Over the last two years, trading cards have become a hot commodity; they’ve become so hot that finding certain ones has become next to impossible.

The trading card seemed to have first started to catch fire with the Pokémon Sword and Shield: Evolving Skies – Moonbreon (Umbreon VMAX Alt Art) hunt, then became even hotter with the Magic: The Gathering One Ring chase.

Since then, each month it seems like there is a new craze or something for people to try and hunt; however, Pokémon seems to be the worst of them all. When you go into local stores, the probability of finding Pokémon cards is lower than your chance of getting robbed.

At PAX East 2025, we had a chance to check out an upcoming card that could become the next must-have. Here is our preview for Riftbound: League of Legends Trading Card Game.

For those who are unfamiliar, this is not the first time we have worked together with Riot Games to share with you something exciting. In the past, we shared different LCS player interviews and even covered the Summer Finals in person.

At PAX East, we met with Dave Guskin, Game Director for Riftbound, to preview the upcoming card game. Before the meeting, we were given the option of whether we wanted to play standard 1v1, 2v2, or Free-for-All format. 

For this meeting, we brought a friend of ours who specialized in Magic: The Gathering and managed to reach Master in Legends of Runterra.

With his insight into both games, I knew he’d be the perfect counterpart to try the game. For this preview, we got to check out four of the upcoming decks; these decks revolved around Jinx, Viktor, Volibear, and Yasuo.

The Jinx deck revolved around discarding cards to get a power spike. The Yasuo deck revolved around untapping cards and being able to move freely between realms.

The Volibear deck revolved around getting as many runes out as possible in order to summon giant creatures. Finally, the Viktor deck revolved around getting different mechanical reinforcements and potentially overwhelming your opponent with sheer numbers. 

Before I share with you my thoughts on the game, I’ll share with you the thoughts of our more skilled counterpart, Retro. 

Riftbound is similar to Magic: The Gathering in terms of a resource system and the commander format (Minus the 1x copy rule that the commander format uses). The resource system is similar to another TCG called Force of Will; it is similar to Commander in the sense that Riftbound has a four-person multiplayer format. You can play it in classic 1 v 1. The decks consist of 60-card decks. You have a Jinx deck, a Yasuo deck, a Viktor deck, and a Volibear deck.

To compare these decks to Magic: The Gathering archetypes, Jinx is a madness agro deck. If you ever played the Legends of Runeterra Jinx decks in the past, it is very similar, and you will feel right at home. Aggressive creatures, discarding cards for value, etc. Yasuo feels like what players would call a temp deck. Combat tricks, Counter spells, and out-tempo the opponent to victory. Viktor is not the same as his L.o.R version. He is now a Go-Wide token strategy, where he wants to amass a wide field of tokens to overwhelm the opponent.

Volibear is a ramp deck. For the MTG comparison, it’s a Green/X deck that wants to pump out the resource system as fast as possible and play big, expensive creatures/units as fast as possible. Volibear by himself as a unit out of the three playable decks has a very strong ability where you cannot target him unless you sacrifice two of your resources to cast your spells/ Units.

From what I’ve played of the four-player environment (a typical Magic: The Gathering Commander game, but everyone fighting over a particular goal). It was a lot of fun and no one’s deck was out right better than the other one. It all depends on the play style that you want to do, and that kind of goes for any competitive TCG or card game in general.

As the winner of the free-for-all, I had a bit of a different experience. While the one player was massing a mechanical army, Retro was getting a ton of resources to summon his big creatures.

Dave, on the other hand, was getting easy points by having the ability to untap his units more quickly, while also countering our ability and other cards.

With Jinx, I always felt like I was behind and only able to get an advantage by discarding a majority of my cards. The resources within the game felt like they allowed those who could get them quickly to win or ramp up their army.

The game has a similar feel to Magic: The Gathering meets Muchkins. Players attempt to conquer and hold different realms. For conquering a realm, a player gets one point. If you hold the realm for a round, you get a point. The first player to get to 10 points.

If you take over another person’s realm, you get a point. The game utilizes a resource system that refreshes easily, despite having to sometimes sacrifice it. Between the four decks, it felt like Jinx and Viktor were the two weakest in overall play, but any deck in the base structure could win. 

Once the game releases later this year, it will be interesting to see how you can mix and match cards to make interesting decks. At the moment, only six decks have been revealed, but it will be interesting to see what kind of strategies players come up with once all 16 decks are out.

The Riftbound: League of Legends Trading Card Game will release in October in English-speaking countries with over 300 cards available; the game will launch in China first this summer.