Riftbound’s first Regional Championship is in Europe! Everything you have to know about the event
The first-ever Regional Championship for Riftbound is happening this weekend 6-8 November 2026. Let's dive into the specifics of what you need to do to compete there, what the tournament structure is, what prizes you can win, and many more!
Here you can find my sources, and let's get into it!
How to Qualify?
In order to compete at Regional Championships, regardless of whether they are in EU or USA, you have to be qualified. You can obtain such a qualification through two main means.
The first is competing at Regional Championship Qualifiers, where the top 64 players earn that qualification to the RC. Currently, you can get up to 2 Qualifications, one for US and one for EU.
Another path is competing at Showdown tournaments where a variable number of qualifications is given out, depending on the size of the event and depending on the number of people attending it has a different rank:
Tier 1: 512+ players
Tier 2: 256-511 players
Tier 3: 129-255 players
All in all, you can get up to 2 Qualifications total, regardless of the means through which you've obtained them.
The Format of the Event
The structure of the tournament is as follows:
The Standard format
Legal cards include all the cards from the first set Origins to Riftbound's fifth set, Radiance, excluding cards banned.
Friday, November 6
6 Swiss rounds
Players with 12 or more match points advance to Day 2
Saturday, November 7
6 additional Swiss rounds
Top 8 advances to single elimination
Sunday, November 8
Quarterfinals, Semifinals, and Finals
What can you win?
The prizes go down to 64th and include variable amounts of money, but also special event-exclusive promos and playmats.
Moreover, the top 8 all qualify to the World Championship of Riftbound!
However, some other prizes are the talk of the town.
If you don't know the BestOf system, I highly suggest you check out this piece here.
While Showdowns have normal Metal promos and RQs have special foil BestOf promos, RCs are to have Overnumbered BestOf promos - which are said to be more expensive than BestOfs by an order of magnitude. These promos are going to be considerably more expensive than even getting the first place monetary prize.
Normally, if you're the best of a single legend, you get such a promo. The twist for this event would be that you also need to at least make Day 2 at 4-2 or better, but the classic rules would apply. But here's the twist.
In order to celebrate the highest level of competition, the rules have changed. Now, the best 58 players will redraft those ON BestOfs, regardless of what legend they played! This heavily incentivises finding and playing the best deck without the usual stipulation that favours choosing niche, underplayed legends.
However, on top of that, you can *also* get the RQ-style BestOf legend if you, predictably, finish as the best of that given Legend - assuming you Day 2 and that Legend is from any of the last 3 sets.
Needless to say, finishing 58th and getting the ON BestOf, in terms of prize money, is miles ahead of actually finishing first. Although the person who does finish first, will take the best value ON BestOf and will likely walk out a millionaire or close to it.
More Extra Stipulations
For this event only, there are more rules policy updates.
First, you cannot concede a match. That's it. This seems super tricky to enforce, but will filter out a good percentage of people who would otherwise do that. This minimises tendencies to collude for those BestOfs.
In a similar vein, a match that would end in a draw, ends in a draw. One person cannot concede to the other if the match were to end in a draw.
This event will also be played with open decklists. While this shouldn't be super impactful as in Riftbound you know what you play against immediately, knowing specifics of the opposing list gives you more comfort of not getting blown out by an obscure tech you may not have seen. However, naturally this also means that you won't blow someone out with a niche tech you'd come up with, so there are two sides to that coin.
However, you can still tactically concede a game when you don't want to lose the clock and you know the opponent is heavily advantaged
Coverage
You will be able to watch the whole thing live!
You can catch the action live on Riftbound’s YouTube and Twitch channels starting at:
10:00 AM CET
1:00 AM PST
8:00 AM GMT
The desk will feature:
Hosts: Amy Wosley & Barcode
Play-by-Play: James O'Leary, Shai Burton, Lothar
Color commentators: Leonard Köning & Riftbound Senior Designer Aaron Barich
What's next?
I cannot wait to tune into the action and see what the best players in the world have cooked up. With fewer incentives to choose a specific legend and more focus on taking down the event, this might be the first time players will be 100% focus on breaking the metagame!
I hope to see you there live in chat! Cheers!