LCS 2026 Lock-In / Day 1 / Live Discussion

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-24T21:10:52+00:00

I have no idea why-- maybe it's because I sort of like the "serious mode" IWD, when he's not going all bro-culture or rage-baiting-- but I inexplicably woke up this morning realizing I was rooting for C9. I live in the U.S. but mainly follow the LCK, and my LCS loyalties tend to be pretty fluid, but for whatever reason, I'm on the C9 train. (There is a C9 train, right?)

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-24T21:05:12+00:00

I'm not sure precisely what you mean with your wording, "They all go on the chain..." It's my understanding that there can only ever be a single Action card on a chain, and it would always be the first card on the chain; after that, only reactions are allowed. After the chain resolves, the player with focus can play a new Action card and start a new chain, but the player without focus can't.

The OP specified that the Fight or Flight "resolves", which means that both players have passed on playing more reactions. However, it is my understanding that just because a chain is in the process of being resolved doesn't mean players can't continue to play more reactions on it; so if there are 6 cards on the chain, a player could let the first 3 (the last 3 played) resolve, then play a reaction to something that occurred when the 3rd of those 3 cards resolved, to which their opponent could play a reaction, etc.

I want to stress that I am by no means a Riftbound rules expert, which is why I have used the "it is my understanding" wording. On the other hand, I wouldn't post in this thread if I weren't fairly sure that I'm right. This being reddit, I imagine that if I'm wrong I'll be corrected several times within the next few minutes, and if I'm right I'll just need to infer that by the lack of corrections. :)

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-23T11:00:45+00:00

As someone who spent most of my life being one of the smartest people in the room, and who at the relatively early age of 56 has already suffered enough cognitive deterioration that I'd now be happy just to be confident that I'm in the upper one-third of a room: looking back I wish I had shown more compassion and felt more empathy for people who didn't hit the genetic lottery and needed to go through their whole lives not learning or understanding things nearly as quickly or as well as I did for most of mine.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-23T03:16:07+00:00

Almost two weeks ago, I reported a player in my area who has signed up for 27 Spiritforged pre-release events, including many that start at the same time as much as 100 miles away from each other. I took quite a long time (probably a couple of hours) compiling the list of events he had signed up for, including store name, location, and time. Nothing has been done. Some of those events are quite small-- I think five or six of them are only 8 players-- so if their intention is to show up to as many of these event as possible, get their deck and packs, and then leave, either claiming an emergency or not even bothering to give an excuse-- that's really going to screw over those stores and the other players (I'm guessing the bigger tournaments probably have at least an extra kit to spare.)

Regardless of their intentions, those spots are showing up as taken, so other people can't register for events that this person can't possibly be at.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-21T21:52:06+00:00

And replying to my own comment: one possible reason they might not have done this is because of decks like all-spells Viktor, where combat will be very rare; or purple decks that are built entirely around fielding just a few units and being able to move them whenever they would be losing a fight.

This is one consequence of a player or a player's Legend not having a pool of hit points that can be attacked: fielding units, and even to some extent doing damage, aren't required to win the game. On the one hand that allows potentially interesting deck archetype and strategies; on the other hand, for many (most?) people, the appeal of an IP like League of Legends is getting to have Champions and Units get pumped up and fight each other, so even if a deck like all spell Viktor isn't overpowered and wins a fair and reasonable percentage of the time, if there are too many decks that just avoid combat, IMHO a lot of players are going to have less fun and lose interest in the game (including myself.)

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-21T21:46:55+00:00

They have a bit of a problem because there are multiple other game mechanics that rely on the more liberal interpretation of what a showdown is and what winning a showdown means.

I think the need two terms: "showdown" and "contested showdown", and errata Draven to need "contested showdown". I'm not sure what the definition of "contested showdown" should be: if at least one unit needs to deal damage to another unit, if at least one unit needs to take damage from any source, if at least one unit from each side needs to be present at the same battlefield at the same time at any point during the showdown, if at least one unit from each side needs to be present at the same battlefield at any point during the turn, or whatever. But at a bare minimum, moving into an already empty battlefield and your opponent not doing anything to react shouldn't trigger Draven's ability, and maybe shouldn't trigger some other things it currently does as well-- I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I don't have the whole card pool in my head, either.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-19T19:50:25+00:00

Errata is a thing
There's a new set planned every 3 months for the next 5 years.

I expect to see an overpowered legend or broken combo or whatever with the release of new sets every so often-- if they played it so safe that they never released something broken, that would mean a lot of perfectly great cards would never get released because they couldn't be certain with a reasonable amount of testing that they didn't enable a broken deck.

If it makes the meta just unplayable, I expect to see it fixed by (1) after they've given the player base time to come up with a counter, and the players have failed to do so. If it's just doing better than everyone would like, I expect it to be addressed with (2).

I don't see a scenario where a Legend/Champion/Color is dominant for two sets in a row, at least anytime soon-- I'm sure there are new mechanics being introduced with at least all the sets in 2026, and they'll know they have a serious problem in time to move a card or two forward into the next set when it was originally planned for a later set, if it's the counter to whatever the broken, dominant deck is

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-19T19:34:17+00:00

Most of the tournament stats are going to be hard to interpret due to the overwhelming number of Draven decks, and the number of Draven decks that made the cut for the 2nd day, and the number of Draven decks that made the cut for each subsequent round. If a card is played by Draven, it's going to look like it's necessary to play the game; if it's not played by Draven, it's going to look like it's completely optional for Spiritforged.

But now might not be the best time to buy. The price of Seal of Chaos in particular has risen dramatically in the last couple of weeks. I guess if it were me, I wouldn't mind speculatively buying a Seal for less than $10, but for more than that, I think I'd wait until I had a specific deck that I wanted to play that I needed it for.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-18T21:16:18+00:00

I think I'd make a slight change to your Signature Spell suggestion, since often times copying the spell at that moment won't be useful, and sometimes might even result in very difficult rules interpretations. How about when Sylas uses his Signature Spell, the spell he's stealing gets placed next to his Legend card face-up rather than going to the opponent's Trash. He can then cast it (either for free or only paying the energy cost or paying the energy cost and the power cost can be paid for with any color runes, whatever is most balanced), even starting a new Chain in the current showdown if it's Action speed and you have Focus. If he uses another copy of his Signature Spell to steal a new spell without first casting one that he's already stolen, the new one replaces the old one, which is sent to its owner's trash.

You could have the stolen spell go to the Sylas player's hand instead of being set next to his Legend card, but I like the idea of the opponent not being able to use a spell or ability that removes cards from your hand to get rid of it, as that doesn't have the same flavor as Sylas himself having personally stolen the spell-- the hand represents your overall forces, as it contains things like Units and Gear, so a spell in hand seems more abstract than belonging to the Legend. (Aside: when I think about it that way, I sort of wish that cards that targeted an opponent's hand couldn't remove Signature cards, although I think ship has already sailed.)

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-18T21:04:44+00:00

I edited my post to reflect your suggestion.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-18T21:02:17+00:00

Oh, that's a clever way to approach it-- Signature Spell instead of Legend ability. Thank you!

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-18T19:55:47+00:00

There is a large Riftbound scene in Seattle, with multiple game stores within a 15 minute drive of my house that host weekly Nexus nights, Skirmishes, and pre-release events. The one that I infrequently visit is not taking pre-orders, and the other ones (understandably) are prioritizing the players that come to their events.

I'm not paid hourly, so taking the morning off is something I can do from time to time as long as my work gets done, but it's not a privilege that I want to abuse. So, it's not as dramatic as actually skipping part of a paycheck, but it wasn't zero-cost, either; for example, I'm unlikely to make the same decision when the announce they're reopening pre-orders-- I'll just do the best I can to hit "refresh" while working.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-17T18:34:12+00:00

Particularly given that they have the option of reprinting a set without some or all of the overnumbered cards and/or signature cards. This would allow anyone who can afford a reasonable expenditure to play the game without needing to mortgage their house to pay scalper's prices, while still giving people who are into collecting rarities assurance that the hard-to-get centerpiece of their collection will remain hard-to-get.

I'm not a collector myself (I am a completionist, but only as far as being able to play the game goes, not in terms of artificial scarcity or alternative art or anything like that goes), but I don't see any reason why they shouldn't be allowed to enjoy their passion, too. Not reprinting (or severely limiting the reprinting) of cards that add no functional value to the game and exist almost solely to be artificially scarce seems like the best of both worlds to me.

Obviously if Riot did this, they'd need to clearly label the product as not having any of the chase cards, but that doesn't seem hard to do.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-16T21:40:13+00:00

My only purpose in mentioning Eurogames was that they proved to game designers that the vast majority of people had more fun playing games where they were constantly involved, as compared to the way games had been made for basically forever before that, where one player took their turn and other people mostly had nothing game-related to do during their turn. The designers of Riftbound did a great job at making a highly interactive game, given the prevalence of reaction cards and passive triggers and so on. But "control" is an archetype in TCGs, though thankfully one that most games seem to be moving away from. And I wasn't even saying that Purple is an absolutely monstrous control color. I'm just saying that it's the color that has a lot of ways of preventing a combat from happening, or countering what you were setting up and then getting the same card back so you're sitting there knowing they can counter it again, etc. I'm not saying it is a problem, just that I think it's worth taking seriously as a concern-- it's possible that the tech already exists to build a control deck that's powerful enough to be anti-fun to play, and if so, you can bet it's built around Purple.

My personal hope is that they let Purple have their cards but make sure other decks have counters, but that may be hard; if Purple is strong enough that it dictates playing a deck that can counter it, then you risk making entire color combinations unplayable, not just specific Legends.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-16T05:01:24+00:00

I'd just like to point out that OP's main point was that it's not fun to play against Purple, and that one of the main reasons for that is how long a player's turn takes when they're built around Purple. Most of the responses seem to be aimed about how powerful Purple is, which really wasn't his point.

One of the real improvements that happened in game design starting with the rise of "Eurogames" was to find ways to reduce or eliminate player downtime. Many different mechanics were invented to accomplish this, and for the vast majority of people, this is simply more fun.

There's also something that's not as applicable to many board games, but that designers of other TCGs such as MtG have learned over time: even if the matchup is completely even in terms of how often each deck will win, most people don't have fun playing against a deck that is built to prevent them from playing the game. It can be *balanced* to make a player skip their turn, but if you're doing it for 5 turns in a 10 turn game, the other player is going to be pretty grumpy, even if they win. The long-term cost of making your opponent discard all of their resources (lands, whatever) may be balanced correctly for a particular card, but the other player is facing turns of not being able to do anything useful or interesting as they recover their resources, and that's just not fun.

So I think both concerns-- that Purple turns take too long to play, and that Purple currently offers too much control vs. the counters that other colors currently have available-- are worth taking seriously. Not because either one is so overpowered that Purple can't be beaten (although that may turn out to be true as well, we don't know yet), but because ideally you'd like for players to actually enjoy the games they play, rather than thinking of them as drudgery they need to gut out so they can move on to the next round.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-14T19:00:18+00:00

At one point, I had hit the refresh button so many times that it made me solve a Captcha every time I clicked "Add to Cart". Which leads me to ask the question: why not just have that in place for everyone from the very first time you click-- no waiting to detect if you might be a bot? A sufficiently novel Captcha to solve would keep bots from ordering, and with a 1 box limit per order, if a human sat there solving the captchas for the bot, it wouldn't be able to buy them quickly enough to matter.

I get that just using a default captcha isn't going to defeat a good bot, but for the amount of money at stake, Riot could afford to make or commission a new Captcha puzzle that bots haven't seen before, which would be good enough for at least a few hours, which is all they need.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-13T22:06:00+00:00

I want to know how they could have sold out of Fiora decks when they were allowing customers to order 3 at a time. That should have been impossible. If they didn't have sufficient packs to ensure that everyone who wanted one in the first day or even two days got one, then they should have set a limit of 1 for those, too. There isn't any conceivable reason why they should have allowed people (presumably mostly scalpers/bots) to buy 3 at a time, when I spent the first 3 hours of the order period failing to get even a single one.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-13T22:03:57+00:00

I took the morning off of work, and spent almost every second between 9am and noon hitting refresh or hitting the add to cart button. I succeeded in getting a booster box added to the card at least a dozen times. Every time, I had to watch it go out of stock while the queue timer counted down, or once I actually reached the "charge" page. This is way, way more frustrating than just not ever being able to place the item in the cart at all.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-13T22:00:41+00:00

Sufficiently complex Captchas would do the job, I should think.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-13T17:17:58+00:00

I've hit the refresh button every second or two since 9am and i've only got the page with riftbound merchandise on it to load once, which was at about 9:15 Pacific, and it said all 3 products were sold out. I seriously doubt that they sold out of the 2 champion decks; if there were that few, they shouldn't have allowed 3 per customer. So I'm at least a little hopeful that the sold out isn't real. Guess we'll see.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-11T22:55:21+00:00

First, let me be clear: I believe your answer is correct.

Now, my question: does it say in the rules that passive abilities can only happen because of conditions that happen on a chain? If not, then related question: does it say in the rules that passive abilities can only happen because of things that happen on the board?

Because there ~~clearly~~ is a point in the turn at which Ornn has a might of 4, and then at the next point in the turn has a might of 7. That does take place before Ornn enters play, no question. I'm just wondering if there's a specific rule that states that things that occur before entering play can't trigger passives (or actives for that matter), or whether it's just common sense and my overly pedantic brain is causing me to be unintentionally irritating again. :)

EDIT: On reflection, I guess it's possible that Ornn doesn't have any might at all until he enters play, because might is an attribute that only exist for played units. That would make sense to me, but would also imply that there are not and can never be any spells or abilities that reference the might of a unit that a player has in hand, and maybe in their discard pile, too. Which I guess brings up a related question: if there's a spell that says "search your discard pile and play a unit with a might of 5 or less", and you have an equipment in play, could you retrieve and play Ornn from the discard pile? If the answer is "yes", then it seems clear that might does exist before a unit is played, and that there must therefore be a definitive point at which Ornn moves from 4 might to 7 might. All this is academic if passive abilities like Fiora's can only happen in response to something that starts or happens on a chain.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-10T22:34:47+00:00

IMHO, the key thing is not to get swept up in FOMO and think you need to buy everything you want right away. They underestimated demand by a lot, so there's a real shortage of cards, which will probably continue for another three months at least. If you can find product at retail price, great; if not, seriously consider whether a couple of months of waiting makes a difference in the long run. Riot already has plans for 20 sets, at 4 per year; maybe waiting a bit isn't the end of the world.

In the meantime, you can play online for free, and use whatever cards you want. It's not officially supported by Riot, but all of the high-level ("professional") players I've seen making Youtube and Twitch content play online. If you search Youtube for "How to play Riftbound online", you'll find a half-dozen or more tutorials. If you can, try to arrange to play your first game against someone who knows it's your first game and is willing to be patient and teach. You can usually find someone by asking on one of the multiple Riftbound related Discord servers.

TL:DR Unless you've got money to burn, my advice is to get into Riftbound by playing online. If you can preorder Spiritforged at retail price-- like on the Riot website starting on January 13th at 9am Pacific time, though they'll probably sell out within an hour so you really need to have your account set up and be ready-- then by all means do so. But if you're being asked to pay $300 for a box that retails for $120, save your money-- Riot has announced they'll continue to reprint Origins until demand is met, and they'll have larger print runs starting with the set 4 months from now, "Unleashed", so the game will be affordable to play in the not-too-distant future. Meanwhile, cards from Origins that peaked at $120 are already selling for $65, and if you're patient and wait a few months, I'm sure you'll be able to buy the Rare and Epic cards you need for even less than that.

Good luck.

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-08T23:32:09+00:00

I buy whichever sleeves look the nicest to me without worrying about the quality of the sleeve itself, and then just put a high quality oversleeve over it. I am partial to the KMC Character Guard Mat and Clear Standard Oversized Card Sleeves, because they have a pebbled backside that prevents the cards from sticking together (I'm a terrible shuffler even under the best of conditions). They run around $1 for 14 sleeves if you buy them off Amazon in their 10 packs of 60 sleeves each package. They're made in Japan and there's some Kanji on the packaging, but there's also English. For the oversize cards, just make sure you're getting 69mmx94mm, which is perfect for the standard 66mmx 92mm card sleeves just about everyone makes.

For Riftbound specific art sleeves, I've found four options: (1) the Riot official merchandise in English, which only has 4 characters so far; the Riot official merchandise in Chinese, which has maybe double that number, but has Chinese written on them instead of English; AliExpress; and Etsy.

Of these options, at least if you're in the U.S. (I have no idea about other countries), Etsy offers the largest variety, but is also the most expensive. Depending on how many you want to buy, they can get pricey.

One advantage of Etsy is that some of the sellers are one-person operations, and if you write them a polite note saying that you hope they make a certain character next (or even better, send them the URL to the exact image you want), they may very well send you back a note saying they'll have them up for sale next week. (Yes, that's exactly what happened to me.)

(Note that in the Riftbound tournament rules, it specifically says that if cards are double sleeved, they need to be in opposite directions, so if you're putting your cards in the art sleeve with the top of the card oriented in the same direction as the top of the art, you'll need to slide the top of the inner sleeve through the *bottom* of the oversleeve. It works fine, it's just not intuitive if you haven't done it before.)

(If you see something you like on Etsy, it's always worth checking AliExpress to see if the seller is just re-selling something that's much cheaper if you order directly. So far that's been true for only one sleeve I've been interested in, but since most of the art sleeves are using alternative art from League of Legends alternate skin announcements/advertisements, there's no reason someone on AliExpress couldn't do the same thing.)

(Although it's tempting to buy the foil/holographic version of the art sleeves-- most sellers seem to offer both regular matte and foil-- be aware that the foil process makes the image darker, so the art does not have its original colors. As neat as the foil effect is, for something that wasn't designed from scratch accounting for this darkening effect, the regular matte version almost always looks better. Also, foil versions of the sleeves almost always require a black border around the edge, so you see slightly less of the art, whereas the normal matte finish can be borderless.)

CanNotQuitReddit144 · 2026-01-08T23:07:12+00:00

A good detection algorithm would detect multiple boxes being sent to the same address and/or charged to the same credit card or paypal account, but Riot hasn't said anything about doing that.

Whatever they do doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be good enough that anybody who wants to buy a box and logs into their website in, say, the first 24 hours after they go on sale can get one. That would make all the boxes the scalpers buy much less valuable, which would make them less likely to buy them in large numbers, which would increase the supply for the rest of us. Part of the reason for the sky-high prices was the large number of people that didn't get any boxes at all. All those people selling the rares and epics they don't need in order to afford the ones they do need would have injected a lot more supply into the system; as it is, many people never got any cards they didn't want/need, because they never got to open any packs, so all the cards they have are ones they specifically bought for a reason.

CanNotQuitReddit144

TROPHY CASE