Las Vegas Regional Qualifier Breakdown

The sweep

Five of the eight Top 8 seats went to Draven, and the first non-Draven name on the standings sheet appears at sixth place. Bologna at least dressed the problem up: three Top 8 Draven lists, a loss in the finals, and two unexpected champions standing over him. Vegas offered no such comfort, as places one through five all belonged to the Glorious Executioner.

The numbers behind the sweep are just as blunt. Draven brought 216 Day 1 pilots, which is 15.2% of the tracked field, and converted 80 of them into the 224-player Day 2 for a 37.0% conversion rate and a 35.7% share of the second day. If those figures feel familiar, they should: Bologna's Draven conversion was 37.9%, and his Day 2 share there was 34%. Two events, two continents, one week apart, and the deck posted nearly identical numbers both times, which is about as strong a consistency signal as this game has produced so far.

The broadcast leaned into the sweep rather than apologizing for it. Closing the weekend, the desk argued that you could not “call the Draven games boring,” and the finals made the case for them: SAMDSHERMAN's mid-range build against TTA's Miracle Draven was a genuine archetype clash inside the mirror, and the desk marveled that the deciding game came down to a Switcheroo.

Day 1 to Day 2 conversion

The champion of the conversion table, though, was not Draven. Rek'Sai turned 44 Day 1 pilots into 12 Day 2 slots, and her 27.3% conversion rate was the best non-Draven number in the room. Her best pilot, Vouz, landed at 49th overall, so the Void Burrower is still hunting for a headline finish, but a champion that quietly outconverts the field is usually a champion worth testing before everyone else notices. The broadcast noticed her before the numbers did, opening Day 2 on the image of a lone Rek'Sai sitting on the top tables in a sea of Draven.

Irelia posted a 25.0% conversion after hitting 25.6% in Bologna, so her floor across two Spiritforged events looks remarkably stable, and DeluxePhilCheese carried her to sixth place here. Kai'Sa converted 21.6% and put aggresia at 11th, close enough to the final table to sting. The strange one is Jax: he converted only 3 of his 44 Day 1 pilots, one of the worst rates at the event, and yet Theverybestgamer still took a Calm/Body build to seventh. One pilot spiking while the rest of the camp collapses usually says more about the pilot than the deck. Even the desk did a double take when the deck flashed on screen late in Swiss, with one caster blurting that he “did not expect Jax,” and by the Top 8 preview the jokes had started, with the desk inviting viewers to “imagine if he had a real weapon” because at that point he “would be unstoppable.”

Selected rows from the official conversion data on the riftboundstats Las Vegas event page, which lists all 28 champions. Leona, Rumble, Garen, Teemo, and Lee Sin sent nobody to Day 2.

The Top 8

Seven of the eight decks at the final table were built in a Chaos domain identity, and the only holdout was the Calm/Body Jax in seventh. The domain that defined Bologna, where six of the eight Top 8 decks ran Chaos runes, now looks less like a trend and more like the format's resting state.

Full standings and decklists are on the riftboundstats event page.

The winning list

SAMDSHERMAN's build is a study in trusting the format's best cards. The rune base is a clean 6/6 Fury/Chaos split, and the main deck plays the full three copies of the cards every Draven pilot has agreed on: Draven, Vanquisher for the engine, Spinning Axe and Overzealous Fan to keep him swinging, and Stacked Deck plus Fight or Flight for the kind of Chaos disruption this format keeps rewarding.

What separates the list is the supporting cast. Tideturner and Treasure Hunter smooth the early turns, Hard Bargain and Rebuke handle the mid-game exchanges, and the top end runs the Kai'Sa, Survivor and Darius, Trifarian pair alongside Noxus Hopeful and Ferrous Forerunner, so the deck never stops presenting must-answer bodies. The battlefield trio of Obelisk of Power, Reaver's Row, and Targon's Peak keeps the pressure mapped to the deck's aggressive plan.

All five Top 8 Draven lists live in the same Fury/Chaos domain identity, because the Legend leaves them no other choice, so the mirror comes down to card selection rather than domains. The winner's even 6/6 rune split reflects a list built to cast both halves of its pool on curve, and with five separate pilots reaching the final table, the deck clearly does not depend on any one player's read of the field, which might be the most frustrating part for everyone trying to beat him.

The other list worth studying

The Bologna threads

Alanzq1, who lifted the trophy in Bologna, backed it up with an eighth-place finish here on the same Mind/Chaos Ezreal pairing, and back-to-back Top 8s at the two biggest Western events of the season is the kind of run that separates a hot weekend from a genuinely elite player. The desk had picked him before a card was played, one caster flatly predicting on Day 1 that Alanzq1 was “going back to back,” and the run only ended in the quarterfinals against TTA, the eventual finalist. Ezreal himself stayed a boutique choice: 74 Day 1 pilots in Vegas after 77 in Bologna, roughly 5% of the field at both events, so the copycat wave I expected after his Bologna win never actually arrived.

Prismaticismism is the other repeat storyline, finishing fifth on Fury/Chaos Draven here after taking fifth on the same champion in Bologna. Two events, two fifth-place finishes, one deck. Somewhere there is a very consistent player wondering what it takes to crack the top four.

What we learned

Draven is no longer a question, he is the answer key. Nearly identical conversion at two consecutive events, a Top 8 majority in Vegas, and now a trophy. Bologna proved the field could beat him in a bracket, and Vegas proved that result does not generalize. Until something changes, every serious testing session starts with the Draven matchup, and I do not say that lightly.

The format underneath him is still breathing. 23 of 28 champions put at least one pilot into Day 2, which is a small step down from Bologna's 25, and the interesting movement is happening in the middle of the table: Rek'Sai outconverted everyone but Draven, Viktor and Azir both held their own, and Lucian quietly converted at 15.7% in his Spiritforged debut season. The pieces for a counter-meta exist, and somebody has to assemble them.

Chaos identities in seven of the eight Top 8 seats is the stat I keep coming back to. The domain question has effectively been answered for this format, and the real competition is happening one layer down, in which champion gets to carry the Chaos half of the pool.

Looking ahead

Two Western Regional Qualifiers on back-to-back weekends gave us more clean competitive data than the game had produced in its entire life before February, and the picture they paint agrees with itself: Draven on top, a stable second tier of Irelia and Kai'Sa, and a long tail of champions that can spike a bracket but not a field. The next stretch of the calendar will tell us whether the game's designers or its players solve the Draven problem first, and I honestly could not tell you which side I would bet on right now.

If you were in Vegas or followed along from home, hit me up on X at @shadow618tv and tell me what you would play next weekend, because my honest answer might just be Draven.

See you on the rift,
Shadow