Riftbound Barcelona Meta: Who Actually Made Day 2

Riot published the full Legend breakdown from Regional Qualifier Barcelona, and it is two columns of raw counts: how many people registered each Champion Legend on Saturday, and how many were still playing it on Sunday.

It is also two columns that want to be three. Divide the second by the first and you get a conversion rate - the share of each Legend's pilots who actually made Day 2 - and that number tells a different story from the one you get by reading either column on its own. The most-played Legend and the best-converting Legend happen to be the same card here, which is not guaranteed. The Legend that won is neither.

What Barcelona was

Regional Qualifier Barcelona ran 21 to 23 August 2026 at Fira de Barcelona, and Riot's own preview framed it as the event where "Spain sees the first Vendetta Regional Qualifier kick off the new set's competitive season." It carried a $25,000 prize pool with $6,000 to the champion, plus Regional Championship invitations - a Top 64 finish is the invite, and the tournament rules post covers what the enforcement level at an event this size actually switches on.

Two numbers frame everything below. 2,130 players registered a Legend on Saturday. 379 came back on Sunday. Riot's phrasing is "over 2,130 competitors battling it out on Saturday, and 379 continuing the fight on Sunday"; the published Legend table accounts for exactly 2,130 Day 1 entries and exactly 379 Day 2 entries, and every percentage in it checks out against those two totals.

This was also the first Regional Qualifier held under the ban list that took effect 24 July 2026 - Stealthy Pursuer and the battlefields The Arena's Greatest and Aspirant's Climb out of Standard, with Master Yi, Wuju Bladesman banned in 2v2 Constructed only. The 2026 set schedule has the full list and Riot's stated reasoning.

The full field: 41 Legends

Forty-one distinct Champion Legends were registered. Here is every one of them, with the conversion column added.

The Day 1 and Day 2 counts and percentages are Riot's. The Converted column is Day 2 divided by Day 1, rounded to one decimal.

Conversion is the column Riot did not print

The field-wide conversion rate is 379 of 2,130, or 17.8%. That is the bar. Anything above it gained share overnight; anything below it lost share.

Kennen converted at 30.0%, the highest of the 37 Legends with 10 or more Day 1 pilots. It was already the most-played Legend at 12.7% of Saturday's field, and by Sunday it was 21.4% - it grew its share of the room by two thirds while the room shrank by 82%. Riot's own write-up calls it "perhaps the deck of the event."

Eleven of those 37 Legends beat the 17.8% baseline: Kennen, Master Yi (Wuju Bladesman), Irelia, Rek'Sai, Rengar, Azir, Kha'Zix, Diana, LeBlanc, Ezreal and Lux. Everything else in the table lost ground.

The compression at the top is the most useful single read. The four most-played Legends on Saturday - Kennen, Master Yi (WB), Irelia and Rek'Sai - were 34.8% of Day 1 between them and 48.8% of Day 2. Kennen and Master Yi alone were a third of Sunday's field at 33.8%. A field that started reasonably wide narrowed hard.

Two things the conversion column does not prove, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It does not separate deck strength from pilot strength - a Legend played disproportionately by strong players will convert well regardless of the cards. And it says nothing about how those players then finished, because Riot published a Day 2 headcount rather than a Day 2 record. Treat it as "who survived Saturday", which is what it measures, not "what is best".

The Top 8

Five distinct Legends filled the eight slots. Kennen took three, Master Yi (Wuju Bladesman) took two, and Ornn, Azir and Rengar took one each.

Riot published all eight of those decklists alongside 33 "Best-Of" lists - each one the player who finished highest among everyone piloting that Legend. It is 33 rather than 41 because Best-Of prizing now covers only Spiritforged, Unleashed and Vendetta Legends; the Barcelona preview says Origins and Proving Grounds "have ended as Best-Ofs," which is why the second most-played Legend in the room, the Proving Grounds Master Yi, has no Best-Of list. Four of the Top 8 also hold a Best-Of, so the article carries 37 distinct decklists across 41 list blocks.

Every Best-Of list is tagged with its rank in the form #1/42, and most of those denominators match the Day 1 counts in the table above. Two do not. The Vi list is tagged #1/34 against a Day 1 count of 40, and DSG Prismaticism's Rengar list is printed twice, identical card for card, once as #1/26 and once as #1/96 - and 26 is Rengar's Day 2 count, not his Day 1. Read the denominators as labels, not as a cross-check on the table; the table checks out on its own arithmetic.

The two Master Yis are different cards

The table has two Master Yi rows and they are not a duplication error. Master Yi, WB is Wuju Bladesman, the Legend from the Proving Grounds starter box (OGS 019/024), with 199 Day 1 pilots. Master Yi, WM is Wuju Master, a separate Legend card, with 25.

The two diverged completely. Wuju Bladesman converted at 23.6% and put two players in the Top 8. Wuju Master converted at 0.0% - all 25 pilots were out after Saturday.

Wuju Bladesman is also the Legend on the 2v2 Constructed ban list and nowhere else, which is exactly the situation the 2v2 rules post describes: banned in teams for a reason specific to teams, and legal in the 1v1 event where it just took a quarter of the Top 8. Barcelona is a data point for the ban being format-scoped rather than a power-level statement about the card in duels.

The winning deck is a gear deck

Ornn was 42 of 2,130 on Saturday - 2.0% of the field - and converted at 11.9%, below the 17.8% baseline. Five Ornn players made Day 2 and one of them won the tournament.

What makes the list worth a look is how narrowly it points at one thing. The Legend, Fire Below the Mountain (SFD 189/221, Calm and Mind), exhausts to add a Power of any domain that can only be spent on playing gear or using gear abilities. The Chosen Champion, Ornn, Blacksmith, digs four cards deep for a gear when you play it or when it holds. One of the three battlefields is Ornn's Forge, which makes the first friendly non-token gear each turn cost 1 Energy less.

Then the main deck cashes all of that in: 3 Sterak's Gage, 3 Brutalizer, 1 Guardian Angel, 1 Helm of Suppression, 1 Cloth Armor, 1 Mask of Foresight and 3 Seal of Focus, supported by 3 Pit Crew, 3 Patched Porobot, 2 Aspiring Engineer and 3 Clockwork Keeper. The rune pool is 8 Calm and 4 Mind.

That is a deck whose resource engine, champion, battlefield and half its main deck are all doing the same job. If you are still working out how a Legend's domains constrain the other three stacks, how to play Riftbound covers Domain Identity and deckbuilding basics covers the legality rules the list is built inside.

Who nobody brought

Riot named eight Legends with zero registrations at the main event: Ahri, Darius, Garen, Jinx, Lee Sin, Leona, Volibear and Yasuo. Three more had exactly one pilot each - Miss Fortune, Sett and Teemo.

At the other end of the survival curve, nine of the 41 registered Legends put nobody into Day 2 at all: Vi, Master Yi (Wuju Master), Pyke, Renata Glasc, Shen, Poppy, Miss Fortune, Sett and Teemo. Three of those nine had 20 or more pilots - Vi with 40, Wuju Master with 25 and Pyke with 24 - so this is not purely a small-sample effect. Forty people brought Vi to a Regional Qualifier and none of them played on Sunday.

Whether that generalises is the open question. Barcelona is one event, on one weekend, four weeks after the 24 July ban list took effect and three weeks after Vendetta's 31 July release.

There is a back catalogue to check it against, and it is worth saying so rather than pretending this table appeared from nowhere. Riot has published the same Day 1 and Day 2 Legend counts for RQ Vegas, RQ Lille, RQ Utrecht and RQ Hartford, and has run the conversion comparison itself in prose before now - the Vegas write-up notes Rek'Sai "saw 27% of her players reach Day 2, up from just 6% in Bologna," and the Lille write-up credits Master Yi with "a very strong 22% conversion rate." It has even printed the number once: Lille's table carries conversion rates in its Day 2 percentage column (Master Yi's 21 of 95 shows as 22%), while the Vegas, Utrecht, Hartford and Barcelona tables all print each day's field share instead - which is why the Barcelona column has to be derived rather than read off. Barcelona is the first of those events played under the 24 July ban list and the first with Vendetta legal, so a trend line drawn straight through Hartford and Barcelona is crossing a format change. Two more clean data points are already on Riot's calendar: RQ Singapore on 4-6 September and RQ Los Angeles on 25-27 September, the last Regional Qualifier of the year.

Quick reference

• Event: Regional Qualifier Barcelona, 21-23 August 2026, Fira de Barcelona. $25,000 prize pool, $6,000 to the champion. First Regional Qualifier of the Vendetta season.
• Attendance: 2,130 Legend registrations Day 1, 379 Day 2. Field conversion 17.8%.
• Legends registered: 41.
• Most played: Kennen, 270 pilots (12.7% of Day 1).
• Best conversion, 10+ pilots: Kennen, 30.0%.
• Winner: MICE TheManland on Ornn, Fire Below the Mountain, with Ornn, Blacksmith as Chosen Champion.
• Top 8 Legends: Kennen x3, Master Yi (Wuju Bladesman) x2, Ornn, Azir, Rengar.
• Zero Day 2 entries: Vi, Master Yi (Wuju Master), Pyke, Renata Glasc, Shen, Poppy, Miss Fortune, Sett, Teemo.
• Zero Day 1 entries, per Riot: Ahri, Darius, Garen, Jinx, Lee Sin, Leona, Volibear, Yasuo.