Riftbound - The hype is real

On Wednesday, I was persuaded to give Riot Games' new TCG, Riftbound, a try. Sitting down to a three-player game, since scalable player numbers have been baked into the game at a fundamental level and playing the Jinx starter deck against Teemo and a full competitive Sett deck, I fully expected to get stomped into the ground, but also to get a good feel of how the game as a whole played and the core mechanics.

My history

I have a long-standing agreement with my bank account: One card game, no more. This game is Magic: the Gathering, and I've played it off and on for 26 years now, so every other card game I play is always going to be tinted through the strengths, weaknesses and design of that main game.

The bad

The subheading for the one bad thing for consistency's sake

I'm only putting this first because there is one thing which annoys me about Riftbound which affects the rest of this post. Whether it's due to IP issues on terminology or not-invented-here-syndrome, everything in Riftbound that has a direct analogue to an MTG concept has a different name. Untap? I think you mean Awaken. Tap? I think you mean Exhaust. Creature? I think you mean Unit. The list goes on, and the game's attempt to use different terminology at every opportunity feels like it goes beyond a preference into outright bloody-mindedness. Every time you try to explain the game to a Magic player, you'll use the established wording (Untap, Upkeep, Play lands, Draw) rather than the official term (Awaken, Beginning, Channel Runes, Draw). The attempt to turn the start of a turn into something memorable (ABCD) falls on its face when everybody is familiar with different words for the same concept.

I lied, there's another thing

Drawing four cards at the start of a game feels wrong to me as an experienced MTG player. It's almost certainly correct, but as somebody who would crawl over broken glass to draw cards, it's depressingly low.

The good

Buckle down, because there's a lot to go into this section.

The end to inconsistent mana: The Rune deck

Everybody who has played Magic has run into the game design's biggest weakness: Land cards in your main deck cause a fundamental variance in games that has nothing to do with player skill. At best, it's not a problem. At worst, it's a tax on people who struggle to shuffle their deck - and when you're dealing with triple-sleeved commander decks, Shuffling becomes a dexterity problem that is explicitly against Magic's ethos.

Now, shuffling is still an important part of playing Riftbound, but the variance between a good hand and an bad hand has much less variance compared to MTG's constant tension of great hands that just need to draw one land will lead to far fewer non-games.

A separate rune deck is also a more elegant solution to this problem than playing regular cards from your hand face-down as resource cards. I've played a few games that use this system, and it always feels bad - I want to play my spells as spells, not just throw them away with no chance of ever casting them.

Using card backs as differentiation

Every commander player has, at some point, shuffled their commander into their deck, leading to consternation, searching through a 100-card deck and then having to reshuffle. Riftbound solves this by ensuring that Legends, Runes, Battlefields and regular cards are differentiable from the back, making it clear immediately if playing unsleeved if something is in the wrong place. Legends and Battlefields have primarily black backs; Runes have primarily white backs and Regular cards have primarily blue backs. The design is the same, but the different lightnesses of the cardbacks should make it colourblind accessible. I'd recommend investing in multiple colours of sleeves to make it abundantly clear where each card lives when they're face-down.

Companions can be balanced, when the game is designed around them

Riftbound deck construction is structured around your legend, your champion and their signature spell.

In Magic terms, your Legend is a cross between your Commander and an Emblem - it defines the colours your deck can be in, and it has an effect on the game. For example, I was playing the Jinx, Loose Cannon starter deck, which encourages playing cards aggressively by giving you an extra draw at the start of your turn if you have one or fewer cards in hand at the time. Jinx, the Legend was paired with Jinx the champion (in this case, the fury - MTG players, read red - Jinx, who enters awakened - MTG players, read untapped).

Champions function identically to the pre-errata version of MTG's Companion. They must be the same character as your Legend. No mixing Jinx legends with Vi as your champion, now matter how much you loved them in Arcane. You can cast them for their cost from basically the command zone, but if they leave the field then they go to the legally distinct Graveyard. MTG players who remember the dark days of pre-errata companions should breathe easy though. The game is designed and hopefully balanced around the existence of these champions in every deck, and the fact that you need to link characters between legend and champion reduces the scope for abuse by players.

A cure for summoning sickness

Summoning sickness is a fundamental part of Magic. Haste is a desirable ability on any creature due to the ability to proactively take actions as soon as it hits the field. Creatures entering untapped by default is a core dynamic of the combat system, letting you drop chump blockers as desperate defences while you hope to draw a proper answer. Riftbound doesn't have this traditional combat setup. If you control a battlefield then you can deploy units directly to that battlefield to increase your strength at a location - but they enter tapped.

In fact, entering tapped is the default state for deployed units in Riftbound. They can't do anything while they are tapped, but if you have a way to untap them, then you can have them impact the game immediately. This elegantly sidesteps a surprisingly clunky mechanic. As a judge, the number of times I've had to repeat "A permanent has summoning sickness if you have not controlled it continuously since the start of your last upkeep" (The permanent wording is relevant since everything has summoning sickness, but only creatures care) - and now you see the hidden depths of a fairly simple mechanic. Even experienced players make mistakes, especially with formats with very long turn cycles like cEDH where remembering which creatures do and don't have summoning sickness can require specific techniques to ease mental burdens is a required skill. Riftbound solves this neatly by saying "If it's untapped, it's all cool."

One match, three different games

Riftbound has a sideboard (8 cards, or 0 cards, no in-between), but the games within matches are further changed by having to change battlefields between games. The effects on the battlefields that you need to conquer or hold for victory points are minor but you have the freedom to choose relevant battlefields for the way your deck plays. It's a small thing, but a fascinating way to make each game within a match feel different, beyond the sideboarding to attempt to counter your opponent's deck.

The interesting stuff that doesn't fit in the above sections

Seeing League of Legends champions while playing against people who have never played the MOBA itself is weird

One of the opponents in my games was playing a Teemo deck.

He didn't know anything about the deep set trauma induced by being a bad player trying to deal with the Yordle from Hell on the other side of the lane.

The other opponent was playing Sett.

Actually, I have no idea who Sett is, they joined the game since I stopped playing, many years ago.

it's still really weird having to explain "Yeah, that mushroom is Teemo's ultimate ability. They're poisonous landmines that slow you. Also he blinds you, poisons you and is fast as heck so you can't catch him when he's running away." or "The Mega Ultra Death Rocket is Jinx's ultimate. She fires it across the map and hopes to hit somebody. Never does." when it's something that's been in such a popular game for over ten years.

Unstructured turns

This is something I personally want to flag, and it's mainly a design note. While I prefer a structured turn like Magic, Riftbound's turns are largely unstructured after the ABCD start. This allows for more player freedom and creativity to find the right sequence to get out of a hole, but it also means that you have no hand-holding on the way you play your turn.

Overall?

Yeah, so as it stands, Riftbound's design is extremely solid. Looking at it from an MTG perspective, it solves a lot of the fundamental problems that Magic had to learn and show the rest of the world the path forwards for newer games.

Riftbound at Bad Wolf

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