After Riftbound's chaotic Spiritforged pre-release, Riot has reworked how you buy the League of Legends TCG

Riftbound feels like it’s been a blessing and a curse for Riot. The blessing? The game is easily the best new TCG I’ve played in years, with bold ideas and fast-paced action that’s a welcome switch from Magic: The Gathering. The curse? It simply can’t seem to get distribution right. At launch some players were missing rares, the Arcane pre-order sets have been delayed, and chaos on the company’s official merch store during the Spiritforged presale left fans furious. But Riot has devised a new system to get your hands on the League of Legends card game’s latest gear, and I’m really hoping it works.

Up until now, pre-purchasing anything Riftbound has been a bit of a free-for-all. Spiritforged – the League of Legends spinoff’s next set – sold out in minutes, with game director Dave Guskin admitting that Riot struggled to combat bots despite scaling up stock by 50%. “We don’t have all the solutions, and it’ll be an ongoing process, but we’re deeply invested in improving here.”

In an attempt to both manage bad actors and keep things moving, Riot has confirmed that it’s adopting to a “drawing-based system.” You’ll need a Riot Account to participate (you need one for the store anyway), and you’ll be able to sign up for different product pools (in this case the Fiora and Rumble decks, and a Spiritforged booster display). You’ll then be selected at random and sent a link to purchase your merch. The link is valid for 24 hours and will be sent to the email affiliated with your account, so make sure you have access to it.

From here, you’ll be able to make your purchase. You can only buy one of each product, and if you’re selected for multiple, you must purchase all of the products you signed up for. So, for example, if you signed up to buy the Fiora and Rumble decks, and the booster display, you have to buy the lot – you can’t ditch the Rumble deck at the last second. Similarly, you can choose to buy none of them, but I suggest making sure you’re ready to commit.

“The Spiritforged preorder was not acceptable and did not hit the quality bar that we hold ourselves to,” Riot writes. “Our goal is to create a fair and equitable process to get our product to the greatest number of people as possible. That includes ensuring the product does not get into the hands of bots. We take this seriously.”

So here’s the nitty gritty: the Spiritforged drawing sign ups open at 9am PST / 12pm EST / 5pm GMT / 6pm CEST on Tuesday, February 3 (today). They close at the same time on Thursday, February 5. Purchase links will be sent to players from Monday, February 9. There are three separate links for you to sign up to for each product, which you can find here.

“We will collect your feedback, see how this performs, and adjust this process to improve this experience in the future,” Riot says. “This isn’t the end of our work: We’re continually iterating on this, because we want each purchasing experience to be smoother than the last.”

I have my fingers crossed that this works. Riftbound is easily one of Riot’s best projects to date, and it’s gutting that fans haven’t been able to get their hands on it. We’ll have to wait and see how this pans out, but either way, I’m excited to see what Spiritforged has to offer.