Riftbound, Riot Games’s trading card game inspired by League of Legends universe, has released its first-ever Core Rules update, ahead of the global English launch on October 31st. This first patch doesn’t alter gameplay, but it modernizes the Official Rules Document with clearer definitions for major mechanics such as Damage, Deal, and Heal, along with new Silver Rules (“Can’t beats can” and “Do as much as you can”). Many foundational elements have also been rewritten to improve consistency and reduce ambiguity as competitive play ramps up.

While much of the update focuses on structure and terminology, several functional adjustments will matter for players and competitors. The 2v2 format now has clarified team-building rules, contested battlefields behave more intuitively, and the new "Pending & Finalizing" system establishes a cleaner framework for resolving spells and abilities.

Our Silver Rules are where we want to express broad rules and concepts across the game that are nearly always true. Considering cards often supersede them, and exceptions are very common, Silver Rules are where we keep the concepts that have vanishingly few exceptions. Not zero, but few. We have two more to add because of how often we found ourselves repeating them.

We have some housekeeping to get out of the way, mostly consisting of us clarifying existing rules and making sure implied rules were written out explicitly.

This is something many players intuited, but it wasn’t made directly clear. We want battlefields to be a source of variance and expression, and that is undermined if both players bring the same battlefield—worse if they each bring three of the same battlefield. We played it this way internally and simply overlooked its definition in the rules. So it is now clear and outlined as intent.

Speaking of 2v2 rules…

There are a few clarifications and new rules for 2v2. We want players on teams to act as one unit, and to that end we want them to consider things in a combined and intentional way when approaching this way of playing.

We made a bunch of definitions more easy to find, and less needed to intuit. Now it is easy to follow along with the way we write out cards in plaintext without needing to know the arcane secrets of letters and brackets. We just let everyone in on the Card Cant.

Bonus Damage for the most part was an easily understood fantasy. If Void Seeker normally deals 4 damage and is dealing 1 Bonus Damage, now it deals 5. However we needed more explicit and detailed rules about how it should interact with our more complex spells and abilities, and the rules were vague in those sections. So we clarified the intent here.

Please put down the torches and pitchforks. We get to the first intentionally functional change and it is one that will be divisive but bear with us. This was not an easy decision for us, as every time we explained the “Relevant Player” system for Free-For-All, players’ eyes would light up with the potential. The idea of being invited to betray their friends, or the decisions for table politics—they obviously felt all that was exciting and interesting, and we agree!

However, in practice these rules instead created situations where players were powerless to defend themselves in FFA games, and that is a worse situation. We are removing the system wholesale because, as we are fond of saying, the juice is not worth the squeeze.

This is a topic we discussed in our recent FAQ, but now we have the full rules available for perusal. The process is detailed as well as the result. The process has its own acronym, FEPR, and the outcome, pending and finalizing, has helped us sequence and control our unique method of card effects and sequencing consistently.

One thing to note is that there is one functional change amidst this new system that has a notable impact on players already familiar with the existing rules: Players can now refuse Deflect costs incurred by triggered abilities. This will result in the triggered ability failing to finalize on the chain.

Reflexive triggers are now clearly communicated. These were also discussed in our recent [FAQ]. Notable is that we have clarified when triggered abilities from spells are still part of the spell—and when they are not.

Many sections have had numbers appended to the text of their rules to clarify that they are sequentially processed:

The steps of combat needed some attention for clarity. The sequence of how things started and ended were just vague enough to cause some confusion, and with this, and some work mentioned later to clarify around the contested status, we believe this will make the systems easier to follow for the more rules-ingrained among our players.

What’s a “Special Cleanup,” you ask? An excellent segue to the next section…

We wanted our cleanup step to do a lot of things. Some of those things only need to happen under very specific circumstances, but others needed to happen repeatedly, almost constantly. Rather than create situations with awkward reminders or exceptions, we created the Special Cleanups with a simpler rule of thumb for players to remember: Cleanups repeat, and Special Cleanups happen once. If a Special Cleanup needs to repeat, it repeats into a normal cleanup.

The concept of contested status is a key part of the state machine that keeps control and conquering flowing in our game. This helps make clear the logic of that machinery. We also defined a few interactions that we answered directly to the community but that weren’t entirely written in black-and-white in the CR—namely the concept of “surprise defense” and “conquering on defense,” both of which are now well documented in the rules.

This is a lexicon change to ensure ongoing clarity. Pending means more for the pending and finalize systems, so combat and showdowns are Staged going forward. Showdowns weren’t previously marked as pending but were handled similarly to pending combats, so we brought them along in the new terminology.

Targeting in our game is complex. This is partially because we have so many moving parts and partially because we have opted to write our cards in a way that nine times out of ten are in plain conversational language. However, this means that getting to the nitty gritty interpretation can get hairy sometimes. We can’t put a Riftbound designer in every game store to answer your targeting questions, so now the rules answer them instead.

This is an odd sentiment, but it can be easily understood with Baited Hook. If you target a unit with Baited Hook, and before the effect resolves that unit gets returned to your hand, then its Might is treated as null—a value that cannot be figured out. So you can’t compute Baited Hook’s ability successfully, because null + 1 is null, and no unit has null as a Might. You’ll reveal the top 5 cards of your Main Deck, but you won’t get to play any of them.

Layers! Everyone’s favorite topic. In addition to numbering these, as previously mentioned, we have done something rather radical to them. Our layers loop now! Layers in Riftbound apply repeatedly until each effect has been applied (or removed) once and layers have been evaluated with no objects changing. Loopy Layers! This helps Fiora actually work without being a paradox. Notably, we are keeping an eye on this. 

We had feedback from the community that our triggered abilities were sometimes hard to identify, so the rules now help with that. And by grouping things like “play effects” and “conquer effects,” we make it easier for rules and cards to refer to them and for players to understand what we mean (and don’t mean) when they do.

We also had some work that came out of the recent [FAQ]. We knew we wanted Attack and Defend triggers to be able to trigger even if a unit joined combat “late.” When we wrote the FAQ, we expected the rules update to allow those those triggers to potentially go off multiple times. After all, to quote our past selves, “moving a unit at Action speed isn’t easy to do, and doing it twice is even harder.” Since then, though, we decided that triggering Attack and Defend triggers multiple times didn’t feel right, and moving units repeatedly in and out of combat wasn’t something we wanted to reward. (We won’t stop you, though.)

A tool that was undefined but utilized can now be easily identified and understood.

Added more language to make clear the intention for Burn Out and when players should be triggering the situation. Also added examples and logistics to make clear when and how, specifically, players would hypothetically infinitely Burn Out.

Hidden is one of our most complex mechanics. It allows you to hide, which is a specific action, but Hidden itself is a keyword, not an action. That is neither here nor there for this update, though, as the things most worth mentioning are related to things that occur after the card is facedown.

Of particular focus, hidden cards now gain Reaction, and the restrictions on targeting for cards played from facedown have been altered. The former is a minor change, and will not have a tangible impact on most players, but as outlined in the FAQ, the latter has a material impact to the way Zhonya’s Hourglass plays. This targeting change and change to hidden means that the card no longer restricts its replacement effect to the battlefield it was hidden at.

More details about the change are in the complete CR. This marks us trying to zero in on making Hidden play intuitively, and we anticipate authoring content in the future that leans in to the intuition as opposed to requiring players to know every gotcha and pitfall.