Riftbound’s final set of the year, Radiance, is finally upon us, and I went hands-on with the cards at a very early Pre-Rift tournament. This marks the League of Legends TCG’s fifth set, and features musically-inspired designs and brand new mechanics poised to disrupt the meta.
I also had the chance to talk with Chengran Chai, the executive producer of Riftbound, to get some insight about the set straight from the source in a joint interview with Temple of Geek’s Myles Obenza.
First, a quick recap of the new mechanics being introduced in Radiance, with some of Chai’s commentary:
New Radiance Keywords: Disarm, Show Off, Deploy
Disarm is the simplest of the new mechanics: When your unit with Disarm attacks, it reduces the might of an enemy unit at that battlefield, usually by one. It immediately made me think of Ahri’s original abilities, which is fitting, since the new green (Calm) Ahri, Confident, comes with Disarm. Her unit has a built-in buff when you reduce the Might of an enemy unit, gaining +1 Might herself. The promising new blue (Mind) Kai’sa, Rebel, has both Disarm and gives spells Reaction speed when in a showdown.
Show Off is a mechanic that might be familiar to you if you’ve played other popular TCGs. Cards with Show Off gain an additional effect if you “Show Off” a qualifying card to your opponent as you play it. We’ve only seen four cards in Radiance with Show Off so far–two units and two spells–and they each grant totally different effects. The 5-cost yellow (Order) Spell Rousing Display (clearly part of the Legend Seraphine’s kit) plays four 1-Might Recruit Tokens to your base instead of just one if you Show Off a card with Energy cost 7 or more.
Chai said that Show Off is a trade off–you’re giving away information in exchange for something, but TCGs are very much a game of information. “If I’m planning a spell heavy deck, whether you have Defy or not in your hand matters a great deal to me,” Chai explained. “Show Off basically opens up another dimension to the kind of like, 3D, 4D chess–that’s 5D.”
Maybe you show your opponent something you have on purpose to throw them off, pushing them into a play you have the perfect counter-play for. Show Off has the possibility of granting great effects, but it opens the game up for more mind games, too.
Deploy is a keyword specifically for Gear, allowing you to deploy that Gear straight to a Battlefield. While there, it’ll provide an effect, but will be killed if your opponent holds the Battlefield it’s at.
“I think Deploy is probably the one that will disrupt [the meta], because historically, you don't think of just going straight to a battlefield,” Chai said. “And now you have, like, Jarvan IV’s E-Q, you have Ziggs just tossing bombs onto battlefields, and it's going to change the way people think about Defending quite a bit.” Jarvan IV’s “E-Q” that Chai references is the move combo in League of Legends where he throws his flag and then pulls himself there–pretty 1-to-1 with Jarvan IV’s Legend ability in Riftbound, which lets you move a friendly unit to a Battlefield when you play a Gear with Deploy there (and pay 1 Power).
Orianna's Legend ability allows you to turn a friendly Gear into a Gear Unit at the start of your Main Phase, a pretty tricky and cool thing you can do to steal some points with Deployable Gear! Her Signature Gear, The Ball, is especially interesting as it also gains Ganking, allowing it to roll back and forth between battlefields each turn. Chai seemed to be especially high on Orianna along with Deploy, noting her Legend and The Ball as playable cards he'd want to showcase from this set.
Both Show Off and Deploy up the complexity of Riftbound. But, Deploy and Disarm seem to be mechanics that will absolutely disrupt defensive Hold strategies the most, which is especially scary for me as someone who’s playing Akali and Vex with Astral Heron hold strategies!
Radiance Pre-Rift and Sealed Hands-On
Last time I got to play with a set early, it was strictly with a preconstructed showcase deck behind closed doors, and I didn’t have more than thirty minutes to actually play with the cards. This time, however, we got a Pre-Rift tournament plus packs to take home to tinker with. So, I played Radiance with one seeded Pre-Rift deck and built two “Sealed” decks to test out–some of which were more successful than others!
In my Radiance Pre-Rift Kit, I got the orange (Body) and yellow (Order) Jarvan IV, Exemplar of Demacia Legend. Jarvan’s Legend ability makes use of the new Deploy keyword: “When you play a gear with [Deploy], you may exhaust me and pay [1 Power] to move a friendly unit to that battlefield.”
I threw in plenty of Gears with Deploy, cards with Gear synergies, plus a couple purple (Chaos) cards that made Bombs, drew cards, and generated Gold so I’d have a decent supply of Power to activate Jarvan IV’s Legend Ability. I removed the 7-cost Jarvan IV, Royal Heir as my chosen Champion Unit, though, and replaced it with the K’Sante, Courageous I pulled. High-cost chosen champions aren’t generally the best move, especially in the speedy Pre-Rift format, and though K’sante still costs a pretty hefty 5 runes, having a Unit with Accelerate at my fingertips in the late game proved to be invaluable.
I can’t say I was thrilled at opening Jarvan IV at first (I was hoping for Riven or Evelynn), but after playing just a few turns, the deck strategy clicked spectacularly for me. I was also lucky enough to get a new battlefield called Hunter’s Circle, which reads, “For each player, the first unit or gear they play here on their turn costs 1 less,” which goes super well with Deployable Gear, since you can play them to the battlefield whenever you want on your turn!
In my first game, a test match, I went second. I played Concert Poster to Hunter’s Circle for free, allowing me to then play Skystrike Squadron for a reduced cost of 3 for returning Concert Poster to my hand. A 4-Might Unit with Reflect on my first turn: Not bad! On my next turn, I was able to create two Recruits with Concert Poster and Buff a Recruit and my Skystrike Squadron with Pillaged Armory. Maybe some godlike luck allowed for this to happen, but it felt pretty dang nifty!
With this build, I have to shoutout Portable Portal, a 2-cost orange (Body) Gear with Deploy. When I showed this card to someone, they said they knew it’d be a menace just because Teemo is on it. When you play it, you can pay one orange (Body) power to ready a Unit. Friendly units at that battlefield with Portable Portal also have Ganking. These abilities paired with the Jarvan IV Legend allowed for double conquering in one turn, or allowing for a Gank and then a retreat with Jarvan’s ability, protecting my Unit. It’s a rare card, though, so pulling it in a Pre-Rift isn’t exactly guaranteed!
In my two Sealed games, one of the decks had no discernible theme besides trying to make Seraphine work (I did not). In the other, I tried for a Ziggs / Bomb build because I happened to pull his Legend and his Epic-rarity red (Fury) Unit, Ziggs, Short-Fused. Let me tell you, the Bomb strategy is pretty tricky to hold together if you don’t have a very reliable way to detonate them on your opponent’s turn. Usually, they explode, dealing two damage per bomb when your opponent holds the battlefield they’re deployed at.
I found it fairly difficult to get enough bombs on a battlefield to matter in one turn unless I held with Explosimian, which lets you play three Bomb gear tokens to a single battlefield. Of course, this still does nothing for protecting you if you’re trying to hold your bomb-ridden battlefield. However, the Pre-Rift Seeded decks with the Ziggs Legend includes the 4-might purple (Chaos) Champion Unit Ziggs, Explosive, which allows you to kill a friendly gear when he defends! If you have enough Bombs, you could potentially wipe your opponent before they can even touch you. And if they can, well, Ziggs, Explosive gets +2 Might if he killed a friendly gear that turn!
Unfortunately, I did not have this Ziggs Unit in my Sealed game, so a different strategy was in order. We determined it’s likely best to load Bombs up one battlefield, leave them alone, and then build a strong Hold at the other Battlefield, forcing your opponent to choose to deal with either a battlefield fortified with Units or fortified with Bombs.
The Unit Reckless Innovator and Gear The Good Stuff, both The purple (Chaos) cards, also proved to be very useful in just about every thrown together deck I or my opponent played. I have a lot more opinions, but it’d be absurd to expect you to read my ramblings, so we’ll end it at that.
Overall, the Sealed and Pre-Rift formats for Radiance were very fun, and the new ideas this set brings to Riftbound add an even higher level of complexity to the existing pool. As for Radiance in a vacuum for Sealed, it seemed to allow for a good variety of unique deck-building options. This is of course by design.
“We want the base set to have a rich enough playing set,” Chai said. “Such that Sealed events are fun… all by itself.”
Radiance’s Rarest Cards
With the playing set determined, that’s when the Riftbound team layers collectibility on top of it with Alt Art, Overnumbered, and SP cards. Some of the rare standouts for Radiance are Riot Games Music crossovers, including the Overnumbered Heartsteel cards, SP K/DA cards, and Overnumbered Ekko, Revolutionary, which features Ekko’s original True Damage skin. The Overnumbered cards also come in the Signature variety, which are the rarest pulls besides the single Ultimate Rare in this set.
“We knew Riot as a whole would have a music moment towards the end of the year, so very early on, we said we would lean into that,” Chai said. However, as a physical game, the Riftbound team needed to finalize many card details before the songs were even composed and the new character designs were finished. “That is why you see… for the K/DA and Heartsteel cards, it is very much their K/DA All Out and Heartsteel 1.0 versions, because the 2.0 versions just weren’t quite ready,” Chai said. “But we thought it would be a great way to showcase Riftbound’s participation… and leverage the broader music moment to allow more fans to see and experience Riftbound as well.”
This original plan didn’t even include teasing Heartsteel’s Riftbound cards in Heartsteel’s new Live My Life music video–the Riot Music Team actually initiated that easter egg, asking the Riftbound team if they wanted the cards in the music video. Of course, they said yes.
Though Riftbound has been very supported from within Riot since the beginning, the somewhat unexpected explosion of its popularity has given Riftbound even more opportunities to be a part of Riot-wide moments. Another example of this is the Riftbound easter egg in Valorant’s Aeris Flex cosmetic.
The Heartsteel Overnumbered cards feature a very unique design, akin to K-pop photo cards, complete with bright motifs, stickers, and Y2K elements. Playing into the photo card inspiration even more, the Heartsteel Overnumbered Signature cards are "signed" by the characters themselves--not the artists like on other Signature cards! Riot Games’ senior Manager of creative development Michelle Mauk spoke about the design process during the Radiance panel at the Riftbound Regional Qualifier (RQ) in Los Angeles, which I highly recommend you watch if you’re interested.
I always feel like renders of Overnumbered cards don’t do them justice, and that’s certainly the case for the Heartsteel cards, too. The texturing and foiling on Riftbound’s most coveted cards are always so impressive to behold in person.
Radiance’s Ultimate Rare ties well into the heavy music theme but is, shockingly, a Battlefield: Packed Amphitheater. This card will be the rarest card in all of Riftbound’s main sets, only appearing in about 0.025% of booster packs. That’s a huge rarity uptick from the only other Ultimate Rare, Baron Nasher from Unleashed, with a 0.1% pack rate. The in-person foiling and texturing you can't see in a render does a lot a lot of heavy lifting for this one–and you can get a better look at it, and see some creators’ reactions, in this official PlayRiftbound reel.
There are other Overnumbers and Alt Art cards to chase that aren’t musically inclined, too, like the Overnumbererd Mordekaiser Legend IGN exclusively revealed last week.
Radiance Pre-Rifts start at local game stores near you on Oct. 16, and I really can’t wait to play some more. With the complexity Radiance introduces, this might not be the best first set to get into, but it’s great for existing players craving more variety and creativity in their deck building. That being said, the Riftbound community has always been nothing but welcoming and helpful at every store I’ve played at, too, so don’t be shy. Otherwise, Radiance booster boxes, packs, and vaults will be available to purchase on Oct. 23.
Casey DeFreitas is the deputy editor of guides at IGN and is playing three more Riftbound Radiance Pre-Rifts this weekend at a local game store, because they're just that much fun. Catch her on socials @ShinyCaseyD.