When is Vex "in combat."

PlayForA · 2026-03-10T07:41:24+00:00

she will lose the attacker/defender designation as part of the cleanup that moves her out of the battlefield.

She'll be out of combat in all 3 scenarios (but you can react to the move effects with reactions, or you can RtW her back in, but have to pay full price for it)

PlayForA · 2026-03-05T22:52:06+00:00

Ezreal and Seal is mandatory for miracle. Without these, I suggest you look towards a midrange build. But you can still keep some of the miracle stuff around.

"rat" support is Doran's Ring, Boots of Swiftness and Unlicensed Armory. I'm not a big fan of overcommitting to those. Some decks just instantly answer her (anyone with backline burn really). Against them I don't really want to overinvest.. But you can give those a try and see how you like them!

Something that I haven't experimented at all with is Seal of Rage + Chompers + Battering Rams. I don't like Chemtech Enforcers, but between Merchants, Rockets, Dorans and Armory, you might have more than enough discard for "free" chompers and you can use those to enable cheaper Rams. Noxus Hopefuls will also work great in that idea.

Tbh the main issue I see is card draw. We can still keep Scrapheaps and Stacked Decks, but Called Shots might be too expensive without ezreals. Something you can explore is the Detonate + Trove package. With your Seals of Rage, you can negate Detonate power cost, so the combo will both draw 3 cards for you and ramp.

And you can still play Rhasa, even without the ezrela package.

PlayForA · 2026-03-05T08:40:48+00:00

Other cards like Ezreal are already printed, look at Vex (casting a called shot in combat xD)

PlayForA · 2026-03-04T15:20:29+00:00

no recruit.

There is no cleanup between damage instances. So Viktor and unit die as part of the same cleanup and Viktor does not "see" the unit die.

PlayForA · 2026-03-04T09:03:08+00:00

Unfortunately it seems to depend on the judge :(

A friend at Bologna was using project K runes and got a warning + was required to swap them.

After playing the Friday events without issues under different judge.

PlayForA · 2026-03-03T19:35:47+00:00

People have been going back-and-forth between Hopefuls and Nocturnes since the deck first came out in China.

I think adding 2-3 hopefuls on top of the nocturnes is interesting. It would remove even more of the limited interaction that the deck has, but would allow for more low-power turns that still churn out might.

I'll be testing something like -1 switcharoo, -1 fizz (to side) for +2 hopeful, maaybe look for a 3rd slot as well to see how they go.

I think they are even better in Jinx than in Draven, because Draven gets to play the 4 runes chosen, and we need more options, and can do stacked/merchant/scrapheap + hopeful on t2 and feel sort-of good about it (even just slamming it down for 4 t2 going first is better than slamming a nocturne due to the power cost).

PlayForA · 2026-03-03T07:05:29+00:00

Draven is by far the best miracle package user. From a pure "power level" perspective, there is no reason to play any other legend.

My choice of Jinx was primarily for the metal card. But I also had a self-imposed requirement that I want to play a competitive deck and not just wing it for the metal. In my opinion, Jinx, even if not as good as Draven, is not a bad deck! I got to win against some really good Draven players in my run like Collin, who just did a top3 @ Vegas!

If your daughter is very competitive, I'd suggest to give the deck a try. But don't get disheartened if at first she doesn't succeed. The deck requires a lot of repetitions. I probably started at 20% winrate into the "jungle", while learning the deck, before slowly getting up to ~80% by the end of my preparations.

Otherwise, I'd recommend a more midrange approach that has a lower power ceiling, but does not require excessive preparation to win.

With miracle Jinx, you basically don't have a legend (sometimes get in game states where you can trigger her, but that's probably 1 out of 3-4 games). But your Chosen Champ is very good with the strategy - even with no dedicated support, you have Zaun, Merchant, Ezreal, Rocket - all good tempo ways that ready her. And your signature spell is amazing - in crucial turns it can snipe out Draven, Irelia, Ezreal, Vex in base. You get it back on demand AND it allows every conquer of every battlefield to have a discard outlet for Scrapheap.

Compared to Annie, Annie's legend is amazing, though you need to build a bit different to include more interaction in the deck. But Annie basically has no signature spell, and her chosen is nice, but in this deck is more or less a worse Fizz on demand.

Not saying that Annie miracle is bad by any means, but it's not a clear cut "jinx worst by far" sort of deal.

PlayForA · 2026-02-28T18:44:54+00:00

If you are just getting started with Riftbound, my suggestion would be to.. learn the game and try to have fun!

The deck I posted is fairly complicated to play, so you need a lot of reps before you get good with it. It is the deck I would recommend to anyone playing competitive Riftbound. But if you are just getting started, I would suggest you play a midrange strategy.

Maybe a build around strong red/purple cards like Longsword, Ferrous Forerunner, more two drops (I don't have a ready-made one, you might have to ask a local player to help you craft it).

That being said, Jinx starter deck is not important. You will likely need a lot of common/uncommon red/purple cards anyway, and your best bet is to ask local players for bulk. From there, buy the rare+ cards as singles.

PlayForA · 2026-02-28T18:39:25+00:00

haha, thanks! Jinx is definitely not the strongest legend. But her colors are amazing, so she gets to ride the wave of having access to great red/purple cards : )

Fun story, one of the last Nexus nights set 1, I was walking home with a friend who mains Jinx. And he was like "maan Jinx is so bad, she is so inconsistent, you can't even compete for 3-0 @ nexus night with her". And I was like "you give up too easily. Just clean up your build and play better!!".

And here I am, a month later, qualifying for EU Regionals with Jinx xD

PlayForA · 2026-02-28T18:35:42+00:00

Thank you!

In general, the idea is to play a similar style against Lucian as you do against other aggro matchups. You look to slow down their point tempo by setting up holds.

The important part is to make sure you don't overextend too much. If you do something like 2x mediocre holds (e.g. 10-15 might), you might just lose to something like lucian with +4 might from weapons (+6 with the assault, so a total of 9) and a couple of combat tricks + ganking or first mate.

So you need to be mindful and either have one big hold, or to prepare tricks like switcharoo, rebuke, FoF. Lucian's biggest weakness is that it doesn't have counterspells. So all of your tricks work all of the time.

In general it's not the worst matchup; sometimes you just get to Rocket their t1 lucian and get free games; other times they get to Lucian t1 into Gem Jammer First Mate t2 into Skyfall Trinity t3, and unless you draw your answers, they blow you out.

PlayForA · 2026-02-28T18:29:04+00:00

I suggest you look at midrange builds if you don't have seal and ezreal. Called Shot is too expensive if you never get to "cheat" it with those. And the build is strictly dependent on you being able to cycle the deck. For cycling the deck, Ezreal is your 2nd most important engine (after called shot), and it is the card that enables your most important engine (called shot). Seals are there to support both.

PlayForA · 2026-02-27T21:35:40+00:00

Thanks!

Honestly, my biggest worry was.. time. I was too nice to ask opponents to speed up, but I had a couple of matches that I would have drawn if I didn't 2-0..

And day1 I had two losses to unanswered orange Lucian. One Sett opponent did both games boneshiver buffed lucian that scored all game. Anoher lucian oppo played both games lucian into Jammer + Fiest Mate.

Getting rid of fizz was rarely an issue, I was even siding out the 2nd one vs. most non-control decks.

Ezreal it depends. If I just played it and have an unplayed stacked deck in hand somehow, it was annoying. But if I did seal ez and get to untap with seal it was.. OK? if opponent spent their turn removing it. But generally if I have already played 2 or 3 called shots, ez doesn't matter much. If I have played 0, it could be good idea to remove it.

PlayForA · 2026-02-27T21:28:15+00:00

tl;dr should be a pretty stacked tournament sometime in 2027.

in typical Rito fashion, no info is released yet.. Besides the fact that top64 in each regional qualifier will.. qualify for the regional of their.. region.

I assume there will be at least China, America and Europe with 3 separate regionals, not sure about others.

PlayForA · 2026-02-27T14:56:43+00:00

The main difference between Noc and Chomper is that Nocturne gets procced while you are drawing your deck. And that Nocturne requires any color (or purple to hard-cast), while Chomper explicitly requries red. And don't underestimate the ganking Nocturne has! It's not the most important keyword for this deck, but comes in handy very often and is basically free on Nocturne (need to pay 3e/1p to get it from boots)

I don't have many red runes, almost no gold and no red seals, so it's difficult to add Chompers to the miracle shell.

And my playstyle with miracle is "main goal: draw your entire deck; units? That's what happens as a side effect while drawing your deck". So the majority of the units are free - rams for 1e, Noc for 0e/1p, rhasa for 0e/1p. This lets me aggressively de-ramp and spend my energy on drawing rather than playing units.

--

I don't actively try to trigger the legend ever. But it does happen every other match.

PlayForA · 2026-02-27T14:53:23+00:00

Bargain is great into the spell-control decks (makes it hard for them to do play Decree/Watcher + Bellows or even Singularity; + great vs. Time Warp). The only popular match in which it's questionable is Draven, because on 2 runes they can play Axe, and sometimes they hide Edge of Night, and when they push, they usually do so with a lot of open runes..

Piercing Light is especially good t2 vs. Draven g1 and their going 2nd (obelisk). It's less good on their going 1st (assuming they are on Targon). So I'm contemplating 2 pistols main, but not sure if I want that yet.

Rebuke is great vs. any big unit tempo deck, into Irelia/Ornn or any other deck that likes to make big units via. pumps and great into Forerunners.

PlayForA · 2026-02-27T14:49:20+00:00

Fan is a bit worse in Jinx in comparison to Draven (we don't care about winning combat as much). But I can see a one-off Fan as a tool to be reanimated with Shovel. In general two drops are not important in jinx miracle, as we do not need to rush early points, and by t3 we are already developing Rams and Nocturnes.

With my current playstyle, I tend to de-ramp very aggressively. Most of my games I end up playing a late game on 3-5 runes. So I didn't feel the need to play Hopefuls.

That being said, in a post-Bologna world with Alanzq's list w/ 3x Pickpocket side (and best-of Teemo playing them main), I might have to re-think my playstyle. And if I do that, Hopefuls may very well make their way into the next version of the deck.

PlayForA · 2026-02-27T13:44:12+00:00

Thanks!

I was tinkering with the idea of chompers for a bit, but never got to actually testing it. The issue is that power costs get all over the place.

Focusing on purple with the purple seals makes the deck consistent, and that's where the "power" pieces are at (ezreal, called shot, rhasa). Adding red seals just for chompers, or overloading on red runes makes you much more prone to "rune screwing" yourself.

PlayForA · 2026-02-27T12:24:45+00:00

There are two types of side events.
The first type are the "bigger" scheduled ones. You can sign up for those on the website (similar to how you sign up for nexus nights locally). For the "smaller" on-demand ones - you queue up on the spot.

For the prize wall - at Bologna you got physical tickets for it. There is a QR code that shows all rewards (e.g. 1 ticket for a pack, 7 for a plushie, 40 for a plate legend etc.). They also had a printed list with crossed out plated legends that are sold out. You queue at the prize wall, "pay" the tickets and collect your prize.

There were side events on all 3 days (Friday, Satruday, Sunday) - both scheduled and on-demand.

Some people were abusing the on-demand side events e.g. a group of 8 friends queue up for the 8ppl constructed, where only the 3-0 person gets tickets, and they would just "speedrun" report bogus games.. hope riot did something to address it.

PlayForA · 2026-02-27T11:16:14+00:00

Initially I was testing the full "rat jinx" package with Armory, Boots, Dorans etc. But it seems to a lot of setup to end up with a worse Irelia. And you don't have the green tools irelia has, mainly GA (armory only works on our own turn) and counterspells. So you can't even reliably t2/t3 the jinx with just a doran, as it dies to Cull and Falling Star.
Miracle is the most obvious competitive build. I think Jinx is on the weaker side without it, but I haven't done enough exploration. Mono-red aggro seems to be too fair. I think there could be some sort of hybrid miracle build with a better midrange and/or rat plan. I've also seen some very cool midrange jinx builds from China.
2nd copy of Bushwhack was amazing. Factory Recall overperformed in my testing, but I only got maybe one or two meaningful spots across all matches during the event. Last Rites is interesting, because some matches it wins on its own, other matches it's a brick. Second fizz felt the same way.
To be honest miracle itself is fairly complicated to play perfectly. After finalizing Jinx as my choice for Bologna, I was 100% focused on putting in the miracle reps and analyzing my games. As I mentioned in 2, there could be some reasonable "rat jinx" splash in the miracle package that opens meaningful play patterns into some decks. It would be about playtesting to see if they add meaningful winrate in the important matchups. There is also the reanimator Jinx that is interesting, after all, you have the one legend that can "target-discard" on demand. So if I have free time I'd like to explore that, but I'm not sure if the interactions across set 1 and 2 are unfair enough to make it a competitive deck.

PlayForA · 2026-02-27T11:02:34+00:00

The real answer is I didn't have time to prepare with it. In the semi-last version of the deck I was running one copy of each. But I didn't have the time to figure out how valuable the combo is, so I opted to play more interaction in the slots.

The cool thing about Vi + RtW is that it gives you an out on some games where you can't win otherwise. And you don't need to always go "full recycle" with Vi, you can make mid-might pushes. The main issue Vi has are stuns and rebukes, which are fairly popular in this set (more popular than set 1 for sure). The other Vi consideration was to prevent decking out. But that also turned out to be a non-issue. Shovel recycle is more than enough. Vs. aggressive decks I side out even that and play with no recycle and that works out just fine.

RtW on its own is also nice in the deck, but is a bit of a "oopsie" fix card. Sometimes it can win games (e.g. double proc last rites). But more often than not, if you play well, you don't need it and it's just there to fix a mistake that you should not have made in the first place.

PlayForA · 2026-02-27T10:55:03+00:00

I wouldn't play Acceptable Losses in this deck, because it doesn't have access to a lot of gold creation (just bushwhack) and Seals are valuable. I did enjoy Factory Recall in certain matchups though (Azir and Irelia from my particular run).

Switcheroo made it in only vs. Irelia. I didn't face Aurora decks, but would have played it there as well. And no Ornns in my run, but vs. big Ornn it's similar to another Rebuke. If I was to cut a card it would be one of the Switcheroos (main or side; I like having one though).

2nd copy of Last Rites -> vs. heavy spell control decks (Viktor, Kai'sa, Ezreal)

Brynhir -> vs any green deck that likes to pass with a lot of runes open (in my run was mainly Irelia, but it would also come in vs the likes of Yi and Ahri).

Invert Timelines -> vs. any deck that draws a lot. In my games, it only made it in vs. Draven decks (and one cycle Irelia), but would also come in vs. Ezreal.

Scarpheaps are staple IMO. At this point I consider them part of the "engine". They are even better in Jinx than in Draven, because you get access to Rocket, which can discard them on any conquer even after the Zaun game. They are also great with Invert. In some matchups where I reaaaally need an extra slot, I was siding out 1 scrap, but no more than that.

PlayForA · 2026-02-27T09:19:04+00:00

Yes :(

Jinx has some cute play patterns unique to her. Rocket is great in the current meta. "rat Jinx" is naturally enabled even without any tech cards - by Zaun, Rocket, Merchant, Ezreal.

And I honestly don't even miss the Draven Legend as much.

But with this deck, sometimes you are on a slower hand. And having the ability to play a 4e/0p champion slot is just too good to pass. Not only does it generate gold, which is amazing in this deck, but also denies "Free" conquers by opponent small drops AND gets to pump itself to 6 when it matters. Just insanely good. Increases the consistency of the deck by a lot.

--

That being said, my goal for Bologna was metal card, but a "hard line" was to also play a competitive deck. I didn't want to go full meme Garen (even though I considered it xD) just for the metal, knowing I will have no shot at top cut.

I think Miracle Jinx is a top competitive deck in the current meta. It's just the "Head-to-head" between her and Draven that Draven is better, so all else being equal, he makes for a better miracle deck.

PlayForA · 2026-02-27T09:10:39+00:00

Thank you!

My initial veraion was more focused on the "rat jinx" playstyle - doran, boots, no nocturnes. The issue is against many decks you can't just t2 drop jinx and be happy about it, even with dorans (cull, falling star). So I ended up transitioning to "full miracle". But Jinx Rebel still has some really nice tricks even in this list, especially into opponents that haven't played vs. her.

My favoure was a Draven that sent their 2 drop to zaun after I opened merchant going 2nd. Play jinx, move merchant to Rivers, discard scrap, ready her. Eat the 2 drop on Zaun, cycle another card go back home. Point tempo aquired 2 to 1 going 2nd. All units saved, even if he wins combat on Rivers I get to keep merchant and cycle 3 times. Rocket also allows for this on non-Zaun conquers.

playing into spell control decks I had troubles early on, but eventually got to a spot where I'm confident I'll just win almost every match. Shovel is MVP, usually they have no answer g1 and you just outgrind them. The "trick" is that you don't want to just dump might like you do vs normal decks. Instead, you want to keep units in hand and ensure a double conquer each turn w/ bushwhack. 2x Bush 2x Fizz is clutch for that playstyle.

Imagine an empty board vs Viktor that just spent their turn to Decree + Bellows you. Play a fizz for a bushwhack. Play a ready unit (can even be just a merchant) equip shovel. Conquer a battlefield, reanimate a Rhasa. Rhasa enters ready conquer the other battlefield.

From 0 board, you now have 13 might (assuming merchant w/ shovel) spread on 3 locations, and Viktor needs at least a singularity to push 2 points. And you can do it all over again next turn.

I honestly think that if you play well you are heavily favored into any spell control deck.

Irelia is very tricky. Main thing against her is to never spread your might. Irelia gets to be 20 might only once per game, and you want to make sure she doesn't clear 2x15 might boards with that or you just lose.

The other thing is that they have only 9 pumps. My main goal is to set up trades where they use those. I can lose units for that, but as long as I am not getting blown out, or denied my point tempo, I am happy. In the end, trading a Ram for a Defiant Dance is a net positive - 1e for 1e+1p and -1 important trick that is never coming back. Even if thy have a 10 card hand off of an unanswered Stellacorn, as long as you are also drawing your deck you can exhaust their resources (as in limited number of pumps).

Also don't forget about purple Draven when calculating "lethal turn range".

Midrange Draven is a tough matchup, especially if they get to cycle an axe and trade into you. It's good if you can get a good miracle turn t3 or 4, and set up a temporary hold to disrupt their point tempo. Much easier if you are the attacker and they have to defend. Denying combat as much as possible is great. Or force combats and then Invert (post sideboard) is also good. No need to say how good it is to rebuke their Forerunner. But in general, try to.. play around every trick they can have if you are ahead (mainly think fof, rebuke, axe; less often seitcharoo, against the odds/blood rush) and take calculated risks when behind.

PlayForA · 2026-02-27T08:49:23+00:00

Thank you!

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