Riftbound runes: energy vs power explained

Almost every rules question I see from new Riftbound players is really this question wearing a hat: why can I not pay for this card?

The answer is nearly always the same. Riftbound has two resources, they come from the same pool of runes, and a rune can only give you one of them.

The two abilities every basic rune has

Every basic rune on the board has exactly two abilities (rule 163.2):

• Exhaust it (turn it sideways): add 1 Energy
• Recycle it (put it on the bottom of your rune deck): add 1 Power of that rune's domain

Energy has no colour and pays the plain number in the top corner of a card. Power has a colour and pays the coloured pips.

The critical part: a rune does one or the other, never both. Exhausting is not a discount on recycling and recycling is not a stronger exhaust. They are two different abilities with two different prices.

What this means for a real cost

Take a card that costs 3 Energy and 1 Fury Power.

You need four runes, not three. Three of them get exhausted and stay on your board lying down. The fourth has to be a Fury rune specifically, and it gets recycled, which means it leaves the board and goes back into your rune deck.

You end the turn with one fewer rune than you started with.

That is the part that catches people. Exhausting is temporary, and everything stands back up in your Awaken Phase (rule 315.1). Recycling is not temporary. That rune is gone from your row until you happen to channel it again, and you only channel 2 a turn (rule 315.3.b).

Your rune count is a resource, not a ceiling

In most card games your land or mana count only goes up. In Riftbound it goes up by two a turn and down every time you pay a coloured cost.

A deck with a coloured pip on half its cards is quietly spending its own board away. That is not a reason to avoid those cards, but it does mean:

• A turn where you pay two Power costs sets your next turn back noticeably.
• Cards with no Power cost are cheaper than they look, because they leave your row intact.
• If you are choosing between two similar cards and one has a pip, the one without it is easier to keep casting.

The domain has to match

Power is domain-specific (rule 162.2.a.1). A Fury Power cost needs a Fury rune recycled. Recycling a Calm rune gives you Calm Power, which does not pay a Fury pip.

This is why the preconstructed decks run six of each of two domains rather than a spread. If your deck needs Fury and Chaos, and you draw a rune row that is entirely Chaos, your Fury cards are stuck no matter how many runes you have on the board.

Energy does not bank

Anything you do not spend disappears. Each player's rune pool empties at the end of their draw phase and again at the end of their turn (rule 166). There is no saving up for a big turn by exhausting runes early and sitting on the energy.

The practical version: exhaust runes when you are paying for something, not before. There is never a reason to pre-pay.

Where runes come from

You do not draw them and you never choose to play them. They arrive automatically, two per Channel Phase, from a separate twelve-card rune deck (rules 103.3 and 315.3.b). You cannot speed that up, and if the rune deck runs dry you channel as many as it has left (rule 315.3.b.1).

The one exception is the player going second, who gets one extra rune on their first Channel Phase to make up for moving second (rule 480.7).

Some cards also channel runes as an effect. Stormclaw Ursine in the Lee Sin deck channels one exhausted when it is played, which is a real rune on your board but not one you can spend this turn (rule 430.2 covers effects specifying how runes enter).

The mistake this causes most often

Here is the sequence I see over and over, and it is the reason I built a check for it into the Trainer:

You need to pay 2 Energy. You click a rune, it turns sideways, you get 1 energy. Then you click the same rune again, expecting the second point of energy.

Nothing happens, because an exhausted rune produces nothing. It has already been spent. A cost can only be paid once.

It sounds obvious written down. In the middle of a turn, with a board full of cards, it is an extremely easy thing to do by accident and then wonder why the game will not let you play your unit.

A quick checklist before you commit to a play

1. Read the full cost. The number and the pips.
2. Count your ready runes, not your total runes. The sideways ones are already spent.
3. Check you have the right domain for each pip.
4. Remember each pip costs you a rune off the board permanently.
5. Spend nothing until you are actually casting something.

Learn it by doing it

The rune economy is the part of Riftbound that reads simple and plays fiddly. Three sections of the Trainer cover it: what a rune is, energy against power, and ready against exhausted. Each ends in tests where you have to pay a real cost on a real board, and it stops you if you try to pay the same rune twice.

Free, no account, and it takes about ten minutes to get through the rune material.