T1 Drawing: the emails are out — and so are the bots. The fixes were on the table

by Riccardo Emanuele Eustor·Riftbound Zone

The selection emails for the T1 2025 Worlds Champion Signature Edition drawing went out today, August 20, right on schedule. The celebration didn't last long: within hours, X filled up with accounts showing off 10 or more boxes secured through bots — inboxes stacked with purchase confirmations, one after another, while a «confirmed preorder» of the box was already being flipped on eBay for $8,000. Riot had promised a fair drawing and says it removed over 60% of entries as suspicious. The scalpers got through anyway. And what stings most, for the community, is that the fixes existed — and Riot already had every single one of them in house.

Facts and dates from official Riftbound announcements and statements by Trick Jarrett (Riot) on X; community reports from the replies to the August 20 announcement. Individual screenshots can't be verified one by one, but the volume and consistency of the reports paint a clear pattern.

What happenedA week of promises, a morning of screenshots

Let's rewind. On August 13, on the eve of registration opening, Riftbound posted a reassuring thread: drawings are designed to give everyone «a fair opportunity», there are security measures in place to identify bots and suspicious registrations (kept confidential so they can't be gamed), and the T1 box got a strict new rule: a maximum of two entrants per household, defined as the same mailing address.

Overnight on August 19–20, Trick Jarrett — Riftbound's editor-in-chief at Riot — added the eye-opening number: security filters and the review process removed more than 60% of the entries, in what still stands as «the largest drawing Riftbound has held, by a dramatic margin».

Then, at 9AM Pacific on August 20, the emails went out. And with them, the screenshots: inboxes with dozens of «Complete Your Purchase» messages all landing in the same mailbox, accounts flaunting 10, 15, 20 boxes secured through networks of bot-run accounts. The implicit message is always the same: the filters slaughtered entries by the thousands, but the professionals got through anyway.

The numberThat 60% says more than it seems

Let's dwell on Jarrett's figure, because it reads two ways. The first is Riot's: the filters work — more than half of all entries were junk and got thrown out before the drawing. The second is the community's: if over 6 entries in 10 were fraudulent, bot pressure on this product was industrial in scale — and a filter that removes 60% tells you nothing about how many slipped through in the remaining 40%.

The incentive, after all, is enormous. The box costs $360 and contains one of the first serialized cards in the game's history, numbered 1–2025, with the player's signature stamped in gold: on the secondary market, sealed Korean and Chinese versions are already listed in presale at over $2,500 — and on the very day the emails went out, a confirmed preorder of the English box sold on eBay for $8,000: more than 22 times MSRP. Margins like these, multiplied by every account that beats the filter, are an open invitation for a professional botting operation — and a few blocked entries are simply the cost of doing business.

How they do it is no mystery: the «two per household» limit keys off the mailing address, which is trivially varied; emails multiply through aliases and catch-all domains — which is exactly what the screenshots show: dozens of confirmations funneling into a single mailbox. The entry requirement? A freshly created Riot account. Free, instant, unlimited.

The proposalsThe fixes the community put on the table

The most frustrating part of this story is that Riot is not just another merch store: it's the only TCG publisher in the world that owns a gaming ecosystem with fifteen years of data. And the replies to the announcement say it in every language. Two proposals keep coming up:

• Check Riot account activity. A real player has a history: games on League of Legends, TFT or Legends of Runeterra, account age, a level. An account spun up last week by a server farm has none of that. Weighting real activity would make mass account creation expensive — the only language bots understand.
• Reward people who play in person. Anyone showing up to Nexus Nights and Skirmishes at their local game store is, by definition, a real human who plays Riftbound: official events run through Riot's own systems, and attendance is trackable. Reserving a share of the boxes — or extra weight in the drawing — for people who have set foot in an event would put the product in players' hands, not scalpers'.

Neither is perfect on its own, and it should be said: a LoL activity check would penalize TCG-only players, and not everyone has a store running events within reasonable distance. But nobody is asking to turn these into entry requirements: they could simply be weights — the more real-player signals you accumulate, the more your chances count — or combined signals (in-game activity, live events, purchase history, account age). Any combination would be harder to game than a mailing address.

Our takeThe drawing is the right road, walked halfway

Let's be fair: a drawing beats a first-come-first-served checkout race — where bots win 100% of the time — and a filter that removes 60% of entries is not smoke and mirrors. The household cap was a sensible step. But as long as the ticket into the lottery remains a free Riot account and any address, the largest drawing in Riftbound history is also the largest bot lottery in Riftbound history: the more fraudulent entries you feed in, the more draws you win. That's arithmetic, not bad luck.

Riot holds what no other publisher does: it knows who actually plays, online and in stores. Not using that data to protect the most premium product it has ever printed is a choice, not a technical limitation. One last point, on transparency: Riot says flagged entries are reviewed before the drawing, but has said nothing about how many boxes will be revoked after the fact from those who cheated, or whether a post-sale audit even exists. If the August 24 and 27 waves also serve to recirculate boxes clawed back from bots, saying so openly would be the right signal — and a better deterrent than any secret filter.

FAQFrequently asked questions

For the full product breakdown — the five T1 player cards, the 10,125-copies-per-language print run and how the drawing works — see our article on the drawing results and our piece on the T1 collection. For daily-updated Riftbound card prices, check our price tracker.

Sources: emails-out announcement and anti-bot measures thread (@playriftbound, X); Trick Jarrett's statement (X); Preorder Drawing FAQ (playriftbound.com). The $8,000 sale: eBay listing, August 20. Screenshots from the community on X. Images © Riot Games.