Day 1Seven rounds, five perfect records
The event runs as Swiss: nobody is knocked out along the way, and each round you face someone on your own score. A win is worth three points, a draw one. Saturday ran seven rounds, so a clean sweep means 21 points — and five players out of 755 got there. The order between them comes down to tiebreakers, the average strength of the opponents you faced: Calvin Jin had the roughest ride, so he sits first.
| # | Player | Legend | Points |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Calvin Jin | Viktor, Herald of the Arcane (Origins) | 21 |
| 2 | Bo Su | Riven, The Exile (Radiance) | 21 |
| 3 | Kevin Duong | Riven, The Exile (Radiance) | 21 |
| 4 | Angelo Lirazan | Kai’Sa, Daughter of the Void (Origins) | 21 |
| 5 | cameren kawamoto | Kennen, Heart of the Tempest (Vendetta) | 21 |
| 6 | Alex Gorica | Akali, Rogue Assassin (Vendetta) | 19 |
| 7 | Nam Dang | Riven, The Exile (Radiance) | 19 |
| 8 | Izaak lau | Riven, The Exile (Radiance) | 18 |
The surpriseWho is Viktor, Herald of the Arcane
Viktor (OGN 265/298) is an Origins Legend — the set Riftbound launched with a year ago — in Mind and Order. His text is a single line: pay 1 energy, turn him sideways, and put a 1 might Recruit token into play. In plain terms, every turn you spend almost nothing and a small new unit shows up. It never wins a game on its own, but it keeps filling the board, and at a tournament where almost everyone is piloting something they built three days ago, an engine that never stalls counts for a lot.
| Legend | The card that stays on the table from start to finish and sets which colours the deck can play: saying «a Riven» is the same as naming a deck. |
| Exhaust | Turning the card sideways: you get the ability once per turn, and it straightens up again on your next one. |
| Recruit token | A 1 might unit that isn’t in your deck at all: the card makes one on the spot. |
The metaRiven and Kennen own the top tables
First place is the good story, but the number that matters heading into Stuttgart is a different one. Riven and Kennen were 20% of the entries and they are 58% of the top 64. Put another way: of every four players still in contention near the top, more than two are on one of those two cards.
| Legend | Entries | In the top 64 | Hit rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Riven, The Exile | 96 | 22 | 23% |
| Kennen, Heart of the Tempest | 56 | 15 | 27% |
| Kai’Sa, Daughter of the Void | 34 | 4 | 12% |
| Rengar, Pridestalker | 30 | 3 | 10% |
| Akali, Rogue Assassin | 34 | 2 | 6% |
| Viktor, Herald of the Arcane | 7 | 1 | 14% |
| Tournament average: 64 seats out of 755 players, or 8.5%. | |||
The flip side concerns Radiance itself. The set’s nine Legends accounted for 274 of the 755 entries, more than a third of the room, and 28 of them are in the top 64 — which sounds healthy until you notice that 22 of those 28 are Riven. The other eight Radiance Legends — Seraphine, Evelynn, Orianna, K’Sante, Ekko, Ziggs, Jarvan IV and Mordekaiser — started with 178 players and put six of them in the top 64. Two days after release, the only Radiance card holding up at a big event is Riven.
755 players
The largest official tournament of the Radiance release weekend: Melbourne, running at the same time, had 252.
Four invites
The top four earn a Regional Championship invite, usable in Stuttgart or Las Vegas, on top of a $25,000 total prize pool.
Why it matters to us. In under two weeks, from November 6 to 8, Stuttgart hosts the European Regional Championship with Radiance legal, and anyone in Italy picking a deck right now finally has a large sample of the new format to work from. Day 1 in Sacramento says two things at once: Riven is the deck to beat and Kennen hasn’t gone anywhere, yet the player on top is one of seven who registered Viktor. The format is still open enough to reward someone who turns up with their own idea.
The short version
- Five of the 755 players at the Sacramento Showdown Series are unbeaten after Saturday’s seven rounds of Swiss.
- Calvin Jin leads the standings with Viktor, Herald of the Arcane, an Origins Legend that only seven players registered.
- Riven and Kennen made up 20% of the entries and hold 37 of the top 64 places.
- Of Radiance’s nine Legends only Riven is delivering: the other eight put six players in the top 64 out of 178 entries.
- Day 2 is for everyone at two losses or better; the top four earn a Regional Championship invite for Stuttgart or Las Vegas.
Source: Topdeck (standings and entries), Riftbound Organized Play (schedule and tiers) and Laughing Dragon Events (prizes and format). Images: Riot Games.
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