Guskin on prices: a competitive deck should cost $100 to $300

by Riccardo Emanuele Eustor·Riftbound Zone

Riftbound game director Dave Guskin has told Wargamer the target Riot keeps in mind while designing the game: the average competitive deck should land between 100 and 300 dollars, and once too many decks sit above that line the game stops being reachable. The same interview carries a concrete change to booster packs: from the Legacy set, arriving in January 2027, Legends and Battlefields move into the common slot.

The targetA hundred, three hundred, and trouble above

“I think we should have the average competitive deck be affordable at the level of, let’s say, 100 to 300 U.S. dollars,” Guskin told Wargamer’s Matt Bassil. It is neither a price list nor a promise: it is the figure the team keeps in front of it when deciding which rarity a card ends up at. Some decks costing less and others costing more is fine by him, because variety is healthy; the trouble starts when the decks above that band multiply, since newcomers then have to spend a large sum on a deck they may not even enjoy. The word he uses for that drift is blunt: unhealthy.

Riot’s thinking on rarity is the industry standard, and Guskin spells it out: the cards you actually need to play sit at the lower rarities, up to Epic, while collector treatments such as alt arts, specials and overnumbers cost more and, in his words, end up subsidising the people who only want to play. He does concede that rising prices worry the team, and that they do not have a huge number of levers to pull.

The packsThe “Legend problem” and what Legacy changes

The most concrete part of the interview is about how packs are built. A Legend is a card nobody chases on the market: one per deck is enough, nobody buys a fourth copy, so the price stays on the floor. The catch is that it still takes up room in the pack, and the player opening it gets a card they do not need instead of a champion. From the Legacy set in January 2027, Legends and Battlefields will move into the common slot, handing the valuable slot back to the cards people actually want.

Riot also weighed a different route, seeding a Legend into the same pack as its matching champion, but Guskin says that proved impractical at the collation stage. What stays true is that champion Epics are the heaviest line on the bill: they are what carries a tournament deck from one hundred dollars to three hundred, and Legacy is the first set trying to address it from inside the pack.

ContextNot the first time Riot has talked prices

This is Guskin’s second public outing on the subject in a matter of weeks: in late September he said the goal was keeping Origins on shelves until rotation, meaning printing enough that resellers do not own the market. The thread is the same: keep supply high, keep functional cards cheap, leave the premium to collectors. It is not an abstract worry either, given that the 2027 calendar lines up three sets after Radiance, Legacy among them.

Source: Wargamer — Dave Guskin interview; booster breakdown from Riot Games. Images: Riot Games.