This is a guide about Legends of Runeterra's card-specific cosmetic option, Prismatic cards. Right now, Prismatic cards are the only card-specific cosmetic option in the game, but Riot has indicated they are exploring more for the future. Prismatic cards will have a unique border, a sheen to their artwork, and a subtle animation reminiscent of a physical holographic foil card. For Champion cards, this effect is even more pronounced. Any cards generated by a Prismatic card in-game (e.g, the random 1 cost Poro from Lonely Poro) will also be in the Prismatic style.
Functionally, prismatic cards act like a permanent "upgrade": once the prismatic option has been unlocked for a particular card, all your copies of that card will be in the Prismatic style. There is also currently no way to revert cards back to their vanilla appearance, so if you don't care for the prismatic style you should take care to avoid opening any prismatic chests or purchasing any Prismatic upgrades.
There are 3 ways to upgrade a card to Prismatic:
- Picking it from a list of random options when opening a Prismatic Chest,
- purchasing an upgrade with a special currency called Essence, or
- purchasing an upgrade with Riot Coins.
Note that purchasing Prismatic upgrades is entirely independent of purchasing playable copies of a card, so if you want to upgrade a card that you haven't collected yet you'll have to pay for both privileges.
Table of Contents
Earning Prismatic Chests and Essence
Most card upgrades will be earned by completing special Card Style Quests which will reward Prismatic Chests and Prismatic Pouches. Prismatic Chests will upgrade a single card for free and provide Essence for purchasing further upgrades while the Prismatic Pouches only have Essence. These quests are time-limited, after which they reset giving players the option to repeat them.
Additional Prismatic Chests are awarded at the end of a season with quantity and quality proportional to your rank.
Prismatic Rewards
After a Prismatic Chest is earned either through quests or end-of-season placement, it can be claimed and opened from the "Loot" button on the home page.
Once the Prismatic Chest is opened, it will first determine a card quality. This card quality is usually the same as the quality of the Prismatic Chest, but it has a chance to improve -- for example, a Rare Prismatic Chest has a large chance of picking Rare, a small chance of picking Epic, and very small chance of picking Champion, but it will never pick Common. After the card quality is determined, it will randomly pick 3 cards of that same quality from the player's collection. You can see from this example this Common Prismatic Chest high-rolled into Epic-quality cards; usually these would all just be Common-quality. The player then picks 1 of the 3 options for the free upgrade; the other 2 options are unaffected.
We're picking Jenny, natch.
The player then continues on to collect the Essence portion of the reward.
Viewing and Purchasing Prismatic Cards
Once a card is upgrade to Prismatic, it will display accordingly within your Card Collection. All decks that use this card will automatically use the new artwork.
To purchase a Prismatic Upgrade for a particular card, open your Card Collection and right-click the card. The cost to upgrade it as well as your available Essence and Coin balances will be displayed on the left side of the screen.
The cost of the upgrade will be proportional to the quality of the card. For reference, 100 Riot Coins is roughly equivalent to $1 USD.
| Card Quality | Essence Cost | Coin Cost |
| Common | 100 | 100 |
| Rare | 200 | 200 |
| Epic | 300 | 300 |
| Champion | 700 | 600 |
Comments
I hope future events will give some essence or prismatic chests as a reward.
So if one want to avoid these cosmetics, one should just never open the cases right?
You will be able to disable card styles in a future update!
I'm jealous that you got Genevieve: she's my favorite non-champion card.
You can't revert them back? luckily i've read this article before trying it, i don't like cosmetic stuffs on cards
As of this writing it's permanent; however Riot is extremely receptive to community feedback and has said they will probably make the option to disable it in the future.
They should have an option to undo it in the future.
After opening my first one, I actually think I kind of like it.