Riftbound just handed the meta its second gut-punch of the season, and the timing couldn’t be sharper. With the Los Angeles Regional Qualifier one week out and the Chengdu Major looming behind it, Riot’s game team dropped a targeted ban list update on September 18 that pulls two cards out of Standard and 2v2 Constructed: Ekko, Recurrent and Stacked Deck. If you’ve been grinding Vendetta-era Lux combo or Kennen Chaos piles, your decklist just changed.
Ekko, Recurrent: the infinite that finally broke
Ekko’s ban was less about raw win rate and more about play pattern. His Deathknell recursion, paired with the Accelerate cost reduction, let Lux combo pilots chain extra turns into a loop with vanishingly small windows for an opponent to interact. Riot’s own reasoning leaned on their three-question ban test — is the card overrepresented, is the problem trending worse, and does it promote unhealthy play — and Ekko cleared bar two out of three. The play rate stayed low all season, but the games it did show up in were, by the design team’s own admission, “solitaire-esque.” That’s rarely a good sign for a card’s long-term health in a two-player game.
The silver lining for Mind players: this shouldn’t gut the rest of the archetype. Ekko was a combo piece, not a curve-filler, so Lux, LeBlanc, and Ezreal decks lose their infinite finisher but keep their core game plan intact.
Stacked Deck: Kennen’s card-selection engine, unplugged
The second ban is the one that will ripple further. Stacked Deck was a near-auto-include in Chaos strategies — cheap, low opportunity cost, and quietly busted when paired with Ravenbloom Student or the Abandoned Hall battlefield. The real trigger, though, was Kennen. Combined with Lightning Rush, Stacked Deck let the Kennen Chaos engine churn through the deck at a rate the design team decided was simply too efficient, digging for payoffs like Nocturne while stuffing the graveyard for Rhasa the Sunderer and Last Rites in the same motion.
Riot was explicit that they’re not trying to kill Kennen as a strategy — they want to knock the format’s clear best deck down a peg without deleting it outright. Expect Kennen to still be a player next month, just noticeably less consistent, and expect Chaos deckbuilders to spend the next two weeks hunting for a replacement piece of card selection that doesn’t carry the same ceiling.
Why the timing matters
Riot pushed this list out fast and in English-first specifically because the Shanghai Regional Open had just wrapped and Los Angeles was bearing down. That’s a meaningful signal for anyone building toward a Regional Qualifier or watching the scene from home: this isn’t a slow-burn shakeup, it’s a pointed correction meant to reshape the field before the next major result gets banked. Combine that with Set 5: Radiance previews kicking off September 25 at the LA RQ itself, and the next two weeks are shaping up to be one of the more consequential stretches in Riftbound’s young competitive calendar.
Elsewhere in the multiverse
Magic: The Gathering players have their own reset coming — on September 22, every rebalanced card that also has a tabletop printing reverts to its original text across all formats, alongside fresh Historic and Brawl ban list changes. It’s a quieter shakeup than Riftbound’s, but Arena regulars should expect a few staples to suddenly read differently. Meanwhile Reality Fracture spoiler season has been in full swing since September 8, with prereleases landing September 25 — the same weekend Riftbound’s Set 5 previews go live, which makes late September a genuinely stacked stretch for anyone following more than one game at once.
Flesh and Blood also dropped its own September Banned Announcement this past week, with the community electing Briar, Oscilio, and Oldhim as cards requiring action and Living Legend scoring shifting to a 0.75x multiplier as of September 18 — the same effective date as Riftbound’s changes, for whatever that coincidence is worth.
What’s your read on the Ekko and Stacked Deck bans — correct call, or too soft on Kennen? Come share it with us on socials, or catch the rest of the week’s roundups at manariotgames.com. 📰 The Sunday Riot Report lands every Sunday, so follow along and stay ahead of the meta.