Riftbound, the League of Legends trading card game, launched in late October to an incredible fan reaction. Packs, themed decks, and an all-in-one tutorial game called Proving Grounds quickly sold out, and the competitive scene is starting to come into its own with tournaments popping up all over the country.
PAX Unplugged served as the launching pad for the game’s second set, Spiritforged, which will launch in early 2026. New cards, mechanics, and Champions were debuted during an hour-long panel led by Dave Guskin, the lead designer for Riftbound at Riot Games, and previews of new cards have popped up around the internet since then.
We sat down with Dave Guskin at PAX Unplugged to learn more about internal reactions to Riftbound’s release, as well as what the team has planned for Spiritforged and beyond. We also have an exclusive card from Spiritforged to reveal, with Guskin giving his thoughts on how this new Champion can best be used in battle.
Lessons Learned
Riftbound’s first set, Origins, has been in the wild for a month now, and Guskin says the team is feeling good, despite a few speed bumps. The biggest of those, both fans and the design team can agree, is getting the product out to those who want it. Guskin assured me that the team has been “doing as much as we can to get cards to the players,” but acknowledges that demand is high.
When planning the first run of Origins, the team had a decision to make: Do they overprint and risk product sitting on shelves, which may make potential players think the game isn’t selling well or cause logistical issues for the stores selling them, or do they underprint and risk discontent from fans looking for a product that’s sold out everywhere? Guskin admits it was a challenge, but the team did have a strategy.
“We tried to hit as close as we could to having enough product, but we knew that no matter what we did, we were going to fall short,” Guskin says. “We wanted to make sure that we got cards to our players, but we also wanted to do [so] while not making choices that could hurt the long-term viability of the game, both for players and for the market. I’d say we played it on the safe side.”
Those who did open the first run of packs might have found an odd problem, in that some packs were reported to only have one rare card instead of the usual two. While the team was disheartened to hear about this, with Guskin specifically pointing out how it may have impacted the experience of opening those first packs, the team is trying to make things right with those customers.
“We have done some due diligence in figuring out how that happened and how it can be prevented in the future,” Guskin confirms, “Getting that feedback, having players show us those packs, was really helpful, and led us to analyze our processes and find ways to get better.” Guskin also mentioned a “rare replacement pack” program that was recently launched, where affected players can sign up to receive a randomized rare card.
Now that the first run has been released, the early competitive scene has begun to develop, with names like Annie and Sett emerging at the top of recent high-profile tournaments. While the design team knew some decks would be strong–Guskin also named Champions like Kai’sa, Ahri, and Teemo among top performers–they didn’t really know how the first competitive metagame was going to shake out.
“It’s hard to predict, because millions of players around the world in aggregate are much better at exploring the game and finding powerful strategies than our little design team,” he explained. “In general, I think we knew the relative strengths, but I wouldn’t say that we knew exactly what specific builds would be strong, because it’s the sort of thing that you just have to see players in the wild come up with.”
“Overall, we’re really happy with the decks people are finding, and the excitement for Nexus Nights at local game stores,” Guskin said. “We were excited for launch, but now that we’re past it, we’re on to the next thing.”
On to Spiritforged
The PAX Unplugged panel blew the lid off of Spiritforged, the second full set for Riftbound, and the new potential strategies that will come with it. 12 Legend cards will offer multiple new deck build ideas, some featuring returning Champions like Ahri, while other Champions like Azir and Ezreal will make their Riftbound debut.
The big mechanical addition, meanwhile, is Equipment cards, which can be attached to friendly units and provide power buffs and other perks. Veteran TCG players can probably imagine how these Equipment cards are going to work, but there are a few key differences to Riftbound’s take.
“Our Equipment cards are slightly different in that, once you attach it to a unit, you can’t remove it,” Guskin reveals. “That unit isn’t going to give it up until it dies, and that creates an interesting situation: Do I equip this now and get the benefits immediately, or do I hold and wait for a stronger unit to attach it to?” Guskin also confirmed that there will be spells and other effects that allow you to switch Equipment between units, which could open up a whole new method of deckbuilding.
Equipment cards have been part of Riftbound’s development from the beginning, but as Guskin explains, there was a key reason for holding off on the mechanic until Spiritforged. “We thought [Equipment] played really well in early testing,” Guskin explains, “but we didn’t put it in Origins because we realized it was a little bit too complicated to introduce on top of all of the other systems of a brand-new card game, so we set it aside.”
Other new mechanics coming to Spiritforged include Repeat, which allows you to double the effects of a spell by paying its casting cost twice, and Gold tokens, which can be tapped and sacrificed to add one energy of any color to your available pool–similar to how Treasure tokens work in Magic: The Gathering.
As for the new Legends, Guskin sees potential in three particular Champions: Ornn, Lucien, and Ezreal. Ornn gives you extra resources to pay for Gear and abilities, which could create a gear-centric deck that Guskin says the competitive scene hasn’t really seen yet. Lucien, meanwhile, is a deck that focuses on mobility and medium-sized units, which when paired with Equipment can create an aggressive attack strategy.
Ezreal, though, is Guskin’s main Champion in League of Legends, so he particularly likes what Ezreal brings to Riftbound. “Just like in League, he’s such a little shit,” Guskin says with a laugh. “His Legend ability says that when you target an enemy unit twice in a turn, you can draw a card. It’s not just killing them either, you can move them around, debuff them, anything, so he has a lot of tricky things you can do with him, and he reloads pretty quickly because of his Legend power.”
One other Champion debuting in Spiritforged is Azir, Emperor of the Sands, a green/yellow Legend who commands an army of Sand Soldier tokens during a match. His companion Champion card, however, has yet to be revealed…until now.
Gallery
Meet Azir, Sovereign
We can exclusively reveal Azir, Sovereign, the yellow Champion card for the Emperor of the Sands. Azir, Sovereign costs four power and enters with an attack strength of four. He has Accelerate, which means you can pay an extra one power and recycle a yellow rune to allow him to act as soon as he’s placed on the battlefield, and his ability reads as follows: “When I attack, you may move any number of token units to this battlefield.”
Azir is tailor-made for token decks, where he can turn a single-unit attack into a massive army with one swing. Guskin says this Azir unit will complement the current Viktor archetype, but there’s a key part of his ability that gives an added layer of versatility.
“Viktor cares specifically about Recruit tokens; when you’re playing Viktor, you want Recruits,” Guskin says. “Azir doesn’t care about that; his card just says tokens. Plus, having a Champion unit with Accelerate in the Champion Zone means you’re threatening to deploy it at any moment, right? The pressure is on your opponent to not only think about where Azir might go, but also to think of where tokens are currently deployed and how that might affect combat.”
The future of Riftbound
Riftbound is in its infancy, with only one set currently available, but Guskin is always thinking about the future. In a way, he has to be, simply because the requests he gets for future Champions are plentiful and constant.
“People have definitely made requests for certain Champions, absolutely,” Guskin says. “I don’t know that I’ve seen one Champion dominate requests, though I think everyone’s got their main they really want to see. When I hear people say, ‘I really want this champion, I love them, when am I going to get them?’ I have to say, ‘Well, I know the future and I can’t really talk to you about it, so it’s either coming soon or it’s not coming soon.'”
Don’t let that dodgy answer fool you, though; the Riftbound team has multiple sets worth of plans in place. The PAX Unplugged panel revealed four sets coming in 2026, and that’s the cadence the team is targeting for future years.
“I have a very vague five year plan for Riftbound, which is about 20 sets or so,” Guskin confirmed. “We’ve developed the first five to 10 sets pretty well, and some of those are already being printed, some are being locked in, and others we’ve either just started or we’re about to start.”
With all of those sets in mind, the competitive scene may start to get unwieldy with so many cards in the card pool, but Guskin has a plan for rotation as well: He wants the first competitive rotation to take place in the beginning of 2028.
“Our plan is at the beginning of 2028, after two full years of four sets each, plus Origins now in 2025, when that 10th set comes out, we’ll rotate out the first four or five,” Guskin explained. “That way, the size of the environment for ‘standard’ or whatever we’ll call our version of ‘standard’ will be from five to eight sets, which to me is more manageable.”
The next set, Spiritforged, is due to launch February 13 in local game stores and big box retailers.
