By Terry Miller

Hello, this past weekend I had the opportunity to go to PAX Unplugged in Philadelphia for Riftbound. I was able to meet a lot of new people in the community while also seeing the Riot staff again. I was also fortunate enough to attend small creator events hosted by Diana over the weekend.

My first event I attended was a creator learn-to-play event, which we thought was required for later events, but it turns out you just have to know how to play. Regardless, we had a good time. I think this was my first time actually playing Volibear (sorry to the Volibear lovers), but it turns out he's pretty decent in trial deck free-for-all. Something I really like about this game's FFA is that when you win, you remove yourself from the game, and everyone else can keep playing, so you don't have to ruin someone else's time in any certain order. 

After the learn to play, the weekend started off with a Spiritforged panel on Friday, showcasing some new cards for the upcoming set. This also revealed that we're getting overnumbered and signatures for cards besides legends this time, which is huge for players who want to bling out their deck. Additionally, the panel announced Riot's future plans for their tournament structure and upcoming regionals around the world.

This was big news for the competitive scene as before, competitive news was released fairly soon to the tournament dates. Now, we know tournaments up to 6 months in advance, and players have adequate time to prepare for these trips. I also hope to see tournaments starting to cap out at 2048 players, creating even more competition and excitement in the scene while also allowing for more people to participate.

During the panel we also got a first look at sets 3, 4, and 5, all coming out in 2026. Overall, the future of the competitive scene looks incredibly promising, with set two spoilers looking to add a nice bit of power to the game without making previous cards obsolete. This is often one of the biggest hardships a game faces: trying to balance their game between sets to still make the older cards worth playing.

After the panel, we met some more people and then went into the first creator-sealed event for the weekend. There were 8 of us, and this was a fun time; the 2 boxes that were opened for our event were really good for being sealed, having an overnumbered Viktor, and having an Aurora floating around. Turns out Aurora is good in sealed when you only have 25 cards instead of 39 to try and dig through to find it. My deck did okay during this event, going 2-0 before we concluded for the day. I had a Rek'Sai name tag, and all my cards were value units and spells, so it felt very fitting.

The events continued like this for the rest of the weekend. I, unfortunately, didn't get to play any more sealed events, but I had a great time just being around the game and getting to meet new people and help people learn how to play. As always, the Riot staff was phenomenal all weekend and did everything they could to make sure everyone had a good time.