If you have been reading these breakdowns since Bologna, you already know the name Prismaticismism: fifth in Bologna, fifth in Vegas, fourth in Lille nine days ago, always at the table and never holding the trophy. Atlanta fixed that. In front of 1,832 players at the last Regional Qualifier of the Spiritforged season, he won the whole event on Fury/Chaos Annie, taking a game-three finals against Challenger TCG's Koko Lopez on Draven with both players sitting at eight points on Aspirant's Climb. The broadcast put it as directly as I would have: very few players could chain results like that back-to-back, and this one finally closed the loop.
1,832
Players
211
Draven registrations
Game 3
Finals went the distance
4th
Straight Top 8 for Alanzq1
The League of Draven
The official recap called Atlanta what it was: the League of Draven, with Chaos and Fury as the domains to beat. A whopping 211 of the 1,832 players registered the Glorious Executioner, which is 11.5% of the field for a deck that lost its chosen champion, its best trick, and two of its favorite battlefields to the March 31 bans a month earlier. Lille suggested the bans had knocked Draven down a tier, and Atlanta complicated that story, because the deck was still the most popular thing in the room and put three pilots into the Top 8, including the finals.
The counterpoint is that the finals is exactly where the run stopped, and it stopped against Annie, the same legend that won Houston back in December. The post-ban Spiritforged format ended with two events, two different champions, and two very different lessons: Lille said the field was wide open, and Atlanta said the old guard still sets the terms even when it does not win.
The top of the standings
Three Draven pilots in the Top 8 of a post-ban event is the stat that keeps the League of Draven line honest, and the full table shows how the rest of the format arranged itself around them.
| Place | Player | Champion | Domains |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | Prismaticismism | Annie | Fury / Chaos |
| 2nd | CTCG Koko Lopez | Draven | Fury / Chaos |
| 3rd | HaruKaze | Irelia | Calm / Chaos |
| 4th | CTG Alanzq | Ezreal | Chaos / Mind |
| 5th | Frosty | Kai'Sa | Fury / Mind |
| 6th | Boulevard | Draven | Fury / Chaos |
| 7th | CTCG Collin K | Sett | Body / Order |
| 8th | StarDust | Draven | Fury / Chaos |
Placements from the riftdecks Atlanta final standings; full decklists are in the official Atlanta's Top Decks article.
The storylines
Sett made his first Regional Qualifier Top 8, and the timing is not an accident. CTCG Collin K took the Body/Order brawler to seventh, and the community read on stream coverage afterward was that Colin “managed to top eight in Atlanta once Fight or Flight got banned,” with fewer Rebukes circulating in the format as a bonus. A legend that spent the whole season getting written off needed exactly one ban wave to become playable, which says as much about the bans as it does about Sett.
Alanzq1 finished fourth on his Chaos/Mind Ezreal, and the streak deserves its own sentence: Houston fifth, Bologna champion, Vegas eighth, Atlanta fourth. Four Regional Qualifiers, four Top 8s, on three different legends across two formats. Nobody else in the West has anything close to that resume right now.
The cruelest line in the standings belongs to Dhawally. The Houston champion was one win from the Top 8 when he ran into Prismaticismism, the eventual champion, and got knocked out of contention. Had that match gone the other way, we might have been talking about the game's first two-time champion instead of its most persistent bridesmaid finally winning, and I suspect those two names are not done colliding.
Atlanta Regional Qualifier · Winning list
Prismaticismism's Annie, Dark Child
1st place · Beat CTCG Koko Lopez's Draven in a game-three finals
Runes (12)
6x Fury Rune
6x Chaos Rune
Battlefields
The Arena's Greatest
Zaun Warrens
Seat of Power
Core cards
Noxus Hopeful · Traveling Merchant · Ferrous Forerunner · Overzealous Fan · Kai'Sa, Survivor · Rengar, Pouncing · Rek'Sai, Breacher · Stacked Deck
Notable decks from the Top 8
CTCG Koko Lopez's Draven (2nd)
The finals Draven is worth comparing card for card against DZiden's third-place list from Lille, because the two independently converged: the same Fury/Chaos 6/6 rune base, the same Aspirant's Climb, Targon's Peak, and Zaun Warrens battlefields, and the same Kai'Sa, Survivor and Noxus Hopeful core. Where Koko Lopez went his own way is the interaction suite, moving Rebuke to a full three copies in the main deck and adding three Gem Jammers, which reads like a direct answer to a format that leaned harder into gear after the bans. One week was enough for post-ban Draven to go from an open question to a stock list with tech slots, and that speed is the scariest thing about the deck.
CTCG Collin K's Sett (7th)
The first Sett to reach a Western Regional Qualifier Top 8 is a Body/Order list on a 7/5 rune split, and it looks nothing like the Fury shells people kept trying to force him into: three copies each of Arena Bar, Pit Rookie, First Mate, and Cithria of Cloudfield build the wide, sturdy board Sett's Legend wants to rescue, with Fiora, Victorious and Showstopper as the finishers and Call to Glory plus Punch First turning combat math sideways. The battlefield set of Grove of the God-Willow, Monastery of Hirana, and Sunken Temple is as off-meta as the deck itself. The community read afterward credited the Fight or Flight ban with opening Sett's window, and the list backs the theory: this deck loses its best units to that spell every time it resolves, and Atlanta was the first big event where it could not.
What we learned
Annie is the quiet constant of Western Riftbound. She won the first English Regional Qualifier in Houston, survived a ban wave that gutted her Fury/Chaos neighbors, and closed the Spiritforged era with the Atlanta trophy. The shell changes, the format changes, and the deck keeps ending up holding hardware.
This was also the end of an era in the literal sense: the official coverage framed Atlanta as the last Regional Qualifier before the Unleashed release, so every conclusion above comes with an expiration date. New legends, new mechanics, and a new meta arrive with the next set, and I will have a first look at what Unleashed does to all of this in the coming days.
See you on the rift,
Shadow