Houston Regional Qualifier Breakdown

The field

Kai'Sa was the story before a single game was played. She drew 372 Day 1 entries, which is 33.1% of the tracked field, and no other champion came close: Master Yi sat in second at 14.8% and Annie in third at 10.9%. When one deck is a third of the room, every other list in the building is either playing it or planning against it, and Houston became a referendum on whether the Daughter of the Void deserved that much respect.

The broadcast desk framed the rest of the field as an open secret, saying the worst-kept secret coming into the event was that “this Annie deck is insane,” and the question the casters kept returning to was historical: in the Chinese events it was Master Yi that “kept Annie away from the top tables,” so Houston doubled as a test of whether the Western Annie builds had actually solved that matchup.

All 16 legal Champions saw Day 1 play, but only 10 of them put at least one pilot into Day 2. Ahri, Sett, Leona, Jinx, Lux, and Garen were shut out entirely, and some of those misses came from real numbers: Ahri brought 63 players and Sett brought 56, so those camps went home with nothing to show for a meaningful share of the field. The Day 2 cut was brutal at this event, with only 64 players surviving into the second day, and that tight funnel is worth keeping in mind when you read the conversion numbers below.

Day 1 to Day 2 conversion

Raw attendance tells you what players expected. Conversion tells you what actually worked. Kai'Sa converted 27 of her 372 pilots into the 64-player Day 2, which means she grew from a third of the field to 42.2% of the second day. That is a champion earning her attendance rather than coasting on it.

The quieter number is Miss Fortune. She brought 59 players, put 7 of them into Day 2, and her 11.9% conversion rate led the entire event. Nobody was calling Miss Fortune a top deck going into Houston, and her pilots outperformed every camp in the room on a rate basis, which seems like the kind of signal that gets ignored until it wins something. The broadcast saw it a day before the standings did: the desk noted that a Miss Fortune Dazzling Aurora list finished Day 1 as the Swiss leader, “cream of the crop at the end of yesterday,” and one caster admitted he came in thinking the deck folded without its namesake card, then spent the day watching these lists “winning without even drawing Dazzling Aurora.”

Conversion data from the official tournament report via the riftboundstats Houston event page. Champions with zero Day 2 pilots (Ahri, Sett, Leona, Jinx, Lux, Garen) are omitted from the table.

The Top 8

Four Annie, two Master Yi, two Kai'Sa. The champion that owned a third of the field walked away with two seats at the final table and neither of the top two finishes, while the two starter deck legends everyone learned the game on claimed six of the eight slots between them. Dhawally finished first and Blargh1111's Calm/Body Master Yi took second. The bracket the broadcast called gave the result real shape: Dhawally won an Annie mirror against Zent in the semifinals while Blargh1111 cut down two of the other Annies on his side of the bracket, and when the finals settled it, the desk credited Dhawally's preparation and said his Rebukes “showed a lot of respect for the matchup.”

Full standings and decklists are on the riftboundstats event page.

The winning list

Dhawally won the first English Regional Qualifier with the Annie, Dark Child starter legend, and I think that sentence is going to age into one of the best arguments this game has for its own health. You did not need a binder full of chase rares to win Houston, but you did need to know exactly what your deck was doing. The broadcast added the detail that makes the run remarkable: the desk introduced Dhawally as a player who started “the game only mere weeks ago,” learning the Annie list his team developed together, which makes this trophy either terrifying or encouraging depending on how your own testing has been going.

The list runs a clean 6/6 Fury/Chaos rune split and plays like an aggressive deck that refuses to run out of gas. Annie, Stubborn and Vi, Destructive supply the early pressure, Stacked Deck and Fight or Flight keep the Chaos disruption flowing, and Rebuke plus Scrapheap give it answers when the board stalls. The top end borrows the same Kai'Sa, Survivor and Darius, Trifarian package that the rest of the field was building whole decks around, which might be the smartest part of the build: it plays the format's best cards without paying the tax of being the format's most targeted legend.

The battlefield choices (The Arena's Greatest, The Dreaming Tree, Zaun Warrens) round out a list that seems built to win long, grindy tournament days rather than pretty games, and a three-day, 1,129-player event is exactly the environment that rewards that kind of build.

What we learned

Kai'Sa is beatable, and the room proved it by beating her. A third of the field and 42% of Day 2 turned into fifth and seventh place, and if there is a configuration of the Daughter of the Void that fixes her top end, nobody in Houston found it. She might still be the safest deck in the format, but Houston showed the gap between safest and best.

The starter legends are real tournament decks. Annie and Master Yi taking six of eight Top 8 seats, including both finalists, means the entry-level builds are not just training wheels, and that has implications for anyone deciding what to buy before the next qualifier.

The other lesson is less comfortable: six champions brought a combined 208 players and sent nobody to Day 2. A 16-champion format where 10 convert is not a crisis, but the bottom of the roster is clearly a tier below the top, and we might see that gap matter more as prize support scales up.

Looking ahead

Houston was the proof of concept: over a thousand players for the first English qualifier, a Top 8 that punished the consensus, and a starter deck holding the trophy. The next wave of qualifiers is going to look different because everyone now knows the field can be this deep, and the players who treat Houston as a data point instead of a fluke are the ones I expect to see on the final tables next year.

If you were in Houston or watched from home, hit me up on X at @shadow618tv and tell me what you think the field misread, because I do not think Kai'Sa at 33% happens again.

See you on the rift,
Shadow