When it comes to playing a TCG competitively, price is a big factor, and high costs can be a major barrier to entry. So when I had the chance to speak to Riftbound game director Dave Guskin, I was keen to know if accessibility was a priority for the League of Legends card game. Guskin spoke about how Riot Games was trying to keep the game approachable to players, and exactly how much he thinks a top-level Riftbound deck should cost.
“I think we should have the average competitive deck be affordable at the level of, let’s say, 100 to 300 U.S. dollars,” Guskin said. “That’s where I like to keep stuff.”
He added that it’s possible for decks using a bunch of high rarity Epic cards to get pricier, “But I think the more decks that exist that are above that, it’s just harder, right? You can’t give people access to the game. It feels like such a huge investment to find a deck that you might not even like, and it just leads to things that I think are unhealthy.”
“If there are some decks that are cheaper than that and some decks that are more expensive, I think that’s totally fine. It’s good for there to be a variety, but that’s the rough target that we’ve tried to think about when we design,” he added.
More generally, Guskin said that players shouldn’t need to break the bank to play their favorite champion or to have a chance to be competitive. “I want to make sure that when a person wants to play Riftbound, they are able to do that – no matter what their circumstances are.”
As with many TCGs, Riftbound’s rarest cards are cosmetic treatments. “We really tried to make sure that the functional cards, the ones at the lowest rarities, even up to epic, are a bit more affordable on average than the things that are a little bit more for collectors,” the director said.
“People who are willing to invest, that want to have the cool shiny thing that they can show off, those people are willing to spend more. Great, we’ll let them spend more, and they can help subsidize the people who are trying just to play. That was the general kind of structural idea behind the way we built our booster packs, the way we think about our rarity.
“If things get too expensive, that’s something that is of concern to us. We don’t have a huge number of levers, but that is something we talk about.”
Riftbound is in an interesting place right now, affordability-wise. The vast majority of its cards are very cheap, while many of the Epic champion cards have soared in value, making up most of the cost of any deck. The price of a competitive deck can vary pretty drastically, depending on how many rare champions are in its strategy.
Guskin said they’d considered the possibility of ensuring legend cards appeared alongside their associated champion in packs, but told me this was very hard to figure out practically, when collating boosters.
One big change that is coming through to boosters in the upcoming January 2027 set Legacy, however, is that Legends and Battlefields will take a ‘common slot’ in packs. This will hopefully solve the so-called ‘Legend problem’.
Essentially, since no deck needs more than one Legend card, these cards are never in short supply, and they’re not considered valuable. Moving these cards to the common slot will therefore mean fewer disappointing rares in packs, making more exciting cards like champions that much more accessible.
Guskin remarked that this was an odd scenario for Riot, because this is, effectively, the company’s first time making a game that isn’t free-to-play – you have to invest in order to play.
He added that another priority for him was making sure “that if you do invest in it, that you can recoup that investment later – if for some reason you want to leave. That’s the nice thing about collectible cards. You can turn these into a different pursuit later if you want to.”
Source: Wargamer
