Dave Guskin: “The goal is to keep Origins on shelves until it rotates”

by Riccardo Emanuele Eustor·Riftbound Zone

Riftbound’s game director Dave Guskin answered yesterday the question everyone has been asking for a year: will Origins ever go back to being a normal product, the kind you buy at your local store when you need it? In a twenty-minute interview with Travis Gafford, recorded at the Los Angeles Regional Qualifier, the answer is a yes wrapped in caveats: Riot keeps printing Origins “as fast as we can”, wants it on shelves next to every new set until it rotates, but will not promise that a box ever costs the same as a freshly released set again. Below I report what he actually said, word for word, and then today’s numbers on the European market.

The wordsWhat Guskin said about Origins

Travis Gafford reminds him of the launch-time promise, when Riot said Origins would be “available for a very long time” on the shelf of your local game store, and asks whether that moment will ever come. Guskin admits the problem first: “the game has outpaced our expectations on our ability to print enough to satisfy demand”. Then he restates the goal, which has not changed: “in my imagination the ideal state is, when a new set comes out, that set and Origins are just available on the shelves, until Origins rotates”.

On the present he is blunt: “right now Origins boxes are hard to come by, we’re aware of that, we watch it”. And on the fix: “we’re printing cards as fast as we can and the goal is to keep printing Origins until that comes down and is a bit easier to acquire”.

The most candid moment is about price. Gafford asks whether one day he will walk into a store and buy an Origins box for the same price as the current set. Guskin: “I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to get Origins down to the price of a new set”. But he adds why he cares: Origins “is so fundamental to building a constructed deck, it has so many foundational cards for the game, I don’t want players to be without those”. The cards can be bought as singles, he says, but “I want to make sure the Origins pack experience is still available, within reach”.

The other setsSpiritforged and Unleashed were not mentioned

One detail is worth as much as the words spoken: in the interview Guskin talks about reprints for Origins only. Spiritforged and Unleashed are never named. That is why the X account RiftboundGG, the first to pick the interview up, reads it this way: Riot will focus its printing capacity on Origins, the other sets will trickle in at lower volumes, and the kind of restocks we have seen so far is the model for next year too. That is a reading, not a statement: I report it because I largely share it, but I keep the two things apart. Guskin did not say Spiritforged and Unleashed will not be reprinted. He only said, clearly, that Origins is the priority.

The market todayWhat an Origins box costs in Europe

As I write, the Origins box on Cardmarket shows these numbers, taken from our sealed-product monitor updated this morning:

A box listed at roughly €120 at launch. So we are 30 to 60 percent above that depending on language, with a trend that has stayed above €180 for the last thirty days. The full day-by-day price history is on the Origins box page. If you look at cases, the six-box cartons, I explained how to read the carton code to tell which print run it comes from.

What changes with Guskin’s words? In the short term, nothing: reprints arrive in waves and every wave so far has been absorbed within days. In the medium term, the stated commitment to print Origins “until that comes down” is one more reason not to pay more than the current trend, because supply is meant to grow. The sentence about price is just as clear, though: Riot itself does not expect Origins to return to a new set’s list price. If you buy to play, waiting for the next wave is the right call; if you buy to keep the box sealed, remember that today’s scarcity comes from a printing capacity Riot says it wants to increase.

The rest of the interviewRarities, card cuts and tournaments

In the twenty minutes Guskin also covered other topics collectors care about. The full rarity ladder, laid out in one go for the first time: each pack holds 8 to 10 commons, 3 to 4 uncommons, 2 rares and, in about one pack in four, an epic. Above them sit the alternate arts and the “special alts” (about two per box), then the alternate-art runes, then the overnumbers (one to three per case) and their signature versions, about ten times rarer. At the top, the ultimates: in Unleashed, he admitted, they were as frequent as a single signature, “a little more common than we want them to be”, and in future they will be rarer still. On an ultimate in Radiance the answer was a smile: “I don’t believe we’ve talked about it, but perhaps there is”.

On badly cut cards, a serious problem in Origins and Spiritforged that Gafford says he still found in a Vendetta box, the explanation is technical: the factory blades wear out faster than expected because Riftbound’s card stock is high quality, and with Radiance and Legacy the replacement cadence should finally be right.

On tournaments, finally: Regional Qualifiers will not get bigger than this, because running many of them in a year is already the limit; the path is adding events, including very large Showdown Series, and regional championships such as Convergence Fest will become continentals. The organised-play system will be revised in 2027. And on the players’ question about “Heron slop”, the packages of cards like Astral Heron and Aurora that end up in every deck regardless of the Legend, Guskin said what many hoped: when the Legend becomes irrelevant “that’s an area of concern for us, something we have our eye on”.

Source: “Riot Answers Riftbound’s Biggest Questions”, Travis Gafford’s interview with Dave Guskin, YouTube, October 1, 2026; reading by RiftboundGG on X. Prices: Cardmarket, Riftbound Zone sealed monitor of October 2, 2026. Image: Riot Games.