Riftbound keywords & game actions glossary

Keywords vs game actions

Not everything in this glossary works the same way on a card. Riot's Core Rules split them into two groups, and knowing which you're looking at tells you where to find its rules text. Printed keywords — Empower, Tank, Flow and the rest — appear in brackets on the card itself and are defined in the rules' own Keyword Glossary. They are properties the card carries.

Game actions — Buff, Stun, Mighty — read like ordinary verbs in a card's sentence rather than bracketed labels, which is why they are easy to mistake for plain English. They are not: each has precise rules text defining exactly what it does, and two cards using the same verb do the same thing. That is what makes them worth looking up, and every entry below is paraphrased from those rules rather than from how a card happens to read.

Vendetta's three new mechanics

Empower, Flow and Burn are the three brand-new keywords introduced in Riftbound: Vendetta. They're designed to combo — Burn fills your trash, Flow spends it, and Empower turns a cheap early card into a late-game threat. Each has its own tutorial-style guide: Empower explained, Flow explained and Burn explained.