What do the most common Riftbound terms mean?

Riftbound: the League of Legends trading card game has a vocabulary of its own. A few words, such as champion and Ganking, come from League of Legends. Others, such as Legend, showdown and the Chain, are terms of Riftbound's own rules, and everyday words such as hold, ready and recycle have a precise meaning there. This glossary groups the most common terms by topic.

What are the parts of a Riftbound deck called?

A Riftbound deck has four parts, and a few more words describe how they fit together in a legal deck.

• Legend. The champion card a deck is built around, called the Champion Legend in the rules. It starts the game in play and stays there.
• Domain. One of the six families of cards: Fury, Calm, Mind, Body, Chaos and Order. A Legend has two, and every card in the deck has to fit them, except Colorless cards, which fit any deck.
• Chosen champion. A champion unit with the Legend's champion name, set aside in your Champion zone and playable from there as if it were in your hand.
• Main Deck. The deck you draw from: at least 40 cards, the chosen champion included, with at most three copies of a card with the same name.
• Rune Deck. Exactly 12 runes, kept apart from the Main Deck.
• Battlefields. The places the players fight over. Each player brings three, and in a one-on-one game one of each player's three is in play.

A unit stays in play and fights, and a champion unit is a League of Legends champion. A spell does what it says and goes to the trash. Gear stays in play, and Equipment is gear you attach to a unit. A signature card belongs to one champion, and only a deck led by that champion's Legend may hold it, three at most. A token is a game piece, most often a unit or gear, that a card creates during play.

The row below shows the parts of an Akali deck from Vendetta: the Legend Rogue Assassin in Fury and Calm, Akali, Silent as chosen champion, the signature spell Shuriken Flip, the basic runes Fury Rune and Calm Rune of its two domains, and the battlefield Kinkou Temple.

What do rune, Energy and Power mean?

Runes pay for everything else, and Energy and Power are the two resources they make.

• Channel. To put runes from the top of your Rune Deck into play. You channel two at the start of each turn.
• Exhaust and ready. To exhaust a card is to turn it sideways, usually to pay a cost, and to ready it is to turn it upright. Everything you control is readied at the start of your turn.
• Energy. What pays the number in a card's top left corner. Exhausting a rune gives 1 Energy, which belongs to no domain.
• Power. What pays the domain symbols under that number. Recycling a rune gives 1 Power of the rune's domain.
• Recycle. To put a card on the bottom of its deck: a rune goes to the Rune Deck, any other card to the Main Deck.

One rune can give both in the same turn, Energy first and then Power, because an exhausted rune can still be recycled. The other way round does not work, since a recycled rune has left the board.

What do conquer, hold and Victory Score mean?

These are the words for points, and points decide almost every game of Riftbound.

• Victory Score. The points that win the game: 8 in most modes, and 11 per team in Magma Chamber, the two-versus-two mode.
• Conquer. To take control of a battlefield, usually by moving units there and being the only player with units left. You keep control for as long as you have units there. Conquering scores 1 point.
• Hold. To still control a battlefield in your Beginning Phase, at the start of your turn. Holding scores 1 point too. Each player scores a battlefield at most once per turn, either way.
• Final point. The winning point. Conquering gives it only if you have scored every battlefield that turn, and otherwise you draw a card instead. Holding has no such limit.
• Burn out. What happens when you must draw or otherwise move more cards out of your Main Deck than it holds: your trash is shuffled back in as your deck, and an opponent of your choice gains 1 point.

What happens in a showdown and a combat?

Showdowns and combats usually start when units move to a battlefield.

• Move. In your Main Phase you exhaust a unit to move it from your base to a battlefield, or back. Your base holds your runes, your gear and your units that are not at a battlefield.
• Showdown. When your units arrive at a battlefield you do not control, a showdown opens there. Starting with the player who moved in, the players take turns to play cards with Action or Reaction until all pass in a row. The turn to act is called focus.
• Combat. When enemy units are there, the showdown is the first step of a combat. The player who moved in is the attacker and the other is the defender.
• Might. A unit's strength, in its top right corner. In combat each player adds up the Might of their units and deals that much damage to the other player's units.
• Kill and heal. A unit with damage equal to or above its Might is killed, or dies in card text, and goes to the trash, your discard pile. Units heal after each combat and at the end of each turn.
• Recall. To send a unit to its base without moving it. When a defender survives, the surviving attackers are recalled.
• Stun. A stunned unit deals no combat damage this turn.
• Buff and Mighty. A buff is a counter worth +1 Might, one per unit unless a card says otherwise. A unit is Mighty while its Might is 5 or more.

What do Action, Reaction and other keywords mean?

A keyword is a short name for an ability, printed on a colored highlight. By default you play cards only in your own Main Phase while nothing else is happening, and the keywords Action and Reaction change this.

• The Chain. The zone where a card or ability waits while it is being played. When its text is carried out, it resolves. While anything is on the Chain, only Reactions can be played.
• Action. The card can also be played during showdowns, on any player's turn.
• Reaction. The card can be played whenever an Action can, and also while something is on the Chain, and it resolves first. It is how you answer a spell before it takes effect.
• Accelerate. You pay 1 Energy and 1 Power of the unit's domain extra, and the unit enters ready instead of exhausted.
• Assault and Shield. Assault 2 gives +2 Might while the unit attacks, and Shield 2 gives +2 Might while it defends. Without a number, each gives +1.
• Tank. Lethal damage has to be assigned to this unit before its controller's other units without Tank.
• Ganking. The unit may move from one battlefield straight to another.
• Deathknell. An effect that happens when the card dies.
• Hidden. For 1 Power of any domain you place the card facedown at a battlefield you control, and from the next turn you may play it from there without paying its cost, even on your opponent's turn.
• Temporary. The unit or gear is killed at the start of its controller's Beginning Phase, before scoring.

In the row below, Sharkling has Accelerate and Assault 4, Sunlit Guardian has Shield and Tank, Master Yi, Honed has Ganking, Watchful Sentry draws you a card with Deathknell, and Pakaa Cub has Hidden.

What do Duel, Match, Sealed and Showcase mean?

The last group of words comes from the ways Riftbound is played and collected.

• Mulligan. Each player draws four cards before the first turn and may set up to two aside, draw that many and recycle the ones set aside.
• Duel and Match. A Duel is one game with each player's battlefield picked at random. A Match is the best of three games, and players choose their battlefield for each game.
• Constructed and Sealed. In Constructed you bring a deck you built beforehand. In Sealed each player builds a deck at the event from six booster packs.
• Showcase. The hexagonal gem of collector printings, such as alternate art, overnumbered and signed cards. They play exactly like the standard card.
• Signed and signature. A signed card is a collector printing with the artist's signature. A signature card is a card tied to one champion for deck building.

Several of these terms are printed on the card itself: the Energy cost and the Power cost in the top left corner, the Might of a unit in the top right corner and, on collector printings, the Showcase gem at the foot of the frame, as the article on each part of a Riftbound card shows. Every card also prints the code of its set, such as OGN for Origins and SFD for Spiritforged, and the article on set codes and abbreviations lists them all. The Core Rules on Riot's Rules Hub give the full wording of every term.