Riot Games has begun sending winner emails for the Riftbound T1 2025 Worlds Champion Signature Edition drawing, but the reaction from the community has been largely negative. Despite the company using a lottery system and claiming to have filtered out more than 60 percent of entries for security reasons, many players say the same botters and scalpers still walked away with the limited product.
One thing of note is that there was probably a millon or more entries, so there is a fair chance that most of the winners have not even opened their emails yet. However the early birds that have checked are mostly disappointed.
The T1 Signature Edition is a high-end collector’s item priced at $360. Only 10,125 English-language copies were produced. Each bundle contains five special Champion cards selected by members of T1’s 2025 Worlds-winning roster, with unique art, special frames, and one randomly included gold-stamped, serialized signature card numbered between 1 and 2025. It was always going to be difficult to obtain. Riot tried to give regular fans a fair shot by requiring registration and running a drawing instead of a first-come, first-served sale.
That approach has not solved the core problem. When the official Riftbound account announced that selection emails had gone out, replies filled with disappointment and anger. Players posted screenshots and comments suggesting that accounts tied to known scalping operations or obvious bot patterns still received wins. One widely circulated reply simply read, "Yea yall really got those bots," alongside evidence that raised further questions about how effective the filters actually were.
There are also plenty of listings on eBay for outrageous prices of the cards, good luck spending $8-10,000 dollars on them:
This is not a new issue for Riftbound or for the wider trading-card market. Limited products with strong demand routinely attract automated entry systems and resale networks. Riot has previously acknowledged bot problems on earlier Riftbound releases and introduced drawing systems specifically to reduce the advantage of speed and volume. Filtering more than half the entries sounds significant on paper. In practice, enough sophisticated operations appear to have gotten through that many genuine fans feel the process failed them again.
The result is familiar and demoralizing. A product meant to celebrate a popular esports team and give collectors something special instead becomes another secondary-market flip opportunity. Copies that retail for $360 are already on resale sites at significantly higher prices (as seen above). Fans who entered in good faith, followed the rules, and checked their email in hopes of a rare win are left watching the same group of operators succeed.
These repeated failures damage more than one release. They erode trust in official distribution methods and make the hobby feel rigged toward people who treat cards as short-term inventory rather than something to play with or collect long-term. When even a randomized drawing with active security review cannot reliably keep limited product in the hands of actual players, the frustration becomes understandable. The comments under Riot’s announcement reflect that exhaustion.
Riot has not issued a further statement addressing the specific complaints about this drawing. The company has encouraged winners to watch for emails from the official support address and warned about impersonators. That does little to address the broader complaint that the selection process itself still favored the wrong participants.
Limited TCG products will always attract secondary-market interest. The persistent ability of bots and scalpers to beat official safeguards, even after multiple rounds of adjustments, remains one of the most irritating and corrosive problems in the hobby. Today’s T1 Signature Edition results are only the latest example. Until distribution systems consistently put product in the hands of real fans instead of automated resale networks, that frustration is not going away.
Did you get lucky and win the drawing? Do you know anyone who did? Let us know what the most you would pay for the bundle is in the comments below!