What happens in a preview season?

Riftbound: the League of Legends trading card game gets a new set about every three months, and the weeks before each release are its preview season. During a preview season, Riot Games and a long list of content creators, professional players and gaming sites show the cards of the coming set a few at a time, so that almost the whole set is known before anyone opens a pack. Riot also calls these weeks spoiler season. This article takes the Radiance season of autumn 2026 as its main example.

When does a preview season start and end?

A preview season lasts about two weeks. The first seasons came just before the Simplified Chinese edition of a set, which was released weeks ahead of the English one. Vendetta was the first set released in English and Chinese on the same day, and since then the daily previews have ended 13 days before the release.

Radiance also had an opening act. On 18 September 2026, a week before the season proper, a few cards were shown on the LCS and LEC broadcasts of League of Legends, among them Neeko, Blending In. Some cards are shown far earlier still: Seraphine, Not Alone and Evelynn, In Control appeared on the broadcast of the Vancouver Regional Qualifier at the end of May 2026.

Who shows the new cards?

Riot opens each season itself and then hands most of the reveals to partners. The Radiance previews began on 25 September 2026 at the Los Angeles Regional Qualifier. On the same day, Riot published the Dev Drop, a video from the developers on the new Legends, mechanics and cards, and The Radiance Overview, an article on the set, its products and its dates. The Dev Drop showed new Legends such as Hexplosives Expert, the Legend of Ziggs. The Vendetta season also opened with a Dev Drop video and an overview article, on 6 July 2026.

From 28 September to 10 October 2026, every day except the weekend of 3 and 4 October, Riot's schedule gave the reveals to more than a hundred partners, and Riot said its list did not hold every one. The partners are of four kinds, and each card below was shown by one of them.

• Content creators, from streamers to cosplayers, each showing a card on their own channel. The streamer Sajam showed Ekko, Revolutionary on 5 October 2026.
• Professional players of League of Legends and their teams. The player G2 Broken Blade showed Riven, Broken Blade on the same day.
• Gaming sites and magazines, such as IGN, Polygon and Game Informer. IGN showed Iron Revenant, the Legend of Mordekaiser, on 1 October 2026.
• Chinese creators, most of them on Bilibili, because Radiance has the same release date in Simplified Chinese as in English. The creator 节能 showed Exemplar of Demacia, the Legend of Jarvan IV, on 28 September 2026.

Where can you follow the reveals?

The official source is Riot's card gallery. During the Radiance season, Riot updated it every day at 5 pm Pacific time with the reveals of the day before, and it asked fans to follow the hashtag #RBRadiance to see each reveal as it happened.

Not every card gets a partner of its own. Riot said so in the Spiritforged season and promised that the cards without an official preview would still reach the gallery, so that the whole set can be seen before the release. In Radiance, about twenty commons and uncommons, such as Entrenched Boar, were seen for the first time in the gallery itself.

On this site, the Radiance previews page shows the season day by day, with the creator or outlet that first showed each card, and the news section has an article for every reveal day.

What does Riot publish at the end of a preview season?

The last days of a season belong to the products and the rules. Riot updated The Radiance Overview on 5 October 2026 and named 16 October 2026 for its final update, with the decklists of both Showdown Decks, Evelynn against Seraphine, and the list of Nexus Night promo cards. Riot said the decklists would follow once all their cards had been revealed.

On 9 October 2026, Riot published the Radiance patch notes for the Core Rules, which take effect on 16 October 2026. The update adds the three new keywords of the set, Deploy, Disarm and Show Off, as rules 830 to 832. On the same day, Riot posted errata for four Radiance cards, among them Elnuk Herd, so some cards are reworded before the set is even released. Origins had its first errata on 28 October 2025, three days before its English release.

When can you play with the new cards?

The first chance is a Pre-Rift event in a store, in the week before the release: for Radiance, from 16 to 22 October 2026. Pre-Rift is played Sealed. Each player gets a kit with a small ready-made deck of 15 cards built around one of the new Legends, five booster packs of the new set and a promo card, and builds a deck from it at the table.

Constructed tournaments wait for the release. The Tournament Rules of 9 October 2026 allow a card in a deck only when it comes from a set that is legal in the format or has the same name as a card from one (rule 601.2.a), and they list Radiance in Standard with its release date of 23 October 2026 (rule 601.3.c.6.a). Where a set comes out on different days in different regions, an event follows the launch date of its own region (rule 601.2.b).

How can you make the most of a preview season?

Use a preview season to choose, not to finish a deck. New Legends and champions are spread over the whole season and the decklists come at the very end, so a deck planned in the first week often changes by the release. Follow the gallery, pick the new Legend you would most like to play and sign up early for a Pre-Rift event, since the seats at each store are limited by the kits it receives.

The Radiance card list holds every Radiance card revealed so far, and the event finder lists the Pre-Rift events near you. In its announcement of 3 August 2026, Riot placed the first preview of Legacy, the set after Radiance, at Convergence Fest in Las Vegas in December 2026, with more previews in January 2027 before its release on 29 January 2027, so the next preview season is already on the calendar.