Riftbound turns one at the end of this month. Riot Games' League of Legends card game launched in English on October 31, 2025, following an August 2025 debut in China, and the twelve months since have handed collectors the clearest lesson in print-run economics any new game has offered in years. Not because Riot got everything right. Because it got one specific thing wrong, corrected it in public, and the price chart recorded every step of the correction.
The fifth set, Radiance, lands October 23. That makes this a good week to read the chart before buying into it. Somebody who paid for an Origins booster display in March 2026 spent roughly double what somebody else paid in May. Nothing about the cardboard changed in between. The only thing that changed was how much of it existed.
A One-Year-Old Game With Nine Sets Already Mapped
Riftbound is developed by Riot, with game director Dave Guskin, who previously ran Legends of Runeterra, and executive producer Chengran Chai. UVS Games publishes the English version worldwide; Shining Soul handles China. That split matters more than it sounds, because it has produced two different release calendars that are only now converging.
The set list so far:
- Origins (OGN) — October 31, 2025, 298 cards
- Spiritforged (SFD) — February 13, 2026, 221 cards
- Unleashed (UNL) — May 8, 2026, 219 cards
- Vendetta (VEN) — July 31, 2026, 166 cards
- Radiance (RAD) — October 23, 2026, 180 cards
Vendetta was the first set to drop in English and Simplified Chinese on the same day, which closed the import arbitrage window that existed for the first three sets. Looking forward, Legacy (LGC) is dated January 29, 2027 with 346 cards, The Reckoning (REC) April 30, 2027 with 264, and two more sets are penciled in for the back half of 2027.
Read that cadence carefully, because it is the single most important fact for anyone thinking about Riftbound as a store of value. Four sets a year, each with a couple hundred cards, means roughly 900 new cards annually competing for shelf space and attention. A game on that schedule does not create scarcity by accident. It creates scarcity only when the publisher chooses to, or fails to print enough.
The Origins Price Curve, Start to Finish
Origins shipped at an MSRP of about $120 for a 24-pack booster display. Each pack holds 14 cards: seven commons, three uncommons, two foil rares or better, one additional foil, and a token.
Then the supply problem hit. Origins launched short, and not quietly short. Riot also dealt with cards arriving with rough edges and with collation errors that left some boxes with fewer rares than the configuration promised. The company sent replacement cards, capped at three per person and six per household, which is the kind of remedy you only build when the complaint volume is real.
Scarcity did what scarcity does. Secondary prices on sealed Origins displays ran to roughly $295 by August 2025, around $320 in the November holiday stretch, and peaked near $337 in March 2026, with individual sales reported as high as $400. At the top of that run, a product with a $120 sticker was trading at nearly three times retail less than five months after release.
Riot then printed more. A reprint wave in late April and early May 2026 took sealed displays down to roughly $248 in April and into the $184 to $192 range by May. That is about a 45 percent drop in nine weeks. Weekly sales volume tripled over the same period, from roughly 150 boxes a week to more than 400, which tells you the demand was always there; the inventory was not.
The part most collectors miss is what happened next. Origins has drifted back up. Recent sales cluster in the $230 to $260 band, with the sealed display sitting around $251 as of early October 2026, and at least one outlier sale at $599.99 in early August. The reprint did not permanently reset the price. It flushed out the speculative premium, then the set went quiet while Riot's attention moved to three newer sets, and a slow out-of-print drift took over.
That is the full shape of a modern TCG first set: launch shortage, speculative spike, reprint crash, then a gradual climb as the publisher moves on. If you can recognize that curve, you know roughly when to buy and when to sit still.
Radiance Lands October 23, and One Door Is Already Shut
Radiance is a 180-card set with 66 Showcase variants and nine Legends, eight of which have been revealed: Seraphine, Ekko, Evelynn, Jarvan IV, Ziggs, Orianna, Riven, and K'Sante. It introduces a new top rarity tier above Overnumbered called Radiance Ultimate Rare, and a Recruit keyword that arrives with Seraphine. Alongside the boosters, there is an Evelynn versus Seraphine Showdown Decks product with two 56-card preconstructed decks plus playmats and accessories. Pre-Rift prerelease events run October 16 through 22.
Here is the part worth paying attention to. Riot distributed part of the Radiance booster display allocation through its merch store by lottery. Registration was free and open September 25 through 30, winners were drawn October 5, selected entrants got a direct purchase link with a 24-hour window, and fulfillment begins October 23. One display per winner, at $119.99 or 127.99 euros plus shipping.
If you are reading this now, that door is closed. The remaining route is a local game store or a distributor, and distributor preorders are not at MSRP. Miniature Market has the Radiance booster box listed at $149.99 with a limit of four per customer. European pricing on Cardmarket runs roughly 120 to 133 euros per box, with Showdown Decks around 33 to 37 euros and single boosters just under 6 euros.
What a Lottery Actually Tells You
A publisher-run draw for a $119.99 box is not a marketing gimmick. It is an admission that demand at MSRP exceeds supply at MSRP, and that the publisher would rather hand the gap to players by raffle than let it accrue to resellers through a first-come queue. For collectors, the signal is twofold: Riot still cannot print to demand on launch week, and Riot is now actively working to keep launch-week scarcity from turning into a secondary market premium.
Both of those things point the same direction. Launch-week Riftbound sealed is a bad place to park money. The Origins chart already showed what happens to a spike once the presses catch up, and Riot has shown it is willing to run them.
How to Buy Into a Young TCG Without Getting Burned
A few rules that the Riftbound year supports directly.
Treat the first print run of any set as temporary. On a four-set-a-year calendar, a publisher that cares about player access will reprint. Price your purchase as if the reprint is coming, because it usually is.
Buy singles for the cards you actually want. With 66 Showcase variants and a brand-new top rarity in Radiance, the odds of pulling the specific card you care about from a $120 to $150 box are poor. Singles are priced against the same supply you are gambling on, without the variance.
Let launch week pass. The post-reprint trough is where Origins was cheapest, and that trough showed up about six months after release. Nobody can promise the same timing for Radiance, but the mechanism is the same.
Watch for the out-of-print drift instead. The quieter opportunity in Riftbound is not a new set. It is a two-year-old set that the publisher has stopped reprinting while shipping four new ones. Origins climbing from $185 back to $251 is that pattern starting.
Keep the sealed-versus-open decision honest. Origins graded sealed displays barely trade at all. There is no established slab market for this game yet, which means a sealed box is worth what another buyer will pay for the contents, not what a certification adds.
Key Takeaways
Riftbound's first year is a complete case study in a short window: a $120 box ran to $337 on a launch shortage, fell 45 percent in nine weeks when the presses caught up, then drifted back to around $251 as attention moved on. Radiance arrives October 23 with a lottery-rationed MSRP channel and distributor preorders about 25 percent above sticker. The game has four sets a year and nine mapped through 2027, which is a calendar built for players, not for scarcity. Collect it because you want the cards. If you want the sealed trade, wait for the reprint and buy the trough.
Prices move quickly in this category and every figure here is an estimate drawn from recent sales data and current listings. Check live sales before you buy or sell.