RIFTBUDDY

Problem

Before a tournament, a Riftbound player jumped between several tools: Riot's card gallery, a collection spreadsheet, a separate deck builder, tournament results sites and articles with decklists. None of them connected what I own with what the meta is playing. Riftbound is a young game, so its tool ecosystem was only just forming. That was the window: whoever gives players one place first builds the habit.

Who I designed for

• Collectors want to know what they are missing for a full set, without typing cards in by hand.
• Casual players want to build a deck from what they own and show it off.
• Tournament players want to see what wins and quickly copy decklists from the Regional Qualifiers.

The tone and features work for all three groups, not just the competitive scene. Hence guest mode with no account required, and badges with no leaderboards or streaks.

Deadline: Utrecht

The app had to be public before the Regional Qualifier in Utrecht (June 12, 2026). I froze the scope: sign-in, hosting and working card images first, no new features until tournament day. The launch worked, and everything "nice to have" came in later versions.

A human beats the scraper

A scraper pulled the tournament decklists until one run wrecked the database: wrong placements, truncated decks. Instead of patching it, I made the official articles the single source of truth and re-entered 6 tournaments with import scripts. Slower, but a player never sees a false result.

Scanner: no new wheel

I adapted the open-source riftbound-scanner (MIT) and wrote to its author before releasing anything, though the licence did not require it. He replied the same day: "Of course you can use it". On top: a card goes into the collection only after you tap Save, and the scanner says when it is not sure. Confidence thresholds come from measuring 40,000 pairs of cards; in doubt, it shows 3 candidates instead of guessing.

Reversing my own call

At launch the collection lived only in the browser, on purpose, to make it in time for Utrecht. Then badges came along, and a badge that disappears when you switch phones motivates no one. I moved the collection to the cloud, with an explicit merge screen when a player has different data on two devices.

Badges, no tricks

Badges reward collecting, they don't keep people in the app by force. No streaks, no leaderboards, no time-limited rewards: 46 badges for real milestones that stay forever.

The phone beats the code

Email link sign-in opened Safari instead of the app installed on the iPhone home screen, so I replaced it with a 6-digit code typed into the app. Badge icons exported from Figma looked fine on desktop and lost half the graphic on the iPhone. The only test that settles it is the player's real device.