Riftbound Radiance Leak: Deploy, Showoff & Disarm Explained

A photo from Riot's own PAX West demo table reveals three new Riftbound: Radiance mechanics — Deploy, Showoff and Disarm — months before the set's 23 October 2026 release. Here's exactly what leaked.

Update, 29 September 2026: all three mechanics are now printed on finished Radiance cards. Preview Season's first wave put Deploy on Pillaged Armory and Dockside Lock-Up, Show Off on Primordial Roar and Rousing Display, and Disarm on Kai'Sa, Rebel and Disposal Expert. Each card's reminder text says what the demo card said, almost word for word. The one real change is the name: the cards print SHOW OFF, two words. The galleries under each section below now show the cards, and the card-by-card read is in Radiance Preview Season, week one. The rest of this page is kept as it was written, as the record of what the leak said before the cards existed.

Three unreleased Riftbound: Radiance mechanics have leaked from Riot's own demo table at PAX West — Deploy, Showoff and Disarm — photographed and shared publicly by Riftbound content creator AskJoshy. This isn't a Riot announcement and it isn't a baseless rumour either: it's a photo of physical reference material Riot itself put in front of players at a public convention, months ahead of Radiance's confirmed 23 October 2026 release. Here's exactly what the photo shows, what each keyword appears to do, and — just as importantly — what still isn't known.

Where this leak actually comes from

Riftbound content creator AskJoshy posted a photo to Facebook of a physical rules-reference card from Riot's demo setup at PAX West 2026, captioned: "There are many new mechanics in the Radiance set!" The text in the photo is legible enough to quote directly, which puts this in a different category from the fabricated "leaked decklists" already circulating for Radiance that we've warned readers about elsewhere. It is still not an official Riot reveal, though, and reference material shown at a demo table is exactly the kind of thing that can be reworded, renamed, or cut entirely before a set goes to actual print. Everything below is reported, not confirmed — treat it accordingly.

Worth noting: the photo's own caption says Radiance has "many new mechanics," and only three are legible in this particular shot. That phrasing on its own suggests this is a partial list, not the complete set of what's changing.

Convention demo tables are a fairly consistent, if unofficial, source of leaks across the wider TCG industry — physical reference material sits in front of hundreds of attendees for hours at a stretch, and photographing text a publisher itself printed and put on public display is a different category of information from an anonymous "leaked decklist" screenshot. That doesn't make the wording final, though. A demo build exists specifically so playtesters and curious attendees can try mechanics ahead of a full release, and it's common across this genre for a keyword's exact phrasing — or even its name — to shift between a convention showing and the card that eventually ships. Treat everything below as a strong signal of intent, not a locked specification.

Deploy: gear with a built-in expiry date

"Play this gear only to a battlefield and it will grant benefits while there. When an opponent holds that battlefield, kill this gear."

As leaked, Deploy is a Gear keyword tied to one specific battlefield. You don't get its benefit everywhere — only at the battlefield you deployed it to — and if your opponent takes that battlefield away from you, the card doesn't just stop working, it dies outright.

That's a real design tension, not a minor drawback. Hunt already rewards holding a battlefield with XP, and Ganking already lets a unit reposition from one battlefield to another. A Deploy card raises the stakes on a fight you're already having: hold the battlefield and you get an ongoing benefit on top of whatever else is happening there; lose it and you're down a whole card, not just a bonus. If the leak holds up, Deploy decks will likely want ways to actually defend a battlefield once they've committed a Gear to it — which points toward the same defensive combat keywords (Tank, Shield, Backline) covered in the combat keywords guide.

Showoff: a payoff that depends on what you reveal

"As you play this, you may reveal a card from hand or choose a friendly card that meets the listed criteria. The card's effect will change based on what is shown off."

Showoff, as leaked, is a modal, reveal-based effect — you play the card, then either show a card from your hand or point at a friendly card already in play that fits some printed condition, and the effect scales with what you showed. That's meaningfully different from Riftbound's existing reveal mechanic, Vision, which looks at the top of your own deck rather than your hand or board. Showoff instead seems to reward deckbuilding around a specific type, domain, or stat line the card is checking for — but without a single confirmed Showoff card yet, its actual power level is impossible to judge. A card that wants you to reveal an Epic-rarity Unit is a completely different build-around than one checking for the biggest Might on your board, and the leak doesn't tell us which.

Disarm: reportedly Assault's mirror image

"When this unit attacks, decrease the Might of an enemy unit here."

This is the mechanic AskJoshy's own caption calls out directly, framing it as "the inverse of Assault." That comparison holds up against the actual rules text: Assault gives the attacking unit +X Might for the duration of combat. Disarm, as leaked, instead takes Might away from an enemy unit when this unit attacks — a debuff aimed at the opponent's board rather than a buff to your own stats.

The caption also suggests Disarm "can pair well with direct damage spells like Falling Star" — a real card already in the game: Falling Star is a Fury-domain Spell from the original Origins set. The logic checks out even without knowing Disarm's exact numbers: shrink a blocker's Might first, and a fixed amount of direct damage goes a lot further toward actually killing it. If Disarm decks end up leaning on that kind of stacked-damage plan, it would put them in the same lane as Fury's existing direct-damage tools rather than introducing a brand-new archetype from scratch.

Deploy, Showoff and Disarm at a glance

What's still unconfirmed

• Which actual cards carry these keywords, and what their cost, domain or rarity is. A keyword is only as useful as the cards printed with it, and right now there isn't a single confirmed card for any of the three to point to.
• The exact printed wording and bracket format. Riftbound's confirmed keywords print an activation number in brackets where relevant — Assault [X], Empower [Cost] — and we don't yet know if Deploy, Showoff or Disarm follow that same convention or work differently.
• Whether more mechanics exist beyond these three. The leaked caption itself says Radiance has "many new mechanics," which reads as an admission that this photo only captured part of a longer list.
• Whether the names or wording survive to release at all. Preview-season terminology shifting before a final print run isn't unusual in this genre, and this is Radiance's first mid-cycle mechanic leak, so Riftbound itself hasn't set a precedent either way yet.

We've written a dedicated deep dive for each of the three — Deploy explained, Showoff explained and Disarm explained — but every one of them carries the same caveat this roundup does, all the way through. We add a keyword to our verified reference glossary — the way Empower, Flow and Burn got added for Vendetta — only once we can check the exact wording against Riot's own Core Rules PDF or an official card image. None of Deploy, Showoff or Disarm had cleared that bar when this was written. (29 September: finished card images now show all three.)

Status, 12 September 2026

Update, 21 September: Preview Season opens in four days. Official reveals, as distinct from this leak, are logged card by card on the live Radiance spoiler tracker; this page stays as the record of what the demo photo showed and how it holds up.

Nothing here has been confirmed or contradicted by Riot since the photo surfaced. Two things have changed around it. First, Preview Season now opens on 25 September at the Regional Qualifier: Los Angeles rather than on the 28th — so the first official card images, the only thing that can settle any of this, are closer than this page originally said. Second, a further wave of "leaks" appeared on social media on 9 September: purported card text for Seraphine's and Evelynn's Legends, a Neeko card, and a Kai'Sa card whose text begins with the word Disarm. We are not reproducing any of it, because none of it has the one thing the PAX photo has — provenance. One of those has since changed status: Seraphine's Legend, Starry-Eyed Songstress, was photographed in print on 22 September, and its printed wording matches what leaked — so we now cover that one card from the photograph rather than the post (the breakdown is here), while the rest stays unquoted. It is worth noting, too, that the Kai'Sa text uses "Disarm" as a label for an effect that has nothing to do with lowering Might, which is inconsistent with the demo-table wording above. At least one of the two sources is wrong about what Disarm is, and a demo card Riot printed and displayed is the more credible of them. Either way, a mechanic's name being reused for something else is one more reason to wait for the real cards. (29 September: the real card, Kai'Sa, Rebel, carries Disarm as a keyword with exactly the Might-lowering reminder text the demo card described, followed by a separate ability of its own. The demo-table wording is what Disarm means.)

How to read a leak like this responsibly

A leak like this is worth tracking, but it's worth reading carefully rather than taking at face value — a few habits are useful here specifically:

• Check the source, not just the claim. A photo of Riot's own printed material at their own demo table carries more weight than a screenshotted "leaked decklist" from an anonymous account — exactly the distinction that separates this leak from the fabricated Radiance decklists we've flagged elsewhere on this site.
• Watch for hedging language in the coverage itself, including ours. Every mention of Deploy, Showoff or Disarm on this page uses "reportedly" or "as leaked" on purpose: none of it is locked until Riot says so directly, through an official channel.
• Don't build a purchase decision around an unconfirmed mechanic. None of the three has a printed card attached to it yet, which means there's nothing to actually buy — the moment there is, that's what Radiance pre-order pricing exists to track.

This is the same bar we hold every unreleased-set claim to, and it's why none of these three keywords live on our verified keyword glossary yet.

What to actually do with this before release

Nothing here is buyable yet — Radiance doesn't release until 23 October 2026, and the first cards carrying these mechanics were only shown in Preview Season's opening week. If you want to track the set as real information lands: our Radiance hub rounds up every confirmed fact, the legends revealed so far and live pre-order prices in one place; Radiance pre-order pricing compares sealed product across stores on its own; and our what's actually confirmed roundup is where we keep everything Riot has said on the record, updated as it changes. We'll publish a proper keyword page for any of these three the moment Riot — not a demo-table photo — confirms it.

Source: https://riftcompare.com/blog/riftbound-radiance-leaked-mechanics