Riftbound: League of Legends TCG’s Origins Set Is A Strong Opening Play

By Elijah Gonzalez | November 12, 2025 | 10:41am

Tabletop Reviews League of Legends

Riftbound: League of Legends TCG’s Origins Set Is A Strong Opening Play

It’s no secret that trading card games (TCGs) are having a bit of a moment, even if that popularity has proven to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there’s no shortage of games to play, whether it’s relative newcomers like Disney Lorcana and One Piece Card Game, or old standbys like Magic: The Gathering (MTG) and Pokémon TCG.

However, this increased interest in the space following the pandemic has also sparked a collector’s gold rush that scalpers have pounced on, as these vultures elbow their way through crowds to snatch up Mega Evolution booster packs out of the hands of literal children. It’s not a good time.

Entering this all-out melee is Riftbound, a League of Legends-themed TCG from Riot Games that aims to bring the world of Runeterra to tabletops with its inaugural set, Origins. Thankfully, it largely makes that transition gracefully. While there are a few design kinks to work out and an all-too-familiar supply shortage that’s giving initial adopters headaches, it finds its own niche thanks to delivering engaging three-to-four player free-for-alls and a unique focus on strategic positioning.

To place Riftbound in a broader context, it has many similarities with Magic: The Gathering: you play cards that can be units, spells, or gear (which are kind of like artifacts) by tapping energy cards (in this case called Runes). Units fight battles against an opponent’s units, can be targeted by spells, and so on. There are tons of keywords, many of which are fairly analogous to MTG terms, such as Accelerate, which lets units enter play readied just like Magic’s Haste keyword.

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However, there is one crucial difference that distinguishes Riftbound from its elders. Here, instead of attacking your opponent’s health bar, you’re trying to score points by capturing and holding battlefields. Essentially, a match will have two to three battlefields, depending on the number of players, and you score by conquering a battlefield (moving units to an empty battlefield or having the last units standing after a battle) or by holding a battlefield until the start of your turn. The first person to score eight points wins, with the caveat that the final point needs to be scored by conquering a battlefield or by capturing all three.

This focus on battlefields is Riftbound’s defining feature, resulting in tactical struggles that provide ample room for decision-making. Do you choose to spread out your forces for quick points at risk of losing them when your foes counterattack? Or do you put all your eggs in one basket, shoring up an army on a single battlefield to consistently earn passive points at risk of losing all your units in one go? There is no clear answer, and you’ll inevitably shift between these two extremes during the ebb and flow of the match, as opponents trade spells to try and come out on top of a showdown.

Beyond granting the game a unique, strategic undercurrent that’s reminiscent of board games, the other main result of this point-based structure is that it makes three and four-player matches dramatically more engaging than what’s found in most of its peers. To pick on Magic: The Gathering for a bit, anyone who has played three or four-person free-for-alls in that game knows how miserable it can be to become the punching bag singled out by your opponents, as you get ganged up on, demolished, and knocked out of the contest to doomscroll on your phone for the next fifteen to twenty minutes.

By contrast, because Riftbound is point-based, there aren’t any early knockouts, and everyone is in it until the end. As a result, alliances shift as opponents fight over territory, resulting in cease-fires and backstabs as players approach the eight-point mark. It all makes it dramatically more enjoyable to play with multiple players than what’s found in most other TCGs.

Outside of this central strength, Riftbound has quite a few other boons. Its energy system is simple but fairly clever. Unlike old-man MTG and its land system that can deliver arbitrary wins and losses based on who gets mana locked or flooded (when you draw too many or too few lands, which are needed to play spells), this game has both players steadily drawing two Rune cards per turn. While this design choice risks overhomogenizing the experience and limiting the differences between decks, there are a few twists that spice things up.

For one, many cards come with an additional “Power” cost: in addition to tapping Runes for a turn to summon a card, you also need to “recycle” Runes of that color, which means putting them at the bottom of your Rune deck to be drawn later. This creates another area of decision making—many of the strongest cards require Power to play, but this can potentially handicap future turns by limiting how many spells and units you can use next turn. On top of this, there are also ways to play additional Rune cards outside of the standard beginning phase, letting some decks ramp up quicker than others.

Speaking more generally, Riftbound already features an impressive degree of complexity, with a long list of keywords and some cool card designs. For instance, one ability unique to this game is something called Ganking (a League of Legends term), which lets you move directly between battlefields—normally, you can’t move directly between battlefields and need to use up a turn moving to your homebase first, so having this skill gives you a great deal of mobility and flexibility.

Related to this, another unique element are the Legend cards. You place these on the board face up at the start of each match, and they grant abilities, like Viktor’s, which lets you summon smaller minions. These give each deck type some specificity and potentially offer additional options you can perform each turn.

However, Legends do come with a bit of a downside from a deckbuilding perspective, which is that per the rules of the game, you’re only allowed to include cards with a Rune color that matches that of your Legend. For instance, if a Legend card is Green and Orange, like Lee Sin, it means you can only include cards that match those colors in your deck. This constrains your deck construction decisions, and at least right now, means that you can’t create mono or tri-colored loadouts. It also makes it quite difficult to play the game in non-constructed formats (i.e., events where you build a deck on the spot as you open packs).

However, my current biggest worry with the game is something else: matches can sometimes feel too quick. It’s entirely possible this is a function of mostly playing with “weaker” base decks from the Proving Grounds set (a $29.99 box which contains four easy-to-play decks geared at beginners), the Champion decks (three $19.99 decks centered around Lee Sin, Jinx, and Viktor, respectively), and on-the-spot constructed decks from a box of booster packs (in our case, 24 booster packs divided among three people), but most of the matches I played generally ended quite quickly. This was a problem because it frequently felt right that the game ended right as you are entering particularly juicy interactions, and your combo is coming together.

Again, this could be an issue that stemmed from mostly playing one-on-ones and three-player free-for-alls with lower power level decks—when I watched some matches from the Chinese National Championship, these went for a solid 25-ish minutes—but my biggest issue with the game right now is that while there is a lot of room for tactical and deck-building complexity, much of this is undermined when things end right as they’re truly getting going.

Another issue is that while the game’s complexity is generally a positive, some of the game’s wording, both on cards and in the rules, can be counterintuitive. While the base flow of a match is easy enough to explain, the phrasing around many of its systems can easily lead to misunderstandings. For example, you will see the word “showdown” on many cards, which you would assume refers to when units have a showdown against each other and are about to battle. However, showdowns technically trigger even if a battlefield is completely uncontested, which is a huge deal because it allows your opponent to utilize certain spell types to stop you from conquering a battlefield even if they don’t have anyone there to fight you. My matches with fellow newbies led to constant rule checks due to some of the vague wording on cards, and while this problem will go away with time, there is definitely a bit of a learning curve regarding certain nuances.

Another hopefully temporary issue with Origins is that there are shortages for the game at basically every level. All of the previously mentioned goods, whether it’s Champion decks, booster packs, or boxes, are hard to find right now, with major supply issues. On top of this, there have been some very noticeable quality control gaffes with the cards themselves: it’s quite common to find cards that are frayed around the edges due to not having been cut properly. Another problem is that some boosters don’t have the proper number of rares, meaning you can randomly get shortchanged. While Riot has said it plans on addressing all of these issues, these circumstances have made the game’s launch very messy.

Hopefully, this situation will improve because Riftbound is very promising. At its core, it maintains the appeal of complex TCGs like Magic: The Gathering while its battlefield-focused mechanics help it carve out its own speciality as a rare trading card game that’s more fun with additional people. As long as players can eventually get their hands on it, its depth and unique approach give it a genuine shot at muscling its way into a crowded TCG space.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.