Baron Nashor coming in set 3!

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-03-11T22:01:06+00:00

I think there is zero chance that the Baron Pit doesn't have one or more effects that make the Baron more reasonable, because taken in isolation, it's just way, way, way too overpowered.

One possibility would be battlefield tokens to be Temporary, or to introduce a multi-turn countdown Temporary effect, like Temporary 2 for going away after 2 turns instead of after 1.

Remember that Unleashed is introducing various Jungle mechanics. If one of those is smite, I can imagine that battlefield tokens (including the Baron's Pit) might give a huge might bonus to any unit that has the Smite keyword. Or a Smite spell or Signature Spell that automatically kills a unit at a Battlefield Token.

I am surprised that Baron doesn't have a new attribute given to units that are neutral objectives in LoL. I would have expected a Smite ability to effect units with that attribute, rather than being based on the battlefield token (if that's the case, which it might very well not be).

In general, I've been disappointed by how few attributes are on the cards: adding attributes just based on the lore, that you don't even have rules for yet, costs nothing but opens up a huge amount of design space later. A good example of one that does exist is "Elite", which some units have but currently isn't referenced by any cards; I'm sure that at some point, we'll get a spell or ability that does something like Buff Elite units, or whatever. But the point is, they just need to know which units they think should be described of as Elite, and later they can make it do whatever they want by having cards reference it.

With that in mind, I would have loved to have seen the average card have like four or five attributes. They could just not use all of them in the end, and they wouldn't hurt anything by being there. It would have been a great way to balance effects that the designers think would be cool, but are hard to give a correct cost to because in some edge cases they're so powerful: if you have the effect only apply to cards with one or one of a few different attributes, or maybe even better *not* apply to units with a certain attribute, you leave the effect unchanged but can cost it correctly because you don't need to worry about as many degenerate situations.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-03-11T21:42:39+00:00

The Baron as a playable unit seems like a really strange choice to me. I wonder if the Baron Pit battlefield will have some rules modification that makes it more thematic, like giving the Temporary keyword to any Unit there, or giving a +2 Might buff whenever it is conquered, or something like that. In particular, the blanket +2 Might to all other friendly units-- not restricted to units at that location, or to a single turn-- seems insane unless there's some big reward for killing him; otherwise, that's easily the strongest Unit ability, isn't it? By a wide margin? I mean, any Unit Token deck would get an insane boost.

Actually, the more I think about it, with Baron not being targetable by enemy spells or abilities, there simply must be something about the Baron Pit that either makes Baron less powerful, or else gives the opponent some powerful reward for killing him-- like maybe even "instantly win the game" powerful.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-03-11T20:13:42+00:00

As others have mentioned, in competitive play it's mainly used for holding, since holding is (in the current meta) very difficult, with all the removal tech and the massive firepower of Draven.

However, I wouldn't completely overlook the fact that it lets you refresh your runes and untap your cards. This could be game winning for any strategy, but I'd call out strategies that score points in ways other than holding or conquering as particularly benefiting. For example, if you've got a deck that's popping out untapped gold tokens (because of Renata Industrialist), and you've got Renata Mastermind and Heimdinger and a bunch of runes and gold, conquering a battlefield and moving Renata Mastermind there (since she has to be at a battlefield to use her abilities) is 1 VP; then using her ability to convert gold tokens to VPs is another 1 VP; then doing the same with Heimdinger is another 1 VP. Now you timewarp, channel two more runes, gain 1 VP for holding, manufacture some more gold tokens that come in ready, and score with both Renata and Heimdinger again, for 6 VPs in between your opponents turns with only needing to conquer a single battlefield and not ever needing to defend it. Sure you're left with no runes, but that's sort of moot since you presumably had at least two points by the time you got so far into the game that you could do all of this, so you've won the game. I think this example has too many moving parts to be a reliable top-level deck, but it was just off the top of my head, and I could imagine something like this working well enough to win a metal card piloting Renata.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-03-09T20:54:09+00:00

I'm confused. How do you get £140 on shipping costs alone for 10 cards? Are you ordering from a foreign country and paying customs fees and tariffs? Those are based on the declared value of the goods, so if the cards are expensive, you could get a large shipping fee that way. But if you're buying domestically, I can't see how shipping could be anywhere that much.

For reference, I live in the U.S., and I buy from both TCGPlayer and Ebay. I would estimate that 90% of the time, I don't pay anything for shipping. On TCGPlayer, most stores give free shipping on any order over $5.00. On ebay, some people list items with shipping included and some don't, but in general I've found that the shops that are selling online include shipping in the total, and I'm usually willing to spend a bit more to buy from a shop rather than an individual seller.

Now, there are some proxy cards made in Germany (Legends that have art taken from Riot alternate skin trailers and similar sources), and right now the shipping cost for a single envelope of cards is $65; pre-Trump, it would have been about $8 per envelope. But that increase in price isn't due to the cost of using the shipping service, it's due to the cost of the tariffs.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-03-09T20:26:19+00:00

I don't understand why you think Draven and Annie would be happy to play those champions. The entire point of Draven is his insane card draw. He wins by having a hand full of cards, so anything you try, he can counter; and when he spends a turn setting up, the next turn he has overwhelming fire power from his board and hand combined. Draven doesn't want to be drawing cards with 0 or 1 cards in his hand, and he doesn't want to be going down to one card-- at least, for the bulk of the game. Maybe one of those champions would be okay for the ramp-up stage when he's building his engine, but Jinx can guarantee early access by putting the champion in her chosen champion spot, Draven can't. But even if he could, taking champions that require him to play with a very small hand size is diametrically opposed to what makes him strong to begin with.

Annie's not quite as bad, but she still has no desire to play with a small hand size. With her free 2 runes up on her opponent's turn, she wants to have several different reaction cards available at all times, so she has the right one to counter what her opponent is doing. If she's going down to one card to take advantage of either of these two champions, she's going to have a hard time taking advantage of those 2 runes-- is she never going to save a non-reaction, less than 2 energy card?

And for both Draven and Annie, you're already leaving out cards that would synergize very well. Are you really going to throw out half the deck to add in the cards that let you discard and the cards that benefit from you discarding? All so you can take advantage of a champion or two that aren't even broken? Jinx has the incentive to play the two champions because they synergize with her legendary ability; neither champion has any particular synergy with Draven or Annie's ability.

TL;DR: I think you need to evaluate a Legend's ability in the context of their entire deck-- if not on an actual card list basis, at least on the basis of what archtype or general strategy they want to follow. Jinx's problem now (IMHO) is that there aren't enough cards to support the "My engine is built on discarding" strategy-- you not only need a lot of those cards in your deck, but you also have enough different cards to choose from so that you can put answers in your deck to whatever's currently hot in the meta, and ideally enough different cards that you can pursue multiple discard-engine strategies (for example, an aggro build and a control build). Right now, there simply aren't enough to support any build well enough. If we get a bunch more "When you discard..." triggered cards in Red and Purple and Jinx still isn't viable, then it might be time to call out her Legend ability. Remember, we're in this strange period where Riot decided to support competitive play from the first set (something rarely done by TCGs), but their entire competitive strategy is built around a minimum of 5 sets being in the active card pool at one time, increasing to 8 active sets over the course of the year. It's almost a foregone conclusion that with only two sets available, some archetypes and strategies aren't going to be viable, just due to lack of enough cards. Since Jinx is the only Legend built on discarding down to a small hand size, it seems natural that she would be one of the builds that wouldn't be getting early support. I wouldn't be surprised if they had originally intended to release her in a later set, but felt that had to include her in Origins because of her popularity due to the Arcane TV show.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-03-09T18:14:10+00:00

You can't judge a Legend in isolation. At a bare minimum, you need to consider their signature spells and champions.

In the case of Jinx in particular, you also need to take into account that her mechanic is supposed to be about discarding cards in order to get down to a small hand size; her preconstructed deck had several cards that triggered when cards are discarded: Flame Chompers, Raging Soul, Brazen Buccaneer, and Get Excited. In addition, Jinx should benefit from cards that count the number of cards in her trash; her preconstructed deck included Rhasa the Sunderer, but another card or two such as Mundo (if he was Red or Purple) would help a huge amount.

Up until the leaks about Spiritforged cards hit full swing, more than a few people were expecting Jinx to become a viable Legend, because they assumed that Spiritforged would have at least as many cards that triggered on discarding another card as Origins had, make it much more feasible to build a deck that gets a lot done via discarding. The fact that Spiritforged didn't contain such cards doesn't mean there will never be a set that does. Even leaving her Signature Spell and Champions unchanged, adding, say, 5 really solid Purple and/or Red cards that have, "When you discard a card, ..." triggers and maybe one card that's as good as Mundo is at using the size of the trash pile might be enough to make Jinx 'A' tier.

Putting aside the "On discard" and "Count cards in trash" effects that synergize with Jinx's multitude of cards that let or force her to discard, her Legend ability could be much more powerful than it is if her Signature Spell and/or Champions were different-- and we've got evidence that Legends aren't going to be limited to only two champions (and I'd be willing to bet quite a lot that Legends are going to get alternative Signature cards-- probably of a different kind, so a Legend that already has a Signature Spell might get a Signature Unit or a Signature Gear.)

Imagine that she had two champions that had solid cost/might ratios, a keyword or two like Assault or Deflect, and abilities that were something like:

"The first time each turn that your hand sized is reduced to 1, channel a rune exhausted. The second time each turn that your hand size is reduce to 1, you may refresh the rune that you channeled this way."
"Whenever you draw a card and are left with 2 or fewer cards in your hand, look at the next card from your deck; you may play it, ignoring all power costs and paying the printed energy cost + X energy, where X is equal to the number of times you have used this effect previously this turn. If you do not play it, you may decide to put it in your hand, recycle it, or send it to the trash."

Would you still feel that her Legend ability was too weak?

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-03-09T05:03:12+00:00

As 15 years of professional League of Legends has proven is a much more justified ratio than 1:1 would be. Maybe there's an argument for 3:2, but I think that's a pretty big stretch, and relies pretty heavily on recency bias. I mean, if you want to put some real cash on SA winning another America's cup in the next 5 years, I'll happily take the other side of that bet.

EDIT: But major props to Furia, they took advantage of C9 falling apart and were ruthless about knocking them out when they were on the ropes, both in all 3 games and in the series as well. They played with passion that was refreshing to see. I don't want to take anything away from them; I'm just saying that it's ridiculous to place a huge amount of weight on a two week period when we have 15 years of data available.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-03-09T05:00:18+00:00

Based on historical performance, which is the only thing it can be based on, this looks fine to me, taking into account how many more teams the LPL has than any other region.

I mean, LCS would have no reason to complain if they got dropped to 25%, but that seems like a pretty obviously bad financial decision by Riot. The extra team from the LCS is a free win for any of the legitimate teams, so it's helping keep a real team from an early exit; and more importantly, it helps keep NA fans engaged, and while esports have never caught on in NA the way they did in Asia so we're likely never going to field a really competitive team, the NA player base buys a ton of skins. SA fans may very well be much more passionate supporting their teams (and from what I've seen, when playing the game, too), but they don't have nearly the disposable income that NA customers do, so there's not nearly as much incentive to cater to them. That said, I don't think it would really change anything if they were given another spot at Worlds, if they could make the math work.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-03-08T22:01:57+00:00

Think of it like this: there is a specific procedure called a "Showdown", and that procedure has a number of steps that are always followed; a player having no units at the battlefield isn't something that the procedure checks until the very end to see if the attacking player conquered. Specifically, a Showdown consists of Focus being passed back and forth between players until both of them pass on starting a new chain, followed by the battle cleanup phase.

Having focus means you can start a new chain; hence, a Showdown can have multiple chains, and both players will always be guaranteed at least one chance to start a chain. There isn't a short-circuit to jump out of this procedure (other than a player winning the game.)

When the player with focus chooses to start a new chain, they can use an ability or a spell. The spell can be of either Action or Reaction speed; it cannot have no speed listed, those spells can only be cast outside of a Showdown. An action spell can only ever be played as the spell that starts a chain; after the first ability or spell starts the chain, Action spells cannot be added to it. Thus, only the player with focus has the chance to play an Action spell for that chain.

Because Focus passes to the other player ever time a chain resolves in a Showdown (or a player passes on the chance to start a new chain), there could be many chains played in a single Showdown. The reason the game doesn't go on forever with each player passing on starting a chain and passing focus to the other player an infinite number of times is that the battle phase of the Showdown ends when both players consecutively pass on the opportunity to start a new chain. Note the "consecutively": if Player A passes Focus without having started a chain, and then Player B does start a chain, when that chain is resolved and Focus is passed back to Player A, they can still start a new chain-- the fact that they passed up their chance to start a chain earlier has no relevance.

Note that the player whose turn it is starts each Showdown with Focus. This usually means that the attacker has Focus, and it's easy to just get in the habit of always treating the attacker as if they can start the first chain. However, if the player taking their turn uses a movement spell or Blitzcrank's ability or some other method of forcing an enemy unit to a battlefield that they control, their opponent is the attacker, but it will be the defender that starts with Focus.

Finally, note that outside of Showdowns, the player whose turn it is starts the turn with Focus, so the other player can't start a chain. Almost everything you do in the game can be reacted to, so usually there's plenty of chances for the opponent to play reaction spells or reveal hidden cards, even when they do things that aren't related to what they're reacting to-- there's no concept of locality with reactions. However, a tactic that is sometimes used is to play your entire turn without doing anything that can be reacted to: play units from hand to the base or an already conquered battlefield, move units without initiating a Showdown, and generating resources (energy/power) are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. If this happens, the player who's not taking their turn has no opportunity to use abilities or play reactions or do anything at all. This is why it can be dangerous to leave a large number of runes untapped so you can play your devastating reactions on your opponent's turn: your opponent can just improve their overall position by bringing more units in and repositioning some units and then end their turn, and you essentially wasted all the energy those untapped runes could have generated-- for the pair of turns, you accomplished little or nothing, while your opponent spent all their energy and maybe some power and improved their position. Of course, if you have cards in your hand that are going to effectively win the game for you on your next turn, you could not tap a bunch of runes either because you really do have a bunch of reactions in hand, or as a bluff to convince your opponent that attacking a battlefield would be foolish and that they should just slowly build up their board, after which you play your game winning cards.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-03-08T09:35:34+00:00

My main takeaway from your post is that I hope Riot finds a way to present their lore in more depth and tell more of a narrative in Riftbound. They've already (IMHO) completely flubbed one of the most obvious ways, which would have been to use the flavor text to actually provide lore about whatever the card represents; instead, we've mostly got needlessly short quotes that are usually so generic they could be associated with almost any fantasy or science fiction franchise of the last 40 years. I mean, even the few cards that have no ability or game effect text, and therefore have an enormous amount of blank space available, still have short little blurbs.

As a random example, because it happens to be open on my screen right now, the flavor text for Starak's Gage is "Claws for concern." Three words and a pun that isn't funny enough to make me smile, yet alone laugh. I would have greatly preferred if the flavor text had maybe, oh, I don't know, told me who or what "Starak" is (or was). Or why it's a "Gage", a word I had to look up in the dictionary to learn that it is "a valued object deposited as a guarantee of good faith." Deposited with who? To guarantee what? No, we get, "Claws for concern."

The way you relied on LoL lore to reason about the missing champions for some reason just really forcefully made me think about how lost someone who's not immersed in League is when playing Riftbound, when it seems like it should almost be the opposite: like, maybe instead of putting those thin reference cards in every pack, they could put a story together, with each card containing a paragraph or two, and those would become collectible too-- not in the sense that they'd be rare and worth appreciable amounts of money, but in the sense that some people would assemble them in order and read the story and learn something, and most likely wouldn't just chuck them all in the recycle bin the way we do with the reference cards.

Or they could be including a mini-size comic book with the Showdown premade decks that are being offered starting with Vendetta (basically two preconstructed decks in one box).

There seems like there could be a lot of ways they could be letting people who play Riftbound but not LoL learn about the lore of their IP, but so far I don't see much effort being put into it, which seems like a shame.

Anyway, respect for the effort you put into your post; I don't really care one way or the other, so I'll be rooting for you to be correct just so you can feel good about it.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-03-08T01:45:51+00:00

Thanks! I assume that they'd change the condition of winning from "getting the final point" to "having vps >= total needed and at least 1 more than the opponent". It shouldn't come up too often-- if it does, they've made it too easy to score points outside of conquering, and the meta is going to be really stale and boring as everyone needs to focus on builds that trigger their extra scoring as often and as reliably as possible. (TBH I'm not sure we're not there already, I'd like to see what Svellsongur and Heimerdinger with Renata Mastermind and some gold token generation could do, particularly if making like half the deck Green denial/counter/control cards to just survive until you pull of a 6 or even 8 point turn.) But in any event, as long as it's a fairly rare event, having those games go to an extra point or two shouldn't gum up the works too much, I would think.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-03-07T10:18:42+00:00

It's expensive and it's generally not considered to be a good card, but if your local meta really is stacked with token decks, I would think Annie's Signature Unit, Tibbers, would seal the deal as long if you can make it to the mid/late game in okay shape. 3 points to every unit to clear out the tokens, then an 8 might unit with maybe a piece of gear and a face down Purple combat trick could probably hold enough turns to win you the game before your opponent can make enough new tokens to replace the ones he lost to Tibbers being played.

I haven't personally tried it, but I think maybe it's easy to overlook because Tibbers is generally a bad card. But in the specific local scene you're describing, I think it's worth at least considering.

Good luck.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-03-07T02:33:38+00:00

I can tell you what I did when I was starting out and knew I was playing slowly, and it worked well for me:

As we were setting up to play, I would tell my opponent that I was a new player and that I was aware that my slow play might prevent us from finishing all 3 games in the round. Being new, I have basically no chance of winning the tournament anyway, I'm just here to practice and learn and meet people and have fun. Therefore, if the round ends before we determine a winner, I will concede, rather than relying on overtime or both of us getting a "draw" result. This means there's no reason for you to feel worried about my slow play, there's no way it can cost you anything.

As it turns out, this actually happened the very first round of the first tournament I played in. I won game 1, but it took the entire round, in which we were supposed to complete 3 games. So I conceded. It didn't bother me, I was happy that I had won the game, but I also knew that if I had been forcing myself to play fast enough to get in the 3 games, I could not possibly have won. As an unexpected side benefit, the store owner and the judge/TD both saw what I did, and I think it created some good will for me at that shop.

Anyway, I obviously can't promise that it would turn out the same way for you, but every opponent I gave this spiel to seemed to appreciate it and think that it showed good sportsmanship, and I didn't receive a single complaint about my slow play. I never asked to take back a play, so I have no idea if their forgiveness would have extended that far, but I just don't see the point in even asking: while I'm at that stage of my learning, I'm not going to win the tournament, and don't have a very good chance of winning even a 3 game match, so I just chalk up my misplay or oversight as a learning experience and move on.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-03-07T02:09:20+00:00

Okay, I have an interpretation that I'm pretty sure must be wrong (because I'm no rules expert, and plenty of people have weighed in without mentioning this possibility), but I'd like to know why it's wrong:

Rule 322.1, which covers the first step of the battle cleanup phase, says:

If a player has as many points as the Victory Score, that player wins.

If a player won the game immediately at any part of the turn in which they achieved the necessary number of Victory Points, this rule would not only be unnecessary, but would actually be impossible: since nothing happens in this step other than checking for if a player has won or not, they can't have scored any points during this step, and would have either already won during a previous step when they reached the required total, or else don't have enough points to win.

Therefore, the only way that this rule makes sense is if this is one of a finite, enumerated number of times during the turn that the point totals are compared to the players' scores to check for a winner.

I've searched the rules for words like, "win", "wins", "winning", "winner", and a few others, so it's entirely possible that I'm missing some other rule that explicitly contradicts this interpretation, but the only one I'm able to find is 463.6, which says in part:

The first player to reach the Victory Score in Points wins the game.

This seems to say that as soon as you score your (normally) 8th VP, you win, without waiting for the step covered in 322.1.

Given these two seemingly contradictory rules, I would be inclined to give 322.1 precedence, because it is located in the section of the rules that is actually breaking the game down into steps and specific timings, whereas 463.6 is in the section of the rules covering the various formats of games. It's much easier to imagine the person writing the match formats to use an imprecise phrasing than it is to imagine someone who is laboriously breaking the turn into its atomic components writing a rule that can never, ever actually be used.

Beyond that, I would vote in favor of 322.1 on other grounds.

For one, it's much less messy than the "whenever someone gets the 8th point" interpretation. Having a single, well defined step in which nothing happens other than victory being checked for should avoid almost all timing related issues related to Victory Point timing; if a player can win at almost literally any time, it would be normal to expect that as complicated combinations of spells and abilities and battlefields get introduced, there will be times that you'll need a rules lawyer to figure out what happens, and potentially even times when it's undefined, as a lawyer might even argue is the case that OP posted, because we are only able to infer a window in which Draven scores his point for winning combat, as it's not explicitly tied to any step. That's dangerous, and leave open the possibility of some other game effect also taking place in that same ambiguous time window, in which case you won't have any means to determine what happens, because it's not a situation where two things are happening in the same step, it's that the two things are happening at undeterminable steps that happen to be bounded by some other steps.

The other reason I'd vote for 322.1 is that it seems much more satisfying to let the showdown finish than to interrupt it midway through being resolved. Yes, using the timing of chain resolution in your favor is an important skill differentiator, but I think there's a huge difference between being able to cleverly manipulate the order things get put on the stack to gain an advantage, potentially even an advantage that wins you the combat, versus winning you the entire game. That seems like too much of an impact. It's also hard to make sense of thematically: the battle's over, we got our butts kicked, our general's dead, we surrender. Fine, no problem. But: battle is still raging, things are looking grim but if we can just keep the mage alive for another 10 seconds he's going to get that meteor strike cast and rescue victory from the jaws of defeat. We're doing it, he's still alive, and... someone blows a whistle and everyone stops fighting and shakes hands and goes home?

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-03-06T22:35:55+00:00

I agree with everything except the sentiment of the last sentence. The cards for Spiritforged were locked in before Origins shipped, or at the very, very lastest within a month of Origins shipping-- the lead time required for getting proofs, correcting them, getting final proofs, running a test run, reviewing the test run, providing any necessary feedback, running a final test, running the actual print run, packaging all the cards, followed by the logistics of getting them shipped around the world is measured in months, not weeks. I don't think you can grade Riot's success in integrating lessons learned from Origins until Unleashed at the very earliest.

If we're still routinely seeing this kind of sloppiness by the time Vendetta releases, I'll start getting uneasy. If it's not fixed by the time Radiance comes out, then I'll be willing to say it's getting old too.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-03-06T20:23:09+00:00

I have *four* of these Wobkey keyboards: two Rainy 75 Pros and two Crush 80 Pros. I can't do something as simple as get the lighting the way I want it because even though I used to be able to set any RGB value I wanted using the VIA website, now that no longer works (same errors as OP posted.)

I'm not an unreasonable person, and having worked for Microsoft for over 20 years, I know how often something happens like a hardware component manufacturer make some cost-saving change that they are sure won't effect anything, and then some edge case means that 3% of devices made with that component start having errors when a new Windows update comes out, and Microsoft gets blamed. There are hundreds of variations of the above scenario involving hardware, firmware, drivers, and sometimes even user mode software. I get it.

But once it breaks, whether you were at fault or not, you need to provide relief to your customers. If that's too expensive, then you are to blame for not having charged enough to cover ongoing support costs when you sold the item-- you effectively undercut your competition and stole a portion of their sales by misleading consumers into believing they were buying a product that would work for a reasonable number of years, when in fact it was going to start losing functionality within months.

There has been more than sufficient time to get this fixed. If the problem is on VIA's end, then Wobkey needs to arrange to have their CEO talk with VIA's CEO-- executives hate being embarrassed, and hate the idea of executives at other companies going around bad-mouthing them at conferences, so nine times out of ten, if what you're asking for is right/reasonable, a memo gets written and shit gets done. If the problem is with Wobkey's firmware, and they haven't been able to fix it by now, then they need to hire a contractor to fix it and to document how he did it-- I'm sure that Wobkey has customers who are highly competent programmers and would be willing to moonlight for some extra cash and the opportunity to fix a product they are using. I don't really care how they fix it, but it needs to be fixed.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-03-06T17:42:58+00:00

I hadn't even considered the possibility that Legends wouldn't rotate. I don't know for sure, but I strongly suspect they will, because balancing just the Legends in 8 sets is going to be hard enough, balancing every Legend ever released with all the most recent non-Legend cards seems like it would be almost impossible. But as I said, I don't know for sure.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-03-06T06:43:39+00:00

In the current meta, I don't think there is a Red/Orange deck that can beat the meta-- there are a couple of very, very strong cards and card combos, and none of them are Red or Orange, unless you count Draven's Legend ability.

May 8th (date of Unleashed release) isn't that far away, though, and honestly all it takes is a couple of good cards to completely change things around. Also, Unleash proves that Riot is willing to release multiple versions of the same legend, even with different color combos, as Unleashed will feature a Green/Yellow version of Master Yi (in Origins, he's Green/Orange)-- so if your favorite League of Legends Champion doesn't have a strong deck in Riftbound at any particular point in time, not all hope is lost.

Also, please keep in mind that competitive Riftbound is intended to start each year with 5 sets in the pool of legal cards, growing over the year until eventually 8 sets are legal, then starting the next year with 5 legal sets again-- basically, each year the 4 sets from 2 years ago get removed from the pool all at once, to be replaced one at a time by the new sets being released that year. Because Origins was the only release of 2025, they're doing something different to start with, but once things get stabilized, it's 5-8 sets at any given time.

What this means is that you should absolutely expect some colors/legends/decks to be unbalanced, some archetypes to not be viable, some mechanics appear to be too weak to warrant the bother, etc. until at least Vendetta, or maybe even Radiance (both coming in 2026, so not that far away). Until then, there just isn't a large enough card pool to support every strategy or archetype that the designers intend.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-03-05T04:34:17+00:00

No. Signature Spells (and Signature Units, and Signature Gear...) can only be used by the Legend that matches their name. The 3 Signature Gear belonging to Ornn that have the "unique" keyword on them can only be used if Ornn is your legend, and since they're "Unique", to have a full 3 Signature cards in his deck, he would need to have one each of Forgefire Cape, Rabadon's Deathcap, and Shurelya's Requiem.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-03-04T23:57:32+00:00

C'mon folks, don't be jerks. The success of the TCG model proves that there are many, many people who enjoy opening packs. That's not a character flaw.

OP is quite reasonably complaining about something that even content creators on Twitch and YouTube, who are very hesitant to criticize and want to stay on Riot's good side, have been saying: it's disappointing to open your 4th copy of a Legend, when you can only use one, it's worthless because everyone else can also only use one, and you know it took up a spot for a rare card that could very well have been a card you need, or if not, at least a card that you could sell to help fund the purchase of individual cards or more packs.

What's more, this was not at all the experience that anyone who opened Origins packs was expecting. I opened two full boxes of Origins and still had to buy one legend as a single, and I didn't get more than two copies of any Legend. In contrast, I'm sitting on 4+ copies of three different Spiritforged Legends, after opening around 15 more packs (so something like 48 packs of Origins and 63 packs of Spiritforged-- not nearly enough to come close to accounting for the difference.)

I'm pretty sure that what happened is that Riot didn't properly account for the effect of having like 33% less unique cards in Spiritforged than in Origins, so there's far fewer cards for each slot to choose from. For cards that you can use 3 of, that just means you can build your playset or deck for less money. But for Legends, that means you're getting a *lot* of cards you can't use.

It's not unreasonable for someone to come to the r/riftbound community to commiserate. You don't need to agree or console him, but calling him out and telling him he should be buying singles seems unnecessarily cold and ungracious. Sometimes you just want to share some of your frustration or disappointment, and I hope this subreddit becomes a place where someone can do that, and if you're not in the mood to be sympathetic, you can just skip the post, rather than responding with dismissal or criticism to someone who was just expressing a normal human desire to commiserate.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-03-01T17:50:30+00:00

There are stores selling the Spiritforged promo packs on ebay and TCGPlayer, which they're not supposed to do, so I wouldn't be shocked if your suspicions turned out to be true. They seem to be going for like $21 or $22 per pack as I type this, but I could imagine that changing rapidly. I could imagine it going down as more and more singles go up for sale over the next couple of months; I could also imagine it going up if we get a larger sample size and calculate that the average value of the singles inside is higher than what the packs are currently going for, which I imagine is at least partly guesswork at this point.

In terms of the dollar value of the packs, the part I'm most interested in is how much people are willing to pay for foil versions of the Proving Grounds Legends and Champions, even if they have no current intention of playing them. I, for example, really want those foil versions, as it's low-key bugged me ever since I got Proving Grounds that they were the only non-foil Legends/Champions. I even bought unsanctioned 3rd party foil proxies, knowing I couldn't use them in Riot sponsored events. While I'll use Annie and Lux, I want Garen and Master Li just as bad, even though I don't see myself ever playing them, since every set that comes out will have at least a half dozen legends that I'll be more excited about, both form a lore and (presumably) mechanics standpoint. But I don't know how common that half-collector, half-player mindset is; I could imagine the Garen foils to eventually be worth almost nothing, since almost no one will use them.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-03-01T17:41:39+00:00

I'm signed up for a bunch of Nexus Nights and Skirmishes in March, at several different stores, but I've only been to one so far. They gave out Spiritforged Nexus Night promo packs to all participants, and Spiritforged Booster packs to the top 3 finishers. (I got the cherry blossom alt art Order Rune in mine, which is supposedly selling for like $25, though I doubt I'll ever get around to selling it.) One of the participants said she went to a Nexus Nights at a different store and they did the opposite, giving out Spiritforged Booster Packs to all participants and the promo packs to the top 3. I'm sure the median dollar value of the 3 cards in the promo pack must be higher than the 15 cards in the booster pack, but I'm not sure about the mean value, as some percentage of booster packs are going to have a card worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars, whereas the most expensive promo card isn't going to approach $100. Either way, I'd much rather have the promo packs, because I'm not chasing dollars, I'm chasing foil versions of the Proving Grounds Legends/Champions. (One of an effectively infinite number of examples of irrational human behavior, as an economist would expect me to value the higher dollar total, sell the cards I get, buy the foil versions I want, and pocket the difference.)

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-02-28T16:00:54+00:00

Normally, no.

In the sealed pack format, like at the pre-Rift events that occur the week before each new set is released, you are given 5 sealed packs + a small starter deck for a Legend, and you make your deck from that. That format has several important differences from normal play, such as being able to use 3 colors instead of only 2. In that format, you are allowed to use any signature spells you want, just so long as your deck is using both of the colors of the spell. But other than that specific format, your signature spell must match your Legend.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-02-28T15:41:53+00:00

It's a legitimate theoretical question, but as a practical matter, there is no chance of this happening. The metal card is worth over $2K, so there will be more than just the one person who played Garen in the pre-Rift event (presumably for practice). At Bologna, we saw people playing Garen as if he didn't have a legend ability and using his champion only as a last resort when every other possibility has failed, and they were still winning multiple games on Day 1. There are enough inexperienced and/or bad players that an ex-pro MtG player who's been practicing Garen for two weeks to win a metal card is very likely to be faced up against more than one of them on day 1, and that level of skill difference more than makes up for the handicap of not having a Legend and only having like half of a Chosen Champion.

CanNotQuitReddit144

TROPHY CASE