I’m not good at League of Legends, but I’m forever drawn in by the siren song of Riot’s beloved Champions, with their approachable cartoon silhouettes backed by untold yottabytes of hardcore lore. I also frigging love trading card games. So when it became clear to me, in my first games of the Riftbound TCG last year, that this was a legit game worth seriously playing, not a tedious corporate cash-in, I was going to want to get involved.
I regret to say I never found the time. Nine months later, though, with Riftbound‘s fourth set Vendetta winging its way onto shelves, I got a second chance to be ensnared: I met Riftbound’s Game Director Dave Guskin at Gen Con 2026, to play a round with the new set’s Zed vs. Shen Showdown decks, and discuss the game’s rapid progress.
Who won the game? Who made embarrassing misplays in front of a senior industry executive? That’s not important right now. What is important is getting to hear what the actual guy running Riftbound says about its latest expansion, plus a little taste of what’s on offer in the next sets: Radiance, due out in October 2026, and Legacy, coming early in 2027.
Here’s our conversation – lightly edited for clarity (and to excise the roughly twenty minutes of gameplay in which mistakes were made, egos were bruised, and a kindly PR told me I did “pretty well, considering”.
Alex Evans: So who are you, then?
Dave Guskin: I’m the Game Director of Riftbound. So, Game Director means I run the design team, and I also am responsible for vision and strategy for the whole game program. I’ve been on the project since its inception. I pitched it to Riot executives a little over two years ago, along with my boss [Chengran Chai]. And – let’s see – day to day, I mostly manage the design team, and I help out with various parts of the game design.
We’re around nine months on from Riftbound’s launch – how has it gone, establishing itself among the TCGs?
It’s quite a boom time for TCGs. We’ve been very fortunate. I think we’ve had a community grow up around our game quite quickly. I think a lot of people are coming to try it from other TCGs, and they’re surprised at how much they like it, which is awesome. I think people who love League of Legends are coming in and trying it as their first TCG, and then I think that over the course of the last months, we’ve seen both the competitive scene and also the content creator scene really explode, and I think we’re seeing a lot of people kind of getting really into Riftbound.
Vendetta is the fourth set – after Origins, Spiritforged, and Unleashed. What’s the vibe behind this one, and how is it going to change up the game?
Vendetta is all about rivalries. So there’s a bunch of champions from League of Legends who have big beef with each other. So Shen and Zed, for example, the decks that we have in front of us; Nasus and Renekton; Mel and Ambessa from the hit TV show Arcane, etc.
The new mechanics are, I would say, pretty straightforward, but you can combine them in interesting ways in power and flow. So they’re sort of open-ended, sort of like an explorer’s paradise, I would say. And most importantly, when we first released Riftbound, you could only play with 12 of the 15 color combinations.
Basically, there are six colors or domains of Riftbound, and they’re in enemy pairs. So red and green are sort of opposed, blue and orange are opposed, and purple and yellow are opposed. Until now, you haven’t been able to play with them.
But in Vendetta, you can, for the first time, play a legend that has those two opposed colors. So the players are very excited about the possibilities there. I’m a little bit anxious that somebody’s going to find some totally broken deck, but that’s okay. I mean, it’s that’s the fun of it, you know.
You were going to get there at some point! If you didn’t get to the point where people were breaking the game, you probably hadn’t succeeded.
Exactly. It’s like we gotta we gotta reach for it if we’re gonna see the possibilities!
What’s your personal favorite thing about this new set?
So I do really like the enemy color combinations. Those are really fun. But I also love having extra resources. I’m like a degenerate, ‘draw lots of cards’ sort of TCG gamer. So Flow, which lets you use your spells again from your from your trash – that’s my favorite. Any deck where I can maximize Flow is is my jam.
Tell us about these new Showdown decks!
You have Shen, which is a Green/Yellow kind of ‘Hold’ deck, so you’re gonna have pretty beefy units that you can use to hold on to a battlefield. And I have Zed, which is much more of an aggressive deck where I need to try to conquer, darting in and out using my my crazy shadow clones.
// THERE FOLLOWS A 20 MINUTE RIFTBOUND MATCH WHOSE RESULTS AND CONTACT HAVE BEEN REDACTED TO PROTECT THE AUTHOR’S FRAGILE SELF CONFIDENCE //
So you’re now doing three, or four sets a year?
It’s four sets a year, once every three months or so. So Vendetta’s got like another month or two to go. The next one is called Radiance, our fifth set. The key art features Echo and Seraphine, and it’s sort of all about expressing yourself, exploring, and showing off. So it’s a little bit more of like I call like a deck builder’s paradise, perhaps. It, too, is a smaller set; it’s got nine legends.
I’m pretty excited about it, I think it’ll be really interesting. We’re doing some cool stuff within the League ecosystem related to that set, so very excited about that. So that’ll come out at the end of this year, like end of October, early November, I think.
And then there’s a period over the Winter holiday where we won’t be releasing any sets, and we only have sort of high-level premier tournaments, though there are regional championships. Then, at the beginning of next year, in late January or early February, is our sixth set Legacy. That’s sort of… I wouldn’t say it’s a new version of the first Origins set, but it is supposed to be sort of the the foundation for the next year.
Any precious nuggets you can share with our readers about Legacy?
Let’s see. It delves a little bit into the conflicts and interests of the various regions of Runeterra. So it’s a little bit more like going back to the roots of: what is this world of Runeterra? Who are the champions that live here? What are their relationships to each other? And what does it mean to be, you know, a champion from the Freljord? Two people from the Freljord might have two very different outlooks on life, and it kind of explores that through the champions.
You mentioned tie-in activities with events in League of Legends. Cynically, that could be anything from a couple of skins to tournament results forming part of the narrative, like we used to see back in the day with TCGs…
Yeah, I was just talking to somebody about that – the [Legend of the Five Rings] living campaign stuff.
Wouldn’t that be exciting for Riftbound?
It would be exciting. I will say, sort of, the sky’s the limit, right? It’s very early in the development of Riftbound, and we’re all consummate TCG gamers. We love playing all the games from the past, and a lot of them have done really cool stuff. I am not afraid to reuse great ideas from the past or remix them in cool ways for our audience.
Also, my background is as a scientist; I have degrees in physics, so I’m I’m an experimentalist. I want to try things, iterate, see if the hypothesis works. So in terms of integration with other League properties and what other things in the League of Legends universe are doing, I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff we can do.
Some of it is coordinating with releases. Some of it is making cool promos or cool products that kind of cross the boundaries between games. And some of it is sort of shared events that all games can kind of participate in. For example, when Arcane Season Two came out, a lot of different games had a lot of different expressions in of that story. So there’s a lot of cool places to go.
I’m sure we’ll try them all at some point. As you said, there’s there’s other things other games have done as well, like tournament results affecting the narrative, etc. I think we’re just going to have to see sort of what the appetite from the community is and how it hits, how it lands.
If there’s one thing that you would love to do with Riftbound that is just kind of a little bit far in the future right now, but it’s on your agenda, what would that be?
There’s this sort of a joke that we have internally about the 5v5 format! Because in League of Legends in Summoner’s Rift you have a team of five, and it just, it sounds so pithy when somebody says it, but I’m like, what is that?
But I would love to see a team format, either in a league at your store or at high-level tournaments, where there’s a team of five people, and it’s sort of a puzzle to figure out how those five people will compete together as a team against the other team.
So I think that’s really interesting. I would love to solve that at some point. I’ve heard a lot of pitches; none of them have really met the bar for me, but we’ll get there eventually. So I’m pretty excited about that in the future.
I also I love playing on a team, I like cooperating with my friends to try to win a tournament – so I am hopeful that we can break that.
Maybe it’d be more like ARAM in the end – with both teams on the one road?
Yeah, I think that’s right. Some people on my team have been very excited to figure out how to make that that mode, that like quirky, chaotic mode in Riftbound. So we might get that too. Hopefully, we might get that too.
I don’t want to promise too much, but thankfully – I feel like we’re blessed that this is the case – we are in a growth period, where we finished the launch, and now we can do a lot of exploring of really cool stuff for our players. There’s a lot of different angles we can take, and it’s nice that the the game’s been doing well enough for us to be like, yeah, we can reinvest in this, we can do more awesome things, we can try out new products, et cetera.
And I assume Daddy Riot is happy?
Yes, in general, I would say Riot’s pretty happy. Riot’s never about the dollars. It’s more about like our players happy? Are we satisfying them? And I think we we have been doing that, which is great.
It’s really awesome that we have such a great community built around Riftbound so quickly because it really is a partnership between the development team and the players, in terms of: hey we know you know how to make our game and we know where to explore, but you the players tell us what you’re interested in what you like what you don’t like where you want us to explore. I think that partnership is it’s really important it’s it’s really amazing to be part of that.
Thanks for talking to us, Dave!
That’s it for our Gen Con Q&A with Riftbound Game Director Dave Guskin – if you’ve got questions about anything other than the results of our little game, or just wanna jam about upcoming Riftbound sets, your current fave deck, how you think a Riftbound 5v5 would work, et cetera – come join the free Wargamer Discord community and chat to us about it!
Source: Wargamer
