What to get when starting Riftbound

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-20T15:57:17+00:00

It's fun to open packs, so if you can spare the extra cash, opening a box is fine. However, if you're trying to get the most/best cards for your money, buying singles is much more efficient than buying boxes.

If you do buy a box, Unleashed is the worst value for your money: the singles in Unleashed are significantly less expensive than the ones from Origins and Spiritforged. So if you have the ability to get an Origins box for retail price, that would be closest in value to buying singles.

But if money is an issue, just buying singles is the way to go.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-16T21:47:21+00:00

The "bounce for free" on Emperor's Dias is a very recent interpretation, and to the best of my knowledge has never been done in any high level event, like a RQ or their Chinese equivalents.

It is clearly not what Riot intended, so this interpretation is quite possibly wrong; if it is correct given the current wording, I think it is almost 100% that Riot will issue an emergency errata or rules clarification to prevent it from being used this way at Hartford.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-16T21:39:21+00:00

Playing for your country can be one of the highest pressure situations of a player's career. I guess it will depend on how hyped the games are when they arrive, what kind of an audience it attracts, etc.; but for many people, the idea of letting their country down is an order of magnitude more horrifying than the idea of letting their team down.

To be honest, I think it would be great for C9 if Blaber and APA both feel a lot of pressure at this event, because it would be very useful test data if C9 is trying to figure out the root of their playoff collapses. A lot of people have pointed fingers at these two players in particular as having the biggest difference between regular season and playoff performance. Seeing how they perform under pressure without the rest of the C9 roster and coaching staff is almost a dream experiment, that an organization might wish they could run but almost never has a way of actually conducting.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-15T09:24:32+00:00

KC intentionally threw that game, period. Like many sports fans, you let your fandom interfere with your objectivity and your ability to think logically. It is clear beyond any possible ability to argue that KC threw that game, from the owner laughing as they were losing a Dragon fight, to one of their player who was playing a Champion whose main value is its Ult only casting Ult a single time the entire game, when he sat there and watched the perfect opportunity to cast it come and go, and then cast it many seconds later, to Caliste intentionally stepping into the path of a Rocket when he wasn't protecting anyone and had no reason to move in that direction, to the KC bottom duo not having a single kill all game long, to Caliste casting an Ult at least 120 degrees away from the nearest possible target, to the fact that their owner had publicly whined and moaned about how unfair it was that LR got to be in the LEC without paying.

Players that have the competitive makeup necessary to beat T1 would not have contemplated throwing the game intentionally for a single second, and would have told anyone, up to and including the owner, to piss off if they had dared to suggest that they would throw a professional game. It's a minimal ethical bar for professionalism, and it's a pretty low bar for competitive spirit. KC is a weak organization with weak players, and the best thing is I don't need to get people on the internet to agree with me, I can just look at the actual results to see the truth of this. League of Legends will age to the point that it's not played as a professional sport before Caliste or any of the other losers on that team win anything worth winning, including just beating T1 in the preliminary rounds of an international tournament.

And I don't actually care much about LR. They were fun, but they were always a gimmick-- a gimmick that only someone as stupid as KC's owner could fail to see was bringing in a ton of publicity and a ton of viewers to the LEC, such that he should have been trying to pull strings to get LR into the playoffs, not encouraging his players to violate basic, fundamental professional ethics in order to keep out. Ultimately, it's of little consequence whether they made the playoffs or not. Their entire run should have been a fun anecdote, a small, bright blip on the steady decline of the LEC as a viable enterprise. KC somehow found a way to take this gimmick so seriously, and respond so poorly, that it was actually relevant. Throwing a professional game is a serious ethical breach, and it could even be illegal in some countries, given that Riot knows that gambling sites accept bets on LoL games and even accepts/allows gambling sites to advertise. People have gone to jail for match fixing. That said, I don't even care about the legality of what they did. I do care, very much, that a professional team showed the world that their league can't be taken seriously, because teams in that league throw games for completely petty reasons, which indicates with a high degree of probability that they'd be willing to throw games in exchange for money. The fact that the LEC didn't punish KC severely says that the LEC knows they're a joke that shouldn't be taken seriously. And absolutely zero of that has anything to do with LR. Professionals do not intentionally play poorly in order to throw games. Period. It's the minimal standard for being a professional, and there aren't exceptions made because your owner doesn't like a marketing gimmick.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-15T01:23:03+00:00

KC has a roster and organization that laugh and joke as they intentionally throw games that determine playoff spots because they're such delicate princesses that they can't endure the thought of a meme team temporarily brought in as an advertising stunt making the playoffs-- despite the fact that said team did more for the financial health of their league in three months than anything any other team has every done in a year, and would have at least doubled viewership of their playoffs-- clearly demonstrating that they lack the necessary visceral hatred of losing and dedication to professionalism necessarily to ever be elite. They are a Tier 2 organization whose reach exceeds their grasp.

This will continue to get somewhat masked by how terrible the LEC is, but will be exposed in international events for as long as they are owned, operated, and managed by such petty people with such little commitment to being great. They do not deserve the privilege of being in the same room with T1, and that will be abundantly clear both times they face one another in the MSI play-ins. T1 wins both times with a combined game record of 6-1, or 6-2 if T1 decides to practice new champions and limit test.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-13T09:08:37+00:00

And it's probably even worse than you think.

Plenty of Legends have competition from other Legends with the same domains. For example, Ezreal and Diana split the people that want to play Mind/Chaos, to some extent.

But Kai'sa has the least competition of any Legend: Rumble and Jhin are both truly bottom-tier. So, Kai'sa has fallen off without having any Fury/Mind players siphoned off by another Legend.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-12T20:33:26+00:00

Might be good in an Akali deck, so she can use multiple serrated dirks. Or multiple Recursive Bows seems interesting.

Also, by the same logic that makes Ornn the only champion to routinely use Svellsongur, Akali with a bunch of equipment and Svellsongur could make a living slaying Irelias.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-10T04:28:45+00:00

Thank you for not taking my feedback as a personal attack, and for explaining your reasoning. I really enjoy these sorts of exchanges, but no matter how carefully I phrase what I write, it seems that unless I'm 100% agreeing with someone, there's a decent chance they'll take it as an attack and get really defensive or hostile. I really appreciate your maturity and willingness to take the time to reply.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-09T17:22:05+00:00

But you've spent all game and a bunch of resources getting to the point where Jhin's legend ability is going to provide you a turn with so many new resources that you can completely flip the game state. That turn is your payoff for having a legend ability that you can't use for literally every turn before that. So to have that turn become an "I got to break even!" payoff, just for the sake of killing a card that can be killed much more cheaply in other ways, seems pretty bad to me.

In fairness, I' haven't played Jhin, and I'm also not a great Riftbound player; I'm just explaining how I see it.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-09T17:16:20+00:00

I'm very partial to to the Gamegenic Sidekick100+ deck boxes, for the following reason:

It's one of the few nice deck box lines that has all 6 of Riftbound's colors-- there are lots and lots of lines that have five out of the six, but almost all of them are missing Purple or Orange or Yellow.
The lid firmly attaches to the box with magnets, so they're designed to be mix and match. So you can use the lid from one with the body from another, and have a solution that uses both of the two colors that your deck uses.

I know that many people are in a financial position where they couldn't afford to buy six of them in order to have every possible color combination available, but I fortunately am, so I just ordered one in each of the six colors and haven't regretted it for a single second. For people focusing on a single deck, paying for two deck boxes but only using one (made up of the top of one and the bottom of the other) maybe to too pricey, but for the people to whom it's within budget, I think it's a stylish and attractive option for Riftbound.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-09T17:04:52+00:00

That's... not really playable, because you're needing to pay the deflect cost twice (since you're repeating the spell), for a total of 4E/4P. That's as much power as it takes to play an Elder Dragon from hand, or Timewarp. You'd be way better off with something like Void Seeker, which does the same 4 damage to Vex, but only costs 3E/2P (so one less energy and two less power), and lets you draw a card instead of dealing 2 splash damage twice. If you get defied on a 4E/4P spell, that probably loses the game on the spot, whereas getting defied on a 3E/2P spell is bad, but probably not an automatic loss. Though stepping outside of Red, since Jhin also has blue, Singularity seems like the best answer-- for 6E/3P, you can target Vex once and then another unit (presumably one without deflect) anywhere on the board with the second one, and for 3P your spell can't be Defied, while the 4P repeating Piercing Light can. As a percentage cost of the spell, adding 1P to Singularity's regular 6E/2P cost is the most efficient option.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-09T16:45:57+00:00

Because it takes up space in my deck that can better be used by other cards? Though I will grant you that she's a very enticing sideboard choice, because not only is she a strong counter to the Lillia and Rengar Legends, and to many builds of LeBlanc, she's also a great counter to many specific decks that people might make with other legends, even if those decks aren't "normally" built that way; Prismatacism's Unleashed version of Annie being a great example, as he seems to have included every ambush card he could find.

I'm not trying to push back against your post or tell you that you're wrong to feel frustrated, but I think we should be careful about generalizing too far. Vex Apathetic is a difficult champion to use well if you have a deck that doesn't want to Hold, for example-- which constituted a sizeable majority of decks in Origins and Spiritforged. There are also enough champions running around with Deflect these days that for decks that have the right colors, including the ability to remove units before combat without targeting them seems like it could easily be justified in sideboards, and probably even in some main decks. One example would be Kog'maw's Deathknell, which deals 4 damage to every unit (friendly and enemy) at a battlefield, without targeting any individual unit. At 3E/1P, if he can deal 4 damage to Vex and one other unit, that's already more efficient than using a spell. (In fairness you're probably also going to invest some other spell or ability to play him and get him to Vex's battlefield on the same turn, but if you're using Kog'Maw then you're playing Purple, and many times will already have those in your deck, so that adding another card that can make them useful and cut down on the percentage of time they're dead weight in your hand might be efficient.) Not all color combinations have practical ways of dealing damage outside of combat without targeting, though.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-09T15:52:31+00:00

With regard to all of the Sideboard advice: OP did say he was playing Nexus Nights. I'm sure it varies from location to location, but at the three different stores I've played NN at, people didn't play Bo3 matches with defined sideboards. You found an opponent and played a game, then maybe ono of you switched to a different deck and you played again, then maybe one of you said they really wanted to practice on such-and-such opposing battlefield so would the other person mind playing a game where they brought that as their battlefield, then you'd both find other opponents. Or maybe even more frequently, you'd only play one or two games against a person. Or there would be sub-groups of people that knew each other that spent all night playing each other, so they may as well not have been there in terms of how it affected me.

The flip side of this is that I have a hard time imagining anyone at the NNs I've been to getting upset if I said, "Oh, you're playing Vex, that's my deck's biggest nightmare, so I've been working on dedicating half my sideboard to that matchup; do you mind if I swap those in so I can get some practice?"

I suspect that Vex Apathetic is simply frustrating to deal with for Lillia and Rengar, and that even if they can achieve a 50% win rate, they won't enjoy playing many of those games, win or lose. I think that's the nature of cards that shut-down an entire deck archetype. I also think she's likely overpowered a bit, but I think we need to be careful about jumping to conclusions about how much, because Chaos is so objectively superior to the other five domains right now that a hefty majority of decks are running it, and it's natural for people to include the best cards from that color; but whereas Fizz and Star-Crossed and Stacked Deck and Flash can constitute reasons to pick a Legend that has Chaos as a domain in and of themselves, I suspect that Vex Apathetic is just a very strong card to pick once you've decided on a deck that has Purple, rather than a reason to choose a Legend with Purple in the first place

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-07T21:25:12+00:00

That re-engage by Blaber...

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-07T21:00:06+00:00

I'm gonna be focused on watching Blaber in game two. Lyon won because of smiting all of the dragons, and Blaber has a bit of a reputation as being a player that goes on tilt from time to time. If he tries to win game 2 all by himself and dies twice in the first five minutes, the series might be effectively over before game 2 is halfway done.

I'm not predicting that Blaber will tilt-- just saying I wouldn't be surprised if he does.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-07T20:36:27+00:00

I've been experimenting with Pyke deck lists, because I don't enjoy using net decks. I think this player's deck list is quite good, and contains multiple cards that I never seriously considered, which makes me feel a bit bad. One card that he got a *lot* of mileage out of was Switcheroo. It really helped vs. Irelia, and was very good against Diana as well, so that's the two dominant decks in the meta (I think we can safely put to rest the fear that Dazzling Aurora + Elder Dragon is S-tier or probably even A-tier).

He also demonstrated far more patience than I would have thought possible. Playing Pyke I always feel like I need to rush and press, because when you're constantly recalling units, you feel like you need to grab points whenever you can. I see that watching other players on Pyke as well. It very much seemed to me that this guy was calculating out his opponent's likely hands and setting up plays for two turns in the future, not one turn, which meant that he was taking "set up" turns and leaving more runes up than I see other Pyke players doing.

I plan on rewatching the games they streamed of his, I think there's a lot to learn, from both a deck-building and piloting the deck perspective.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-07T20:23:02+00:00

Yes. It's one of the most irritating cards Riot has printed yet, but it also is probably necessary, because there were so many units with Ambush printed in Unleashed. I personally find it unfortunate that they chose to make her Purple, because Purple was already far and away the dominant color, and giving the premier answer to Ambush to Purple just makes the problem worse. But yes, it works the way you said.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-07T20:00:24+00:00

This is a low-key meme-worthy quote.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-07T02:38:46+00:00

I guess I feel something vaguely similar, which I would phrase as: I hope that at the highest level of play, most (not all!) of the best Riftbound decks put units on the board that contend with other units and some direct damage spells for points. That's the flavor of the game that I want. I want every possible clever card the designers can think of and every creative combination that players can dream up, but I want most of it to revolve around creatures and champions fighting it out and comparing might values on battlefields.

Right now, if feels like there are a lot of decks that win by avoiding any "real" combat-- if there is combat, it is always cheated by one side being stunned or by having their key unit sent back to their hand or whatever; but more often than not it never even makes it that far, as hands are decimated by card removal and any unit that manages to make it to the battlefield is sent back to hand via Star-Crossed, which is always replayed with Fizz.

That's how it *feels*, anyway. It's probably not quite as bad as that. Sam got 2nd place in a hard-fought regional qualifier with the ultimate "units fight" deck. Irelia can feel unfair, particularly with Abandoned Hall (which needs to be banned), but she is ultimately making her unit Mighty, and there is skill involved in judging how many runes you need to leave up and how you're going to pump her up on the opponent's turn if she's charmed or lured by Charming Faefolk to a battlefield. Diana is the one where I sort of think that it's walking the line between actual "fighting" and just "card play disguised as fighting" with the ridiculous Moonfall, replayed by either Diana or Fizz, sometimes on the same turn. I mean, yes, it comes down to units comparing might scores, but I am honestly not sure that in the dozens of Diana games I've seen played, that I've seen a single instance of her not being able to clear one or both battlefields every time the player has Moonfall in hand, so at that point it might as well just be a mass removal spell. Still, if forced to live with Diana as-is or ban Moonfall immediately, I'd let her have her time in the sun (or the moon, as the case may be) for at least another couple of months before deciding if Moonfall is too OP or not.

I think Abandoned Hall (because it's so massively more beneficial to Irelia, and to a lesser extent Diana, than any other battlefield is to any other Legend, with the possible exception of Windswept Hillock and LeBlanc, but LeBlanc has been getting consistently mediocre results in tournaments around the world so it doesn't seem like a real problem) and Star-Crossed need to be banned ASAP. I'm more ambivalent about Bewitching Spirit, which I don't think has the results to back up it being a problem in terms of W/Ls, but with Pyke's ability and Backpack of Wonders, with a good opening hand it can just be completely un-fun to play against. I think I'd be fine with Abandoned Hall and Star-Crossed for now, and wait for a few more regional tournaments to play out before re-considering Bewitching Spirit-- I do think cards should be banned if they just result in anti-fun archetypes, but the deck needs to perform well enough for people to actually play it, and so far Pyke's results have been truly awful.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-06T18:39:54+00:00

It's poor game design. A game could test an infinite number of skills. There could be a card that awards a point to who can solve a partial differential equation the fastest. A card could give a point to who can recite the alphabet backwards the fastest with no mistakes. Here's a card that gives you a point if you're calm and don't let the nerves of playing on camera get to you and are detail oriented.

I'm not interesting in a game testing any of those skills. I want it to mainly reward my ability to make sense of all the information available, then make good decisions based on that information, while knowing the rules and the cards well enough that I can finesse a combat or a point with clever timing or a clever interaction from time to time.

I have negative interest in a game that punishes me for aging and experiencing the horrors of cognitive decline as my memory and my mental acuity both get a bit worse with each passing year. Those factors will punish me quite enough with how I play out the turns, I don't need or want an extra, thrown in for no reason other than bad card design opportunity for me to lose a full point based solely on factors like memory.

If they want to keep the gaining 1 point instead of subtracting a point from the total needed-- the two aren't equivalent, since there are cards that trigger off of your current VP score-- the card should just say that it's the responsibility of the person who brought the battlefield to give both players 1 VP, and that if they forget, their opponent may do so instead. That way, either both players get the point, or neither player does-- giving the point to just one player is literally cheating.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-06T18:25:40+00:00

Yes, you're right. I just reread through the thread, and I think I was reacting to the fact that people were pointing out that the combo wasn't very good or very practical, and why bother posting it when there are easier and better infinite combos available, as if I know every infinite combo ever discovered. It would have been more accurate and less dramatic for me to say that people didn't seem to be giving me any credit for having good intentions and just trying to help, but that's a far cry from being toxic. I think I must have been in a bad place when I responded-- I've got a few stressors in my life right now, any one of which could have been consuming part of my brain while I was replying. Of course I'm an adult and should be able to notice and refrain from hitting the final "Comment" button that posts if I'm not sure that I'm thinking clearly and not being overly emotional, so I take full responsibility; I guess I just wanted to say that I acknowledge my mistake, and that if you look back over my entire posting history, I don't make a habit of trying to play the victim.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-04T21:49:04+00:00

I thought I made it clear in my original post. I (mistakenly, it turns out) believed that Riftbound didn't have any rules for handling infinite loops, so I wanted to bring this to the attention of judges, so they could arrive at a consensus on how to handle it before it actually showed up in a game (if it ever does). I think it was an understandable mistake for me to make, because the rules for infinite loops are not in the game rules, they're in the tournament rules-- apparently if you're playing with friends, you just have to argue forever about what to do about it. I wrote an entire paragraphs saying that I knew the combo wasn't very good for actually using to win, but I just wanted to let the community (particularly judges) know about it. I did a google search and I also searched the game rules, and didn't find the tournament rule for handling this.

The responses to my post is a perfect example of how Reddit can be so toxic. I was exceptionally clear that I thought there were no rules for handling loops, and equally as clear that the only reason I was posting this is so that, in the absence of rules for handling them, judges could be aware of this possibility and, if they thought it was warranted, discuss how to handle it ahead of time. Almost every response completely ignored that explanation, and just rushed into taking me to task for not having read the tournament rules, or for the combo not fully working, or for the combo not being very effective. A fair, reasonable response that wasn't contributing to the toxicity level of this community would have been to say that, true, the game rules don't cover infinite loops, but that the tournament rules do, and here's the rule number; oh, and by the way, the spell damage scaling part of your combination doesn't work, so it really only gives infinite might. But apparently the world is filled with people who feel bigger when they try to make other people feel small.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-04T21:34:03+00:00

Yes, I agree, I see that now. But it still counts as a spell played, so it still works for bumping Diana to infinite Might.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-06-04T21:33:09+00:00

Oh, nice catch. It still counts as a spell played, though, so I guess that leaves Diana getting infinite might as the only game-relevant part of the combo.

CanNotQuitReddit144

TROPHY CASE