Taking on Magic: The Gathering is often seen as futile. Maybe it’s not—if you’re Riot Games.
Trading Card Games are in an odd place. They’re probably more popular than ever, with more playing them than ever. Given Magic: The Gathering’s recent big focus on crossover events, which makers of Wizards of the Coast keep reporting as being phenomenally successful, they’re probably making more money than ever.
At the same time TCGs are still competing for attention with the last decade’s huge growth in the resurgent board game, miniatures wargame, and roleplaying game communities. They’re also sharing space with digital card games, which give many people the strategic experience of playing a TCG without the social one.
But Magic’s still a juggernaut, with only two long-term competitors really sticking around: The Pokémon TCG and Yu-Gi-Oh, neither of which are actual threats to Magic’s throne. In Pokémon’s case simply because its audience is by necessity either younger or—in many cases—simply speculatively collecting rather than properly playing. Because it’s people actually showing up and playing the game every week that makes it have staying power and value long-term. The wisdom would be that it’s hard to compete well enough with Magic that you’ll actually survive in the world of TCGs, and the road from the ’90s is littered with literally hundreds of dead ones that didn’t measure up.
So the conventional wisdom would tell Riot Games not to publish Riftbound: The League of Legends card game—but they have, and perhaps the hunger is actually there this time. Their initial print run, despite a few errors, has vanished off shelves and is being scalped at incredible rates. The League of Legends name, the decade-plus driving force of Riot’s success, has clearly got enough cachet to punch into the TCG market. Whether it has the staying power to stick with it is another question entirely—to do well it’ll have to attract people who aren’t solely interested in LoL, but TCG hardliners who’re in it to show up and play the game at their local multiple times a month, or travel to conventions for tournaments. That’s the kind of loyalty that makes TCGs succeed.
