When people think of Riot Games, it’s usually the mainstay MOBA League of Legends they developed that comes to mind. Since its launch the Runeterra universe has expanded through Teamfight Tactics, and the more recent fighter 2XKO. Riot has digital gaming well and truly covered, so what’s missing from the line-up? A physical trading card game.
Given the resounding success of the Pokémon TCG, Magic: The Gathering, and even Lorcana, it’s definitely apparent that people love collecting cardboard and actually playing with it, myself included. So how does Riot go about translating that universe of lore and diverse Champions, each with their own history with fans of League? It can’t be an easy task, and yet Riftbound has already captured the eye of League, Arcane and TCG fans alike.
I’ll admit, League has always been a game I’ve had a bumpy relationship with. I love the Champion designs, but Summoner’s Rift never really clicked with me. I did try to pick it up but that early learning curve is brutal even with a play group supporting you. ARAM on the other hand was much more my speed and kinder in terms of play and learning. However, it really wasn’t until the Netflix show Arcane pulled me deeper into the world and the stories here. Since then I’ve always had a craving to learn more about the world of Runeterra.
My hope for Riftbound is that it becomes that doorway into the world of Runeterra I’ve be waiting for. A way in that allows me to explore the world at my own pace, while collecting and building decks with Champions I know, and maybe even a few I don’t. Time will tell but I’m looking forward to how it’s shaping up so far.
Hands-on with Riftbound at PAX Aus
During PAX Aus, I was very lucky to test out the new Riftbound TCG ahead of its launch. With lines literally wrapping around the booth on the Friday, it was certainly popular. During the demo session we were paired up, and each given a sample deck to shuffle up and sort out the card types and get a quick guided game of the TCG.
My main takeaway from the session was the flow of the game after we got rolling. Having an independent way to gain mana or runes as the card resource is called in Riftbound helps alleviate that feeling like you can’t do cool stuff when your mana-locked. The trade-off here is that players usually must sacrifice at least one rune when they play a card. Thankfully, though, you only need to put sacrificed runes on the bottom of your rune deck.
The goal of Riftbound is usually to win by accruing 8 points, which are gained by either conquering or holding battlefields by either successfully attacking or holding a battlefield till the start of your next turn. Opposing players then need to work to ensure their opponent doesn’t sit on a battlefield and build up points for too long. This can be much easier said than done.
Being a big Arcane fan, I couldn’t not pick Viktor and from the light research I’d done on the sample decks he played right into my usual playstyle. I love decks that let you play tokens and build a force of low-level units. It wasn’t long before we were a few turns in. While I might’ve been a little bit brave about my hand choice, opting for higher rune cost cards, it did pay off thanks in no small part to Cull the Weak, a spell card that let me clear both battlefields on the two times I played it. Gaining tokens with Viktor really is the best path to overwhelming your opponent.
My early take on Riftbound is that it’s very much it’s own thing. There’s an element of uncomplicatedness after that initial learning curve that is almost a surprise, specifically if you are a TCG die-hard. I found myself a little lost in those early turns because my muscle memory from other card games was eager to interject. The card art, as well, looks great, with the higher rarity stuff looking superb. I’m also really interested to see how packs feel – are they going to feel good to collect? It’s an exciting debut with a lot of potential in my eyes.
Interview with Nik Davidson, Game Design Architect at Riot Games on
We were given the opportunity by Riot Games to talk with Nik Davidson, a Game Design Architect working on Riftbound. Davidson has extensive experience developing TCGs, including Magic: The Gathering and the Pokémon TCG. During our chat we spoke about translating Champions from League of Legends to the TCG and what the early response from players has been like.
What does a Game Design Architect actually do on a card game?
Well, for our purposes, I’m a designer who gets to touch many aspects of the game. We have a wonderful design team. There are folks focused on set design, card design, playtesting, and iteration within the design team. We also have people focused on editing and templating, making sure everything works smoothly from a rules perspective.
A lot of my focus has been on the product lineup itself – the contents of a booster pack, how those collectibles within the booster pack are distributed, what preconstructed decks are out there in the world, in addition to working on card sets and game rules. We have partnerships around the world, and those publishing partners have a lot of expertise in physically publishing a trading card game. So Riot, being almost exclusively a digital game company, we’ve had to rely heavily on that expertise.
I have a lot of experience and background with Magic: The Gathering, and The Pokémon Company, so I get to serve as that liaison between Riot’s digital game expertise and our partners – so that we’re all speaking the same language and rowing in the same direction.
How do you go about translating League of Legends – the biggest MOBA on the planet – into a card game?
So one of the most fun challenges is taking a character – specifically one that is such a well-known champion in League, and trying to get that champion in their deck to feel like they’re playing that character. It’s not necessarily mechanical translation.
Viktor and Jinx are two sides of the same coin when it comes to top-down design for characters. Viktor, this idea of building an army, recruiting and making difficult sacrifices is both the narrative story of that character reflects a little bit of how the character plays in League, but the actions that you take as a Viktor player tell the story of the character a little bit.
Jinx is a little bit different because it’s much more about feelings. It’s a vibes-based design in a sense in that there’s nothing in Jinx’s loadout or abilities in League that have to do with discarding, throwing away resources. That’s not really a concept that exists with the character in League. But the thing that the character captures and how a discard-based strategy works is it feels like you’re playing recklessly.
It’s this idea that the character is reckless, ambitious and aggressive. Taking big chances for big swings. That fits the narrative mold of the character, even if it’s not a one-to-one translation of Jinx’s Q as it is in the game. That’s less of the goal than making the character feel like the Champion in some way.
Is that hard to do or does it vary per Champion?
Sometimes it is so straightforward. There are some characters… my best examples are in future sets, so I’m not going to use them. But there are some characters that are like Set 1 Leona – an archetype built around stunning. Great. Done. That’s the primary expression of that character in League. Lots of stuns, lots of area control. To make a stun-based champion in Riftbound makes a lot of sense, right?
But there are other characters where you really need to go searching for it a little bit. If you look at Sett, for example, more mechanically intricate, it doesn’t necessarily reflect the kit so much, but has this feeling of being overwhelming and durable, keeps coming back, can play from behind, and has big power spikes. A lot of that fantasy gets replicated, even if mechanically it’s a little bit harder to fit those concepts together. I’m speaking a little bit on behalf of people like Dave Smith, John Morman, and Zara Berry, who were much more involved in the design of the Set 1 cards than I was. I want to give them the credit they’re due.
Some of the characters pop right from the brain onto the paper, and it just works as designed. Other characters, we iterate and iterate and iterate until they feel right. One advantage we have, though, is that the character is not just represented on one card. We have the champion legend, but we also have two versions of the champion unit to express themselves on the battlefield and the signature spell. We don’t need to try to tell the entire story of a character on a single card. We can build it into more of the archetype surrounding them and tell little bits of that story in different ways.
With Showstopper as Sett’s signature spell, we get to evoke that sense of showing up and slamming out of nowhere. But that’s not the entirety of the character’s expression that we need. We can take some of the elements just of the character narratively and express it on the cards. It doesn’t need to just be a one-to-one translation of the League champion. In fact, if it was, I would really struggle with that – I’m not a huge League player.
Was it very conscious effort to keep it a League experience in that sense, or make it its own thing outside of that?
I think that it was always going to be its own thing – that it is part of the overall Runeterra IP and ecosystem. That if you look at the games that are set in Runeterra, and that’s Legends of Runeterra, League of Legends, TFT, and also now 2XK0.
We’re all building up this world collaboratively across all of these games, even though the games themselves are in different genres and very much stand on their own. One thing that’s really cool is that I’ve found a lot of people coming to Riftbound who say, “Oh, I don’t know about TCGs.” Then we mention that Teemo is in the starting lineup, and they’re like, “Well, I was a Teemo main, so I’ll give it a try.”
The fact that those characters – those Champions – have such strong identities and strong followings that we can make a 2XKO version of Darius, and we can make a Riftbound version of Darius, and have Darius in TFT. All of these different incarnations, and they still build the character together. That’s really unique, and really cool.
Are you finding that Riftbound is bringing different players into the League universe as a card game?
I think so. League is a game that has reached tens of millions of people at this point, truly an astounding number of players. A lot of those players, it’s been around for a while. The way that you engage with games changes sometimes as you get older. You might start in a place where you play a lot of TCGs, then you start gaining attachment to these characters through Riftbound and decide to try League for the first time. Or you might want to try TFT, or maybe you come from the fighting game world and start with 2XKO, and then notice that there’s a lot of overlap between the fighting game community and the TCG community. There’s things that overlap and things that are very different – I mean, a MOBA and a TCG in terms of actual gameplay are very, very, very far apart. But that doesn’t mean that the same gamer doesn’t enjoy both genres.
I’ve had the opportunity to teach a lot of people how to play this game at various events. I went to MSI in Vancouver, and we taught a bunch of people who were there for the midseason invitationals. A lot of the people that I spoke to were huge League players, TFT dabblers, and they had never played a trading card game before. I was shocked at how quickly they picked it up.
Part of that, I think is that Riftbound isn’t the hardest TCG to learn. It’s designed to be accessible and easy to pick up. But I think someone coming in with that strategic mindset – that same energy you need for League or TFT – is definitely ready to take on something like Riftbound if it’s more your speed, or it fits with your friend group or whatever factor draws you in.
We talk about the player who plays both – if you play both League and TCGs, you should love Riftbound. If you don’t, we’ve messed up. But we’re also looking for people who’ve only dabbled in one or the other, or who’ve never touched a TCG before but have an affinity for strategy, competitive, and social games. A lot of League players already have that team-based mindset – people play a lot of League cooperatively with their friends, on teams, and have that co-op communication. Riftbound actually plays really well as a 2v2 game.
When you were talking about the early player experience, teaching people the game, has there been any surprises within that early onboarding?
Let’s see… in terms of surprises with onboarding, it’s sometimes – and this surprised me a little bit – it is actually harder to teach someone who already has a lot of rules anchoring from another TCG how to play Riftbound than someone who’s never touched a deck of cards. Because there are a lot of things that are unique about the gameplay of Riftbound, but the form factor is exactly the same. There’s a lot of assumptions that people might come in with that take a little bit of time to unlearn before they can fully learn. That’s been a little bit of a surprise. But yeah, it’s been a surprise how quickly people have picked it up with zero TCG experience. People that have come in with a lot of experience get stuck on a couple of things, but then they pick it up pretty quick, too.
For players jumping into Riftbound for the first time, what’s your suggestion for how they go about that?
The best piece of advice I can give anyone is do it with a friend because learning is so much more fun when it’s shared. I would suggest either picking up a Proving Grounds box – it’s a four-player intro set that has four different decks, all of which are balanced to play against each other and have a lot of play materials like play and score tracker tokens that are a great place to get started. They have these cool oversize battlefields. That’s a great place to start.
You can also pick up one of the preconstructed decks – the Lee Sin, Viktor, and Jinx decks are all precons. Each one comes with a booster pack, so you get the experience of cracking a pack and adding to your deck. If you’re doing that with a friend, the learning is shared, and you get to have a lot of those discoveries together, which is great.
The next best thing is definitely going to any local game store. These games are meant to be played as part of a community. The cool thing about TCGs that is different than the digital games that Riot has made up to this point is that you get to sit across the table from someone, you get to know somebody and talk to them in real-time. Our four-player free-for-all matches get very wild, very political, and it’s just a different experience than you can have playing a digital game. So my advice is simple: find someone to queue up with.
Local game stores are a great place to find that community. I started playing TCGs in local game stores an embarrassingly long time ago, and I still keep in touch with many of the people I met through those experiences. Those are friends I have to this very day!
What are you and the rest of the Riftbound team most excited for players to experience?
Well, we are not too far away from the beginning of spoiler season for Spiritforged. There’ll be news coming about our Set Two very soon. I’m excited to see how people start integrating all of the Set Two decks and archetypes into what we’ve already done in Set One. Internally call Set One “Good Honest Riftbound”. But a 300-card environment, it’s just 300 cards.
Once a game’s been out for a couple of years, and we are planning – I’m not even going to tell you which set I’m on – but we have a long-term plan for this game. We’re talking about a five-year, even ten-year plan based on what we know today. We want this to grow. We want it to be a game we’ll still be playing with our grandkids someday.
But I’m excited to see the decks that people find within Set One that the designers ourselves didn’t. I’m excited to see the discoveries that people make that will be surprising to us just because once you get a game in the hands of hundreds of thousands of millions, the combinations always surprise you.
Then we get to do it again with Set Two, and again with Set Three, and watch how it all comes together. I’m really looking forward to seeing what people create with the building blocks we’ve given them.
I’m excited about people getting to experience it in local game stores. That’s really the thing that I’m looking forward to. I’m getting on a plane back home tomorrow morning, and one of the first things I do when I get off that plane is I’m going to my local game store to see people playing my game in the wild. There’s just nothing else like it.
Riftbound: Origins is out now – however a lot of Australian stock has been delayed till roughly November 7 so keep an eye out via the Local Game Store Tracker or TCG Stockist!
Prior to this interview Riot Games had confirmed they would be sending a review kit of TCG products from Riftbound: Orgins.
