Riftbound RQ Hartford winner, Factor:"Riot puts in so much more work than every other TCG does to immerse you in that experience when you're in the building"

Riftbound’s competitive scene is increasingly driven by statistics shared through Discord communities, LGS testing groups, and post-event data from recent regionals. However, concerns around inconsistent judge rulings, slow-play enforcement, and overall tournament structure still come up among competitive players months after the first RQ — is it just a matter of time before Riot find the perfect formula?

In an interview with Sheep Esports, Factor, winner of RQ Hartford, shares how a last-minute shift to the format’s strongest deck helped him secure the win. He talks about how understanding your opponents' win conditions often matters more than perfect knowledge of your own own deck, and why even strong players can be eliminated early due to bad matchup runs.

Factor: Yes. Thursday night in the hotel was the first game I had played with the list. Thankfully, way back in set one in origin format, I went to the Houston Regional. I played Master Yi, so I had a little bit of experience. Also, one of my teammates and my best friend, Ethan, has been playing Master Yi since he played him in set one. He brought him to a side event, a bunch of side events in Atlanta, and he knew the deck. I still think he's even a better mastery player than I am and he taught me everything that I needed to know over the two days to be able to take it down.

Factor: I think it kind of depends. I think preparation is really important. I think I already have a lot of experience with Riftbound. I played a lot of big events already. Also, we had been talking about the deck for two weeks before while I hadn't played any games on the deck. Both my teammates had been playing a lot of games on the deck and talking about it publicly with me. And so I was reading a lot of their thoughts and how games were going. I'd even watched some of their games being played. So while I hadn't got any physical experience playing it, I kind of knew what the lines were.

Factor: Yeah, I think that you're playing a deck, especially a deck like Master Yi, which in my opinion, is the best deck in the format right now. Knowing your opponent’s deck is very important. The only match that I lost at the entire event was against Samdsherman (Sam Sherman), and I just didn't know he was playing Rengar. I hadn't tested all of it. I'd watched one of his games against Alanzq, the finals, and so I didn't really know what his deck was doing, and I think that's really the main reason that I lost.

Whereas every other deck I hit on the event, I've played games against with either maybe some with Yi or with other decks and just knew what their win condition was and how to evaluate their win condition. And knowing that allowed me to just essentially make sure that they weren't able to get there.

Factor: So going into events for me when I'm evaluating my deck choice, I like to try to take something that has a solid matchup into the most amount of decks. So I would prefer if I could play a deck that had a 49% win rate across the board, but was 49% into every matchup in the format, I would always choose to play that deck over a deck that maybe was 60% into this matchup and 30% into this matchup. And I think Master Yi is favoured 50% plus into every deck in the format that's not.

Sivir or LeBlanc, I think those are your only two matchups that are in the red, I think everything else — as long as you navigate it correctly — is in the green. And so just knowing that while I didn't have any matchups, I think were really auto wins other than maybe Annie felt really, really easy. I just wanted to pick the deck that had the most solid win rate spread across the board.

Factor: I think that statistics are very important. For me specifically, I've always been a numbers person and so looking at stats and everything like that is something that I do a lot in my free time. And so I think taking a deck that has good, good statistics across the board is always going to be something that gets you into a more favourable position to win the event. I still think there's a lot of factors that goes into it other than that. And you could always play a deck that has three or four bad matchups and dodged them on the weekend, it'll happen sometimes. But also on the flip hand, you could play that deck and then hit your first three bad matchups.

One of my friends that was playing, he was going for the Miss Fortune best of, and he hit Dazzling Aurora Sivir, which Miss Fortune didn't beat on the whole weekend in round two after the buy. And then round three hit Volibear, which Miss Fortune had like a 17% on the weekend and so sometimes the variance doesn't go in your way.

Factor: I think for me, it's really all the community aspects. There's a website, I don't remember the name, that shows a lot of statistics from different regional events. And with Utrecht and Vancouver happening so close to this event, there hasn't been many changes and so those stats were pretty easy for us to go off of.

And then me and my friends, we all have a Discord server that we talk about. We'll test certain matchups and be like, we feel it's favoured for one deck or the other and kind of talk about it. Even after looking at the statistics, we'll kind of come up to our own conclusions about what feels good based on our play styles.

Factor: I think if you want to be competitive, it's really, really important. I think having people that you can play with that are near your level or, I mean, preferably above your level is always the best because that's how you're going to learn and improve. The biggest thing for me is playing with my friends and my team.

When we're testing and everything like that, while yes, we're taking it seriously, we are very strong players. Multiple of us have invites already and have made money playing events. We just really have a good time playing the game. We really enjoy going, and we'll go and play for eight hours straight, and we'll test a bunch of different matchups, and we'll just be having a blast the whole time. And I think that mindset has helped me a lot as far as going into events and just having a good time enjoying playing the game.

Factor: Yes. Yes, I do actually. Yeah. I'm the manager there.

Factor: It's really cool. There's some benefits as far as, like, if my friends are at the store testing, I can kind of hear what they're talking about a little bit while I'm working. But it can be really hard because when they are there testing, I'm like, “Oh, I want to be playing with Riftbound and I have to help these customers whenever they want to buy cars and everything like that." So it's definitely a little bit of a balance.

As far as going into this regional win, I'm taking a little bit of a step back from the store. I'm not working as full-time as I was before, but I'll still be there working and helping out a lot.

Factor: I think the biggest thing that we need is I think that skirmishes need cooler participation promos and things like that, college, I don't know. It's hard because colleges that Riot, I think, expect to be playable need to be things that we have that are being given out.

I think the top 8 promo right now is like a Yuumi card that's not playable in the meta before the top eight promos, and the mat was like World Atlas, Edge of Night, things that people just weren't really excited for. I think that what we need from Riot is just getting promos and making better decisions on what they're picking for things that they think that the people would be way more excited for to actually want them to come out to our store and play these special events.

Factor: Yeah, I think that Riftbound can support professional players pretty comfortably. I think there's a lot of, I mean, as far as like the promos, and there's a lot of people with it being Riot Games and League of Legends, I think there's a lot of people who aren't even super into Riftbound that are like big buyers that'll buy the promos and things, the champion stuff.

And then they do a good job at giving out, like, cool prizes and cool side event stuff. Even if you go, like my friend Ethan, who went to Atlanta, didn't play the main event; he played side events and ended up getting like five metal cards on the weekend, which was enough that he got the money to at least pay for his trip. So I think Riftbound does a really good job at supporting these players.

I also have seen a lot of things that Riot has been doing at the events to help support these content creators and players. They have special creative content tournaments, and especially, like they just did for the first time in Hartford, they just did a meet and greet with all the pro players, like with Alanzq (Mateusz Jasiński). So I think Riot's been doing an incredible job at supporting and building that community.

Factor: I think that as far as TCGs go, mostly it's hard sometimes because sometimes I think Star Wars is a good example that I want to bring up is like our local Star Wars community is not very big here in Utah unfortunately, but I know that nationwide, that game's doing a lot better. So it's hard sometimes to see just from my little perspective because we have games that do well at our store that don't do well nationally. We host a game called Brand Archive that does really well at a store, but isn't as big nationally or we have games that do well nationally that don't do well as our store.

So sometimes it's hard to look at the bigger picture for me because sometimes I'll just be like: "Oh, this is not doing well here, but it does really well nationally." So it's hard sometimes. I think that as long as the company behind the game is really just supporting people wanting to play, that's the biggest thing.

Factor: Yeah, so I have played a lot of League of Legends. I started playing League Legends when I was like six years old. I would play against the AI bots when I was like six, but I unfortunately never ever played any legend of Runeterra, but my friends played a lot of Runeterra. I know that there have been a lot of things that they have brought over from that game and they have taken a lot of the things that Runeterra did well and brought it into Riftbound and then kind of left to the wayside a lot of the things that it did poorly. As far as from what I've seen, they've done a really good job at it, but I don't have much firsthand knowledge because I never ended up playing.

Factor: I think that Riot does a lot of things to get people excited. I think that one big example is when the game was coming out, they released the Worlds Bundle, the 2025 bundle, and a lot of people were super, super excited about it. I think it got a lot of League of Legends people super excited about it because they had a reason to get into Riftbound and it was this special exclusive thing. I think those crossovers that they have been doing with League of Legends to bring more people over has been really strong.

I remember walking into Houston — because I played in other TCGs, I played One Piece, I played Pokemon, I've been to Magic events — I walked into the building and it just felt more like the production, and everything felt so much cooler. You walk in, you see the big signs, you see the misfortune up there, and you see all the colleges from the set. And I think at the events, they do the best job because I mean, they've hosted LoL Esports things for 15 years now. And when you walk into an event, it just feels more elevated than any other TCG event I've walked into.

Factor: Yeah. I mean, I was very surprised because normally I walk into a convention center hall, and I expect it to just be white tables lying down the line and then maybe one little judge area inside of an area, and that's kind of it. But yeah, for Riftbound, they bring out cards for players who come and talk to you and hang out.

They do a bunch of really cool stuff with things like that. They have banners showing all of the cards from all the sets you can play. They have display cases that show all the Best-Ofs cards that everyone's competing for and display cases that show all the overnumbered cards that you can get out of different sets. I think they just put in so much more work than every other TCG does to immerse you in that experience when you're in the building.

Factor: I think the only two biggest complaints that I've had at Regional Qualifiers is that, of course, sometimes the balance will take a really, really long time, which is a really hard thing to crack down on. I think that this is half a point on Riot.

I think a lot of people, players specifically, are scared to call judges on slow play. I think that judges are scared to crack down on slow playing, and people are kind of scared to really make sure that people are playing at an efficient pace. I think that the only other issue I've really had is I've had some judge calls that have been a little bit questionable. I feel like I end up having to appeal judge calls a lot. I think that Riot needs to work on a stronger judge program going into these events. Currently, I remember when the judge test came out, I think it was late November of last year, and it's like ten questions, and then it's like open book, you pass those ten questions, boom, you're a judge.

I think they need to build a better path to become a judge, better questions, better way to navigate through the rule book so that these judges can feel a lot more involved in the rules and feel like that they're not going to make the wrong decision a lot of times.

Factor: I think it is a problem that can't solve itself, but I do think the tools that are given to us right now aren't strong enough for the problem to solve itself. I think that just having the rule book is not going to be good enough.

I think that a lot of other TCGs have more levels that you're kind of going through and an easier path to being a stronger and stronger judge and going to more events and doing things like that. And I think Riot needs to build a way to get more people excited. I know judges get a promo at events and things like that, but just building a path that makes it easier for the judges to learn more about the game and the rules and things like that is something that I think they should work on.”