entirely. How can Riftbound hope to stand out when there are already so many popular TCGs, especially when Riot is seemingly rushing the game out the door with fewer than two years in development?
These are the questions I brought into last week’s pre-release media summit at Riot’s Los Angeles offices, where I spent an entire day talking to developers, playing the game, and building decks. My takeaway from the event is that the game is very good and is going to be extraordinarily popular with League and TCG fans alike, but more importantly, that Riot is aware of what it’s going to take to make this game a success, and is fully prepared to give it, and its players, everything they need. From distribution to organized play, to new player and collector support, the Riftbound team has the experience, expertise, and plans in place to make a panoptic entry into the TCG market. Riftbound will be a force to be reckoned with.
A New Take On Trading Card Combat
While there are some familiar concepts and mechanics in Riftbound, you’re probably better off forgetting what you know from other games and coming into it with fresh eyes. A lot of what makes Riftbound unique is the way it reimagines traditional card game conventions in clever, game-changing ways.
Take, for example, the resource system. Instead of adding lands or mana to your deck, you have a separate deck of cards called runes. At the start of every turn you’ll add two runes from the top of your deck to your pool, which you’re able to exhaust (tap) as a cost to play other cards, like units, spells, and gear.
Sounds like a lot of other card games, right? In Riftbound, your resource pool is constantly expanding and contracting. Many cards, especially powerful ones, have a secondary recycle cost. This means that on top of spending your runes to play a card, you also have to return a number of your runes to the bottom of the deck. How you manage your resource pool, not just turn to turn but over the entire course of a match, is a big part of Riftbound’s strategy.
Riftbound’s combat and point system is centered around conquering and holding battlefields. Players take turns adding units to their base, then send them - either one at a time or in groups - to conquer neutral battlefields. Conquering earns you one point, as does holding a battlefield with any number of your units until your following turn. The first player to earn eight points wins.
Units have just one stat number - Might - and when a player sends their units to conquer a battlefield held by an opponent’s unit, you simply add up the total might value on both sides, and the higher number wins. Only then does each player decide how damage is to be assigned to each unit, making combat easy to parse, especially as you’re learning the game, but strategically complex once you learn the cards and can start to plan ahead for subsequent turns.
Your eighth and final point can’t be earned by simply conquering a battlefield. You must either conquer both battlefields (or all three in a multiplayer game) in a single turn, or hold one battlefield until your next turn and conquer the other. This adds a lot of exciting drama and tension to the end of every match.
This focus on central action is one of Riftbound’s most unique features, and I found that it gave each player a lot of agency to dictate the pace of their own game. Since units are (mostly) safe at the base, you get to decide how long you want to build up your forces, when to unleash them on the battlefield, and how you want them to fight.
There’s an RTS quality to the way you strategize and plan out your turns. It adds a dimension of storytelling to games that’s a lot more compelling than just being two summoners standing on either side of a battlefield, smashing monsters into each other. It also contributes a lot to the identity of each Legend, as their unique way of approaching the battlefield defines their decks’ playstyle.
The Decks Of Legends
Every Riftbound deck features a dual-color legend card and one of their corresponding champion units. So a Kai’Sa deck includes the Kai’Sa legend card and any Kai’Sa champion unit (up to three copies). You may also include that champion’s signature spell card - a powerful spell that can only be played in that champion’s deck - but this isn’t required. After that, you’ll add 39 more cards from either of your legend’s colors to make a 40 card deck (your legend card does not count).
The four trial decks (which you can play for yourself in local game stores starting today) feature four Legends:Viktor, Volibear, Yasuo, andJinx. Viktor’s deck, which is the first one I played, is based around token creation. You can exhaust Victor’s Legend card and one rune to create a token at your base each turn, and Victor’s champion card has an ability that creates a token every time a non-token unit dies. Victor’s strategy is all about building an army of expendable followers who will sacrifice themselves for his cause. There are so many flavor wins like this in Riftbound that aren’t just cute nods to the characters, but essential parts of their deck’s strategy.
Origins will feature 12 Legends: Kai’Sa, Volibear, Jinx, Darius, Ahri, Lee Sin, Yasuo, Leona, Teemo, Viktor, Miss Fortune, and Sett. There are more champions than that (Vi is in Jinx’s trial deck, for example) but these are the 12 Legends who will have their own deck archetypes.
Jinx is another great example. Her deck is all about playing empty-handed. Many of her units can be enhanced if you choose to discard your own cards, and her Legend ability lets you draw an extra card at the start of your turn if you don’t have any cards in hand. Jinx is a reckless and unpredictable anti-hero, and her deck’s archetype reflects her personality beautifully. If you love the characters and worldbuilding in League, there’s so much great emergent storytelling to be found in Riftbound.
Lots And Lots Of Shinies
As a sucker for shiny cardboard, Riftbound has a nice variety of card rarities to keep opening packs exciting. Each 14-card pack contains a token or rune, seven commons, three uncommons, a foil of any rarity, and two rare-or-better foil cards. These can be either rare or epic versions of legend and champion unit cards, but they might also be alternate art cards. At a rate of about two per box, alternate art champions will be some of the most popular cards in the Origins set.
There are even rarer cards, though. About one in every three boxes will contain an overnumbered card. These full-art, alternate art cards won’t be revealed during spoiler season (the only one I got to see at the event featured a stunning three-quarter shot of Yasuo) because Riot wants to give players a chance to discover them together as a community.
The ultimate chase case card is an artist’s signature version of each overnumbered card. The signature will only appear on one in every ten overnumbered cards, or roughly one in every 30 boxes. Origins features a lot of reused art from LoR, some of which can only be credited to the agencies they came from rather than the actual artist, so these artists’ signature cards are a great indication of how much Riot values Riftbound’s artists and intends to give them credit for their amazing work.
A TCG That Could Only Come From Riot
When you consider all of the resources at Riot’s disposal, launching Riftbound in under two years doesn’t seem all that strange. A lot of developers on the design team, including game director Dave Guskin, came from Legends of Runeterra - the original, all-digital League of Legends card game. And while Riftbound plays very differently from Legends of Runeterra, having people on the team who already have experience designing a card game around League of Legends helped the iteration process significantly.
Riftbound is also reusing a lot of art from both Legends of Runeterra and League of Legends for Origins, which helped speed up development. We’ll see more reused art in upcoming sets, but eventually Riftbound will predominantly feature original art.
If there’s one thing Riot knows better than anyone, it’s how to host successful competitive events for its games. Over the last 16 years of hosting League of Legends events, Riot has developed an industry-leading competitive program, which has since expanded to include its other titles, Valorant and Teamfight Tactics. Riot is leveraging that experience and infrastructure, along with the expertise of global publisher UVS, to create a robust organized play program for Riftbound right from the start.
Supporting Every Kind Of TCG Player
Organized play director Josh TKTK walked us through all the different ways Riot will be supporting players through game stores and official tournaments. This starts at the local level with release events and league play, called Nexus Nights. For the first release event, players will each get one of three pre-constructed Champion Decks (which comes with a booster pack), an additional booster pack, and a release promo pack containing one epic champion unit (Jinx, Viktor, or Lee Sin), and one of twelve champion legend cards.
Players who attend weekly Nexus Night events will receive a three-card Nexus Night promo pack, containing 18 possible parallel foils and six possible alternate art runes (about one in every two packs).
Supporting casual and social players is a big focus for the Riftbound team. They expect League fans will be looking for the most competitive experience possible, and while there are plenty of plans in place for premier play, the devs see the dedicated weekly players who show up to support their local store and enjoy the game with friends as the lifeblood of the TCG community. Supporting Nexus Night events with unique promo packs is one way Riot is focusing on community building in stores.
A board game-style boxed set of four decks called Proving Grounds will be available as a learn-to-play experience for new players. These decks are unique, with simple cards that aren’t meant to be used outside of Proving Grounds.
Riftbound was originally designed as a multiplayer game and supports both four-player and 2v2, making it a flexible game for one-on-one competition and groups of friends. Other formats include Sealed, Draft, and a 5v5 mode that consists of two 2v2 “lane” matches and a 1v1 “jungler” match, mirroring the core League of Legends gameplay experience.
A Fully Fleshed Out Competitive Circuit
The competitive circuit will begin at local game stores with Summoner Skirmish events. These tournaments will occur twice a set, one month apart. Summoner Skirmish prizing will include a participation promo and a Top 8 promo card, which will be rewarded again in Top 4 and the finals, so the winner will take home a full playset of the promo card, as well as a champion playmat.
Winners of Summoner Skirmish will also be rewarded a bye in the first round of a regional tournament. Regional tournaments will kick off this December, with the top players at each qualifying for regional championships. In order to keep things fair between regions, the number of participants will determine how many players qualify (i.e. with 512 players, the Top 16 will qualify). In addition, there will be promo, swag, and cash prizing at these events.
There will also be “Best Of” prizing for unique accomplishments at regionals. For example, if someone makes an impressive run with an off-meta Yasuo deck, they might be rewarded with some Yasuo-themed prizes.
Riot is planning on hosting one or two regional championships in the first competitive season, with the goal of increasing that to two or three in the future. These championships will begin in October 2026 and players can expect the same size and scope as other Riot events. There will be a Last Chance Qualifier for those who weren’t able to qualify at a regional, and prizing will be similar, but at a higher level than regional, which includes an invitation to the World Championship. Running big coveted events is Riot’s expertise, so it’s no surprise to see so many great plans in place for organized play, but it’s still impressive to see how much is planned and already in motion.
Riftbound Is Hitting The Ground Running
I had a lot of concerns about Riftbound when I got to Riot, but by the time I left, I had very few. The three-month gap between the Chinese and global launch is a bit of a disappointment, but Riot intends to slow down future Chinese releases until the English sets catch up, which it hopes to accomplish within the first year.
There are some mechanical intricacies in the game that I found to be unintuitive, especially when it comes to playing instant-speed spells and Riftbound’s trap-style “hidden” cards, but Riot was aware of those stumbling blocks and is working to smooth out those rough edges, because the game’s approachability is one of its best features. It sits in a nice middle ground of complexity between Pokemon and Magic that makes it easy to learn while offering a lot of moment-to-moment decision-making and depth.
What impressed me the most about the Riftbound team was their confidence. They know they have a great game, and they’re building up all of the mechanisms and programs around it that it needs to be successful. That doesn’t mean they’re cocky. Everyone I spoke to was insistent that they intend to work with the community to shape Riftbound into the best game it can be, even if that means going back to square one on things, as they did with the initial UI design of the cards.
They know mistakes will happen along the way, but there’s a sincerity and transparency among this team that’s rare to find, especially among studios as big as Riot. They answered every question asked and shared more about the inner workings of the studio and the development process than I ever expected. Communication between the studio and the community is a crucial part of any card game. The Riftbound team seems to understand how valuable its credibility is, and doesn’t want to take that for granted.
I haven’t stopped thinking about Riftbound since I played it last week, and don’t expect I’ll stop thinking about it until it launches this October. I didn’t know what to expect from Riot’s second crack at a League of Legends card game - a China-exclusive TCG turned global release overnight - but now my expectations are extremely high. If Riot does everything it says it’s going to do over the next year, I anticipate Riftbound will be a TCG juggernaut and a staple at game stores around the world.
