The Legends of Runeterra World Champion has been revealed courtesy of Riot Games, and the 200,000 prize pool has to be appealing. In this tournament, 192 players from the American, European, and Asian regions will be competing. There will also be a host of ranked and seasonal tournament participants for the 16 empty seats in the World Championship finals. Back in December, there was a seasonal tournament for 10,000 dollars, and it appears to have done well enough to warrant a World Championship!

As a big fan of Legends of Runeterra, this writer is incredibly excited to see how this World Championship goes over. How does one qualify though? There are three ways, based either on Seasonal Tournament or Ranked performance. In addition, players will receive “Ranked Points” retroactively, based on how well they did in the Monuments of Power/Cosmic Creation seasons. There will be 64 players from each region (Americas, Europe, Asia/SEA), and we know how this will be determined.

• Points will be awarded to Master rank players based on their final rank at the end of each season.
• The top 22 players on each shard by the cutoff will earn a seat for the World Championship qualifiers.
• A player’s score is determined based on their best placement in 2 out of the 5 seasons leading up to the World Championship.

• The top four players from each shard’s five Seasonal Tournaments will be guaranteed a seat in the World Championship qualifiers.
• Any duplicates will pass their seat to a qualifier based on Seasonal Tournament Points

• Points are granted based on performance in each Seasonal Tournament
• One point will be awarded per game won in both the Open Rounds and Playoffs phase of the Seasonal Tournament
• Points from all Seasonal Tournaments from Empires of the Ascended onward will be combined into a singular total.

Now that we have qualified players, where do we go from here? American competitors will do battle for six seats in the finals, Europe compete for five seats, and the Asia/SEA region players will compete for five seats in the finals of the Legends of Runeterra World Championships.

This leaves us with 16 finalists, who will compete in a group stage with four-player round robins. The top two from each group go on to the finals, which are a single-elimination phase to determine the first Legends of Runeterra World Champion. It’s been hard to get CCG players to tune in in droves for card games, but with proper advertising to the League of Legends crowd, this could see more people show up. We’re curious if nothing else, to see what decks will be in the final phases of the tournament.

Jon “More Synergy” Stebel, Riot Games Comms Strategist commented on the announcement:

“We’ve been thrilled to see thousands of players battle it out to earn the title of Seasonal Tournament champion in the Monuments of Power and Cosmic Creation seasons. Today, we are excited to announce our greatest competitive milestone yet; the Legends of Runeterra World Championship — a major global event that provides a new opportunity for fans and players alike to engage like never before, pushing competitive LoR play to new heights.”

This is a big deal for Legends of Runeterra, and as a new, growing game, this is a fine time to show the rest of the card game players what Riot Games has brought to their genre. If all goes well, this could lead to way more people trying the game, after seeing the ways it changes the CCG game up.