League of Legends TCG Riftbound lowers Legends of Runeterra's "really high mental ceiling" so that everyone can play, Riot says

It's been an odd few years for Riot Games. As League of Legends' microtransaction systems have grown more invasive, 2XKO launched in early access to a somewhat muted response, and players consistently make allegations about AI use in official trailers and art, it feels like the company is struggling to find its feet. For a lot of longtime fans, that instability began with the shuttering of Riot Forge and the gutting of Legends of Runetera, the LoL-adjacent card game that once attempted to compete with the likes of Hearthstone. While its player count was apparently relatively low, it was much-beloved by its fanbase, and the switch across to PvE didn't exactly go down well. When Riot announced that it was creating Riftbound, a physical TCG that it hopes will rival Magic: The Gathering, a lot of LoR fans were left out in the cold: LoR died for this? Speaking to PCGamesN, I asked design manager Jonathan Moormann (formerly senior game designer on LoR) about what the team learned from its virtual CCG.

Moormann, who's worked on League of Legends and Legends of Runeterra, has, in his own words, "a little bit of experience translating League into card games." From playing using demo cards alone, I can sense that. While my full Riftbound review is still in the works, I'm genuinely impressed with how the decks feel like their characters, especially Jinx and Yasuo. The team's LoR experience shines through, with the core focus of Riftbound being to "fully express League of Legends' characters."

It's all about creating "specific moments," he continues. "It's like Malphite bolting into a fight and knocking everybody up - if you don't do that, it doesn't feel like Malphite. Then there's the lore behind them; it's who Yasuo is, who Annie is - that's something you really want to get across in the deck. When we made Riftbound, we knew that we wanted to have the whole deck feel that way."

The team drew on its experience with LoR to really hone that "champion resonance," as Moormann calls it, but he notes that Riftbound's format makes doing that a lot easier. "In [Legends of] Runeterra, we had a much smaller footprint in which we could describe what a champion does, and that meant that a lot of times we had to try and cram a lot onto one card," he recalls. "When we started off with Riftbound, we really wanted to emphasize that we have a Legend card, a signature spell, and unit cards so that we can basically take sides of the character as opposed to trying to cram 100% of Jinx onto one card, and then there's way too much text on it.

"Runeterra is a game that also has a really high mental ceiling, so we learned a lot from designing Runeterra cards and being like, 'how do we take that down a bit?' I want Riftbound to be complex and something you can play competitively and actively express your skill at, but I don't want it to be something that you can't teach to your friends. A lot of times that's where LoR struggled to get new players in, and I think it's one of those tradeoffs you have: the deeper your game goes, often it's harder to get people into the shallow end."

But perhaps the biggest deviation from LoR is the battlefield system. Riftbound revolves around the capturing and holding of specific battlefield cards, which grant their own unique buffs. Battlefields hail from all different regions of Runeterra, but their exact locations don't dictate the rest of the deck. LoR, by contrast, leaned heavily into world state thematics, with regions effectively replacing the colors you have in Magic: The Gathering (instead of a black/white deck, you'd get Bandle City/Demacia, for example). Taking the Shurima as his example (which, as someone who loves Amumu, works for me), he recalls that LoR's location focus "actually made it harder to make colors balanced.

"We had to maintain the ethos of that region while giving you cards, but there are a lot of regions in League of Legends, so trying to cut out unique spaces was very difficult. It often ended with like 'well, Shurima can't do this thing that you really need to be functional in the game at the moment, so it's very hard for us to make Shurima strong as a color.' That's a big part of why we went for domains instead of regions; it let us break away from that strict regionality that LoR had, keep it to a slightly smaller set of slices, and make sure each of those slices can really play against each other so it doesn't feel like any of our domains are missing a key piece to be competitive.

"We've moved the regions onto the tags on the cards and saved those for future content. Who knows, they might come up," he says with a smile.

While I too lament Legends of Runeterra's demise, I can't deny that what I've played of Riftbound so far (albeit just demo decks) is a lot of fun. With Spiritforged next on the list, adding champions that I'm excited to play (hello, Irelia deck), I can't wait to see what happens with Riftbound. My wallet, however, is groaning.

Riftbound launches in English (in North America, Europe, Latin America, and Oceania) on Friday October 31. You can pick up the various decks, including the Worlds 2025 and Arcane box sets, on the official Riot Games merch store or in participating local game stores.

Keep an eye out for our Riftbound review, but in the meantime, we have a list of all the League of Legends skins that are currently on sale. Or, if you're looking for something a little more exclusive, here's what's available in the current League of Legends Mythic shop.

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