League of Legends Classic launches July 29 with community-voted patches and old-school builds

Riot Games revealed League of Legends Classic at the MSI Finals, where the mode debuted in a showmatch featuring pros like Doublelift and Cpt Jack. It launches July 29 — Riot is already telling players to pre-download the client ahead of time.

Classic is built around the season three era but isn't a straight museum piece. Old runes, quintessences, and the three-tree mastery pages are back, as are old summoner spells like rally and revive. Infamous builds return too — AP Master Yi, pre-rework Sion, and anything running Deathfire Grasp are all confirmed. The mode launches with 60 champions, all with their pre-rework kits; more will be added over time, with RiotMeddler specifically calling out Graves and Urgot as ones he's excited about. Some modern additions made the cut as well — ward trinkets are in, and the art has been partially modernized rather than fully rolled back. Unlike WoW Classic's era-locked approach, Classic will evolve through community-voted patches, similar to how Old School RuneScape handles updates. That means broken metas like AP Yi won't necessarily stick around forever if players vote for balance changes.

League of Legends has been running for 16 years, and Riot is simultaneously working on a full remake of the game planned for 2027. Classic sits alongside that as a nostalgia-driven parallel track — part of a broader industry trend that's seen WoW Classic, Old School RuneScape, and even a permanent retro mode in Black Ops 7 all find real audiences. The community-vote model is the most interesting wrinkle here: it hands players genuine influence over how the mode evolves, which could send Classic down a different historical path than the original game took.

Player reaction online is mixed. The era-mashup approach — modern models, trinkets, and UI elements sitting alongside season three gameplay — is the main sticking point. Reddit users have pointed out that the showmatch version had more muted colors and newer character models than the game actually looked a decade and a half ago, with some calling for old base skins to at least be toggleable. RiotMeddler has been active on Reddit addressing questions, and a full dev blog with a wider range of details was confirmed to go up Tuesday.