Card games seldomly grant you access to the entire card collection from the get-go, and Legends of Runeterra is no exception. It’s a digital collectible card game, meaning that it’s up to the individual player to gather all the cards in the collection, and no trading can take place. But how do you expand your collection in Legends of Runeterra without pulling out your credit card? In this guide we break down how to earn cards in Riot’s card game.

There are three ways to improve your collection: levelling up regions, weekly Vaults, and Expeditions. All three use the same types of rewards: cards, wildcards, shards, Capsules, and Chests. Those rewards have various degrees to them, and we’ll dissect exactly what each degree rewards.

Capsules and Chests

Getting a card of a certain rarity, whether it’s a Common, Rare, Epic or Champion Card, speaks for itself. What Wildcards do isn’t too difficult either: they can be used to craft any card of the corresponding rarity. Shards do the same thing: you can spend 150, 400, 1500, or 4000 Shards to craft a Common, Rare, Epic, or Champion Card, respectively.

But then there are Capsules, and Chests with Capsules… it can get pretty convoluted. Here’s what each tier of Capsule contains:

Chests are the bigger prize, and contain Capsules. Here’s what each tier of Chest contains:

Levelling up regions

When playing Legends of Runeterra, you can select which of the six regions you want to “level up”. All the experience you earn by completing daily quests or just by playing games will be dedicated to the region you have selected at that moment. By levelling up regions you’re granted cards, chests and capsules, all from the selected region. So if you want to earn more cards from Demacia, select it, and simply play games to expand your Demacian card collection. You can swap regions at any time, but keep in mind that each region has its own progression counter.

There are twenty levels of rewards per region:

If you level up a single region entirely, the netto sum of all the rewards is:

• 52 Common cards (specific region)
• 22 Rare cards (specific region)
• 4 Epic cards (specific region)
• 2 Epic cards (random region)
• 2 Champion cards (specific region)
• 8 Common Wildcards
• 3 Rare Wildcards
• 1 Epic Wildcard
• 1 Champion Wildcard
• 1900+ Shards

The Weekly Vault

Regardless of which region you’re levelling up, all experience you earn in a week’s time contributes to levelling up your Weekly Vault. Starting each Tuesday, you’re levelling up this treasure chest automatically. The more experience you earn, the higher the reward is. When you’ve opened your Weekly Vault it resets, and you can start grinding again to improve the next week’s prizes.

Below you can see how much experience is needed per level of Weekly Vault, and what the corresponding rewards are. As you can see, even if you don’t do anything you’ll earn three Bronze Chests (six Common Cards, 180+ shards) at the end of a week. If you complete all daily quests loyally, Riot thinks the level 10 Vault should be easily within reach. This means that, in addition to a free Expedition Token (Expeditions always reward you with a random Champion), you’ll get three Platinum Chests at the end of every week, equalling 24 Common Cards, 2 Rare Cards and 1500+ Shards!

Duplicates and upgrades

It may happen that, while you're expanding your collection, you are rewarded a copy of a card that you already have three of. Since you cannot add more than three of any card to a deck, Legends of Runeterra recycles those extra copies. An fourth copy of a Common Card is turned into 15 Shards, and a Rare turns into 75 Shards. If you get a fourth Epic or Champion Card, they are automatically rerolled into a copy of the same rarity of a card you don't have three of yet.

Every now and then Legends of Runeterra randomly upgrades one of your prizes. This means that an earned Common Wildcard could be turned into a a Rare Wildcard. Sometimes even a Capsule or Chest is upgraded to a higher tier, to grant you even more rewards.

Images via Riot Games