Riftbound Guide

If you want to win by making your opponent run out of good options, the riftbound vex champion deck is built for you. Riot’s own description of Vex is that she “thwarts your opponent at every turn, forcing difficult decision after difficult decision.” That is not a passive style of play. It is a different kind of aggression. Instead of hitting hard and fast, you are dismantling your opponent’s plan piece by piece, drawing into answers they cannot predict, and watching their best moves get shut down one by one. If that sounds more satisfying to you than winning through raw combat power, keep reading.

What Kind of Deck Is This?

Vex plays Calm (Green) and Chaos (Purple) domains. Calm gives you units that stabilise the board and build value over time. Chaos gives you disruption, the ability to interfere with your opponent’s plans, and tools to force difficult choices. Put them together and you have a deck that is genuinely hard to play against.

The feeling of playing Vex is different from any of the other champion decks. You are not building to a big swing turn. You are applying constant pressure through attrition. Your opponent plays a unit, and you have an answer. They try to take a battlefield, and you push back. By the time they realise they are behind on cards and options, it is usually too late for them to recover.

One of the things that makes this concrete is Vex, Apathetic. When your opponent plays a unit while Vex Apathetic is on the battlefield, that unit enters stunned. In plain terms: they spent their energy to play a card, and it cannot do anything on the turn it arrives. That single ability creates a situation your opponent has to plan around every single turn. Do they play their unit now and accept it being stunned? Do they hold it back and lose tempo? Every decision becomes harder than it should be. That is Vex working exactly as intended.

This does make the deck harder to pick up in the first few games compared to something like Jinx, where the plan is simpler. You need to recognise when to hold and when to push, and that takes a few games to develop. I would describe this as a strong second or third deck rather than a first purchase, if you are completely new to Riftbound.

The Champion: Vex

Vex is a Legend card, which means she is your champion and the centrepiece of the deck. Her confirmed card text reads:

Legend Vex, Gloomist. When you or an ally hold, you may exhaust me to draw 1.

In plain terms: every time one of your units holds a battlefield (rather than attacking), Vex gives you the option to exhaust her (tap her, temporarily making her inactive) to draw a card from your deck. The more units you have holding, the more cards you can draw each round.

This is what makes the deck work. You are not just being passive when you hold battlefields, you are actively drawing into your upgrades, your disruption cards, and your answers. The longer the game goes, the more advantage you build.

The catch is that exhausting Vex takes her out of action for a turn. You will need to think about when drawing an extra card is worth more than having Vex available to attack or defend. That is the kind of decision the deck asks you to make regularly, and it is genuinely interesting once you get the hang of it.

If that already sounds like your kind of deck, the Vex Champion Deck is available on TCGPlayer from May 8.

What Is in the Box?

The Vex Champion Deck ships ready to play. All cards below are included in the box, so you do not need to buy anything extra to get started. The deck contains 40 cards across Green (Calm) and Purple (Chaos) domains, plus three battlefields, 12 runes, and four double-faced tokens.

Legend and Champion Units

Main Deck Cards

Battlefields and Runes

Tokens

How to Play the Deck

Vex plays a slow, patient game. The goal is not to rush your opponent down but to outlast them, using Calm (Green) and Chaos (Purple) cards to draw ahead, disrupt their plans, and grind them down over time. If you have ever played a card game and felt most comfortable when you had more cards in hand than your opponent, this is that kind of deck.

Green cards in Riftbound tend to support units, ramp up resources, and help you stabilise. Purple brings disruption and card manipulation. Together they give Vex the tools to control the pace of the game without relying on big individual units to win.

The Core Gameplan

Your Legend, Vex, Gloomist, is the engine the whole deck runs through. Her ability triggers whenever you or an ally holds a battlefield rather than attacking. When that happens, you can exhaust her (tap her out of action for a turn) to draw a card. The more units you have holding, the more draw opportunities you get.

This means your early turns are about getting units onto battlefields and keeping them there rather than swinging in. Wuju Apprentice (three copies in the deck) is a unit worth getting down early. Mosstomper brings the Hunt mechanic, meaning it can level up after conquering two battlefields, giving it more punch as the game develops.

Mid-game you should be pulling ahead in cards. Back Off (three copies) is your most reliable disruption spell, available to push back threats when they appear. Blast Cone gives you a tool to reposition enemy units or lock them down. The combination of holding with your units and drawing with Vex means that by turns four or five you should have more options available than your opponent.

Late game, the card advantage you have built becomes decisive. Units like Evelyn, Entrancing, Nami, Headstrong, and Iascylla provide individually powerful effects that reward you for having held on long enough to play them.

One Honest Note

The weakness of this gameplan is aggressive decks that do not give you time to set up. If your opponent is attacking every turn and conquering battlefields quickly, you may not get enough hold triggers to make Vex’s draw engine work. In those games you will lean harder on your disruption spells, Back Off and Blast Cone especially, to slow things down. It is worth knowing this going in: Vex can struggle against very fast opponents if your opening hand does not have an answer.

Vex or Vi: Which One Is Right for You?

Unleashed launches with two champion decks, and if you are only buying one, this is the decision. The fear of picking the wrong one is real, and I want to address it directly: you cannot make a genuinely bad choice here. Both decks are well-constructed and play very differently from each other. The question is which style of play will feel satisfying to you.

Choose Vex if: you enjoy winning through patience and superior decision-making, you find it satisfying when an opponent’s plan falls apart, and you would rather control the pace of a game than force it. Vex rewards players who like having the answer, not just the punches.

Choose Vi if: you want to be on the front foot from turn one, you enjoy taking battlefields and building unstoppable momentum, and you would rather win through pressure than through disruption. Vi is more straightforward to learn and more immediately aggressive.

If you have played other card games and preferred control or midrange archetypes, Vex is almost certainly your deck. If you have always gravitated toward aggro, Vi will feel more natural. Either way, both decks hold their own. You are not making a mistake with either.

Recommended Upgrades

The deck is playable out of the box, but like all the champion decks there are cards you can add to strengthen it. The Tier 1 upgrades below are all under $5 per copy and directly tighten the core gameplan. Tier 2 covers the more significant competitive addition. If you are new to upgrading champion decks, this guide walks through the process.

Tier 1: Under $5 per card

Tier 2: $5-15 per card

Chaos domain took 7 of 8 Top 8 slots at RQ Sydney (May 15-17), with Irelia winning the event. Vex shares the Chaos domain identity and is a genuine competitive option in the current Unleashed format, not just a beginner deck. The Tier 1 upgrades above are all affordable and directly improve what the deck is already trying to do. If you enjoy the Chaos playstyle, they are worthwhile investments regardless of how the competitive meta develops.

Final Verdict

If you prefer to win by making your opponent run out of good options rather than outpunching them, Vex is the right deck. Buy it.

The draw engine, the disruption, and Vex Apathetic’s ability to tax every unit your opponent plays all combine into something that is genuinely satisfying to pilot once you understand the gameplan. The patience required is not a weakness. It is the point. Every card you draw while your opponent is fighting through your disruption is another advantage they cannot claw back.

I would not hand this to someone who has never played a card game before and expect it to feel intuitive on day one. But if you have a game or two under your belt and the idea of outthinking your opponent appeals more than outpunching them, Vex is exactly what you are looking for.

The Tier 1 upgrades are genuinely cheap. Evelyn and Iascylla are both available for under $1 per copy. The meaningful competitive addition, Dazzling Aurora, is currently out of stock at primary market and under ban watch, so there is no pressure to chase it right now. The deck upgrades well on a small budget.

Where to Buy

TCGPlayer is the best place to pick up the Vex Champion Deck. Multiple sellers compete on price, stock is tracked clearly, and you can add any upgrades to the same order. The deck will be available from the May 8 release date.

If the idea of watching your opponent’s plan fall apart card by card sounds like your kind of win, this is the button.

Amazon is worth checking if you want to order alongside other products or prefer that checkout experience.

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