The Unleashed season closed in Hartford ten days ago, and the next format is already on the calendar: Vendetta, Riftbound's fourth set, releases on July 31 as the game's first synchronized worldwide launch, with the official preview season starting Monday, July 6. The announcement on the Vancouver broadcast pitched the theme as rivals and “how an enemy can define you,” every legend sharpened by the person or philosophy standing against them, and for once the marketing line and the mechanical hook are the same thing, because this is the set where Riftbound finally prints the domain pairs it has been refusing to print for four sets.
JUL 31
Release day, global
160
Cards, 50+ showcase
9
New champion legends
3
Never-printed domain pairs
The dates that matter
Preview season opens July 6 at 6pm Pacific with the Vendetta Dev Drop video and the set overview article, deliberately timed so China and the West get the reveals together, and daily card previews run July 6 through 17 across a published roster of reveal partners. The global Pre-Rift weekend lands July 24 to 26, release day is July 31, and if you want product on day one, the official store's preorder drawing takes signups July 6 to 8 with selection emails on July 13. All of it is on the official 2026 roadmap.
The synchronized launch matters more than it sounds like it should. Riftbound started as a China-first game with the West a set behind on a different cadence, which is why our tournament coverage has spent all year squinting at Chinese results for signals, and Riot has been saying since the February State of the Game that Vendetta is where the schedules converge. From July 31 onward, every region plays the same format at the same time, and the days of scouting another region's meta three months early are mostly over.
The three forbidden pairs
Here is the piece that changes deckbuilding. Six domains make fifteen possible two-domain identities, and through three sets Riftbound has printed legends for only twelve of them. The three that have never existed — Fury/Calm, Mind/Body, and Chaos/Order — are exactly the ones Vendetta adds, with the official announcement confirming “enemy color pairs” for legends for the first time and the Vancouver broadcast counting “nine new champion legends” in the set.
The Chaos/Order pairing comes with a fun piece of unfinished business attached. Twisted Fate's champion unit has been sitting in the card pool since Origins with an Order effect nobody could ever turn on, because no legend with the right identity existed, and when the Riftbound editor-in-chief was asked about it on the Vancouver broadcast, the answer was that a legend for it is coming. I am not saying Twisted Fate is one of the nine. I am saying somebody at Riot has been holding that card's other half for four sets, and this is the set of grudges.
Strategically, the new pairs land in a format that has been begging for them. The Utrecht top cut briefly locked three decks without a single Chaos domain among them, Hartford answered with a Top 8 where six of eight decks carried Chaos, and every metagame argument this season has eventually become an argument about who gets to wear which domains. Nine legends on identities nobody has ever built around is the biggest deckbuilding space this game has opened at once.
The champions we know about
Seven of the nine legends have names, courtesy of Riot's GAMA Expo presentation: Nasus, Renekton, Akali, Mel, Ambessa, Zed, and Shen. The set's rival pairings write themselves from that list, with Zed against Shen and Nasus against Renekton headlining, and the showcase treatment pairs rivals across connected artwork, including Vi against Jinx and Jayce against Viktor. Akali was the name the official desk kept repeating during the Regional Qualifier broadcasts, and community box-art readings put Renekton and Nasus on the front of the set, which fits a rivalry called Vendetta about as well as anything could.
Two actual cards escaped early. During the T1 versus KC broadcast at MSI, a side banner revealed Mel and Jayce as the first Vendetta cards, and the community write-ups that followed describe Mel as an Epic champion unit for four energy with an Empowered mode that turns enemy cost-reduction effects back against their owner, while Jayce reads as a Rare champion unit that picks a combat mode each time he readies. Both descriptions come from reveal coverage rather than official card pages, so treat the exact wording as provisional until July 6, but the direction is clear enough: champion units built around answering what the opponent is doing, which is very on theme.
Products and prices
The product lineup brings one genuinely new thing: the Showdown Deck, confirmed on the official June store update as two pre-built decks designed to be played against each other straight out of the box, with Vendetta's edition starring Zed versus Shen. Reveal coverage lists the package at two 56-card decks with a pair of Vendetta boosters, playmats, and a rulebook, which reads like the best new-player product this game has shipped, and a duel in a box called Zed versus Shen is exactly the kind of thing that sells a rivalry set.
Booster displays are listed at $119.99 for 24 packs in US reveal coverage, with European preorders around €144 for the display and €6 per booster, and a Vendetta Vault plus a Pre-Rift event kit sit in distributor listings. Prices before release always come with a shrug attached, and I will do a proper price watch once previews show us which cards actually matter.
What it means for competitive play
Barcelona, August 21 to 23, is the first Regional Qualifier after release and the start of the Vendetta season, with Singapore following September 4 to 6 and Los Angeles closing the run in late September. If the Unleashed season taught us anything, it is that the first event of a format crowns somebody nobody predicted, and with nine new legends on never-built identities, Barcelona might be the least predictable Regional Qualifier this game has run.
There is also a quiet rotation attached. Per the February State of the Game, once Vendetta releases, Origins and Proving Grounds legends stop being Best-of prize targets at events, even though they stay legal in the format, and the broadcast desks spent the last two Regional Qualifiers reminding players that Hartford was the final chance at those medal cards. The prize wall changes even where the format does not.
The pace deserves its own note: Radiance, Set 5, already has dates, with previews September 21 and release October 23. Two sets in three months is a fast, confident calendar, and it means whatever Vendetta breaks or fixes will get all of about eight weeks to prove it before the next shake-up. The full set review lands here when the Dev Drop does.
See you on the rift,
Shadow