Irelia, Blade Dancer Guide - Best Decks & Cards

Table of Contents

1 Play Style
2 Key Cards
3 Competitive Status
4 Performances in Unleashed
5 Irelia Decks

The Noxian occupation of Ionia produced many heroes, none more unlikely than young Irelia of Navori. Trained in the ancient dances of her province, she adapted her art for war, using the graceful and carefully practised movements to levitate a host of deadly blades. After proving herself as a fighter, she was thrust into the role of resistance leader and figurehead, and to this day remains dedicated to the preservation of her homeland.

Play Style

Irelia is all about finding the right timing to start using her ability to push for points. Too early and we won't have enough runes to develop, but too late and the opponent has time to build their side of the board.

Unleashed didn't bring any new ways to play the Blade Dancer, still very much focused on SFD-057 and SFD-048 as primary win conditions. However, the new set did bring a few support cards : UNL-150, UNL-053 and UNL-128.

As a result, Irelia is still playing the exact same game plan from Spiritforged, aimed at controlling the pace of the match while SFD-057 dominates the board or SFD-048 fills our hand with cards.

Once these key units start moving around, the opponent is forced to react in a rush to prevent the situation from snowballing, exposing themselves to all the spells available in the Calm and Chaos domains.

Key Cards

Irelia is focused on extracting as much value as possible from UNL-150, SFD-048 and SFD-057. Thus, the deck will build around drawing and supporting these three cards in particular. We have all sorts or cards to do so, starting with our 2-costs: UNL-053 to draw and OGN-199 to move.

Once set on the board, we'll move our key units with OGN-173 or SFD-133.

Keep them alive through SFD-051 or OGN-077. Buff their might with OGN-058 or SFD-196. Counter spells with OGN-045.

Overall, Irelia is building around her own strategy first and foremost. Once you feel you have enough cards to reliably achieve that goal, plenty of flexible cards are available to help specific match-ups. OGN-056 massively improves the Aurora match-up, while SFD-140 combines with UNL-128 to deal with large threats we don't want to deal with in showdowns.

Competitive Status

Towards the end of Unleashed, Irelia started to struggle a bit against a faster-paced metagame. Typically, the Blade Dancer enjoys a quiet early game, allowing her to develop her key units while keeping runes available to protect them.

In the Chinese metagame, typically slower and more value oriented, Irelia kept being a dominant legend. She is the only one in Riftbound with a top 8 in all four regional opens. However, the western metagame has been more brutal. Against the surge of Fury decks in the second half of this set, with Annie, Rek'Sai, Pyke or Rengar all gaining some momentum, Irelia had to rush things a bit more. This resulted in a significant performance drop, as Irelia missed the top 8 in both Utrecht and Hartford.