The Riftbound 2026 Set Schedule - Vendetta Just Landed, Radiance Is Next

Two days ago, on 31 July 2026, a Riftbound set released in English and Simplified Chinese on the same day for the first time. That is the actual headline of Vendetta. Not the nine new Legends, not the three new mechanics, not the 22 rival diptych chase cards. One date.

If you have only ever played TCGs that ship worldwide at once, that sounds like a non-event. It is not. Riftbound spent its first nine months running two separate release calendars, and the gap decided which players got to see a set first, which metagame formed first, and which regional tournament results were even relevant to yours. Vendetta closed it. Here is the whole 2026 schedule, what each set actually put in the box, and what is worth your money on the second day of a new set's life.

Where Riftbound actually stands on 1 August 2026

Quick grounding for anyone arriving late: Riftbound is Riot Games' physical League of Legends trading card game, published by UVS Games in English-speaking regions and Shining Soul in China, with Dave Guskin as game director. It launched in China in August 2025 and in English on 31 October 2025. You take battlefields instead of dealing damage to a face, you pay for things with a separate 12-card rune deck, and the default win is 8 points. If none of that is familiar, start with how to play Riftbound and come back.

2026 is the game's first full release year, and it runs four sets deep: Spiritforged, Unleashed, Vendetta and Radiance. That is a set a quarter, which is a genuinely aggressive cadence for a game that is not yet a year old in English.

The 2026 calendar, set by set

Read the first two columns top to bottom and you can watch the gap close in real time: two months, then four weeks, then zero. That was deliberate. In the February 2026 State of the Game, executive producer Chengran Chai explained the mismatch plainly - the Chinese sets were spaced on a four-month cadence while the English sets ran on three months, and the plan was for the two to meet when Vendetta launched. They did, on schedule.

French is the third calendar and it is still catching up. Origins launched in French on 29 May 2026, Spiritforged and Unleashed both arrived on 24 July, and Vendetta lands there on 23 October - the same day Radiance goes wide everywhere else. Riot's own roadmap frames 23 October as the moment "France reaches global parity with Riftbound's fifth set."

Spiritforged: the set that set the pattern

Spiritforged was the first set after Origins and the first to demonstrate what a Riftbound expansion looks like: a large set, in the low 200s of numbered cards, with a wide champion roster. Riot's announcement pitched it as "200+ new cards"; the printed collector numbering runs to 221.

It brought Equipment as a new card subtype - gear you attach to units that survives the unit dying - plus Gold and Repeat. Champion Decks for Fiora and Rumble were the pick-up-and-play product. The champion list Riot revealed across preview season leaned hard on Shurima and Demacia: Azir, Irelia, Draven, Lucian, Renata Glasc, Sivir, Ezreal, Fiora, Rumble, Jax, Rek'Sai and Ornn.

If you started with Origins and skipped Spiritforged, that Equipment package is the mechanical hole in your collection. It is the one earlier set whose absence you feel when you read a modern decklist.

Unleashed: XP, Ambush and Hunt

Unleashed hit China on 10 April 2026 and English on 8 May, and it is the set that made Riftbound decks think in more than one axis. It added 219 numbered cards, four new Champion Legends built around jungle and stealth identities - Kha'Zix, Lillia, Diana and Ivern - and three mechanics that still shape the format:

• Ambush lets you play a card as a reaction into a battlefield where you already have units. Reinforcements mid-showdown, which meant combat maths stopped being a solved arithmetic problem the moment your opponent had two power open.
• XP is a stored resource you accumulate and spend, and it converts into Levels that other cards read off.
• Hunt earns XP when a card conquers or holds a battlefield, which is Riot deliberately paying you for doing the thing the game already wants you to do.

Riot's own July 2026 tournament rules update tells on how much overhead XP added: the section on tracking resources had to be rewritten specifically to cover XP and floating energy or power at competitive events. When a mechanic forces a policy document update two sets later, it stuck.

Vendetta: the parity set

Vendetta is built around rivalry - Riot's set overview opens with "there is no Shen without Zed. Or no Mel without Ambessa" - and it cashes that theme out mechanically as enemy-colour-pair Legends. Nine new Legends, each pointed at a domain pairing that previously fought each other.

Three new mechanics, in Riot's own words from the Vendetta overview and the Core Rules patch notes:

• Flow is a keyword on spells. It is a permission and an alternate cost at once: pay the Flow cost and you play the spell from your trash, then banish it. One and done. Cards with Flow carry a symbol on the text box specifically to tell you they do something from the trash.
• Burn X takes X cards off the top of your main deck and puts them in your trash. Some cards burn your own deck to fuel synergies, some point it at your opponent's. Riot's patch notes are refreshingly blunt about the tension: burning brings you closer to burning out, but it also stocks your trash with Flow cards.
• Empower is the tentpole. It is an activated ability with a cost that applies an indefinite Empowered status to a unit, gear or legend. Empowered does nothing on its own - it is a state other abilities read. Pay once, and the dependent Empowered ability on that card switches on until something disempowers it.

There is a fourth addition that got less airtime and deserves more: Skip. Vendetta printed the first card that lets a player skip part of their own turn, and Riot had to add a whole new action to the Core Rules to support it. Skip is a replacement effect that replaces the named event or procedure with nothing at all - no triggers, no procedures, nothing. That is a genuinely new lever in a game where the turn structure has been fixed since Origins.

The set also introduces Unit-Gear, a card type that counts as both a unit and gear, and Decrees - a cycle of spells built for domain rivalries, where each domain's decree hits hardest against its opposite colour.

Why one release date matters more than any card in the box

Here is the practical consequence of the split calendar, and why Vendetta closing it changes your week rather than just Riot's press release.

When China played a set two to four months early, every English-language deck discussion started from imported results. You were reading translated lists for a metagame you could not buy into, then watching your own local format arrive pre-solved. That is not inherently fatal - Yu-Gi-Oh! survived a Japan-first calendar for two decades - but it does mean the English player base spends the first month of every set catching up to a conversation that started without them.

It is not a uniquely Riftbound problem either - a staggered regional calendar is normal enough that tracking what ships where is a standing job in most card games, as anyone following the Pokemon TCG set schedule can tell you. What is unusual is a publisher closing the gap inside nine months.

Vendetta is the first set where nobody had that head start. The Pre-Rift weekend ran 24 to 26 July globally, previews opened 6 July and ran to the 18th, and both language versions hit shelves on the 31st. For once the answer to "what is good in this set" is genuinely being worked out by everyone at the same time.

The flip side, and I would rather say it than pretend it away: a synchronised release is also a synchronised demand spike, and Riftbound has an unhappy history with supply. Origins was badly under-printed at English launch - Riot's own launch-learnings post conceded that demand "greatly surpassed our wildest expectations," and Proving Grounds in particular was near-impossible to buy at retail for months. Riot has since run reprints and, for the premium Vendetta products, moved to a randomised drawing system on the official store rather than a first-come rush. Whether that holds up under one global launch instead of two staggered ones is the open question of August 2026, and the second State of the Game - due early this month - is where Riot said it would talk about it.

Vendetta is also a smaller set

Spiritforged shipped 221 numbered cards. Unleashed shipped 219. Vendetta shipped 166.

That is not a rumour or an estimate - it is printed on the cards. Every Vendetta card carries its collector number over 166, and the Overnumber chase cards start at 167. The Vi and Jinx rival diptych at the top of this post reads VEN 167/166 and VEN 168/166, which is a slightly ridiculous and completely intentional flex.

Around that 166-card core sit more than 50 Showcase cards, Overnumbered variants of all nine new Legends complete with artist signatures, and 22 Rival Overnumbers presented as diptychs so a pairing physically lines up when you put the two cards side by side. There is also a Crystal Rose Alt Art run celebrating Wild Rift's returning skinline, and Riot went out of its way to clarify those appear at normal Alt Art frequency and should not be read as Overnumbers.

Whether 166 becomes the new normal is being widely reported as settled. I would not treat it that way yet. Riot has not published a stated set-size policy in any of the official documents I can find, and one smaller set following two large ones is a data point, not a plan. If it matters to you, the early-August State of the Game is where an answer would land.

What changed in the rules and the ban list on 24 July

Vendetta's rules and policy updates went live a week before the set, on 24 July 2026, which is a change Riot made on purpose after player feedback that the Unleashed updates landed too close to Pre-Rift.

Three things you should actually know:

1. Vendetta is Standard-legal. The tournament rules changelog lists it plainly: "Added Vendetta to legal Standard sets."
2. Sideboards are now 10 cards, up from 8. Riot's reasoning was that Vendetta brings more designs aimed at sideboard play and the format has room for more reactive strategising.
3. Three cards left Standard and one Legend left 2v2. Stealthy Pursuer is banned in Standard, along with two battlefields - The Arena's Greatest and Aspirant's Climb. Master Yi, Wuju Bladesman is banned in Constructed 2v2 only, in what is also the creation of a separate 2v2 ban list.

The reasoning on Stealthy Pursuer is worth reading if you like knowing why a card dies: Riot flagged an infinite unit combo with Eye of the Herald and Renata Glasc, Industrialist that could produce infinite Recruits as early as turn three, and judged the problem "likely to get worse over time." The two battlefield bans are more structural - The Arena's Greatest handed the first player an advantage Riot did not want to reinforce, and Aspirant's Climb was stretching round length badly enough to hurt tournament logistics.

That last one is the tell of a young game with a maturing organised play scene. Banning for round length is a tournament-operations decision, not a power-level one.

Radiance, 23 October: what Riot has actually said

Set 5 is Radiance, and it releases 23 October 2026 in English, Chinese and French simultaneously - the first fully global Riftbound launch across all three languages.

Riot revealed the shape of it at RQ Vancouver on 1 June 2026: 180 new cards, 60 Showcase cards, and nine new Champion Legends. Ekko, Seraphine and Evelynn have been named. The other six Legends have not.

The preview and event dates are where I would keep one eyebrow up. Riot's published 2026 roadmap - last edited 1 June - lists Radiance previews beginning 21 September and the Radiance Pre-Rift running 16 to 18 October. The reveal coverage out of Vancouver has previews running 28 September to 9 October and Pre-Rift 16 to 22 October. Those do not agree, and Riot's own roadmap carries an explicit disclaimer that plans change and dates may shift. Treat 23 October as firm and the preview window as approximate until Riot restates it.

Beyond the counts, champion names and dates, nothing about Radiance's mechanics, keywords or product lineup has been confirmed. Anything you read describing Radiance's new mechanics right now is speculation, and there is no official set overview page for it yet.

What to buy right now, honestly

No prices, no pull rates, no market values from me - those move weekly, they vary by region, and half the numbers circulating are secondhand. What I can tell you is what each product is for.

If you have never played: the Showdown Decks. This is Vendetta's genuinely new product and it replaced the usual Champion Deck slot for this set. Shen versus Zed, two complete 56-card decks in one box - each 40-card main deck, 12 runes and three battlefields - plus tokens, two Vendetta boosters and a pair of paper playmats. It is the only Riftbound product designed so that opening one box gives two people a real game against each other, and the two decks are deliberately built as a matchup rather than as two unrelated preconstructs.

If you already play and want to build: boosters, and specifically boosters bought at a store running events. A Vendetta pack is 7 commons, 3 uncommons, 1 foil slot that can be common through epic, 2 slots of rare/epic/alt/special alt/overnumber, and 1 token-rune-or-alt-rune slot.

If you want to play competitively this season: get to a Pre-Rift-adjacent store event and then a Summoner Skirmish. Riot has published the promo structure for the first two Skirmish windows after Vendetta - events start 17 August with Morgana, Vindictive and Illaoi, Prophet of the Great Kraken on the line, and again on 14 September with Swain, Visionary and Kayle, Justified. All while supplies last, which for Riftbound promos is a meaningful caveat - the same "attend to acquire" model that drives Lorcana promo cards, and the same reason store events are where the interesting cardboard lives.

If you are a returning Origins player: you are two sets behind mechanically, not one. Equipment came in Spiritforged, XP and Levels came in Unleashed, and both are load-bearing in current decks. Reading a Vendetta list without knowing what Hunt does will not go well.

What I would skip: chasing a specific Overnumber. There are 22 rival diptychs plus nine signed Legend variants in this set. That is a collection goal, not a purchase.

The rest of the 2026 calendar

Riot's roadmap has the remainder of the year mapped, and the events matter as much as the sets if you actually want to play the game rather than collect it:

• Early August - the second State of the Game. Exact date still being finalised as of publication.
• 17 August - first post-Vendetta Summoner Skirmish window opens.
• 21 to 23 August - Regional Qualifier, Barcelona.
• 4 to 6 September - Regional Qualifier, Singapore, and PAX West.
• 14 September - second Summoner Skirmish window.
• 21 September - Radiance previews begin, per the roadmap.
• 25 to 27 September - Regional Qualifier, Los Angeles. The last RQ of 2026.
• Mid-October - China's Vendetta Major Tournament.
• 16 to 18 October - Radiance Pre-Rift.
• 23 October - Radiance releases everywhere, and French Vendetta lands.
• 27 to 29 November - DreamHack Stockholm. 4 to 6 December - PAX Unplugged.

Regional Championship venues and dates were still unannounced as of the roadmap's last edit on 1 June 2026.

Quick reference

• Current set: Vendetta (VEN), released 31 July 2026 in English and Chinese simultaneously. 166 numbered cards, nine new Legends, 50+ Showcase cards.
• New Vendetta mechanics: Flow (play spells from your trash), Burn (mill from your main deck to your trash), Empower (pay a cost for an indefinite Empowered state), plus the Skip action and the Unit-Gear card type.
• Standard-legal as of 24 July 2026: Origins supplemental (OGS), Origins (OGN), Spiritforged (SFD), Unleashed (UNL), Vendetta (VEN).
• Banned in Standard: Stealthy Pursuer, The Arena's Greatest, Aspirant's Climb. Banned in 2v2: Master Yi, Wuju Bladesman.
• Sideboard: 10 cards maximum, up from 8.
• Next set: Radiance, 23 October 2026, all three languages. 180 cards, 60 Showcase, nine Legends. Ekko, Seraphine and Evelynn confirmed.
• Not confirmed: Radiance mechanics, keywords, products, and six of its nine Legends.

If you play other TCGs on a rotation clock, the closest structural comparison is Magic's Standard, where the format is defined by a rolling set window rather than a fixed list. Riftbound's Standard is currently the most recent five to eight sets - which means nothing has rotated out yet, and the first Riftbound rotation is a conversation for a future year, not this one. Enjoy the part where the whole card pool is legal. It does not last.