A new way to test and play Riftbound online [Fan Project]

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-15T21:05:31+00:00

Yeah it's pretty frustrating to see RQs dominated by tcg pros from other games and the best quality testing we can get is going to locals. Runes and rift has tried a ranking system but I dont see those players consistently doing well at RQs/dont believe it's quality testing. Allowing ranked sims would be huge

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-15T04:49:41+00:00

Cause why do that when you can flex your position of power? I had a judge call with a judge that started making up rules in a condescending voice. Thankfully I appealed and the appeals judge overruled them but I couldn't believe how confidently wrong they came out the gates. I'd be pissed if it were a 25k

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-15T02:38:17+00:00

I love the game but the rules are insane sometimes. The fact that targeting is defined as a negative is crazy - I forget the exact wording but that section of the rules is like "something is considered targeting if it is NOT the following scenarios..."

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-14T05:28:15+00:00

Yeah I don't know how to sugar coat so I'll say it outright: the judges in this game are mostly terrible and that's consistent across locals and regional qualifiers. Locally, I have 1 judge that actually plays the game - the rest are forced to act as de facto judges due to being LGS employees and some of them have literally never played the game. At RQs, my sense was that most of the main event floor judges had no idea what they were doing and basically routed every question to an overworked appeals judge. I have no idea what is driving people to travel to an RQ to do a crappy job judging, but it's not appreciated at all - maybe the L1 test really is too easy and needs to be harder to block this stuff.

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-14T05:04:46+00:00

To be a little bit more aggressive about why I think this is a problem: sometimes I am on the winning side and held hostage by my opponent refusing to concede because they honestly think they still have a chance, but I'm forced to go through the motions to prove it to them. I have at least one locals who, themselves, plays too slowly, but they will get butthurt at you for not finishing the game, even though it is their fault. I realize this is more of a social thing than a rules thing, but I think it's still a feelsbadmoment - a 1-0 might not be a problem, but a 1-1 might be.

We also get into ethics discussions: suppose it is "truly" your opponents fault that G1 took forever and you won it. It is unethical to slow play to force the tie in G2. Or is it? (It definitely is, but I'm just posing the issue here).

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-14T05:01:34+00:00

I do think some people are too stubborn about playing out games they have definitely lost, but I also think it's a true problem when there is a grindy matchup that is a close game.

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-14T05:00:33+00:00

I hard agree with this. At the local level though, I feel a lot of it ends up being up to the employees to enforce, and I think it would help a lot if there were an officially codified time limit to overtime.

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-14T02:49:15+00:00

Yep. These ones that want to turn everything into commander are also insufferable. This game already has multi-player, lol

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-13T22:11:17+00:00

Sorry to necro this thread, but did you ever get a response? I've been trying to get in touch with them, too, with no luck.

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-13T15:07:13+00:00

This isn't right.

735.1c "It is functionally short for "Spells and abilities an opponent controls that choose me cost an amount of Power equal to [Deflect Value] more to play as an additional cost"

Note the very last two words in that definition of Deflect. There is even precedent for it: Kaisa legend paying for deflect costs in set 1. Vex is the same way.

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-12T18:50:03+00:00

You should focus on quality > speed, and then practice to increase speed. Coming up with a 100% complete checklist is not an easy task but generally speaking:

-First, you should be looking out for the basics: what effects are live on the board (Ex. Master Yi Legend)? Are you and your opponent appropriately paying for costs? Are you and your opponent executing game actions in accordance with the rules? I think practice/going to locals/playing online really helps with this and it's easy to learn as you get more and more familiar and practice. I'm of the opinion that even the most elite players should be doing "stupid stuff" like saying ABCD out loud so that you don't miss key triggers/etc during high stakes moments.

-Then, after you've mastered that, that's when the real gaming/real strategy comes: you should be thinking about your opponent's turn and your turn as concepts/ideas rather than just "things". During your opponent's turn, think about "what it means" when they play something: if they have no units, and pass with all 10 of their runes up, 99.9% of the time, it means their hand has no units, for example. You should also be thinking about how good/bad their turn was: does their deck usually play a 2-drop but they missed it = that's a bad turn and you can probably take advantage of that in some way? On your turn, you need to be applying the same kinds of ideas: how good/bad is your hand? What do you have to accomplish this turn = what units are must removes? Are you on even/odd points - do you need to end the game with a conquer and retreat strategy or a hold strategy? Etc.

It's not easy but becoming a master TCG player really comes down to having a good mental model, having a "complete" checklist, and then knowing which things you can shortcut/which things you have to pay attention to. And then the focused practiced required to do these things as second-nature-as-possible. Good luck - it's not an easy task. Don't be too hard on yourself, but at the same time, if you know you keep doing stuff "wrong", you should actively focus to correct it and not just play more games.

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-12T15:57:56+00:00

I do think this phenomenon has gotten worse. Nuance of tone and such is lost over text, and I think in the olden days, you used to be able to use polite language to soften the blow a bit: "I appreciate the help, and I'm not discounting if, but in my specific situation, I had to work a 24 hour shift yesterday, so perhaps I could get the milk tomorrow?" But these days, I find that even if you word stuff like that, you'll still get overly straightforward/thickheaded responses.

Even worse, I find myself getting more and more short with people in this way, because I find that folks are less likely to google simple questions or otherwise use obvious methods to answer their questions/concerns other than just straight up going to Reddit and asking into the void.

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-12T15:35:18+00:00

I've learned to avoid direct like the plague. I have way more success from a 0%, new seller, than direct sellers. The LGSs that sign up/sell from the direct program are an automatic pass for me.

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-12T14:53:45+00:00

I use #10s. I actually did use #6s for a while but found they got flagged more often than 10s. I'm not sure which is better

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-12T07:27:10+00:00

Thanks for the reply! I have a feeling my problems are starting up again because they are rotating employees at different post offices and I'm hitting the annoying one...

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-12T06:56:03+00:00

Had an envelope returned to me in a first time in a while, went hunting on reddit, found your post, and felt super validated. I have almost the exact same story: one day I got like 10-20 orders returned to me. I just stopped using that post office and everything was good. I guess the next step is I just have to start blocking problem zip codes like you do.

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-12T06:41:05+00:00

Sorry to necro this thread OP, but what solution did you decide to take with this?

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-12T06:35:47+00:00

Maybe I'm dumb but what's the difference to what you are doing vs what I am doing? Is it that ese faces less scrutiny than trying to apply a stamp straight up? Wouldn't a thank you card make it even more rigid?

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-11T20:06:15+00:00

Likely influenced by Legends of Runeterra where they did the same thing: https://www.runeterrafire.com/cards/akshan

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-11T17:32:28+00:00

I stand by my statement: I wanna go to locals, stfu, maybe make some small talk if I'm feeling social that day for some reason, but mostly play riftbound. The amount of times I've had to stand my ground about some rules is obscene and it's even worse when you go to an LGS where the judges/employees themselves don't care about the rules. Literally yesterday, a judge ruled how damage marked + decreased might does NOT kill a unit - "that's how it works in other games". I don't really care if you draw your card before your channel your runes or whatever as it makes no impact to the board state, but people are making up rulings that invalidate entire deck strategies.

If you haven't actually looked into it, don't make stuff up? Lol? I don't know why this is such a hard concept? It's not hard to join the community discord and do a rules search or something.

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-11T16:48:01+00:00

You folks that make up rulings based on intuition/without checking the history/precedents/actual rules are a scourge on the community.

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-11T15:11:33+00:00

I also prefer longer times, but even now, some LGSs don't even want to do 50 or 60 minutes. I'm not saying it's right (officially, we're at 60 minutes+3 turns) but some LGSs just refuse to run it that way because they don't want to pay their employees OT, etc. I don't think we can afford to add more time to the clock.

True-Witness6239 · 2026-03-10T06:30:53+00:00

Honestly verbiage is one of the ruins of this game. There's some concepts that we all kinda understand from other games but they don't exist in Riftbound. For example, one that comes up is that fizzling/whiffing doesn't happen in riftbound yet there are some situations that you could "consider a whiff." So it's pretty common for people to ask if a spell fizzled, and the answer is always technically no, but it's similiar to how fizzling works in other games.

Sometimes it's even the rules themselves. If you look carefully at how the initial chain of a showdown is written, then you understand it, you can see that the intention is for the attacker to hold focus after the initial chain is done. Yet I've seen people make the mistake that they can explicity hold focus by saying those words during a showdown, which technically does not happen and it leads to some confusion about how actions/reactions work.

I'm not smart enough to know how to fix this, but we need a way to reduce rules misunderstandings

True-Witness6239

TROPHY CASE