How a Riftbound Deck Is Built

New to Riftbound deckbuilding? A constructed deck is made of a few distinct parts. Here's how the current tournament lists are put together.

The parts of a deck

• Legend (1) — your identity card. It sets your deck's direction and which Champion you build around (e.g. Master Yi, Wuju Bladesman).
• Champion (1) — your signature unit, tied to your legend (e.g. Master Yi, Tempered).
• Main deck (~40 cards) — your Units, Gear and Spells. This is where most of your strategy lives.
• Runes (12) — your resource cards. Their colours must match your deck's domains.
• Battlefields (3) — the locations you contest during the game.
• Sideboard (up to 8) — extra cards you can swap in between games at tournaments.

Add it up and a full tournament list is 64 cards (56 in the main deck plus the sideboard).

Domains and runes

Riftbound has seven domains — Fury, Calm, Mind, Body, Chaos, Order and Colorless. Most competitive decks commit to one or two domains (for example Master Yi is Body/Calm, while Irelia is Calm/Chaos). Your 12 runes are split to match those domains, which is how you reliably cast your cards.

Building on a budget

A deck's cost is dominated by a handful of chase cards — the commons, runes and battlefields are cheap. On every meta deck page we show the build cost broken down card-by-card and priced across Australian stores, so you can see exactly where the money goes and where to save. Want to tweak a list? Open it in the Deck Builder to re-price your own version.

Mulligan: keep or ship your opening hand

After you draw your opening hand you get one chance to mulligan — shuffle back any number of cards and redraw that many. A good keep usually has:

• Enough runes to cast your early plays — a hand with no resources, or all resources and no spells, is a mulligan.
• Something to do on your first few turns — a cheap unit or a tempo spell so you're not passing turns.
• A plan that matches your domains — if your runes can't cast the expensive cards in hand, ship the dead weight.

Against aggressive decks, keep cheap blockers and removal; against slower decks, you can keep a slightly greedier hand with your stronger mid-game cards.

Sideboarding between games

At tournaments you play best-of-three, and between games you can swap up to your full sideboard (8 cards) in and out. The idea is to tune your deck to the matchup: bring in extra removal against go-wide decks, more resilient threats against control, or anti-aggro tools when you're on the back foot. Plan your swaps before the event — for each common matchup, decide which cards come out and which come in, so you're not guessing at the table.

Want to test these ideas without buying in first? Print a list with the proxy sheet tool, practise your mulligans and sideboard plan, then price the final deck and buy the cheapest copies across stores.