I missed out on the T1 Signature Edition twice, and I am still not sure the draw worked

I have played League of Legends for years. When Riftbound was announced I was in immediately, and I have since built a whole site around collecting it. So when the T1 2025 Worlds Champion Signature Edition drawing opened, I entered on the first day and then did what everybody else did, which is refresh my inbox like an idiot.

I did not get one. Then a second draw happened, and I did not get one from that either.

This is what actually happened over those two days, and why the second attempt bothered me more than the first.

The first wave

Entries closed on 17 August. The winner emails went out on the morning of the 20th, from support@riotgames.com.

Mine said no. That is fine. It was a draw, there were far more entrants than sets, and most people were always going to lose. I refreshed, sighed, and got on with my day.

What happened next is where it stopped being a normal disappointment.

Within a couple of hours the Riftbound X account was buried in replies from people posting screenshots of what looked like bot accounts winning. Freshly made accounts. Batches of near-identical entries. The usual signatures. And sets were already appearing at resale prices in the thousands, which tells you exactly why the bots showed up.

The part that stung was that Riot had said they filtered out more than 60% of entries for security before drawing at all. They clearly knew this was coming. It still was not enough.

Riot's response, which was genuinely good

To their credit, Riot did not go quiet.

Their Player Security team went through the screenshots people had posted, found more suspicious accounts both among the winners and in the wider pool, and voided those orders. Copies from voided orders went back into the pool. Suspicious accounts that had not won were removed from the next draw entirely. A second drawing was announced for the following day.

I want to be fair here, because it is easy to pile on. That is a reasonable response and a fast one. They admitted the first draw was compromised, they clawed back what they could, and they committed to redrawing rather than shrugging. Plenty of companies would have said nothing.

I went to bed genuinely optimistic.

Then the 21st happened

Nine in the morning came and went. Nothing.

What arrived instead were cancellation emails, and not to the bots. People who had been selected, paid their $360, and received a confirmation were watching their orders get refunded. Long-standing accounts. People who had done nothing but follow the rules and win.

So the anti-bot sweep had caught real players. Some of them had been celebrating a day earlier.

Then the whole day passed with no draw and no explanation. If you were refreshing your inbox on the 21st, you spent it not knowing whether you were about to be picked, had already been picked and cancelled, or were simply not in the running at all.

Late in the day Riot posted an apology, saying they had paused the drawing to manually review the cancelled orders. When the update came, it turned out there had been a problem with how the rejected-order pool was built. Anyone wrongly cancelled would get a new selection email. A second wave then went out, drawn from unclaimed sets and confirmed bot accounts.

I checked. Nothing. Again.

What I actually think

I want to separate two things, because I think the internet is currently mashing them together.

Not winning a draw is not a grievance. There were never going to be enough sets. Somebody has to lose, and this time it was me and most of you. If the draw had run cleanly on the 20th and I had missed out, I would have been disappointed for an hour and then moved on.

The execution is a fair grievance. Cancelling paying customers who had done everything right, then leaving everyone in silence for a full day, is the part that turned a normal disappointment into two days of stress for a lot of people. Being wrongly flagged as a bot, refunded, and then told to wait is a genuinely horrible experience for someone whose only crime was being excited.

And the thing I keep coming back to: the bots showed up because a sealed product is worth several thousand dollars on resale. No filter fixes that. You are asking a security team to out-engineer an entire industry whose whole business is beating exactly this kind of system, on a product with that kind of margin, in one shot with no do-over. It was always going to be hard.

Riot did respond, quickly and publicly, and they did claw sets back from bots and hand them to real players. That matters and I do not want it lost in the noise. But the review that found the flawed methodology happened after the cancellations went out, not before, and that ordering is what cost people their day.

Where this leaves me

Still without a T1 set. Slightly less annoyed than I was on the 21st, which I think is the honest place to land.

If you got one, genuinely, congratulations. If you were one of the people wrongly cancelled and then reinstated, I hope the second email actually arrived.

And if you missed out like me, the cards themselves are still just cards. They will show up on the secondary market, they will be expensive for a while, and eventually they will settle. In the meantime there is a whole game to collect that does not require winning a lottery, which is most of why I built this site in the first place.

If you are tracking what you own, you can see what your collection is worth and browse the most valuable Riftbound cards while we all wait for the next drop to go sideways.