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Udyr NFT — Partnership proposal to Riot Games
An unsolicited pitch for an official champion drop on Mongolia's first NFT marketplace. Strategy, narrative, copy, data visualisation, and design across 16 pages.
Role
Strategy & Design
Industry
Gaming · Web3
status
Not pursued
Year
2022
Challenge
MongolNFT was Mongolia's first NFT marketplace and the first in Central Asia — over a million users, roughly 90% domestic market share, multi-chain since launch in 2021. Real numbers, in a market of three million people.
Riot Games has 180 million registered players. From where they sit, a marketplace in Ulaanbaatar asking for an official champion drop is a licensing request from a company they've never heard of, in a country they have no reason to think about. There's no leverage in that conversation and no reason to answer it.
So the proposal couldn't be a request. It had to find something Riot already wanted and arrive as the answer to that instead.
Process
The deck couldn't open by asking. It opens with a gap in Riot's own numbers: 180M League players worldwide, 59,000 in Mongolia — 0.03% of the global base, and two Mongolian pro players against China's 285. On its own that reads like a market that doesn't play games, so the next page sets CS:GO beside it at 1.2M Mongolian players and Dota 2 at 788K. The comparison reframes everything. Mongolia plays multiplayer games heavily; League specifically is underrepresented. Not a market problem — a promotion problem, and promotion is something a partner can fix.
Only then does the proposal arrive, structured as three utility tiers running tangible to intangible: merch, in-game items, and access to Worlds and the Arcane premiere. The tiering gives Riot a menu instead of a single yes-or-no, and makes every tier legible as promotion — each one drives engagement with the game, not with the NFT. All proceeds go to Mongolian children's rights organisations or to funding the country's first League national championship, so the ask reads as market development rather than revenue extraction from their IP.
The cultural argument is held until the end. Udyr — a warrior-shaman drawing power from nature spirits — maps onto Mongolian shamanic heritage, but asserted on page one that's a stretch. So the deck closes on Bayra Bela, MongolNFT ambassador and the cultural consultant who worked on Udyr's own 2021 rework in Legends of Runeterra. The thread already existed inside Riot's own production. The deck saves it for the last page.
Outcome
No response. The deck went to Riot and nothing came back, which is the ordinary outcome for an unsolicited proposal from a company they'd never heard of.
What I Learned
A pitch doesn't work by presenting what you have. It works by finding something the reader already wants and showing up as the answer. Every structural choice in the deck followed from that.
Where a fact sits changes what it's worth. The Mongolian cultural consultant on Riot's own Udyr rework would have read as a stretch on page one; on the last page it's the strongest thing in the deck.
One unsourced number weakens the sourced ones around it. The 1,700% growth projection is the only figure in sixteen pages I couldn't stand behind, and it made everything near it look softer. I'd cut it.
Back
Udyr NFT — Partnership proposal to Riot Games
An unsolicited pitch for an official champion drop on Mongolia's first NFT marketplace. Strategy, narrative, copy, data visualisation, and design across 16 pages.
Role
Strategy & Design
Industry
Gaming · Web3
status
Not pursued
Year
2022
Challenge
MongolNFT was Mongolia's first NFT marketplace and the first in Central Asia — over a million users, roughly 90% domestic market share, multi-chain since launch in 2021. Real numbers, in a market of three million people.
Riot Games has 180 million registered players. From where they sit, a marketplace in Ulaanbaatar asking for an official champion drop is a licensing request from a company they've never heard of, in a country they have no reason to think about. There's no leverage in that conversation and no reason to answer it.
So the proposal couldn't be a request. It had to find something Riot already wanted and arrive as the answer to that instead.
Process
The deck couldn't open by asking. It opens with a gap in Riot's own numbers: 180M League players worldwide, 59,000 in Mongolia — 0.03% of the global base, and two Mongolian pro players against China's 285. On its own that reads like a market that doesn't play games, so the next page sets CS:GO beside it at 1.2M Mongolian players and Dota 2 at 788K. The comparison reframes everything. Mongolia plays multiplayer games heavily; League specifically is underrepresented. Not a market problem — a promotion problem, and promotion is something a partner can fix.
Only then does the proposal arrive, structured as three utility tiers running tangible to intangible: merch, in-game items, and access to Worlds and the Arcane premiere. The tiering gives Riot a menu instead of a single yes-or-no, and makes every tier legible as promotion — each one drives engagement with the game, not with the NFT. All proceeds go to Mongolian children's rights organisations or to funding the country's first League national championship, so the ask reads as market development rather than revenue extraction from their IP.
The cultural argument is held until the end. Udyr — a warrior-shaman drawing power from nature spirits — maps onto Mongolian shamanic heritage, but asserted on page one that's a stretch. So the deck closes on Bayra Bela, MongolNFT ambassador and the cultural consultant who worked on Udyr's own 2021 rework in Legends of Runeterra. The thread already existed inside Riot's own production. The deck saves it for the last page.
Outcome
No response. The deck went to Riot and nothing came back, which is the ordinary outcome for an unsolicited proposal from a company they'd never heard of.
What I Learned
A pitch doesn't work by presenting what you have. It works by finding something the reader already wants and showing up as the answer. Every structural choice in the deck followed from that.
Where a fact sits changes what it's worth. The Mongolian cultural consultant on Riot's own Udyr rework would have read as a stretch on page one; on the last page it's the strongest thing in the deck.
One unsourced number weakens the sourced ones around it. The 1,700% growth projection is the only figure in sixteen pages I couldn't stand behind, and it made everything near it look softer. I'd cut it.