Welcome to my Meta Monday article! Every Monday I’ll be taking a look at the current state of competitive Riftbound, recapping any big or notable tourneys, and giving some predictions on how the upcoming meta game could change!
Tournament Recap
This weekend was the second official Riot Riftbound Open in China. This tournament was held in Beijing and featured a main event that was capped at 512 players.
The Beijing Open
The meta game so far in China has been completely dominated by Kaisa, and Master Yi with Viktor being one of the most popular decks both weeks so far. After the first China Open where we saw Kaisa have an exceptional conversion rate into day 2 and then eventually win the entire tournament, it’s no surprise that we saw her play rate sky rocket even higher this week surpassing Master Yi as the most played deck with 30% of all players deciding to play Kaisa. On the other hand, after Viktor’s abysmal 8% conversion rate last week, it’s no surprise we saw a 30% decrease in Viktor’s play rate dropping from over 100 players last week to only 70 this weekend in Beijing. And while Kaisa stood on business and had an insane 22% conversion rate, Viktor also tried to stand on business, but fell short of expectations again by having an impressive (for all the wrong reasons) conversion rate of just 4%. Kaisa and Master Yi went on to make up the entire top 8 with a clean split of 4 Yi and 4 Kaisa, with the finals again being a Kaisa vs Yi match taken down by Kaisa. A few notable finishes was a Volibear player made it all the way to 13th place barely missing out on top 8, and a Viktor player following in the Volibears footsteps of placing in 11th place just outside of top 8. So look at the bright side, at least Viktor is just as good as Volibear 🙂
Current State of the Meta
Kaisa and Master Yi are clear front runners early on in the meta right now. I think it’s very reasonable to call them the 2 best decks to bring for most players due to how easy they are to play well enough to win, how strong the decks are compared to the field so their ability to sometimes win games for you is a bonus, and the amount of refinement that has been put into these two Legends specifically.
Right behind them though I think we’re seeing a few decks get more and more refined making them real contenders to take Kaisa’s crown. Miss Fortune Aurora is picking up a lot of popularity due to its favored matchup into Kaisa and how hard it is overall for most decks to actually deal with the dazzling Aurora game plan. MF Aurora is a really good deck choice right now for one of these China Opens where you can expect the Kaisa and Yi play rate to be close to 50% of the entire field.
On the other end of the spectrum is Viktor continuing to show how much of a fraud deck he is. While I don’t think Viktor is actually an overall bad legend, I do think the builds we’ve seen so far for Viktor are everything but impressive. Viktor doesn’t get to really do anything broken or so above rate it warrants such a high play rate. Most of the strong things Viktor is doing is thanks to the blue cards in his deck, and then the rest of his deck is fairly bad yellow cards. Viktor just seems like a worse Teemo deck if you just compare the cards side by side and the quality of cards you get in purple over yellow.
What’s The Future Hold?
While Kaisa and Yi are very strong and too meta picks right now, I’m not sure they will be in this tier 0 state for long. The truth is there just hasn’t been enough time to refine other legends to the same degree as Yi and Kaisa whether that’s due to the decks being harder to build or the play patterns being harder to master. The best decks that aren’t being played right now and could make a huge appearance and spike an upcoming China Open are Darius Hook and Sett. Both Darius Hook and Sett are strong enough to win a tournament, and are the next decks that are looking closer and closer to becoming fully optimized. While their play patterns may still take a bit to learn and players will have to get their reps in with the decks, I’m confident we’ll see one of those 2 decks make the top 8 of one of the next two Majors.
As always, thanks for your time, I hope I've helped you on your journey to achieving your Riftbound goals, and have a nice rest of your day, evening, or morning!
~ Moe
