Lille was the format's first real test since the March 31 bans took apart the decks that had been winning everything, and the answer it gave was not subtle. Over 2,000 players showed up for Europe's second Regional Qualifier, and Squirtle won the whole thing on Azir without losing a match, closing a run of straight wins and two draws with a two-game finals against Master Yi. If you had told me in February that a Regional Qualifier finals would be Master Yi against Azir with no Chaos deck at the table, I would have asked what game you were talking about.
2,000+
Players
7
Cards banned pre-event
0
Champion match losses
3 / 0
Irelia in Top 8 / top 4
The format walked in different
Seven cards came off the table between Bologna and Lille: Called Shot, Draven, Vanquisher, Fight or Flight, and Scrapheap, plus the battlefields Reaver's Row, Obelisk of Power, and The Dreaming Tree. That list reads like a targeted strike on the decks that defined the Vegas and Bologna results, and the broadcast desk treated it that way, opening Day 1 with the announcement that the cards had been “banned, and it has shaken up the meta.” The number the desk kept coming back to was Obelisk of Power sitting at “52% of the entire field in the previous” regional, and their argument was that removing it made Riftbound feel “a little bit more like a card game” again instead of a solved script.
Draven himself was not banned, and the desk was careful about the distinction: his chosen champion was gone, but they did not expect that to push him out of the field entirely, just down into a fairer mid-range shape. The standings agreed with half of that. Draven pilots still showed up, but only one Draven sat in the top 16 entering Day 2, and the deck that had swept the entire top five in Vegas produced exactly one Top 8 finish in Lille.
The field and the Day 2 numbers
The event ran eight rounds of Swiss on Day 1 and five more on Day 2 before an untimed Top 8, and twelve players finished the first day undefeated, ten of them at a clean 8-0. Irelia was the deck of the weekend by volume: she grew from 15% of the Day 1 population to 22% of Day 2 on a 28% conversion rate, with 70 Irelia pilots still alive going into Sunday, and Annie converted a healthy 26% of her players behind her.
Then the bracket happened. Three Irelia made the Top 8 and all three landed in the bottom half of it, which the desk called out with unusual bluntness: three Irelia in the Top 8, “zero in the top four,” and their conclusion was that they all flopped. Numbers win Swiss, but brackets are where a deck's ceiling gets tested, and Irelia's ceiling failed the test in Lille.
The Top 8
Five of the eight decks still ran Chaos, so the domain did not go anywhere, but the desk noted the surprise of a finals without a single Chaos deck in it — and the quiet winner of the weekend's deckbuilding argument was mid-range Master Yi, which put two copies into the Top 8 a week before anyone was calling him a contender.
| Place | Player | Champion | Domains |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | Squirtle | Azir | Calm / Order |
| 2nd | Schorn | Master Yi | Body / Calm |
| 3rd | CTCG DZiden | Draven | Fury / Chaos |
| 4th | Prismaticismism | Annie | Fury / Chaos |
| 5th | Natureal | Irelia | Calm / Chaos |
| 6th | Alex Shans | Irelia | Calm / Chaos |
| 7th | tinodluffy | Irelia | Calm / Chaos |
| 8th | barczek | Master Yi | Body / Calm |
Placements and decklists from the official Lille's Top Decks article.
The champion nobody predicted
Squirtle, introduced on stream as Pedro, ran a Calm/Order Azir list on a clean 6/6 rune split through the entire event without a single match loss. His semifinal ended Prismaticismism's Annie run, and the desk's call caught the mood: an Azir had “powerfully pummeled their way into the finals,” with one caster admitting he had tried to make the legend work himself and could not. The finals against Schorn's Master Yi went two games, and the desk crowned him with the record attached: undefeated all the way, with only two draws.
The desk said it plainly before the finals started: not a single person predicted a Master Yi against Azir finals. Two legends that had spent the Spiritforged season as afterthoughts met for the trophy the first weekend after the bans, and that feels less like a coincidence than like the whole point of the bans.
Lille Regional Qualifier · Winning list
Squirtle's Azir, Emperor of the Sands
1st place · Undefeated with two draws · Beat Schorn's Master Yi in the finals
Runes (12)
6x Calm Rune
6x Order Rune
Battlefields
Hall of Legends
Seat of Power
Trifarian War Camp
Core cards
Arise! · B.F. Sword · Brutalizer · Deathgrip · Desert's Call · Discipline · Doran's Shield · Eye of the Herald
Notable decks from the Top 8
Schorn's Master Yi (2nd)
The runner-up list is the clearest picture yet of what mid-range Master Yi looks like when it is built for a bracket instead of a kitchen table: a clean 6/6 Body/Calm rune base, the full three copies of Charm, Desert's Call, Discipline, and Lonely Poro, and three Ruin Runners on top, the unit the Bologna desk had already flagged as the card Kai'Sa decks cannot fight through. The battlefield trio of Forge of the Fluft, Ravenbloom Conservatory, and Vilemaw's Lair is nothing like the pre-ban standards, which is exactly the point: the three battlefields everyone used to agree on are gone, and Schorn found a set that fits a deck built to grind.
CTCG DZiden's Draven (3rd)
This is the list that answers the question everyone asked on March 31: what does Draven even play now? The ban took Draven, Vanquisher, Fight or Flight, and two of his three standard battlefields, and DZiden's answer was to lean all the way into the mid-range package, with three copies each of Kai'Sa, Survivor, Darius, Trifarian, Noxus Hopeful, Ferrous Forerunner, and Spinning Axe, a pair of Rek'Sai, Breacher on top, and Aspirant's Climb, Targon's Peak, and Zaun Warrens as the new battlefield set. The desk predicted before round one that the bans were not enough to take Draven out of the field, and third place on the first attempt is about as strong a proof as the prediction could ask for.
Prismaticismism's Annie (4th)
File this one away, because the fourth-place Annie list is a draft of something. The Fury/Chaos core is familiar from Houston, but the top end now runs Rengar, Pouncing and Rek'Sai, Breacher alongside the Kai'Sa, Survivor package, and the whole list reads like a player systematically testing which threats survive the post-ban format. Fourth in Lille makes it four final tables in four Western events for Prismaticismism, and a list this tuned suggests the near-misses are sharpening something rather than wearing him down.
What we learned
The bans worked, at least on the first weekend's evidence. The format produced a finals nobody called, a champion from outside the established top tier, and a Draven population that behaved like one strong deck among many instead of the deck the tournament was about. Whether that holds once players have had more than three weeks to rebuild is the real question, and Atlanta is only days away with the answer.
The other lesson is about Irelia, and it cuts both ways. Her Swiss numbers were the best in the room and her bracket results were the worst of the Top 8, which might mean the deck is the format's new consistency king without being its power king. We might see that exact profile become the defining shape of post-ban Spiritforged.
Looking ahead
Atlanta runs this coming weekend, and it closes the Spiritforged season, which makes it the second and final data point on the post-ban format before Unleashed changes everything again. The specific things I am watching: whether Draven's mid-range rebuild holds up in a field that has now seen it, whether Azir was a one-weekend miracle or a real deck, and whether Irelia's Swiss-monster, bracket-mortal profile repeats. If you are competing in Atlanta, the Lille Top 8 lists above are the homework, and I will have the full breakdown here once the trophy is handed out.
See you on the rift,
Shadow