Radiance’s real names: 18 cards were called something else
Riot has pushed a large batch of Radiance cards into its official gallery with their final English names, and the comparison with what has been circulating on Reddit for days is brutal: at least eighteen cards are not called what everyone thinks. The counterspell everybody calls “Silence” is Hush. “Crossing Fee” is The Waters’ Wage. Riven’s signature gear is Blade of the Exile. These were never mistakes, just fan translations off Chinese scans: good enough to understand a card, useless for finding one.
What happenedThe official gallery is up to 144 of 167
Through preview season, most of Radiance came out the back door: photos from Chinese game stores, scans, screenshots passed around on X and Reddit. Whoever posted them translated the name from Chinese on the fly, and that name became the name everyone used. Riot has now brought its own card gallery up to date: it currently shows 144 of the set’s 167 base cards, with art, collector number and the printed English text. Twenty-three numbers are still missing, Riven’s Legend among them.
Lining the gallery up against the names in circulation turns up eighteen cards with a different official name. Sometimes the gap is a shade of meaning (“Reckless Inventor” versus Reckless Innovator); sometimes it is the whole name, and searching for the old one gets you nowhere.
| Number | Name in circulation | Official name |
|---|---|---|
| 001/167 | Explosive Amateur | Amateur Demolitionist |
| 005/167 | Lingering Spirit | Lingering Animus |
| 026/167 | Wild Boar | Entrenched Boar |
| 029/167 | Reborn Anew | Life from Stone |
| 041/167 | Silence | Hush |
| 049/167 | Diligent Machinist | Industrious Mechsmith |
| 058/167 | Raging Sea Mage | Riptide Mage |
| 072/167 | Aloof Travellers | Overloaded Traveler |
| 074/167 | Fervent Witness | Raving Witness |
| 097/167 | Shoal Siren | Siren of the Shallows |
| 099/167 | Silver-Tongued Persuader | Suave Negotiator |
| 100/167 | Crossing Fee | The Waters’ Wage |
| 105/167 | Reckless Inventor | Reckless Innovator |
| 118/167 | Imperial Emissary | Herald of the Emperor |
| 120/167 | Meticulous Mechanic | Meticulous Restorationist |
| 131/167 | Illuminators | Demacian Illuminators |
| 150/167 | Riven Signature Gear | Blade of the Exile |
| 162/167 | Firelights Base | Firelights’ Hideout |
Not just namesAnd five champions finally have their subtitle
The same batch brings the subtitles of the champion units we had only been able to list as placeholders: Ziggs, Short-Fused (023/167), Orianna, Mechanical Marvel (068/167), Lulu, Whimsical (110/167), Jarvan IV, Royal Heir (133/167) and Mordekaiser, Dominating (137/167). Add One-Two Punch (121/167), the spell that Buffs a friendly unit and Stuns an enemy one, and which until yesterday had no name at all.
What it means
Give a friendly unit +1 Might — +1 to its combat strength — if it does not already have one.
What it means
The enemy unit deals no combat damage this turn. It stays on the board, but for one turn it cannot bite.
How to read themWhy the fan translations missed
The mechanism is always the same. A card surfaces in Chinese, someone renders the name literally, and the result is accurate in meaning but far from Riot’s choice, which is made for tone and flavour. “Shoal Siren” tells you where the siren is; Siren of the Shallows says the same thing with the cadence of a title. “Silver-Tongued Persuader” describes the character; Suave Negotiator pins him down in two words. The rules text, on the other hand, was nearly always right in the community previews: what changes is the label, not how the card works.
One warning about the gallery: it is not infallible. On some entries the card-type and domain fields still contradict what you can read on the art — Bushwhack Trap (108/167), for instance, is filed as a Fury unit while the card shown by the Chinese store was a Chaos gear. For names, though, the gallery is the source to trust: the name is printed on the card.
Why this matters for us. Radiance launches on October 23 in English, French and Chinese: in Italy the game is played and bought in English, so the official name is the only one that actually does any work. It is the name you search for a single on a marketplace, the name you write on the decklist you hand a judge at a Regional Qualifier, the name a search engine recognises. If you are putting a deck together for the Pre-Rift events on October 16-22, fix your notes now: nobody is going to find “Crossing Fee”.
The short version
- Riftbound’s official gallery now shows 144 of Radiance’s 167 base cards, with their final English names.
- Eighteen cards carry an official name different from the one in circulation, among them Hush (formerly “Silence”), The Waters’ Wage (“Crossing Fee”) and Blade of the Exile (Riven’s gear).
- The batch also brings subtitles for Ziggs, Orianna, Lulu, Jarvan IV and Mordekaiser, plus the name of One-Two Punch.
- Card text matches what previews already showed: the label changes, the effect does not.
Source: Riftbound Card Gallery (Riot Games). Images: Riot Games.
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