In recent years, the trading card game (TCG) environment has seen a boom of new games entering the market. There are still genre mainstays, like Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon, and Yu-Gi-Oh!, which continue to receive support and feature a thriving secondhand market. However, new original IP TCGs like Flesh and Blood and Sorcery are making rounds at the local game store level and beyond.
But licensed IP TCGs, like One Piece and the upcoming Cyberpunk TCG, have also taken the tabletop world by storm. Riftbound, the League of Legends trading card game, is no exception. After releasing late last year (at least in English), Riot Games’ popular TCG has developed quite a large fanbase, leading to a massive presence at Gen Con in Indianapolis. GameSpot’s Jessica Cogswell was present during the show, and got the chance to sit down with Riftbound game director Dave Guskin, who explained that the Riftbound team is much smaller than you’d think.
With such a small team, you have to wonder what other games the team looked to for guidance. Resource systems, which are costs you’ll typically pay to play or activate cards, are present in most TCGs. Guskin, who worked previously as a designer on Magic: The Gathering (and is also a big fan of the game), took inspiration from that game’s mana system.
“[I’m] a big fan of Magic’s [mana system],” he explains. “I actually thought, ‘Okay, we’re going to start with the resources in the deck. That’s the appropriate amount of variance for game variety.’ We tried it with players and they completely rejected it. They were like, ‘This is horrible. I don’t want to not play this game.'”
“So then I was like, ‘Well, I’m not the right person to design this resource system,'” Guskin continued. “I recruited my two designers, Dave and Jon, who had joined shortly after the start, [and said], ‘You’ve got to find a better resource system.’ They tried like 10 or 12 different systems. Then they found one they liked, brought it to me, and were like, ‘Okay, you’re going to hate this,'” referring to Riftbound’s Rune resource system.
“[They told me,] ‘So what you do is you get rid of your own resources,'” Guskin explained. “And I was like, ‘I hate it’. They’re like, ‘No, no, you’ve got to play it.’ And as you saw, when you actually play it, you’re like, ‘Wow, this is actually pretty cool.’ So that was all them–they were amazing at making that system. And now it’s one of the things that TCG players of other games say they like the most about Riftbound.”
In Riftbound, Runes operate similarly to Magic’s lands in that you’ll “tap” them (or exhaust, in this case) to pay a cards cost. But cards in Riftbound will often have two costs: Power and Energy. The Energy cost is represented by the top-most, colorless number in the upper left corner of a card, while the Power cost–which is also locationed in the upper left corner of the card but below Energy–is tied to one of Riftbound’s six Domains (think Magic’s colors). To pay a Power cost, you have to recycle a Rune of that Domain, which means placing it on the bottom of your 12-card Rune deck, referencing the two designers’ “get rid of your own resources” pitch to Guskin.
Riftbound is nearing its one year mark since its English release, with its fourth expansion Vendetta having recently hit store shelves. This week also marks the game’s biannual State of the Game updates, which details changes coming to organized play, upcoming products, and next year’s roadmap.
