Riftbound RQ Los Angeles Results and the Post-Ban Meta

DSG Prismaticism won Riftbound's last Regional Qualifier of 2026 on Rengar, and did it without losing a match: Riot's own placements graphic lists his Los Angeles record as 14-0-2. The player he beat for the title, per Riot's write-up, was Xeno on Irelia - the Legend more people registered on Day 1 than any other.

That is the headline. The more useful story sits underneath it. RQ Los Angeles was the first Regional Qualifier played after Riot banned Ekko, Recurrent and Stacked Deck, effective 18 September, and the Stacked Deck half of that ban was aimed at Kennen, the most-registered Legend at both earlier Vendetta RQs. Riot's published table says the ban did something to Kennen - just not the obvious thing. Fewer people brought it. The ones who did reached Day 2 at a higher rate than at either earlier event. And none of them made the Top 8.

The event numbers below come from Riot's Los Angeles' Top Decks article and its Barcelona and Singapore equivalents. Where a number is mine rather than Riot's - the conversion rates, mostly - I say so and it is simple division you can redo. For the event logistics (venue, prize ladder, the Jayce promos) see our RQ Los Angeles preview. This is what happened.

What Los Angeles was

Regional Qualifier Los Angeles ran 25 to 27 September 2026 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Riot billed it as "the final Regional Qualifier of 2026" and the last stop of the Vendetta season, and it is also the last event on the calendar to carry the Regional Qualifier name - in 2027 the format becomes the Riftbound Regional, which our 2027 organized play post covers.

Two numbers frame the rest. Riot's Legend table accounts for 1,962 Day 1 registrations and 371 Day 2 entries. The article does not print a headline attendance, but every percentage in the table checks out against those two totals - Irelia's 193 is 9.8% of 1,962, Kennen's 63 is 17.0% of 371. That is a field-wide Day 2 conversion of 18.9%, against 17.8% at Barcelona and 16.0% at Singapore.

The ban list in force was the one that took effect on 18 September: Ekko, Recurrent and Stacked Deck added to the earlier five banned cards and five banned battlefields. Riot's full reasoning is in our September ban list breakdown.

The Top 8

Six distinct Legends, and no Kennen. Riot lists the eight decklists by overall ranking:

Irelia and Azir took two slots each, and each pair registered identical battlefields: the two Irelia lists ran Abandoned Hall, Sunken Temple and Targon's Peak, and the two Azir lists ran Hall of Legends, Seat of Power and Trifarian War Camp. Seat of Power turned up in five of the eight battlefield trios. The one Top 8 Legend not eligible for a Best-Of prize was Master Yi, Wuju Bladesman, the Proving Grounds starter Legend that also put two players into each of the Barcelona and Singapore Top 8s.

Riot also published 33 Best-Of lists, one for each eligible Legend from Spiritforged, Unleashed and Vendetta. Riot's rule gives the Best-Of to the highest-placing pilot on each Legend, and 32 of the 33 lists are headed Legend Rank #1; the Rumble list is the exception, headed #2. Five of the Top 8 players hold one as well, so the article carries 36 distinct decklists across 41 list blocks. The Best-Of rankings answer something the Top 8 cannot: how far down the standings the best pilot of each popular Legend landed. Three of the four most-registered Legends had nobody in the Top 8. The best Kennen finished 13th, the best LeBlanc 12th, and the best Jayce - the third most-registered Legend in the hall, with 153 pilots - 42nd.

The winning list: Rengar, 14-0-2

Prismaticism ran Rengar, Pridestalker with Rengar, Trophy Hunter as Chosen Champion, 8 Body and 4 Fury runes, and the battlefields Emperor's Dais, Seat of Power and Star Spring. The 39 cards around the champion:

The sideboard is the full 10 the Tournament Rules allow: 2 Brittle Steel, 1 Brynhir Thundersong, 2 Decree of Strength, 2 Ferrous Forerunner, 1 Noxian Demolitionist, 1 Pyke, Dockside Butcher and 1 Rampage.

The deck is not the interesting part of this win. The pilot is, and Riot's placements graphic is the evidence. It lists his finish at 12 Regional Qualifiers, and eight of the twelve are Top 8 finishes: 5th at Bologna, 5th at Las Vegas, 4th at Lille, 1st at Atlanta, 8th at Utrecht, 7th at Hartford, 6th at Barcelona and 1st here. The other four are 50th at Houston, 23rd at Sydney, 10th at Vancouver and 11th at Singapore. Riot's article calls Los Angeles his second RQ victory; the first was Atlanta, where Riot's Atlanta's Top Decks article lists him winning on Annie, Dark Child.

Rengar the Legend was not a breakout. It drew 92 pilots, 4.7% of Day 1, and converted to Day 2 at 21.7% - above the 18.9% baseline, but ninth of the 35 Legends with ten or more pilots.

Kennen after Stacked Deck: fewer pilots, better survival

Riot did not ban Kennen. It banned the card it said was over-fuelling him, and it said exactly what it expected: "We think Kennen will feel the loss of Stacked Deck acutely," with the stated goal of a ban that "doesn't obliterate the deck and strategy, but brings it more in line with other top decks."

Here is Kennen across the three Vendetta-season Regional Qualifiers. Day 1 and Day 2 counts and shares are Riot's; conversion is Day 2 divided by Day 1.

Read across and the rows disagree with each other. Kennen's share of Day 1 fell for the second event running, and the LA drop - 11.5% to 8.4% - is the biggest yet. Its conversion went the other way: 38.2% is the best of the 35 Legends with ten or more pilots at Los Angeles, 12.7 points clear of LeBlanc in second, and better than Kennen managed at either event where Stacked Deck was legal. Its swing from 8.4% of Day 1 to 17.0% of Day 2, +8.6 points, is the largest in the LA table, as its +7.8 was at Singapore. Riot's own line is that Kennen "undeniably remains a powerful deck, putting the most players into Day 2 of LA."

Then 63 Kennen players in Day 2 produced zero Top 8 decks. Riot's reading is that "players came into the event with plans for countering it."

One caution before anyone calls the ban a failure or a success. The conversion column cannot separate deck strength from pilot strength, and a ban changes who plays a deck as well as what the deck can do. A 38.2% conversion is what you would see if Kennen stayed strong in Swiss, and it is also what you would see if the 165 who stayed on Kennen after the ban were a stronger-than-average group of pilots. Riot published a Day 2 headcount, not Day 2 records, so this table measures who survived Day 1 - nothing about who won from there. Our Barcelona breakdown sets out why conversion is still the more useful number than raw share.

What the table does show plainly: after the ban, fewer players registered Kennen, and the ones who did reached Day 2 more often than the pilots of any other Legend in the room.

A note on the Singapore column: Riot's Singapore prose says the Top 8 held "five Kennen", but the Top 8 decklists it published underneath show four Kennen lists, with the eighth-ranked list being Fr0zen's Fiora, Grand Duelist. The table uses the decklists.

Same pilot, same Legend, before and after the ban

Riot handed the Los Angeles Best-Of Kennen to DSG AwesumRosum - spelled "AwesomeRosum" in the article's prose, AwesumRosum on the decklist itself - whom Riot names as Prismaticism's teammate. The same player also held the Best-Of Kennen at Singapore, finishing 2nd overall there with Stacked Deck legal and 13th here without it. That makes their two lists the cleanest before-and-after in Riot's published data.

Every main-deck card that changed between the two lists:

Ten cards out, ten in, and 29 of the 39 main-deck cards untouched. The runes stayed at 9 Chaos and 3 Order, and one battlefield moved - Sandswept Tomb out, Shadow Temple in, alongside the same Minefield and Zaun Warrens.

The line worth reading twice is Nocturne. Riot's ban note named it: Stacked Deck, it said, let Kennen churn through the deck "finding key cards like Nocturne while simultaneously filling the trash for Rhasa the Sunderer and Last Rites." With Stacked Deck gone, this list dropped all three Nocturne, Horrifying as well - while Lightning Rush (3), Rhasa the Sunderer (3) and Last Rites (2) stayed at exactly their Singapore counts. For comparison, all seven Kennen lists in the Barcelona and Singapore Top 8s ran three Stacked Deck and three Nocturne, Horrifying.

Keep the scale in view: this is one list, and it is the only Kennen list Riot published from Los Angeles. It shows what one strong Kennen pilot did after the ban, not what 165 of them did.

The full field: 44 Legends

Forty-four Legends were registered. 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. An asterisk marks the eleven Legends Riot shades as not competing for Best-Of prizes - the Origins and Proving Grounds Legends - which leaves the 33 that match the 33 Best-Of lists.

Fourteen of the 35 Legends with ten or more pilots beat the 18.9% baseline: Kennen, LeBlanc, Irelia, Ezreal, Ornn, Viktor, Vex, Master Yi (Wuju Bladesman), Rengar, Jayce, Diana, Azir, Kai'Sa and Kha'Zix, in that order. The four most-registered Legends - Irelia, Kennen, Jayce and LeBlanc - were 33.6% of Day 1 and 49.1% of Day 2, close to the compression Barcelona showed (34.8% to 48.8%). The top of the field narrowed by a similar margin. It just had two different names in it: Jayce and LeBlanc in, Master Yi (Wuju Bladesman) and Rek'Sai out.

Who moved: Irelia, Jayce, LeBlanc and the Lux collapse

Day 1 share across the three Vendetta RQs, with Riot's raw counts in brackets:

Irelia took the top spot Kennen vacated - Riot's words are that Irelia "has moved into the top spot, unseating Kennen as the most played deck of the event" - and backed it up: 24.9% conversion and two Top 8 lists, including the finalist.

Between Singapore and Los Angeles, Jayce nearly tripled its raw registrations (57 to 153) and LeBlanc nearly doubled (79 to 149), and the two got different returns. LeBlanc converted at 25.5%, second only to Kennen, with its best pilot 12th overall. Jayce converted at 21.6%, tenth of the fourteen Legends that beat the baseline, and its best finish was 42nd.

Lux is the other ban story. Riot banned Ekko, Recurrent over an infinite combo in the Lux deck, noting that "the play rate has remained low." It was low - 17 pilots at Barcelona, 11 at Singapore - and at Los Angeles it was one, who did not make Day 2. A deck that small cannot tell you much by itself, but the direction matches what Riot said the ban was for.

Master Yi, Wuju Bladesman keeps falling, from the second most-registered Legend at Barcelona to ninth here, and keeps making Top 8s anyway: SWAGALISK's 6th is its third RQ running with a list in the Top 8.

Three players, three events, the same three Legends

The Best-Of and Top 8 lists let you follow individual players across events, and three names show up near the top at all three Vendetta RQs, each on the same Legend every time. Rankings are Riot's overall rankings from each event's decklists.

Riot's Singapore write-up already called Squirtle a "two-time RQ winner", and TheManLand won Barcelona on Ornn. Three pilots who picked a Legend and stayed on it through a 2,130-player event, a ban-list change and an Irelia-topped field, and finished no worse than 40th, is the best argument in this data for reading the conversion column as partly a pilot column.

Zero for three: Vi, Shen and Renata Glasc

At the other end, three Legends drew at least ten pilots at every one of the three Vendetta-season Regional Qualifiers and put nobody into Day 2 at any of them:

That is 230 registrations and no Day 2s. At each event's field-wide conversion rate, those 230 would have been expected to put around 40 players into Day 2 - about 18 of them on Vi alone. Zero is not a rounding error. The Best-Of lists say the same thing from the other side: Renata Glasc's and Shen's were the two lowest-ranked of the 33, at 567th and 549th overall. (Sett was also registered at all three events and never reached Day 2, but on eight pilots in total that says very little.)

What this does not tell you about Stuttgart

The next event on this ladder is the European Regional Championship in Stuttgart, 6 to 8 November, which Riot's Regional Championship page says will be played in Standard including Radiance, the set releasing 23 October. So Los Angeles is the last Regional Qualifier data point for a format with Vendetta as its newest set, and the next one adds a whole set of cards, keywords and Legends that no Regional Qualifier has seen.

What carries over, unless Riot changes it first, is the ban list - along with the players and the table above. What does not is the card pool. Anyone projecting a Stuttgart metagame from Los Angeles numbers is projecting across a set release.

Quick reference

• Event: Regional Qualifier Los Angeles, 25-27 September 2026, Los Angeles Convention Center. The final Regional Qualifier of 2026 and the first played under the 18 September ban list.
• Winner: DSG Prismaticism on Rengar, Pridestalker, with Rengar, Trophy Hunter as Chosen Champion. 14-0-2 per Riot's graphic. His second RQ win, after Atlanta.
• Finalist: Xeno, on Irelia, Blade Dancer.
• Top 8 Legends: Irelia x2, Azir x2, Master Yi (Wuju Bladesman), Akali, Ornn, Rengar. No Kennen.
• Field: 1,962 Day 1 registrations, 371 Day 2, 18.9% conversion, 44 Legends.
• Most registered: Irelia, 193 (9.8% of Day 1).
• Best conversion, 10+ pilots: Kennen, 63 of 165 (38.2%).
• Kennen Day 1 share: 12.7% at Barcelona, 11.5% at Singapore, 8.4% at Los Angeles.
• Lux after the Ekko ban: one pilot, no Day 2.
• No Day 2 at any of the three Vendetta RQs, despite 10+ pilots at each: Vi, Shen, Renata Glasc.