Deploy and Bomb: Radiance gear lives on the battlefield
Alongside Show Off and Disarm, Radiance brings a third keyword that had gone largely unnoticed: Deploy. And it brings a new token, the Bomb, which on dying deals 2 damage to an enemy unit standing there. The two are tied together: Deploy is what nails Bombs to a battlefield, and what sets them off when you lose it. All of it official, straight from the set overview.
The keywordWhat Deploy does
The reminder text is short: a Gear with Deploy is played only to a battlefield, grants its benefits while it is there, and is killed when an opponent holds that battlefield. No extra cost, no decision to make — a positional restriction and an expiry date written into the same line.
It is a shift from the gear we have had so far, which simply stayed put once it hit the board. With Deploy, gear stops being a safe investment and becomes a garrison. It holds while you hold the ground and vanishes the moment you give it up, without your opponent spending a single card to remove it.
The card Riot uses to explain it is Dockside Lock-Up, a 6 Energy Gear numbered 136/167 and illustrated by Yeon Art Studio. Playing it banishes a unit at that location; while you hold the battlefield you can kill it to play the banished card ignoring its cost, with a line in brackets clarifying that tokens are not cards. It is removal that turns into theft — but only if you genuinely defend the ground. Lose it and Deploy kills the gear while the banished unit stays where it is.
The tokenHow much a Bomb hurts
The Bomb is a Token Gear, marked T02, illustrated by Kudos Productions. It has Deploy and it has Deathknell: when it dies it deals 2 damage to an enemy unit at that location and kills every other Bomb you control there. Riot sums it up as small gifts to leave your opponent — the more you play, the bigger the boom.
A chain, not a sum
If a dying Bomb kills the other Bombs at the same location, those have Deathknell of their own. That is the natural explanation for Riot’s line about the growing boom, but the exact behaviour of the chain is not spelled out yet.
Losing the spot loses them
With Deploy, losing the battlefield kills every Bomb you placed there. A carefully stacked pile can discharge in a single turn, and not necessarily at a moment of your choosing.
Why it matters here. This is the first Radiance mechanic that changes how battlefields are contested rather than how decks are built. At the Pre-Rifts of October 16–22 in Italian stores, people will be playing new cards with almost no reps behind them: knowing that retaking a battlefield destroys enemy Deploy gear, and that walking into one stacked with Bombs can cost a unit 2 damage, is exactly the sort of detail that decides the game at the next table.
CommunityReddit’s question has an answer
Shortly before the overview went up, r/riftboundtcg user u/eSpo298 opened a thread titled «Ziggs Revealed» with two words of commentary: «Fire in the Hole!». Underneath it, u/Jerjmq99 and u/Crafty-Bass5506 were asking the same thing — what Bomb tokens are, and how much damage they do. The official site answered within the hour: 2 damage. The photo of the Ziggs card circulating in that thread, however, is a 140-pixel thumbnail and unreadable, so we are not reporting its numbers until a real image surfaces.
The short version
- Deploy: the gear is played only to a battlefield and dies when the opponent holds it.
- The Bomb token has Deathknell: 2 damage to an enemy unit there, plus it kills the other Bombs you control at that location.
- Dockside Lock-Up, a 6-cost Gear, banishes a unit and lets you replay it for free if you defend the battlefield.
Source: playriftbound.com. Images: Riot Games.
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