Riftbound RQ Los Angeles: Prizes, Schedule, Radiance Panel

Riot posted the RQ Los Angeles details on 11 September, and the framing matters more than the logistics: this is "the final stop of the Vendetta Regional Qualifier season." It is the last Regional Qualifier on the 2026 calendar, and Riot's own wording is careful about what that means - LA "represents one of the final opportunities for players to make their mark before Regional Championships begin," not the only one.

What comes after it is the Regional Championship layer: Stuttgart on 6-8 November and Las Vegas on 11-13 December, both fed by Top 64 finishes at any Regional Qualifier, plus a third 2026 Regional Championship in China that replaces the Radiance Major and pairs a 256-player invitational with an open-registration event for more than 1,500 players. Riot has said it will publish that invitational's qualification structure "in a future update," so LA is the last Regional Qualifier route to an invite rather than provably the last route of any kind.

That makes LA two different weekends stacked on one badge. If you are competing, it is the last Regional Qualifier on the board. If you are not, it is where Radiance stops being a name on a roadmap.

The dates, the venue and the doors

25 to 27 September 2026, Los Angeles Convention Center, 1201 South Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, CA 90015.

Riot published badge and door times per day, and Friday is the odd one out - doors open at lunchtime, not first thing. All times Pacific Daylight Time.

Thursday exists purely for badge pickup, and there is one reason to use it beyond skipping a queue: the merch booth, sitting outside the Main Event Hall, opens Thursday at 2:00 PM alongside badge collection. Riot is explicit that you cannot buy anything without a badge in hand first - "A valid RQ Los Angeles event badge will be required to make any purchases."

The Radiance panel is the reason to care if you are not competing

Our 2026 set schedule said Radiance previews would kick off during RQ Los Angeles with Riot still deciding the exact moment. That moment now has a clock on it.

Friday, 3:00 PM Pacific. Riot calls it the kick-off to Radiance preview season, "showing off a bunch of new cards to players," and it is being recorded and uploaded to YouTube afterwards for anyone not in the hall. Four people are on it:

• Dave Guskin, Game Director
• Jon Moormann, Radiance's Lead Designer
• Brice Cox, Creative Director
• Michelle Mauk, Art Director for Radiance

Radiance releases 23 October in English, Chinese and French simultaneously. What Riot has confirmed about the set so far - 180 cards, 66 Showcase, nine Champion Legends with five named - is in the set schedule post. What it has not confirmed is any Radiance mechanic or keyword. The Friday panel is where that changes, and anything circulating before 3:00 PM on 25 September about how Radiance plays is speculation.

The prize ladder, and the number that checks out

The pool is $25,000, the same as Barcelona and Singapore carried. Riot's prose lists prizes cumulatively (Top 32, Top 16, Top 8), which reads as overlapping; its prizing graphic resolves the same numbers into placement brackets. The brackets, read off Riot's own graphic:

Add the cash column up: 6,000 + 3,000 + (2 x 2,000) + (4 x 1,000) + (8 x 500) + (16 x 250) = $25,000 exactly. The published ladder is the whole pool, not a headline figure with an undisclosed remainder. That is worth checking rather than assuming, because a stated prize pool and the sum of its published placements are not automatically the same number.

Two things in that table are easy to skim past. The Regional Championship invite line starts at Top 64, not Top 32 - the cash stops at 32nd but the invite does not, and the invite is the thing worth travelling for. And the Participation row means the promo is not a top-tables reward: every competitor gets a Jayce, Brilliant Inventor.

The promo itself, read directly off Riot's graphic: Jayce, Brilliant Inventor, a Champion Unit (Jayce, Piltover), cost 6 with 6 might, blue Mind domain icon. Printed ability: "When you play me or the first time you play a non-token gear each turn, you may ready something besides me that's exhausted."

The treatments are not one card in four frames, and the flavour text is where you can tell them apart. The two Exclusive Art copies - Champion and Top 8 - read "Never look back." The Alt Art copies, which is what the Top 128 and the participation reward actually are, read "I will light our path." Riot describes the treatment as carrying "Vendetta and Regional Qualifier foil stamps"; on the graphic the champion copy reads VENDETTA plus WINNER, the Top 8 copy VENDETTA plus TOP 8, the Top 128 copy TOP 128, and the participation copy carries the VENDETTA stamp with no placement stamp at all.

The 33 Best-Of Legends

LA carries 33 Best-Of Foil Plated Legends from Spiritforged, Unleashed and Vendetta. One goes to the highest-placing competitor piloting each eligible Legend, regardless of where that player finished overall.

The count is the interesting part. It is 33 rather than the 40-odd Legends that actually show up at an RQ because Origins and Proving Grounds Legends have ended as Best-Ofs - which is why Master Yi, Wuju Bladesman has no Best-Of to win despite being the second-most-played Legend at Barcelona (9.3% of Day 1) and the third-most-played at Singapore (6.6%), with two copies in each of those Top 8s. Riot's Singapore table colours the ineligible Legends in, and there are exactly ten of them against 43 listed - which is where the 33 comes from. If your deck runs a Legend from the current three sets, there is a plated card with your name on it that has nothing to do with making Day 2.

Secret Garden: one per badge, and nine events total

When Riot announced Secret Garden for PAX West, it said the bundle was "an event exclusive product (and will be at additional events)" and named none of them. On 11 September it named all of them, in a separate announcement published the same day as the LA details.

The first two have already happened. Seven remain, and Riot frames 2027 as conditional rather than planned: "We will see what stock remains at the end of 2026 and if able extend it to future events into 2027."

LA also finally gets the contents published, which the PAX West announcement never itemised. At $70 in English, the bundle is:

• 3 alt-art cards: Ivern, Green Father; Lillia, Bashful Bloom; Ultrasoft Poro
• 5 alt-art double-sided tokens
• 2 sleeve packs
• 2 full-art postcards
• 3 Unleashed boosters

And one hard limit that did not apply at PAX West: at RQ Los Angeles, Secret Garden bundles are one per event badge, while supplies last.

What the field looked like three weeks out

RQ Singapore ran 4-6 September, and Riot published its Legend breakdown on the 9th. Gorica won it on Akali, beating a Top 8 that was five Kennen, two Master Yi (Wuju Bladesman) and that one Akali.

Kennen is the number to carry into LA: 11.5% of the Day 1 field and 19.3% of Day 2. Work down Riot's table and that +7.8-point swing is the biggest of the 43 Legends listed; the next largest is Jayce at +3.6. Akali did the opposite - 3.8% of Day 1, 1.3% of Day 2 - and won anyway, which is the second Regional Qualifier running where the trophy went to a Legend the conversion table did not favour.

One caution on reading Riot's prose rather than its table. The article names Kennen, Master Yi (Wuju Bladesman), Azir, LeBlanc and Jayce as the Legends that "increased by at least two percent" between days. By the table printed directly underneath that sentence, Master Yi (Wuju Bladesman) went 6.6% to 8.3%, which is 1.7 points, while Kha'Zix went 2.9% to 5.0% - 2.1 points - and is not in the list. Trust the table. Our Barcelona breakdown explains why the Day 1 to Day 2 ratio is the number to read rather than the raw counts.

Riot addresses the last two qualifiers

Riot opens the announcement with something closer to an apology than a hype line: "We know the past two Regional Qualifiers have had their share of problems for players attending the show."

Three specific commitments follow, and they are worth quoting rather than paraphrasing because they are narrow:

• "More play space is available for players"
• "Improving logistics for the prize wall and merch stores"
• "Reviewing judge staffing and policies"

Riot also says outright that some fixes will take longer than one event. Note what is not there: no refund policy, no capacity change, no named cause. It is an acknowledgement plus three workstreams, not a remedy list - and if your complaint about Barcelona or Singapore was something other than space, queues or judging, LA is not promising to have fixed it.

Coverage if you are not going

The stream runs on Riftbound's YouTube and Twitch channels, starting 10:00 AM PDT / 5:00 PM GMT / 6:00 PM CET / 1:00 AM SGT each day. The desk is Julian Carr, Alex Coccia, Silverfuse, Charm3r, Ursiiday and Barrett Bryant.

For faster-than-stream updates, Riot points at @RiftboundOP on X for match results, bracket updates, player interviews and deck techs.

What Riot has not published yet

Being precise about the gaps, because an event preview that quietly fills them is worse than one that admits them:

• The round structure. Riot has not published LA's Swiss count or the Day 2 cut for this event, and neither the LA announcement nor the Rules Hub's Tournament Rules document names one. Singapore is reported to have used eight Swiss rounds on Day 1 with 18 match points to advance, then five more before the Top 8 cut, but that figure comes from event trackers rather than Riot's own channel, and nothing states LA repeats it. LA's hall hours are the same shape Riot ran at Barcelona and Singapore - Friday doors at noon, Saturday and Sunday at 9:00 AM - so the schedule is no evidence either way.
• Registration deadlines and on-site entry. The announcement covers badge collection hours, not whether entry is still open.
• Side event schedule. Riot references "a packed weekend of side events" and a Prize Wall without listing either.
• Attendance. Barcelona drew 2,130 on Day 1, and the Day 1 column of Riot's Singapore table accounts for 1,893 registrations. LA has no published cap or projection, and I have not seen one anywhere official.

Check the Rules Hub, which Riot says it has just updated, for the tournament documents themselves - and our tournament rules post for what the Competitive enforcement level at an RQ actually switches on before you sit down.

Quick reference

• Event: Riftbound Regional Qualifier Los Angeles, 25-27 September 2026, Los Angeles Convention Center, 1201 South Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, CA 90015. The final Regional Qualifier of the Vendetta season and of 2026.
• Prize pool: $25,000. $6,000 champion, $3,000 second, $2,000 third-fourth, $1,000 fifth-eighth, $500 ninth-sixteenth, $250 seventeenth-thirty-second. The placements sum to the full $25,000.
• Regional Championship invitations: Top 64, along with 40 Prize Wall Tickets and a future RQ Competitor Pass.
• Promos: Jayce, Brilliant Inventor, in participation, Top 128 alt-art, Top 8 exclusive-art and Champion versions, plus a Lux, Crownguard (Crystal Rose) playmat from Top 128.
• Best-Of: 33 Foil Plated Legends, drawn from Spiritforged, Unleashed and Vendetta only.
• Radiance panel: Friday 3:00 PM PDT, with Dave Guskin, Jon Moormann, Brice Cox and Michelle Mauk. Recorded for YouTube. It opens Radiance preview season.
• Secret Garden: $70 English, one per event badge at LA, while supplies last. Seven more events carry it through December.
• Coverage: 10:00 AM PDT daily on Riftbound's YouTube and Twitch, plus @RiftboundOP on X.