Bologna Regional Qualifier Breakdown

How my predictions held up

In the meta preview, I predicted Draven would be the most popular legend at 20-25% of the field, with Kai'Sa and Annie behind him. Draven came in at 15% on Day 1, which is lower than I expected, but 37.9% of those players reached Day 2, the highest share in the tournament. That made Draven 34% of the Day 2 field. The spirit of the call was right even if the Day 1 number was off.

I said I liked Irelia or Annie to send a strong share of players to Day 2, and both delivered. Of the players who entered with Irelia, 25.6% reached Day 2, and krowz took her to 3rd place overall. Annie sent 16.4% of her players to Day 2, and COPE Anªrchy finished 27th. Both showed up.

Where I got it wrong was the winner. I gave the edge to Draven, Annie, or Kai'Sa. Alanzq1 took it down with Ezreal, a champion I had in Tier 3 alongside Miss Fortune, Lux, Jinx, and several others I thought needed an accurate prediction of the opposing field and some luck. Alanzq1 had both, and SEBIQQQQQQQQQQQQ took Miss Fortune to 2nd place on top of it. Two Tier 3 champions in the finals. I said “I'd love to be wrong” and I got my wish.

The other miss was Sett. I called him the dark horse I was watching closest and said if even one made Top 8, it would confirm the Nanjing signal. No Sett in the Top 8. NLV Tomino finished 96th overall as the best Sett, which is respectable in a 1,719-player field, but the breakout I was hoping for didn't happen. Looks like I overread the Chinese data on that one.

The field

Going into the weekend, the big three were Draven, Kai'Sa, and Irelia. All three drew triple-digit player counts and combined for 35% of the Day 1 field. Draven alone accounted for 219 entries. Everyone knew Draven was the deck to beat, and a lot of people showed up specifically trying to beat it.

All 28 legal Champions saw play on Day 1, and 25 of them made it to Day 2. Compare that to the Houston Regional Qualifier where only 10 of 16 legal Champions survived the cut. Spiritforged spread the field across more Champions. The meta is wider than it's ever been.

Ornn, Leona, and Garen sent no players to Day 2. Their best individual finishes still deserve context. Ghostfunk took the top Ornn slot at #490 overall. RiftboundTee led all 15 Garen players to #403. Daakkotah97 played Leona to #320. These Champions did not make the Day 2 cut as a group, but their best players still put up competitive Swiss finishes.

Who advanced to Day 2

Day 1 attendance tells you what players expected. The percentage who reached Day 2 shows which Champions backed that popularity with results.

Draven's 37.9% is the headline number. Nearly four out of every ten Draven players made Day 2, and the Champion went from 15% of the Day 1 field to over a third of Day 2. Everyone prepared for Draven, but the field still could not keep him in check.

Irelia's 25.6% is also notable because it confirms what the Dalian data was showing: a strong share of her players still reaches Day 2 in fields built around Draven. She can play the Draven matchup and beat the decks designed to beat Draven, which is a strong place to be in competitive play.

The Top 8

Full decklists are up on the official Riftbound site. Here's who made it.

Three Draven, two Ezreal, one Miss Fortune, one Irelia, one Viktor. Chaos runes showed up in six of the eight decks, which is the defining trend of Bologna. Chaos is no longer a fringe domain. It's the backbone of the competitive format right now.

1st

Alanzq1

EzrealChaosMind

2nd

SEBIQQQQQQQQQQQQ

Miss FortuneBodyChaos

3rd

krowz

IreliaCalmChaos

4th

Ghosterdriver

ViktorMindOrder

5th

Prismaticismism

DravenChaosFury

6th

Randyyy

DravenChaosFury

7th

M4rcus99

DravenChaosFury

8th

TheManLandRFT

EzrealChaosMind

The winning list

Alanzq1 won the whole event with Ezreal, a champion that had 77 Day 1 players out of 1,466 who made it to the table. That's barely 5% of the field. Nobody was talking about Ezreal as the deck to beat going into the weekend, and that might be exactly why it worked.

The list runs 17 unique cards in the main deck, with many cards included once. That gives it several ways to control a fight instead of relying on one sequence. Vex, Cheerless makes enemy spells cost more during combat. Ravenbloom Student gains 1 Might for the turn whenever you play a spell. Stupefy gives a unit -1 Might and draws a card, while Wages of Pain deals 3 damage and creates an exhausted Gold token. Arcane Shift banishes and replays one of your units, then deals 3 damage to an enemy unit at a battlefield. Called Shot looks at the top two cards, keeps one, and can repeat the effect. The Chaos/Mind rune split (7/5) supports those spells that disrupt opponents and expensive units that can finish games, such as Thousand-Tailed Watcher and Singularity.

How the winning list controls fights

Makes friendly spells cheaper and enemy spells more expensive while in combat.

Gains +1 Might for the turn whenever its controller plays a spell.

Gives a unit -1 Might for the turn, to a minimum of 1, and draws a card.

Deals 3 damage to a unit and creates an exhausted Gold token.

Three Pickpockets in the sideboard is interesting because it means Alanzq1 was prepared for games against other control decks, not just fast attack decks. That kind of targeted preparation wins tournaments when everyone else is focused on beating Draven.

The broadcast filled in why nobody else was on the list: the desk kept returning to players who had seen the deck in testing and passed on it, with one telling them it was “simply too difficult for me to play,” and Alanzq1 answered that by running the Swiss undefeated. By the time the trophy was decided, the casting booth had moved past analysis and was simply asking “how perfect can a deck be.”

“

How perfect can a deck be.

Notable decks from the Top 8

The Draven problem

Draven put three copies in the Top 8, sent 38% of his players to Day 2, the highest share in the field, and grew from 15% of the field to 34% on Day 2. He did all of this while being the most targeted Champion in the room. The Top 8 Draven lists all stayed in Chaos/Fury, but they were not identical. Prismaticismism and Randyyy built around Ezreal, Prodigy, Stacked Deck, Called Shot, and Scrapheap, while M4rcus99 took a different Chaos/Fury route with Darius, Trifarian and Kai'Sa, Survivor. That is still enough convergence to put Draven under balance-watch pressure.

The broadcast desk was ahead of the data on this one, calling Draven “one of the best decks in the room” before the weekend proved it and slotting him into “the S tier or the Z tier” if you wanted to put him above that. The more interesting broadcast observation was structural: because attacking into Draven feeds him card draw, the desk argued “you want to build your deck differently” and play fewer units against him, which then leaves you soft to decks that punish passive boards. A champion that warps deckbuilding two seats away from him is a different kind of problem than a champion that just wins.

The saving grace for Draven's balance case is that he lost in the finals. Alanzq1's Ezreal proved the champion can be beaten by a well-positioned deck with a great player. Whether that's enough to stave off errata is anyone's guess. My take: Draven should be on the watch list, even if Bologna proved he can be beaten.

The broadcast

Quick shoutout to the broadcast team. Leonard K, Amy Wosley, James O'Leary, and Aaron Chamberlain did an amazing job all weekend. The game is still young and the broadcast is already at a level that makes you want to keep watching. Card-by-card breakdowns of key turns, real-time explanations of what players expected to face during Swiss, and some genuinely great commentary during the Top 8 matches. If you missed the live broadcast, the VODs are up on the official Riftbound YouTube and Twitch channels and they're worth your time even if you already know the results.

What we learned

Chaos is the dominant domain in competitive Riftbound right now. Six of eight Top 8 decks ran Chaos runes, but their shared cards do different jobs. Called Shot and Stacked Deck select cards, Fight or Flight moves a unit from a battlefield to base, and Seal of Discord exhausts to add 1 Chaos Power.

The Chaos tools defining the format

Looks at the top two cards, draws one, recycles the other, and can Repeat.

Looks at the top three cards, puts one into hand, and recycles the rest.

Moves a unit from a battlefield to its base and can be hidden for later.

Exhausts as a Reaction to add 1 Chaos Power.

Draven is the best deck and the most beatable. He sent the largest share of players to Day 2 and put three decks in the Top 8, but he lost in the finals, and both Champions that beat him came from outside the expected top tier. The metagame can answer Draven. Whether it will answer him consistently across multiple events is the question heading into Vegas.

Kai'Sa deserves a line in the postmortem too. The desk called the missing Kai'Sa one of the real surprises of the weekend, admitting they had thought at some point she “might be the best deck in the tournament,” and a reversal that sharp inside a single weekend says a lot about how quickly this format punishes the consensus pick.

Ezreal is the breakout Champion. From 5% of the field to two Top 8 slots and the trophy. Alanzq1's Chaos/Mind list uses flexible single-copy answers, and TheManLandRFT reached the Top 8 with a completely different Ezreal build. The Champion has more unexplored space than people realized.

And the format is healthy. 25 of 28 Champions on Day 2 is a massive improvement from Houston's 10 of 16. Bologna showed a wider meta than Houston, and Bologna proved it at the biggest stage the game has seen in the West so far.

Looking ahead

Las Vegas is two days away. Players who watched Bologna have had barely enough time to process the results, let alone rebuild their decks. Expect a lot of people trying to copy Alanzq1's Ezreal list, and a lot of other people preparing for exactly that. That's the beauty of a fast tournament cycle: the meta can't settle, and the players who stay one step ahead of the field are the ones who end up in the Top 8.

I'll have a price impact follow-up later this week once the market has time to react to the decklists. In the meantime, if you're competing in Vegas or just watching from home, hit me up on X at @shadow618tv and tell me what you think the Vegas meta looks like now that Bologna has reshuffled the deck.

See you on the rift,
Shadow