Riot Games tends to have multiple irons in the fire, from upcoming games like 2XKO to their continued support of a whole bunch of multiplayer titles like Team Fight Tactics, Valorant, and, of course, League of Legends. However, among these online-oriented PvP experiences, one undeniably got the short end of the stick: Legends of Runeterra, a digital trading card game largely beloved for its tactical depth and charitable (for a TCG anyway) monetization. Unfortunately, after a round of layoffs last year, Riot pared back support for the game’s PvP and competitive play, instead shifting focus to a PvE mode called Path of Champions, which is structured like a roguelike. While it is still certainly possible to play against other players online in Legends of Runeterra, at least for now, new sets aren’t being released and official support of the tournament circuit has been pulled, meaning the game’s future as a competitive game seems dim.
However, despite slashing Runeterra, Riot is still moving forward with a different card game, Riftbound: The League of Legends Trading Card Game, a physical TCG coming out in the US in October 2025. While many Runeterra fans are understandably upset about what happened to their game, the good news is that from the demo I played at PAX East 2025, Riftbound has a lot of potential, sporting a relatively novel tactical component, lots of crunchy card keywords, and a seemingly well-considered energy system. While it still has many hurdles to clear, like the ongoing scalping problems across the trading card scene, judged purely by how it plays, Riftbound has a lot of potential.
To dig deeper into the nitty-gritty of the rules, the game can be played in 1v1, 2v2, or three-to-four-player free-for-alls. An interesting point of differentiation compared to many other TCGs is that this one seems particularly designed around playing with more than two people. Matches center around controlling three battlefields that can be conquered by placing a unit card on that space. If there’s already an enemy unit on a battlefield when you move your units there, a fight happens, and if you have the last unit(s) standing, you take over that area, gaining a point in the process. You also gain a point for each battlefield you control at the start of your turn. While you win when you get to eight points, you can only earn the final point by holding a battlefield until the beginning of your turn or conquering all three battlefields in a single turn: basically, you can’t win by grabbing a single battlefield during your turn without holding it. When a player moves a unit onto a contested battlefield, a showdown occurs. Here, both players deal damage equal to their cards’ combined attack power, with both the defender and attacker distributing the damage to opposing units in any way they like. A single shared number represents both a unit’s health and attack power, and as long as a creature survives combat, its health recovers between fights.
This battlefield element lends a strategic feel to the game, as instead of just swinging at a foe, you’re trying to work out which areas to attack or fortify and when. You could hypothetically play a more hit-and-run approach where you attack the weakest battlefield each turn to rack up quick points, entrench a position to keep earning every turn, or some combination of the two. It’s a very novel focus that pairs particularly well with the 3+ player modes.
Unlike in Magic: The Gathering free-for-alls, where an unlucky player frequently gets ganged up on, killed, and has to watch from the sidelines, here alliances naturally form and break apart as you work to prevent one player from getting too much of a field advantage. For instance, in the game I played, as a Viktor player was on the verge of victory, everyone else naturally teamed up to shore up their own battlefields instead of weakening each other.
As for the card game elements, each deck is made up of 40 cards, with a maximum of three duplicates of a given card allowed in a deck. For energy (which are called runes in this case), there’s a separate 24-card deck. At the beginning of each turn, you draw a card from your main deck and two from your rune deck, resulting in a stable supply of resources that helps minimize the likelihood of losing simply because you didn’t draw the right energy cards. From here, things largely work like Magic: The Gathering players would expect, and you tap rune cards to play units, spells, gear, and more, while untapping these runes at the start of your next turn. Where things get really interesting though is that some cards have an additional “recycling” cost, meaning that they require you to recycle one of your rune cards from the playfield back into the deck: most of the strongest cards require recycling, which creates an interesting tension between wanting to get these abilities out versus the fact that doing so will hamper your energy output for future turns.
Another important element is the Champion and Legends cards, both of which begin on your board at the start of the game. A Champion is exactly what it sounds like: powerful units with abilities that are tailored to your deck. Meanwhile, Legends cards are arguably even more crucial, as they come with strong passive skills and determine which rune colors you’re allowed to play in your deck. From what I saw, the Champion cards seemed to have quite a bit of utility without entirely dominating the game, because, unlike MTG’s Commander mode, when a Champion dies, they go into the trash pile instead of returning to the board automatically. While I’m a little worried that Legends cards could concentrate decks too tightly around certain archetypes and limit deckbuilding expression, I only saw a handful of these, so it is difficult to tell.
That said, one aspect that is encouraging for putting together interesting decks is that there are already a long list of unit and spell keywords that seem like they will lend themselves to deckbuilding: Accelerate lets you pay additional energy for a card to be able to attack immediately after being played, Legion activates extra properties if you’ve played another card this turn, Ganking lets you move a card directly between battlefields instead of needing to return to HQ first, and so on.
As for the pre-built deck I chose, I used a Jinx-centric red and purple rune deck that combined aggression (this mostly came from the red cards) and discard abilities (the purple cards). My Legend ability allowed me to draw an additional card at the start of my turn if my hand was empty, which paired well with Jinx’s passive ability that powered her up for each card discarded that turn. Meanwhile, the rest of the deck was filled with units that mostly came with built-in discard skills or the Accelerate ability that let them attack quicker, letting me get lots of small units out quickly. Meanwhile, my opponents were a green and purple rune deck centered around spell counters and moving Yasuo around the battlefield, a Viktor-focused yellow and blue deck which pumped out smaller minions, and a yellow and red Volibear deck oriented around swinging with big boys. And while the match, with its numerous phases, tapping cards, and long list of keywords, was quite reminiscent of Magic: The Gathering, the refined energy system and battlefield focus gave it a distinct flavor, resulting in a strategically rich push-and-pull.
All that said, coming off what happened to Legends of Runeterra and its competitive scene, Riftbound has a lot to live up to. It will have to justify Riot’s pivot away from their previous game, which will undoubtedly lead to plenty of card design and monetization comparisons. Possibly even more difficult, it will need to deliver deckbuilding variety and balanced design, while also somehow avoiding the ongoing scalping circus. In all these ways, this upstart TCG faces a tough hand.
Thankfully, though, there are quite a few reasons to be hopeful for Riftbound: frankly, I wasn’t thinking about any of these concerns as I played a four-person free-for-all that combined strategy and rewarding layers of complexity. It was easy enough to understand in a single sitting, but clearly has lots of room for decision-making thanks to its focus on board control. While standing out in a packed card game market won’t be an easy feat, Riftbound’s gratifying core gameplay has me hopeful it will survive this brawl.
Elijah Gonzalez is the assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.
