Recently, I had the chance to try out the upcoming League of Legends trading card game, Riftbound. A physical, collectible TCG sold in booster packs, it marks an interesting new avenue for Riot Games. Riftbound has many similarities to other TCGs – most notably Magic: The Gathering. But it really shines in the areas where it chooses to differ.
In an interview with the game’s director, Dave Guskin, he explained that the ethos of the game was to foster explosive “moments of power”. The player has to choose the perfect time to pop off, like firing off your ultimate in League of Legends.
Riftbound was never supposed to be released in the US. According to Riot, the game was originally planned as a way to tap into a Chinese audience, trickier to reach with an online video game. But, after seeing how popular the concept was with fans, the company changed its plans.
While the first set, Origins, will launch in China this Summer, an English-language release is coming in October 2025, and Riot wants to remove any lag between releases as soon as possible. Given that the designers only began work on the TCG in 2024, it’s pretty incredible how quickly everything has come together.
And far from a rushed release stumbling out of the gate, from what I saw and heard, Riftbound has an impressive degree of polish. Part of that is because the game is able to use art from Legends of Runeterra to jumpstart its first set. But – while not every detail has been worked out yet – Riot has put some serious thought into how to package a trading card game, from what products to put out to how a competitive circuit will work. It’s clear Riftbound is a major investment for Riot, and the company has no intention of delivering a flop.
But with such a competitive genre – one that’s only getting more crowded in recent years with new releases like Star Wars Unlimited, One Piece, and Disney Lorcana – none of that matters if the game ain’t good. I had the chance to try it out at Riot campus last week, for a whole day of playing matches with other TCG aficionados, chatting to developers, and soaking up every detail I could about Riftbound. We also received swag: I came away with four trial decks to test out some more.
As a hard nosed trading card games veteran, it didn’t take me long to pick up Riftbound’s rules. That’s because many of the fundamentals will be familiar to anyone who has ever touched a TCG. You have soldiers and monsters that fight one another in combat, many with special abilities. You have mechanical ‘gear’ that can be exhausted for resources. You have spells that deal damage to your opponents’ units, others that buff your own dudes, or draw you cards, counter opposing spells, and so on. Some are restricted to your own turn, while others can be played to disrupt your opponents’ gameplans.
Fans of the original TCG, Magic: The Gathering, will have an even easier time of it, as much of the game feels like a slightly simplified Magic (there’s only one combat stat, for instance). The different types of cards are similar, with units, spells, gear, and runes (lands). The game features a color system, with six rune types providing deckbuilding constraints. Cards are turned sideways and ‘exhausted’ when they’re used, a term no one is going to remember (even the developers called it ‘legally distinct tapped’).
As well as some mechanical foundations, Riftbound has also taken lessons from how popular the multiplayer MTG Commander format has been, the player-made four-player game mode that has come to dominate many an LGS over the last decade. For starters, Riftbound has been built with a four-player multiplayer mode in mind (either free-for-all or 2v2) as well as more competitive 1v1 battles.
Being multiplayer friendly also “means that it’s friendly to bring in your friends to learn” says the game’s director, Dave Guskin. While League of Legends is not exactly known for being a ‘casual’ experience, Guskin says that Riftbound is aiming to be approachable to TCG newbs – perhaps even a way for LoL fans to get their uninitiated friends interested in the setting. He admits it’s a cliche, but says he wants Riftbound to be easy to learn and difficult to master.
While obviously I can’t speak from the POV of a TCG novice, I’ll note that my first opponent, who’d not played Magic before, picked it up pretty swiftly (and whalloped me in game two).
One of Riftbound’s really strong ideas, also borrowed from Commander, is that you build each Riftbound deck around your personal favorite League of Legends character.
Currently, each 40-card deck will be two colors, and feature a dual-color legend card representing your chosen champion. This is a special ability – which could be a static effect (Jinx’s Loose Cannon legend draws you an extra card if you start the turn with one or less) or an activated ability (Darius’s legend taps for ‘mana’ if you’ve already played a card that turn).
Your deck won’t just have the one card mapping onto your chosen champion, however. You also have a unit card for the character that goes into a special zone at the start of the game. And you have the option to include a powerful signature spell in your deck, named after one of your champions’ in-game abilities.
This strikes me as very beginner-friendly. It will help guide new players towards a strategy they want to pursue, while delighting League fans. Guskin explained that Riot has taken pains to “be faithful to their identity in the game”.
While the genres are very different, a Volibear deck, for instance, should feel true to the character. I don’t really know that champion well, but the Riftbound deck consists of loads of enormous monsters that can smash opposing units up real good. Judging by Volibear’s design, I don’t think that can be far off the mark.
Of the 298 cards in Riftbound’s first set, Origins (apparently it was going to be called Foundations until another game took that name) only 12 will be legends. The system does therefore sound a little limiting if brewing decks is your passion, but there are already multiple unit cards for each playable champion, and presumably there’ll eventually be several legends to pick from too.
Figuring out what cards work best with each champion is still a lot of fun, and ultimately I imagine picking from a roster of different legends, units, and signature spell cards for your chosen deck will allow for plenty of self-expression.
I’ve spoken a lot about Riftbound in comparison to Magic – I can’t help it, I’m a Magic fan. I want to drill in deep on the points of difference, however, as Riftbound has a couple of mechanics that really make it stand out. Now’s probably a great time to explain what you’re actually aiming to do in this game, as well.
Unlike many trading card games, where you win by attacking your opponents’ base or HP, in Riftbound, the victor is the first to score eight points – a little bit more like Lorcana, or Pokémon for that matter.
However, what’s interesting is the way you gain points. Riftbound is built around an area control system. The board consists of players’ ‘bases’ where units are safe (at least from each other) and then each player brings a battlefield card to put into play for the match. These are locations that your units can ‘exhaust’ to move to. It’s where the fighting takes place and games are won and lost.
In Riftbound, you gain points not by smacking your opponents or removing their minions, but by taking and holding these battlefields. Units can be moved in groups or individually on your turn, and fight as soon as they enter the same battlefield as an enemy. You get a point for each battlefield you take, and then at the start of your turn gain one for each battlefield you’re holding.
This adds an awesome element of strategy that I don’t think I’ve really seen a big card game explore before. You’re not just trying to defeat your opponents’ forces, you’re also deciding where and when. Do you send out a Might 1 creature to a neutral location to get a quick point, knowing it’ll be taken back very easily? Or do you build up your forces, risking defeat as your speedier foe ticks up points? While it goes against every instinct, there are even some situations where it might be prudent to retreat.
Guskin adds that this system also means there’s no player elimination, which is better for a ‘friendly multiplayer experience.’ “Rather than counting down players’ life totals, and you’re eliminated when you get to zero, we wanted to count up towards a victory condition where anybody could win until the very end.”
The other major innovation is Riftbound’s resource system. Like pretty much every new TCG, the League of Legends card game does away with lands. Instead, there’s a separate Rune deck, which you automatically play two cards from each turn. That means your resources tick up quickly, which is pretty exciting, but there’s another reason I think this system does wonders for the game.
See, these runes are exhausted to pay the generic cost of all your cards, but many stronger cards also have a secondary cost. They demand that you ‘recycle’ your runes, tucking them to the bottom of your deck. This means that, unlike in most card games where you start with low-cost stuff and gradually build up, in Riftbound your resource pool has the potential to grow and shrink over the course of a game.
It creates another interesting decision point – do you keep building runes to play your most expensive cards, or burn them as soon as you’ve reached four or five to get a good card out quickly?
Ultimately, it’s those opportunities for decisions and clever plays that make Riftbound a solid game. It allows for really interesting, strategic gameplay and I think succeeds at creating a sense that you can pick when to be powerful. The deckbuilding might be a weak point right now in terms of fostering innovation, but over time this will improve, and the current strategy does a good job at something that’s vital to the game: focusing hard on the characters.
Mix this promising system with an incredibly popular IP that’s already shown it can jump seamlessly from medium to medium, and I’ll be shocked if Riot isn’t onto a winner here.
I’ve got more thoughts on this game than I can marshal into words here, so if you’re interested to chat more – come join me on the Wargamer Discord. Or for more great tales of trading card games you might be interested in hearing about the best MTG cards of all time or the most expensive rare Pokémon cards.
Source: Wargamer
