Executive Producer Chengran Chai proves he’s no pushover in our pre-launch Riftbound showdown.
This week, during a visit to Riot Games’ Los Angeles office, Riftbound executive producer Chengran Chai gave me the business. Over the past few months, I’ve been on a mission to beat the Riftbound developers at their own game, and Chai was set to be my next victim. Unfortunately for me, the TCG veteran decided it was time to put me in my place. I managed to take down a few Rioters, but Chai crushed my deck, and subsequently, my hopes and dreams.
Having just landed on a flight from China a few hours prior, Chai arrived at our play session no worse for wear. While supporting Riot’s business in China over the last six years, Chai has developed a foolproof way to overcome jet lag: “You have to stay awake, if you give in and nap during the day, there’s no recovering,” he says. “I should be awake anyway; it’s almost 6 am in China.”
Between standing up Riot’s Chinese office, launching Riftbound there in August, and supporting that country’s quickly evolving tournament scene, Chai has spent much of the last year traveling back and forth between opposite sides of the world. After the launch of Riftbound’s base set, Origins, Chai has attended three of the four regional events in China. I can only imagine how exhausted he must be, but he doesn’t show it. Chai’s only complaint is how much time he spends apart from his kids. “Four straight weekends away from the family is a little too much.”
For our match, I get to choose one of the three Champion decks: Jinx, Lee Sin, or Viktor. Having had a lot of experience with the Jinx and Viktor archetype from playing with the Trial decks, I opt for Lee Sin. In hindsight, that was my first mistake. Chai chooses Viktor, and we get started.
As we sleeve up our decks (in Riftbound’s smooth-shuffling foiled art sleeves), I ask Chai how he feels about this week’s global launch, having already launched the game once in China. Is launching Riftbound easier the second time? “It’s probably more pressure,” he says. “I think it’s the sheer amount of attention and passion from players who have been waiting patiently for us to launch the game. Now the pressure is on. I think I can speak for the team that we’re both excited and a little bit nervous about what’s to come.”
As I start thumbing through my deck to familiarize myself with the cards, I get a little bit nervous myself. Lee Sin’s deck is all about buffing units to brute force your way into battlefields, and occasionally spending those buffs for tactical effects. Meanwhile, the Viktor deck employs an aggro strategy to flood battlefields with loads of low-cost units. With Chai winning the dice roll and opting to go first, I know I’ll be in for a tough game if he has a strong start. When he announces he wants to keep all four cards in his opening hand, I know I’m in big, big trouble.
While I panic, Chai explains how the Chinese launch has helped ensure the global launch is a smoother experience for the company and for Riftbound players. Once the game was in players’ hands, Riot received a lot of feedback about confusing mechanics, inconsistencies in the rules, and vague interactions. The rules have since been revised and tightened up so that by this week’s global launch, new players won’t experience those early pain points.
Chai has had the opportunity to see firsthand how the game and the community around it have evolved since launch. Premiering Riftbound in China first makes it unique among TCGs. “Chinese players typically get games later than the rest of the world,” Chai explains. “Their meta is basically whatever the meta was six to 12 months prior. There’s not a lot of fun in terms of construction, which is not a great experience for them. Now they get to do it before everybody else.” Chai says creating a better environment for Chinese players to do their own deckbuilding and theorycrafting is one of the reasons Riot decided to launch the game there before bringing it to the rest of the world.
For the first few turns, I’m able to keep pace with Chai. He plays a Soaring Scout, I play a Stalwart Poro and buff it. He conquers one battlefield, I conquer the other. I’m matching his Might and earning points, but going second means I need to turn a corner and take control of the game eventually, and three turns in, I’m still looking for my opportunity to tilt things in my favor. On my next turn, I play my champion and accelerate him, but I make a mathematical error when adding up my buffs, and chai seizes the opportunity to send Lee Sin to my trash pile in the ensuing battle. Chai calls the play a “bold move,” which is a nice way of saying “very bad.” This ends up being a turning point in the game from which I’m unable to recover. Damn my inept arithmetic.
Following this week’s global launch, Chai anticipates the meta will evolve in completely new directions. While players will inevitably gravitate towards Legends with proven tournament results like Kai’Sa and Master Yi, he also expects that the players with a lot of deckbuilding experience in other games will be motivated to crack the meta with their own inventions. “There’s gonna be a lot of folks who are gonna be like ‘I’m gonna figure out that Teemo deck,’ or ‘Hey, why aren’t people playing Leona? I’m going to figure out the Leona deck that’s going to crush people.’ I’m excited to see it.”
Fans are excited too. So excited, in fact, that demand for Origins has far exceeded the supply. Tickets for the first US regional qualifier in Dallas went on sale on October 6, weeks before the global launch, and sold out almost immediately. Riot released a second wave of preorders on its web shop last week, which sold out faster than the company anticipated. For this weekend’s launch, the hardest part of Riftbound may just be finding cards to play with.
Chai says Riot wants to ensure there’s a healthy balance of product availability for Riftbound. “With any TCG, you’ve got to make sure it’s accessible for players to acquire at a reasonable price,” he says. “But at the same time, once players are invested in the TCG, we also don’t want to see the value of cards drop or fluctuate significantly.” This perspective surprised me. While other TCGs like Pokemon and Magic typically refuse to acknowledge that the secondary card market even exists, Chai is upfront about Riot’s interest in card values. “It’s real dollars players have spent,” he says. “We want to make sure [their collection] is keeping its value, or not greatly declining in value.”
Chai says predicting demand is always more of an art than a science, and that finding the right balance requires an understanding of the realities of retail and distribution. “If I’m a very interested player and I want to buy two boxes, I’ll go to three of my nearest stores and I’ll tell them I want five boxes, because I know I’m not going to get two,” he explains. “Each store might go to their distributor and say ‘I really only want 60, but I’m going to ask for 200.’ We see upstream these big, big numbers, and now we have to decipher. If you actually give everybody what they want, the market reacts very poorly. We want to solve the accessibility aspect, but it’s going to take some time.”
Time is exactly what I’m running out of. Chai has been creeping up to seven points turn after turn by stacking every unit he can onto a single battleground and trusting I won’t be able to muster up enough Might to break his defenses, while I’ve been building a buffed-up army at my base and preparing to make one big play to wrest back control of the game. The ace up my sleeve is the Wildclaw Shaman, a three-Might unit that can be accelerated by taking another unit’s buff —- and I have two of them. It’s not much, but it’s all I’ve got. I play down both Shaman, and move my entire army onto the battlefield Chai controls.
Spells start a-slingin’. Chai Stupefies one of my Shamans, but I give it Discipline to boost it back up. Chai reveals a hidden card, Consult The Past, and draws two cards. Is he looking for an out? Does he have an answer to my army? I immediately get my answer when he plays Back to Back, giving two of his units +2 Might, and ensuring at least one of his units survives to hold the battleground. If I had conquered here, I would have had a fighting chance, but with no more gas in the tank, I have no choice but to concede and take my well-deserved L. My quest to take down the entire Riftbound team one by one has ended… for now.
This is just the beginning of Riftbound for me, and for players all around the world. There’s nothing like a new TCG launch, but as Chai says, a launch is just a moment. “After that, you’ve got to follow through.” Between organized play at the local store level, regional qualifiers, collector items like the Arcane box set and Worlds Bundle, and the collective card game expertise of the dev team, Riftbound seems to have everything going for it, and I can’t wait to start this journey when the game launches this Friday. And to Chai: sleep with one eye open, if in fact you sleep at all, because I’m coming back for revenge, and I’m bringing a Kai’Sa deck.
