Most new sets ask you to learn a handful of cards. Riftbound's Radiance is asking you to unlearn a habit, because three of the keywords arriving on October 23 change where you put your cards, not just which ones you play.
Riot opened Radiance previews on September 25 and is running them through October 9, ahead of the set's October 23 release in English, French and Simplified Chinese. A four-week runway between the first preview and the street date is generous, and it is there for a reason, because Radiance introduces three new mechanics — Deploy, Show Off and Disarm — that each pull on a different part of how a Riftbound game is decided. If you play in our Friday night Riftbound locals, the cheapest edge available in the first month of a new set is understanding those three before the boxes get cracked, not after.
Deploy puts your gear on contested ground
Riot describes Deploy plainly in its Radiance overview, saying you play this gear only to a battlefield, where it grants benefits while it is there, and that the gear is killed when an opponent holds that battlefield. Riot's announcement adds the detail that matters most for planning, which is that deployed gear can be played to battlefields you do not control.
That turns gear from a safe investment into a stake you plant on a location. A piece of gear you deploy onto a battlefield your opponent is about to take is not a permanent buff, it is a timer, and the value you squeeze out of it depends entirely on whether you can hold the ground long enough to use it. It also makes gear a reason to contest a battlefield you might otherwise have conceded, because leaving that ground uncontested hands your opponent a free removal spell for something you paid for.
Show Off pays you for the cards you keep
Show Off works in the opposite direction. Riot's overview describes it as revealing, or showing off, a qualifying card from your hand or from your board to unlock a new effect on the card you are playing. You are not discarding the revealed card or spending it, you are only proving that you have it.
The weight of that lands on deckbuilding rather than on any single turn. A deck full of cheap, immediately castable cards has always been the safe way to build into an unknown format, but Show Off gives you a reason to keep an expensive card in hand instead of dumping it on curve. It also leaks information, since every reveal tells your opponent something true about what you are holding, and that is a real cost in a game where attacking into an unknown hand is already a judgment call.
Disarm turns combat into subtraction
Disarm is the most straightforward of the three and probably the one that reshapes the most decks. Riot describes it as reducing the Might of an enemy unit, triggering when a unit with Disarm attacks and applying to an enemy unit on the same battlefield, with the effect growing stronger the more instances of it you stack. Riot's overview compares how it scales to Assault.
What that does to the format is turn cheap units into answers. Under the older math, the way you beat a large unit was to find something larger or to remove it outright. Disarm gives you a third route, which is to shrink the thing a point at a time until the board you already have is simply bigger than the board across the table. If you evaluate previews by Might alone over the next two weeks, you will undervalue exactly the cards that end up doing the work.
Nine Legends, and the first neutral one
Radiance brings nine new Legends. Riot has named Ekko, Orianna, K'Sante, Neeko, Seraphine, Ziggs, Jarvan, Evelynn and Heimerdinger across its overview and its announcement, introducing Ekko as The Boy Who Shattered Time, Orianna as Lady of Clockwork and K'Sante as Pride of Nazumah.
Neeko is the one worth circling. Riot calls her the first neutral domain Champion Unit, and a champion that is not locked to a single domain widens the range of decks she can legally sit in. For anyone building toward a store event, that is the kind of card that quietly raises the ceiling of every shell in the room, so expect her to turn up in lists that otherwise share nothing with each other.
What the set ships in, and what to reserve
Riot's overview lists the Radiance lineup as booster packs, preconstructed decks, a Showdown Deck pairing Seraphine against Evelynn, a Vault holding a storage box, six boosters, tokens and 36 Runes, and Pre-Rift Kits with five boosters plus seeded packs for the nine new Legends. Pre-Rift events run October 16 through 22, the week before the set goes on general sale.
Which of those you want depends on what you are actually doing in October. If you are new to Riftbound and want a game you can play the day you buy it, the Showdown Deck is the one, because it arrives as two decks already built to face each other. If you are a locals regular, Pre-Rift week is the cheapest look at the new keywords in play before anybody has a tuned list. And if you are the person who keeps a collection in order, the Vault does double duty as product and as storage for a set you are about to own a great deal of.
We have the Radiance Vault Bundle listed as a presale right now, shipping on the publisher's October 23 release date, and the count we are holding is not a large one. Come play a Friday night with us in Wellington between now and then, bring whatever you are testing, and we will happily argue with you about whether Disarm is better than it looks. Play Bold. Collect Smart. Trade with Trust.
Written from Riot Games' own Radiance overview on playriftbound.com and Riot's Radiance announcement distributed through TriplePoint PR, both opened on September 27, 2026, with the presale and ship-date details taken from Triad's own Shopify catalog record for the Radiance Vault Bundle.