- Joined
- Mar 4, 2023
A year after Disney decided to make their own trading card game, Riot Games decided to tap into the market as well with Riftbound. A 2-4 player card game about conquering battlefields.
It releases in China in August, while worldwide in October.
It releases in China in August, while worldwide in October.
Deckbuilding is somewhat similar to Magic's commander. You start by choosing your champion legend (commander), that dictates which rune domains (mana color) cards you can use. However, instead of using 100 card decks, the deck is split into two, the 12 card Rune Deck(precons use 6-6 split for domains), and the 40 card Main Deck, you also pick 3 battlefield cards, but only one of them is used in a game.
Basically the gist of the gameplay is that you play units (creatures in Magic) to conquer the battlefields picked before the game starts, if only your units remain on the battlefield its yours, otherwise you fight the opposing units, the attacking player distributes the summed up might of his units between the defenders (you have to kill the unit first before damaging another), if the opponent loses all of their units the battlefield is conquered, otherwise the attacker units go back to the base (they do not die). While conquered, battlefields give you various effects that are described on the card, and every turn they provide you with a point. First to 8 points wins.
The rune (mana) system itself is interesting, you channel (play) two runes each turn, each card has an associated rune cost called energy, which requires you to exhaust (tap) rune cards in order to play it, additionally to energy, some cards possess an additional cost called power, that requires you to recycle (put at the bottom of a deck) a rune card of the specified color. You can recycle the same rune that was exhausted in order to play a card.
The spells system is interesting, too. The spells are split into Actions and Reactions. Actions can be played at "Instant speed" (whenever you want), but to respond to an Action you can only use a Reaction spell. Reaction spells resolve before Action spells.
You can play with between 1 and 3 other people. You can even team up and play a 2v2, which I find unique.
If you want more details on how the game works, here's an official how to play guide.
Okay that's fine... But the game isn't even out yet, how can I even play it?
Most people opt to use the community made Riftbound mod for Tabletop Simulator. That's the most popular option since you don't need to code up a whole client and every effect of every card. The mod has various features like a button on every rune to easily recycle it, the playmat image changing based on your chosen champion legend and allows you to import decks made on Piltover Archive.
The fact that it's a TTS mod comes with the caveat that there's no matchmaking, people play with each other by pinging the Looking for Games role on the Riftbound community Discord
There even already are weekly Riftbound tournaments
The official client for Riftbound will drop in October, hopefully with no Vanguard.
My personal thoughts, so the post doesn't read like an astroturfed piece of shit ad bullshit
I think the gameplay is interesting, but I find changing the names of some of the already established terms fucking retarded, e.g. "trash" instead of "graveyard" or "exhaust" instead of "tap", some terms though, stayed the same, like token or mulligan. I dislike that cards are written in first person ("Ready (untap) me" instead of "Ready this card" or whatever). There's also the question of whether or not the client version will include Vanguard, because on one hand it's just a card game, on the other hand it's Riot Games.
I mainly want to get into it, because, unlike other well-established card games, it doesn't have a lot of cards (only around 320), and because the state of the Big Ones is pretty bad - Magic kind of fell off hard, especially now that Universes Beyond cards are now Standard-legal, Yu-Gi-Oh is the funny haha win by turn 2 game, Pokemon TCG is more of a collector thing than a game in my eyes, and Hearthstone is digital-only.
Overall, I'll be following this game to see what comes out of it.
anyone get any luck today with pre purchasing? Only got 1 of each pre con deck, got that good old middle finger of my booster box selling out while I sat in queue
