League of Legends Was Pitched as 'Onslaught' in 2007 - and the Deck Just Surfaced

The biggest esport on the planet started life as a pitch deck with a different name. Lore YouTuber Necrit - with help from a few people inside Riot - has tracked down the original investor pitch the studio sent out in 2007, back when the game was still called Onslaught: War of the Immortals, and turned the whole dig into a mini documentary.

Nineteen years is an eternity in this industry, and the deck shows it. The pitch describes a world split between realms of order and chaos, with a story built around "an antichrist of sorts" tearing reality apart. Some champions were exclusive to one faction - pick a side, lose access to part of the roster.

Faction-locked champions would have killed the draft

That last detail is the one I can't get past. I've watched more pro drafts than I can count, and champion flexibility is the entire chess game of modern League. The 60-second dance of picks, bans, flexes and counters only works because everyone can theoretically play everything. Lock champions behind factions and you get two half-rosters staring at each other - a strategic layer amputated before the game even loads. Whoever talked Riot out of that idea deserves a statue outside the Worlds venue.

The rest of the deck reads like a fever dream in hindsight. The game was seemingly framed around 6v6 rather than the 5v5 that became the genre standard. Sion had a beard. Singed went by "Zij". Annie, meanwhile, was already there with her flaming teddy bear - some ideas really do land on the first try.

Archives matter, and Riot actually opened theirs

Credit where it's due: Necrit asked to see League's original form and Riot handed over the material instead of letting it rot on a dead hard drive. Game preservation usually means fans reverse-engineering builds against a publisher's wishes, so a studio voluntarily opening the vault on its own awkward adolescence is genuinely rare.

It's also a useful reality check. The product that defined a genre and built a global esports circuit started as a rough deck that had to convince investors this whole thing was a business. Somewhere right now, a 2026 pitch is getting laughed out of a meeting room - and it might be filling arenas in 2045. Odds are it also features a bearded character who ends up bald.

Image: Hilary Murugu / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:League_of_Legends_esports_championship_in_Nairobi.jpg