Riftbound Guide

Knowing how to upgrade your Riftbound champion deck is the moment the game clicks into a different gear. You have played your starter deck a dozen times. You know which cards you love drawing and which ones feel like dead weight. Now you want to do something about it, without spending £100 and getting it wrong.

The good news: a targeted £15-20 singles order will do more for most starter decks than any amount of random pack opening. The process below takes you from “I know my deck has a problem” to “I know exactly what to buy and why,” in six steps.

Step 1: Identify What Your Deck Is Trying to Do

Before you change a single card, you need to know your deck’s plan. Not in vague terms like “I want to win.” In specific terms. What does a good game look like when you are playing this champion?

Every champion deck has a core strategy baked in. Jinx wants to move units off the battlefield and trigger her ability repeatedly. Vi wants to conquer battlefields and build attack momentum. Jax wants to survive long enough to level up and become unstoppable. Vex wants to draw cards and grind opponents out slowly.

The reason this matters for upgrading is this: every card you add should serve that plan. The most common beginner upgrade mistake is buying cards that are generally strong but do not fit the strategy. A card that looks good in theory can actively slow your deck down if it pulls you away from what you are trying to do.

Before you spend anything, write down one sentence: “My deck wins by doing X.” That sentence is your filter for every upgrade decision that follows.

Step 2: Find the Cards That Are Letting You Down

Now look at your deck honestly. Which cards do you groan when you draw? Which ones sit in your hand because you can never find a good moment to play them? Which gaps do you feel every game, that moment where you think “I really wish I had X right now”?

There are two types of problem cards:

Dead weight cards are ones you almost never want to draw. They may have been included in the pre-built deck to round out the card count, but they rarely do what you need. These are candidates for cutting.

Gap cards are ones you do not have but feel the absence of. You keep wishing for more removal, or a cheaper blocker, or a way to get a unit back from the discard pile. These are candidates for adding.

Write both lists down before you go near TCGPlayer. If you cannot name at least two dead weight cards and two gaps without looking at the deck, play five more games first. The clarity will come.

Step 3: Add Consistency Before Power

This is the single thing most beginners get backwards, so it is worth spending a moment on.

When people imagine upgrading a deck, they imagine adding powerful new cards. And eventually, that is exactly what you do. But the first upgrade pass almost always has a bigger impact if you focus on consistency instead.

Consistency means drawing your best cards more often. If your deck has one copy of a card that wins you games every time you draw it, adding a second or third copy of that card is almost always more valuable than adding a new card that does something similar. You know the first card works. You know you want to see it. The problem is that with one copy in a 56-card deck, you might not draw it until turn six.

In Riftbound, most decks run two or three copies of their key cards. Starter decks often include single copies of cards that really want to be threes. That gap is where your first upgrade money goes furthest.

Step 4: Set Your Budget Before Opening TCGPlayer

£20 goes further on singles than most beginners expect. That surprised me when I looked into it properly. Most Riftbound singles from Spiritforged and Origins sit between $0.50 and $3.00 on TCGPlayer. A £20 budget (roughly $25 at current rates) can comfortably cover six to eight cards, which is enough to make a real difference to how your deck plays.

The key is setting the ceiling before you start browsing. TCGPlayer makes it easy to add cards one at a time, and it is easy to rationalise each addition individually until the total is double what you intended. Decide on your number first. Stick to it. A focused £20 upgrade beats a sprawling £40 haul where half the cards end up sitting in a binder.

As a rough guide:

• £15 to £20: three to five targeted singles, enough to cover adding copies of key cards and one or two gap cards
• £25 to £35: five to eight singles, covering consistency upgrades plus one or two more impactful new additions
• Over £40: diminishing returns unless you are targeting specific high-value singles for a particular deck build

For most beginner decks, the first pass should stay at £20 or under. There is a reason for that limit beyond budget, which brings us to Step 6.

Ready to start browsing? TCGPlayer lets you filter by condition, price, and seller rating. It is the best place to buy Riftbound singles and the prices are competitive. You can browse the full singles catalogue here:

Step 5: Where to Buy Singles

For Riftbound singles, TCGPlayer is the right answer. It aggregates multiple sellers competing on price, which keeps individual card costs down. Condition filtering means you can choose Near Mint if you care about card condition, or save a little on Lightly Played copies if you are upgrading a deck you are going to sleeve anyway.

A few practical notes for first-time buyers:

Combine shipping. TCGPlayer lets you consolidate orders across sellers. If two cards you want are available from the same seller, buying them together saves on shipping. When you add cards to your cart, the system shows you which sellers have multiple items you want.

Check seller ratings. Most sellers are reliable, but filter for sellers with 98% positive feedback or above. The difference in price between a 95% and 99% seller is rarely worth the risk on a small order.

Near Mint vs Lightly Played. For a deck you are going to sleeve (which you should, as it extends the life of your cards and keeps the decks shuffling evenly), Lightly Played is usually fine and can save 10-20% on more expensive singles.

If you are in the UK, TCGPlayer ships internationally. Shipping costs are variable but usually reasonable on orders of five or more cards from the same seller. For UK buyers who prefer a domestic option, keep an eye on Magic Madhouse, which stocks Riftbound singles and avoids international postage.

Step 6: Test Before Buying More

Play ten games with your upgraded deck before buying anything else. This is important enough that it is worth saying twice: ten games, then decide.

Here is why. Every card change has knock-on effects that are hard to predict before you have played with them. Adding a third copy of a card that was previously a two-of changes how often you draw it, but it also changes what you have to cut to make room, and those cuts have their own effects. Sometimes a change that looks obviously correct on paper feels wrong at the table because of interactions you did not anticipate.

Ten games gives you enough sample size to know whether the change worked. Five games is not enough. One or two games is definitely not enough, as early games skew heavily based on who went first and how the draw went.

After ten games, you will know: did the new cards show up when you needed them? Did you miss anything you cut? Did the change solve the problem you identified in Step 2, or did it surface a different problem you had not noticed?

That answer tells you what the next £20 should go towards. Upgrade in iterations, not all at once.

Champion-Specific Upgrade Guides

The process above works for any champion deck. If you want specific card recommendations for your champion, the guides below include upgrade tables with cards sourced from TCGPlayer, real prices, and priority ratings for which to add first.

Final Verdict

If you have played ten or more games with your starter deck and you keep losing games where you drew the wrong cards at the wrong time, your deck is ready for its first upgrade pass. That is not a flaw in how you played. It is a signal that the deck is doing its job as a starting point and you have learned enough to go further.

Start with Step 1. Write down your win condition. Name your dead weight cards. Then set a budget of £20 and look for additional copies of your best cards before you look for anything new. That process, done once, will improve your games more than any amount of pack opening.

A focused £15 to £20 singles order targeting three or four key cards is not a compromise. For most starter decks at this stage, it is exactly the right size of investment. Spend the money, play ten games, and then decide whether you want to go further.

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