Riftbound: The January Announcement and the Signs for 2026

On last Thursday (8), Riot released an announcement on the official Riftbound website regarding updates and plans for the League of Legends card game.

The article emphasizes the company's plans for the Spiritforged pre-sale on their official website, along with some updates on new print runs of Proving Grounds and Origins, plus clarifications on the delays for the Arcane Box Set and the start of the pre-sale for the Lunar Revel Bundle 2026, a product celebrating the Chinese Lunar New Year.

The text can be categorized into two main axes: the good news and the nothingburger — parts of the text whose primary aim is to reassure the community about current limitations but which do not bring any concrete information upon which one can base an estimate of when the issues regarding card acquisition and product availability in Riftbound will improve.

Let's delve a bit deeper into each.

There is a point we must emphasize about Riot's communication: they are being quite clear and honest about the current state of Riftbound, even if accompanied by the semantic softness of any official corporate letter.

It is convenient for a company to omit certain information — and Riot omits, like every company — on certain matters, especially those concerning logistical and production issues, which are often protected by NDAs and other agreements ensuring their secrecy and security.

Riot doesn't explain a lot, but they explain more than expected. They openly say things like "there may be delays," "we had a production problem," "we changed the product material," and other things that don't inspire consumer confidence, but demonstrate the most important part: they are trying to correct the mistakes of the disastrous Origins launch.

As someone coming from other card games and as a journalist, I cannot say I don't admire the way Riot has been straightforward and mostly honest about Riftbound's current state and what they plan for the coming months — even if that comes at the price of short-term unreliability.

Riot will limit pre-sales on their official store, which will begin on January 13th. Each Riot ID will be entitled to purchase one booster box and three of each Champion Deck, which in theory ensures greater product availability for more buyers.

In the same announcement, the company also states it has made improvements in logistics and storage processes to ensure boxes reach consumers as close as possible to the release date, but with no guarantees that all pre-orders will arrive exactly on February 13th.

There are two evident messages in this statement. First, Riot is aware of scalping, but also the product shortage problem can be partially mitigated by limiting purchase volume — the initial impression is good, but it seems like strategic planning also aimed at avoiding an overload of official pre-sales that could disrupt the entire distribution scale, as may have happened with Origins.

The second message is that there still isn't enough product for everyone, and limiting purchases helps mitigate the damage. There's no reason to believe the Spiritforged launch will be different from Origins for most of the public.

Logistical solutions take time, and, as Riot themselves admitted in a previous announcement, there wouldn't be enough time to increase print quantities by the second set's release, especially while trying to simultaneously fix Origins' printing availability — which could create a snowball effect where one set always overwhelms the other, and we have acquisition issues until the next expansion launches.

The Lunar Revel is coming to the West: a bundle with a promotional Irelia card, a playmat, sleeves, a promotional Poro coin — one in ten will be gold — and eight red pockets, plus three Spiritforged boosters in Chinese.

The complete bundle will cost US$40 and will be available on Riot's official store on February 17th, with an estimated delivery date of May 2026.

There isn't much to say about this product, at least not until it's in consumers' hands. However, it is a great initiative that Riot is willing to sell a China-exclusive product to the West.

Proving Grounds is where the nothingburger begins. Riot once again confirmed we will get a reprint after its low availability at the official launch and added some details.

To speed up the production process, Riftbound will work with another printing company for Proving Grounds, and the announcement highlights that there will be differences in the material used in the new print runs compared to the first one due to this change.

According to Riot, the development team was unable to perceive the difference between the two versions when both are sleeved, but if this is noticeable to judges or among players, we will have trouble organizing competitive tournaments in the future, with competitors being disqualified or receiving warnings for playing with "marked cards", even though they came straight from the factory.

The MSRP will increase from US$ 30 to US$ 40, a notable precedent that may serve as a message for the future: expanding print quantity and/or adding more products to the queue inevitably means having to pay more employees, make more contracts for distribution and storage — all these elements, combined, could culminate in a trade-off where we have greater product availability but also a price increase for Booster Boxes and Champion Decks.

This, in fact, seems the most likely scenario for the future now that they've announced the first price increase for an already launched product. However, the bigger issue isn't the causality between needing new printers and price increases, but in not giving any estimate of when Proving Grounds will be available in stores again, which means Flash will remain a notable staple as a common card costing US$ 40-60 and that a product made for beginners will remain in the hands of scalpers as a treasure indefinitely.

The message about restocking Origins is clear: it will happen, but we don't know when. Of all the points addressed, the new print runs of the set are the vaguest part, filled with public relations slang, emphasizing the importance of making cards accessible to players and that Origins, as the first expansion, is fundamental for Riftbound's growth.

For practical purposes, promises are actionable when there are estimates. Without them, the words about restocking Origins sound like a nothingburger.

Given the details of the announcement and the lack of urgency with which some topics — Proving Grounds and the Origins Reprint — were addressed, it seems unlikely that availability for Riftbound will see substantial changes before the second half of 2026, with a more probable estimate occurring in the last quarter of the year or the first quarter of 2027.

In a piece about FOMO I produced when covering the topic of Magic burnout due to Wizards of the Coast's incessant releases, I mentioned that real-world time is not the same as social media time, and how this creates discrepancies between public perception and corporate action, especially concerning games.

Every day, the Riftbound community sees at least one comment and/or post regarding stores selling boxes at exorbitant prices, scalping, and other issues caused by product shortages, which gives the constant sensation that Riot/UVS is doing nothing on the matter according to demand.

Establishing new distribution contracts takes time, as does making more printing machines available and having them work to print both the new set that needs increased demand and previous sets that were underprinted during the first months of the game — this doesn't excuse the major planning failure Origins demonstrated, but actions are being taken, even if slowly from the public's perspective.

The problem is that the longer Riot/UVS takes to address these problems, the more they accumulate to the point of opening various possibilities — price increases for boxes and other products due to increased allocation of machines and employees, and the previous set always being "behind" in terms of having enough boxes in stores because the company cannot print two distinct expansions at the same speed are some of the main risks we might see become reality during this semester.

By actively working to resolve these issues, perhaps we can imagine a brighter future in the global scenario for Riftbound, where players won't constantly live under the risk of scalping and abusive prices, although these will always exist for any card game: Wizards of the Coast has 30 years of TCG production expertise, and yet Magic: The Gathering suffered from shortages of Universes Beyond products like Final Fantasy as demand was much higher than supply could anticipate.

Therefore, what Riftbound needs right now are two things: time to address the problems and a clear reprint planning policy, including the possibility of a "Reprint Set" at some point in the coming years to reprint staples and other low-availability cards while reintroducing them into the release schedule and allowing machines to focus on a "new product" instead of always trying to catch up with the damage while dividing printing capacity between the new and old sets.

But this "reprint set" talk should only happen, at the earliest, from 2027 onward — if it happens at all. Until then, Riftbound's fate, while the company responsible for manufacturing the card game tries to correct its initial mistakes, is to live in a constant keep-up between the old set and the new set.

As for us, the players, we should consider whether we want to keep this relationship with this game as more news comes out, much like we do or did with other card games.

Thanks for reading!