News

A new home, a new Play screen, and the Arena Board

NEW Story mode has been implemented! Chapter 1, Part 1: The First Duality. Please try it out and leave feedback. Massive Home, Play, and Shop menus overhaul. More are coming soon. The Decks screen has been redone too: your decks as a grid of Leader paintings with their element, card count and ready status, and your Best-of-3 pairings on their own tab. Leader Reactions and three foil finishes added to the shop. Friend list now shows who is online. New battlefields have been implemented. Turn it on in Settings, as it's still in testing, but we hope it becomes a permanent addition soon. The tutorial uses the classic board for now and should be updated later. Five Arena Boards are in the Shop at 1500 Gold. The old background and boards have been removed from the store and players' lockers. You can now set how fast the practice bot plays: Fast, Normal, Slow, or Step. On Step, it takes one action per click. With Gameplay Analytics on, finished practice games are now kept as anonymous replays that help improve the practice AI. No name, account, or deck names are kept in this data. The toggle is in Settings under Privacy, and you can turn it off there at any time. CHANGED Unranked is now called Casual. Ranked is only Best of 3, Duel Deck Format only now. You will need to set up a paired deck on the Decks screen to play in Ranked. We may put a single-game ranked in the future, but Focus is designed with Duel Deck Format as its competitive format. Shop pricing changes. These will go through a lot of changes in the coming weeks as we prepare for Steam Launch. The old Playmats and Deck Boxes have been taken out of the Shop. FIXED Three cards were behaving as though they were face-up while they were set on the board. Watery Grave, Geometric Storm, and Gather Water were all activating their triggers while being set. All three must be face-up to activate and should be fixed to do so now. After a match, "Find Match" takes you back to the queue correctly now. Installed build fixes that were causing images not to load should be fixed now. On the Arena Board, a damage shield now shows on the board. Shields show as a badge above the units, telling all players what effect is on that unit. The classic board already did this. Matchmaking games now count for your achievements and quests. Since matchmaking became server-run, Ranked and Casual's Find Match have not recorded this information. Fixes to the back end on how players' information is transmitted to both players' clients. Surrendering a game now actually surrenders. There was a server issue where one player would quit, and the other would still be stuck in the game. Turning off personalised marketing now applies to your whole account. It was only taking effect on the device you turned it off on. Fixed a Quick Chat bug so that the spam limit is counted per player. Players' messages no longer affect each other. Once you set a Skill or Rally face-down, you can no longer go back and cast a Skill or Rally you played face-up earlier if you never cast it, the same as playing a card or using an ability before casting it. If you haven't built a deck yet, the client will direct you to build one. On Mobile, your opponent's face-down Rally was shown face up; it should be fixed. Also, card-choice prompts like Osmosis now fit the screen. The bottom bar turns into a Confirm button while you're choosing.

Focus, on your phone

NEW Focus plays better on mobile. Desktop Layout is now in Settings if you need to force it. FIXED Fixed an issue with players' hands getting stuck down. The practice bot improvements Rainbow Maker, Ray now triggers after a Skill that removed itself. Paying a Focus cost works on mobile again. Surrender asks if you're sure now. IMPROVED When choosing cards from an ability, the UI now displays the cards instead of just the card names. Mobile Improvements. The Drop Zone wasn't labeled as such, and now it is.

Card backs are back

FIXED Face-down cards and your opponent's hand were showing a broken image instead of the card back. Anyone with a card sleeve equipped never saw this, because the sleeve was standing in for it. If a match stopped because the two games had fallen out of sync, only one player was told. The other was left sitting in a match nobody was playing, with surrendering as the only way out. Both players are now returned to the menu, and neither of you is counted as having lost. The menu tour asks once. It had been re-offering itself every time you opened the menu if you had not redeemed an alpha code, which meant it never stopped. You can still replay it whenever you like from Settings. CHANGED The card inspector is back to the size and position it had before the last update. A proper inspect zone on the battlefield is being built to replace the overlay entirely, so the panel stays as it was until that arrives.

New borders, a mobile deck builder, and cards you can read

NEW The cards have a new border. Every card in FB1 has been updated. Improved deck builder on mobile. IMPROVED Cards are much bigger when you inspect them. We are looking to implement a zone on the battlefield for inspected cards to go so they can be visible but not hinder you from playing the match by being in the way. Hovering over a card now inspects it. It’s now the default instead of the middle mouse button. You can change this in the settings. Buttons and controls are easier to hit on a phone throughout the shop and the deck builder. When a card has more than one “per-turn” circle, they now stack up in the corner of the card on the field the way they're printed on the card. Error messages are now displayed for players to be able to report. If something goes wrong, please report that message so we can diagnose it. FIXED Being able to cast a skill/rally after leaving the play cast resolve step has been fixed. We will probably add a toggle for warning the player they are about to leave the skill/rally cast step if the player tries to activate or play something. The shop could not sell you an element set and would just error. It should be functioning correctly now. The “Play Again” option after a practice match now starts another practice match with the same settings instead of putting you in a random hotseat mode.

Solo, mobile, and a deck builder that keeps up

NEW We are actively making changes to the mobile setup to improve how the UI looks. These changes will roll out with this update, along with future updates. So expect a lot of changes to the UI and UX on mobile layouts. Solo has been fine-tuned and now allows you to select what you want to play against instead of it being one of your pre-built decks. This should help players get ideas for decks along with seeing how some of these decks are played. A slow-mo function was also added so the AI isn't blowing through its turn and you can see the actions it's taking. Deck storage is now purchasable in the shop for 500 Gold if you need more than the 15 every account starts with. There's now a short tour of the menu the first time you arrive on the home page. IMPROVED The deck builder now has filters. Your Leader is a full-size card in the builder now, with its text beside it instead of squeezed underneath. The Card Glossary has a search box now. FIXED Blow Them Away, Mistral had a bug: she was milling cards when played from anywhere, not just when played from hand. Wind Apprentice was triggering when cards were flipped and will no longer do so, functioning as she's supposed to. Renaming a deck was creating an entirely new deck instead of renaming the current one you were editing. That has been fixed. There is now a confirmation when you go to leave the deck builder, and it's not saved. Fixed a bug that was giving you double focus at the start of online matches. Alternate art bought from the shop now actually changes your card. Fixed a bug that was putting standby skills face up. Deck builder fixes. The practice opponent has had improvements. Tutorial fixes.

Tap to play, and press-and-hold behaves itself on a phone

CHANGED Cards are no longer drag and drop. This has been removed because of lingering issues from it and on PC, it's much easier to click the locations you want the cards to be played in. This should be added back as an option in settings and default on mobile in the coming days or weeks. FIXED Pressing and holding on a card on mobile should now allow you to inspect it. Improvements to how auto-hide works for the player's hands. GOOD TO KNOW Invite codes only work for one account, but if you need to log in on a new device, or if your account gets locked out on accident, you can use the code to re-enter. The landing page now points you to Discord if you have any issues.

A rewritten tutorial, and your foils on the board

IMPROVED The tutorial has been improved. Card names in the match log are now interactive. You can click them for full information. You can buy foil tokens in bulk. The shop now has a quantity stepper, in ones and fives, and the price on the button is the total. A token still applies to one card. NEW Foil printings now correctly show for both players. Your deck icon warns you when it is running out of cards. At 7 cards or fewer, it takes on an amber glow, giving you warning that you are about to Regen. FIXED A Skill played and not cast can no longer be cast by a DIFFERENT Unit. If the Unit that played it leaves the lane — destroyed, replaced or bounced — its cast window closes with it, including when another Unit is then placed in the same column. The pre-match screen fits on a phone. Your opening hand was cutting off the confirmation and should no longer do this. The Next Phase button no longer goes missing in a local game. In Practice it could disappear on your own turn, leaving the bar with no way to advance.

Eight cards reprinted, and new art for the whole set

CARD BALANCE/CHANGES Stoke the Black Flames — Remake of Explosion of Black Flame: It no longer deals 5 damage and now costs 0 Focus, becoming a Support. This change is due to the Focus cost being too taxing and the card not being worth the cost even with all it did. We hope that this small change will help elevate Black Flame as it feels slightly weaker compared to everything else in our testing. Lightning Magi, Sigamore: deals 2 to every enemy unit when played, instead of the 1 it dealt before. Lightning needs to clear boards to help keep it different from how Fire feels to play. In testing, Sigamore has felt weak. He originally dealt 3 which felt too strong in initial testing, but it looks like bringing him down to 1 was an over-nerf, so we are trying 2 out. Wind Magi, Glenn: I've been trying to get this card to work for a while but felt like using 3 focus in wind was just too tall an ask, and it never felt great to pay the 3 and pass turn after bad draws. Bringing his capabilities down and reducing his cost to 2 might put him in the zone where player skill can really shine. I'm not 100% on if this will fix him, but I am sure he will feel a lot better to play. Flap of the Wings: removed the discard from the cost. Too many times this card was unplayable due to the discard cost, now I believe even the SL1 part of the card is usable. Geometric Storm: is now a you may. Should help Wind players structure their turns better. Guiding Breeze: now bottoms a skill that has resolved and is still in a skill zone. This is another wording change to help deal with cards that remove themselves. Tempest Arrow: changed the SL3 to SL3+. Wind needs to feel more rewarding for building skill link, instead of being punished for it. Flash Step: now only works if the Unit casting it is Lightning. This is just a future-proofing change as we feel it will become a problem down the line to have a non-restrictive effect like this in future Duel Elements. NEW ART Updated some of the old A.I. art that was dated. IMPROVED Press and hold any card to read it full size. This should help with mobile applications. Shop display improvements FIXED Rally cards can now be set face-down in a Scion's Skill Zone. Playing one there face-up already worked, so only half the rule was in — which made it look like Rallies were broken outright. NEW Anyone without an invite code can apply for one from almost any focus web page they land on, so if you know someone who wants in, that's where to send them.

A tutorial that shows you where to click

The tutorial fixes to help new players. CHANGED The alpha title now reads “Alpha Tester” instead of “Founder” due to confusing wording.

A new name, if you want one

It now costs 500 Gold to change your username, you can do it by going to Profile → Edit Profile — type the new name and hit Rename. Platoon commanders can rename their platoon, also for 500 Gold, from the platoon panel. The tag stays as it is. NOTE The Focus app is in closed alpha and the link alone is no longer enough to join. You can get a code from us or on our Discord if you need one. Nothing about accounts has changed — decks, Gold, rank and progress are exactly where you left them.

Platoons decide who gets in

NEW Your platoon chooses who can join it. If you command one, open Social → Platoon and set the door: open to anyone from the directory, invite only, or a minimum rank. The directory tells people the requirement before they click rather than bouncing them afterwards, and the rule is enforced on the server — a platoon set to invite only cannot be joined by anyone who was not asked, whatever they try. A rank requirement is set by tier, and it holds the number that tier meant when you set it. If the ladder is retuned later, your platoon keeps asking for what you actually chose. Best-of-3 pairings explain themselves. There is a Learn more link beside the pairings panel on the Decks page now, covering what a series actually is: two decks registered together, sharing one card pool across both lists — 4 of a Unit, 3 of a Skill, 1 of a Rally between them — and two different Leaders, because two lists under one Leader teaches your opponent nothing between games. New players get a proper welcome. The gift that has always been waiting in the Gift Box now arrives as an actual moment when you first sign in, with your rewards shown and claimed on the spot. It is the same gift and the same Gold; it just no longer sits unnoticed behind a menu. IMPROVED The Shop fits on one screen. Today's four featured items sit on a single row instead of wrapping onto a second, and the page no longer scrolls at a normal window size — the hero, the daily rotation, the categories and your Gold are all visible at once. NOTE Focus is a closed alpha, and joining now needs an invite code. Nothing changes for you — your account, decks and progress are exactly where you left them. It only affects new sign-ups: if you want to bring someone in, ask us for a code rather than sending them the link.

The menus, rebuilt

NEW Foil Tokens are reachable. All three — Rainbow Holo, Prismatic and Element Sheen — have been in the catalogue since the day finishes shipped, at 50 Gold each, with no way to get to them: the Shop had no Foil Tokens category, so they only ever turned up if the daily rotation happened to pick one. They have their own category now, alongside everything else the Shop sells. Redeem one on any card you own to give it that finish. Right-click a deck for its actions: edit it, test it against the practice AI, duplicate it, copy its deck code to share, or delete it. The same list is on the ⋮ button in the corner of every deck, so nothing is hidden behind a right-click you have to know about. Duplicate a deck. It arrives as "<name> (copy)" and you can take it apart without touching the original — the usual way to try a variant. You can save 15 decks. There was no limit before, which mostly meant nobody knew what the limit was; now the Decks page shows the count and what is left, and tells you plainly when the shelf is full. Saving over a deck you already have always works, so a full shelf is never a stuck one. IMPROVED The Shop is a storefront. Six categories across the top — Featured, Elements, Card Sleeves, Playmats, Cosmetics and Gold — with a browse list for the finer categories, your Gold balance and the day's rotation with the time left on it. The bigger change is that items show you what you are buying: playmats, menu backgrounds, alternate arts, sleeves and finishes all draw their actual artwork now instead of a shopping bag. Anything you cannot afford says "Insufficient Gold" rather than being a button that quietly does nothing. Your Decks page is a command centre. Pairings, the Card Glossary and your deck storage sit in a column beside the shelf instead of below it. Decks sort by name, element or status, and each one carries a thin line in its Leader's element so you can pick out a Fire deck from across the page. A deck that is not ready says why — "35 more cards" rather than just "Draft". Your Profile fits on one screen. Everything that used to need scrolling — record, achievements, tournament commendations, telemetry, elemental history and your collection — is visible at once. Your rank now sits in the header with a bar showing progress to the next step inside your tier, so a win moves something visible instead of nudging a bar by six percent. Losses are shown next to games and wins. The Locker is a loadout. A preview panel on the left shows the actual playmat, sleeve, board or menu background you have selected, at the size it will appear; your five equipped slots sit together at the top; and you can filter by owned, equipped or locked, or search by name. Locked items show what they cost in the Shop — including sleeves, which never showed a price at all. Your collection completion is on the same screen, along with what you picked up most recently. FIXED The Wins by Element chart stops drawing a shape when you have no wins. It scales to your own best result, so at zero it drew every point at the centre — which looked like a broken chart rather than an empty one. It says so now.

Focus Online, and a home for your platoon

NEW The game has its name on the tin: FOCUS, with ONLINE beneath it. Same game, same account — new wordmark. It has its own address too, at focus.pmg.cards. The old link still works and nothing you have bookmarked has broken, but that is the one to keep. Sign in with Google. If you do, you choose your own display name straight afterwards rather than being handed one built out of your email address. Platoons can recruit. A commander gets an invite box on the roster and can invite any player by username; the invitation arrives in Social under Invites, carrying the platoon's own emblem, tag and description — you are being asked to join a thing, so the thing is what you see. Accept or decline from there, and a commander can withdraw an offer that has not been answered yet. Social is one page instead of a scattering. Friends, requests, sent requests, blocked players and the people you have recently played sit on the left; your platoon and your invitations sit on the right, both visible at once instead of one tab hiding the other. It has its own entry in the side rail now, and Recent Players will offer to friend whoever you just fought. IMPROVED The menus fit a phone held sideways. Every screen the rail can reach was audited on a landscape phone, and all seven had controls that could not be reached at all — including the bottom of the rail itself, which put Profile and Settings off the edge of the screen on every screen in the app. Sign-in, the main menu, Decks, the Shop, Settings, Social and Profile all rearrange now instead of running off the bottom. The match board gets about 10% more of a landscape phone. The space came out of the gap between your hand and the playmat, which is the one place a short screen can afford to give any up. Settings is a console rather than a wall of panels. Categories run down the left, one group at a time, folding into a tab strip on a narrow screen — so Privacy and About are two clicks away rather than a scroll nobody makes. The sliders are proper controls now, with the value beside them. Passwords ask a little more and help a little more: eight characters with a mix of kinds, typed twice when you register, and an eye on every password box so you can check what you actually typed. The emails Focus sends now look like they came from Focus, confirmations and password resets included. News and Gifts are reachable on a small screen, and onboarding has a way back out if you land in it by mistake. FIXED An activated ability's questions go to whoever used the ability. Used one on your opponent's turn and the choice appeared in front of them instead — they answered it, for you. It was reported against Asher in Surge, which is where it shows: unsurged, that ability never asks. Ice Blast's discard cost now happens in an online match. The ability resolved on your screen and the card left your hand, then the next update from the server put it back, because the server had never been told the ability was used. It is told now. The Rally zone draws its once-per-turn orb, like every other zone — Geometric Storm's in particular. Declining "discard your hand before your turn?" no longer strands the game. The turn was handing over correctly on the server; the news of it just never reached your screen, so it looked frozen until somebody reloaded. Any state that settles a moment late now reaches both players within a second, whatever caused it. You can look for another match after one ends without reloading the page. A finished unranked match stops offering to resume itself, the way a ranked one already did. When a reward does not arrive, the game now says why instead of going quiet. Replays are being recorded again. The recorder was not surviving a server restart, which is why so few finished matches had one. IN DISCORD Oracle learned the rules. /rules answers deck questions by reading the same numbers the game itself enforces — deck size, copy limits, the rally cap, the clock — so it cannot drift from the client, and /keyword gives the rulebook's own wording for Surge, Skill Link, Unveil and the rest. There is a card of the day, every day, each in its own thread, and one day a week the spotlight walks a whole cycle. Time in the server earns something now: Apprentice when you arrive, Elder after a week, Magi after a year. No account linking needed — it counts your time in the community, not in the simulator. Tournaments are proper Discord events, and a finished one posts its podium.

Smoother plays

IMPROVED Your hand comes back on its own after you play a Unit. It tucks away when you pick a card up so you can see the lanes you're placing into — now it returns once the Unit is down, instead of making you open it again before every single play. Skills still tuck the board clear, because a Skill isn't finished when it lands: you've still got to tap Focus to pay for it. A unit's HP now pops when it changes. The floating red or green number already tells you what happened — this tells you where it happened, which is the part that gets lost when one Skill hits three units at once.

The tutorial points at what to click

FIXED The navigation rail is back on smaller screens. Below a certain window width it disappeared entirely — and since the Back buttons were taken off those screens a while ago, that left no way out of the deck builder, shop or settings short of reloading. It is a little narrower than on a wide screen now, but it is always there. IMPROVED Red arrows show you where to click in the tutorial. The gold glow already marked the target, but on a full board you have to find the glow before it helps you. An arrow now sits against whatever the current step wants you to click and nudges toward it, so it reads from the corner of your eye instead of needing to be hunted for. The text box moves out of your way. It used to sit at the top edge for all 23 steps. The opening step — and any step that is only explaining something — now sits in the middle of the screen where you are already looking, and once a step starts pointing at something the box moves to whichever edge keeps it clear of the thing it is telling you to click.

Speed of the Strike works on tapped cards

FIXED Speed of the Strike lets you play tapped attack Skills, the way it reads. "Until the end of this turn, you may play attack skills from your Focus" puts no condition on the card's state, but the game was refusing any Focus card that had been tapped. Tapped matters for spending a Focus card to pay a cost — it still does — and not for taking a card out of Focus to play it. Two different questions about the same card, and the game was asking the wrong one. The match log names a card when you have already seen where it came from. Wind Tunnel reveals cards to both players, so the log now says which one went to hand instead of "adds 1 revealed card"; Lightning Magi, Gaven takes a card from Focus, which sits face-up on the board, so that one is named too. At a table you would watch your opponent take the card. Anything drawn from a deck is still unnamed, because nobody has seen it. IMPROVED The menu background effects sit on the art properly. Every Leader background has its particles placed on the glow in its own painting — embers off Dracostar's burning core, sparks where Asher's lightning is, bubbles rising through Zola — each found by measuring where that element's colour actually burns brightest in the image. They also stay put when you resize the window, where before they drifted away from whatever they were meant to be coming from.

The menu comes alive

IMPROVED The main menu background moves. The painting drifts against your cursor, so the menu has some depth to it instead of sitting flat behind the panels, and ambient particles drift across the art in its own element's colour — embers lifting off the wizard's fireball on the default background, and something suited to each Leader on theirs. It is deliberately slight. The art is cropped by hand on every background so the figure's face sits where it should, and a big movement would undo that — so the drift is a few pixels, enough to feel and not enough to shift what you are looking at. Reduce Motion in Settings switches all of it off, the same as everywhere else in the game.

Achievements are chains now, and the long ones give titles

NEW Achievements come in steps. Win 10 matches, then 100, then 500, then 1,000 — one goal on your list that moves up as you finish it, instead of three rows sitting there being noise. Eleven chains in total: wins, matches played, cards played, units removed, Rally triggers, single-element wins, and one for each of the five elements. Ten new titles, all on the final step of a chain. Immortal, Fixture, Field Marshal, Warcry, Unalloyed, and a Fire Ascendant, Water Ascendant and so on for each element. A title is the one reward other players can actually see, so they sit at the end of the longest chains and nowhere else. Twenty new achievements altogether, and nothing you were already working toward has moved. Every existing target became a rung in its chain rather than being replaced, so no progress was reset. CHANGED The Rally chain is built on what a Rally is actually worth, not on a guess. Forty matches were played through the engine and their counters read off: a Rally triggers about once a game, and sometimes not at all. So 250 triggers is the END of that chain rather than a middle step, and the daily quest now asks for 2 rather than 5 — every other daily was levelled to about one sitting last patch, and that one had never been measured. FIXED Card images are served as images. Every card picture and all the audio were going out with a generic file type. Browsers guess and cope, which is why nothing ever looked wrong in the game itself — it surfaced from outside, as Discord refusing to show a card preview.

Two of your daily quests could never be finished

FIXED Two daily quests were impossible. "Play 5 Advanced Element cards" needs Black Flame and "Play 10 Dual Element cards" needs Ice or Magnetic — all three are held back, so nobody could move either by a single card. And because you only ever top up to three quests and unclaimed ones carry over, drawing one meant that slot was gone for good. Seven of ten accounts were holding at least one; one player had no working quest at all. They have been cleared from your slots, and quests now check what is actually released before they are dealt — so when Ice ships, its quest arrives with it rather than waiting for someone to remember. Inspecting a card shows the printing you have equipped. The board, the deck builder and the full-size art view all showed your foil. The inspect panel showed the plain card, which looks less like a missing feature than like your foil going missing. CHANGED Quest targets are levelled out. Every quest pays the same 50 Gold, so drawing "Play 10 matches" instead of "Play 3 matches" was three times the work for identical pay. Nothing now asks for more than a sitting: matches top out at 5, wins at 2, element cards at 10. "Remove an opponent's unit" is now three of them, since one happened in almost every match you played anyway. "Play matches against 2 new opponents" is off the list for now. With the number of people currently playing it was a wall rather than a challenge, and it will come back when the queue can support it. Your name and life total moved. They used to sit either side of the phase track, which put your HP and your opponent's at opposite ends of the bar with the turn readout in between. Each now sits beside its own Leader, and the middle of the screen keeps only Leave, the turn, and Next Phase. NEW An achievement for every element, not just Fire. A Water or Wind main could not earn the foil tokens a Fire main could, which was an unfairness rather than an omission. Stonewarden, Tidecaller, Stormbringer and Galewalker join Pyromancer — 500 cards played of that element, two foil tokens each. "Undefeated" is now "Ascendant". It was awarded for winning 500 matches, which says nothing at all about how many you lost.

Your rank now moves

NEW Ranks have sub-levels. Bronze now runs from Bronze 4 up to Bronze 1 before you cross into Silver, and every tier above works the same way. Bronze used to be one flat 400-point stretch — sixteen or more series in which the screen said "Bronze" and never changed. The bar on the menu and the Ranked screen fills across the step you are actually on now, so a win is about a quarter of it rather than six percent of a tier. IMPROVED The Ranked screen tells you when a loss is free. Bronze and Silver are loss-protected, which went in last patch — but nothing said so, and the only way to find out was to lose and watch the number stay put. It says so now. The series line underneath has stopped printing loss numbers at tiers where they do not apply, which it was doing directly below the line saying losses cost you nothing. FIXED Opening Settings during a match could take you out of the match. The menu rail came up over the running game, and every entry on it left immediately — no confirmation, unlike the Leave button sitting a few pixels away. In a ranked series that meant a misclick on "Shop" conceded it. The same screen also carried a sign-out button, one click and no prompt, which dropped your session and lost the match on the clock. Neither is reachable from a match any more. Settings during a game is settings.

Online matches get their log back

FIXED Online matches now have a match log. Every ranked and friendly game showed "No events yet…" from start to finish — the log lines were being written on the server and thrown away before they ever reached you. Solo and hotseat were never affected, which is why this went unnoticed for so long. The log keeps the whole game, not the last 50 events. It was holding a rolling window, so the older turns you can fold open had quietly already been dropped. A full game fits comfortably now. Losing no longer costs you rank points below Gold. Bronze and Silver were always meant to be loss-protected — you cannot go backwards — but the ladder was applying the same loss at every tier. Gold and above are unchanged: the protection is the bottom of the ladder, not a softening of the rest of it. Water Chant only stops your opponents' skills now. It reads "your water units take 3 less damage from your opponents' skills", but it was reducing every source of damage — including your own, so it blunted the combos you cast it to protect. IMPROVED Your hand size reads X/Y — cards in hand, then the minimum you will be drawn back up to in your Gather Phase. The second number moves when something changes it, so Zola's Surge and High Tide's bonus are now visible instead of quietly changing what Gather does.

Five reported bugs, fixed

FIXED Water units were losing their damage bonus. Water Apprentice, Water Magi Mary and Water Magi Clair all add damage to the water attack skills they cast — but Dehydration worked out that bonus after dealing its damage to the caster, so if you chose an X big enough to finish your own unit off, its bonus died with it. Since choosing the largest X is usually the point, this looked like the unit bonuses simply didn't work. A second Guiding Breeze now keeps its own effect. If your first Guiding Breeze sent your second one to the bottom of your deck, the second one's "put the next skill on the bottom" was thrown away in the same moment. It now applies to the skill you play after it, as it should. Asher shows the right ability in Surge. His Surge changes his ability to "[Discard 1] draw 2 or Focus 1" — but the activate window kept offering the printed version, so the text you read to make the decision was wrong at exactly the moment the decision got interesting. You can set a Skill face-down again without digging your hand back out. Picking up a card tucks your hand away, which took the face-down button with it. The card you're playing now floats above your hand with its face-down toggle beside it — so you can also see what you picked up, which you couldn't before. Dragging a card no longer flashes to the top-left corner. The dragged card had a single frame where it hadn't been told where your cursor was yet, so it appeared in the corner of the screen before catching up. Most of the time that frame was too quick to see; if you paused as you picked a card up, it wasn't.

Oracle joins the Discord, and deck codes

NEW Oracle, a Discord bot for the community. It answers card questions, looks up rulings and shows off decks without anyone having to leave the chat. You can link your Discord account to your Focus account in Settings, so Oracle knows who it's talking to. Deck codes. Export any deck from the builder with Copy Code, and paste a code into your deck library to import it — the whole list, in one string. Share a deck in Discord, in a message, anywhere text goes. FIXED Auto-Pass Empty Phases now works in Solo. The setting was only ever wired up for hotseat and online matches, so it quietly did nothing against the computer. The match log no longer names a card going into a player's hand. Wind Tunnel and Lightning Magi, Gaven both announced exactly which card was picked up — in a game where your hand is meant to be yours. They now say how many, not which. IMPROVED Your hand is easier to get out of the way. Click it to raise it, click anywhere on the board to put it down, and it puts itself down as soon as you pick up a card to play — so the board is clear exactly when you need to see it. The label above your hand is gone. It only said whose hand it was and how many cards, and both of those are on the life bar now — and it was close enough to your cards to get clicked by accident.

The match screen, rebuilt

NEW The board fills your screen. It used to be drawn at a fixed size and scroll when that didn't fit — on a 1920x1080 display at the default setting, about a quarter of the board was below the fold and you had to scroll during your own turn. It now fits whatever window you play in, and never scrolls. Cards on the board show their artwork. A card in a lane is the painting, with its name across the bottom — no rules text crammed into 130 pixels where nobody could read it anyway. The full card, text and all, is one middle-click away exactly as before, or on hover if you've set that in Settings. The match log keeps the whole game, grouped by turn. Every turn is its own section you can fold open or shut, so you can go back and read what happened on turn four instead of scrolling through everything since. The current turn is open, earlier ones are tucked away. You can resize the log. Drag the corner, and it remembers the size — and the place you dragged it to — for every game after. IMPROVED Your playmat runs off the bottom of the screen and both mats reach the sides, so the play area is the whole display rather than a panel floating on a background. Your hand shows whole cards again instead of being clipped by the bottom edge. The Focus zone fills left to right instead of stacking downwards into a second column, and it's much wider — your Focus now reads as one row of cards rather than two piles. Your Leader and Rally sit next to your lanes rather than out at the edge of the screen. Both players' hand sizes are on the life bar, next to the deck count. Empty zones show a socket mark in their zone's colour instead of the word "empty" six times over. CHANGED Board Size in Settings now means how much of the screen the board fills, from 70% to 100%, and it defaults to 100%. It used to be an exact scale that the view scrolled to accommodate — that setting no longer has anything to describe, because the board always fits.

A new main menu, and a shop that shows you things

NEW The main menu is built around full art. Your Leader fills the screen, painted edge to edge, with the menu arranged around them instead of sitting on top of them. You can change that painting. The Wizard you already know is the default and stays free; the five element Leaders — Magus Dracostar, Geo the Solid, Asher, Zola of the Midnight Tide and Iris — are 1,000 Gold each in the Shop, and you equip them in Profile > Locker alongside the rest of your cosmetics. Three card sleeves with real art are in the Shop at 1,000 Gold: Magus Dracostar, Asher, and Geometric Storm. They are the first sleeves in the game that actually show a picture on the back of your cards. You can now choose how the card inspector opens. Settings > Gameplay has three options: middle-click a card as before, hover to see it, or hover to peek and middle-click to keep it open. Middle-click stays the default, so nothing changes unless you want it to. IMPROVED The Shop shows what you are buying. Every item used to be the same shopping bag icon — now a playmat shows the mat, a background shows the painting, an element shows its Leader, and a foil token shows the finish it gives you. The deck list groups your copies together. A finished deck used to be 35 separate rows; now it is one row per card with a count, so a full deck fits on screen without scrolling. Minus removes a single copy and the cross removes the whole stack. Every screen now has one way in. Profile, Practice, Decks and Ranked each used to sit in two places at once; the side rail owns them now. Your record sits beside your name — win rate, season record and deck count, where you can see them. Win rate stays hidden until you have played a game, rather than greeting you with 0%. The Gift Box is a labelled panel on the menu instead of an unmarked icon in the corner, so you can tell at a glance when something is waiting. Send Feedback is a real button in the middle of the top bar. During an alpha, telling us what broke should be the easiest thing on the screen. FIXED The Locker now ticks the background and playmat you are actually using. If you chose one before these were priced and do not own it, your menu quietly fell back to the Wizard while the picker still showed a tick on the one you picked — it now agrees with the screen behind it. Daily challenge names no longer get cut off halfway through. Scrollbars outside a match are no longer the browser's default light-grey bar. Celtic Knot and Holo sleeves, and both deck boxes, are off sale for now. Their artwork was never finished, so they were being sold as blank placeholders. If you already bought one you keep it, and it comes back the moment it has a picture.

The alpha runs on five elements

Focus has eight elements built. The alpha runs on **five**: Fire, Earth, Lightning, Water and Wind. Ice, Magnetic and Black Flame are finished — 29 cards and three Leaders, balanced and tested — and they are being held back rather than removed. They will arrive as a set, with their own release, once the five have had a proper shake. **If you already own them, they will disappear from view.** Your cards have not been deleted and nothing has been taken off your account; Salume, Emery and Marco simply stop appearing in the deck builder, the shop and the Glossary, and decks built on them can no longer be saved or played. Everything comes back exactly as it was on the day those elements open. Five Leaders is a better first impression than eight. It is a smaller pool to learn, the matchups are easier to reason about, and the balance data we collect actually means something when it is spread across five decks instead of thin across eight. **Foil tokens now drop from achievements.** Three of them pay in tokens rather than Gold: - **Pyromancer** — 500 Fire cards — 2× Element Sheen - **Rallying Cry** — 250 Rally effects — 2× Rainbow Holo - **Voidtouched** — 250 Black Flame cards — 3× Prismatic Element Sheen goes to the element achievement on purpose: that finish takes the card's own colour, so mastering an element pays out in the finish that shows it. Voidtouched will have to wait for Black Flame, like everything else about it.

Foil tokens are in the shop

The three finishes now have a way to get them. **Foil tokens** — one for each — are in the shop at **50 Gold**, and redeem onto any single card you own. Buy a token, click any card in the deck builder, and spend it right there in the printing picker. That card keeps the finish from then on, everywhere it appears, and you can switch back to the standard art whenever you like. Buy as many as you want; they stack. For scale: a won match pays 25 Gold and the daily cap is 150. A token is about two wins — worth spending on a card you like, and enough that foiling a whole deck is something you work towards. They will also turn up as tournament prizes and achievement rewards. **This came from a player suggestion**, filed through the in-game feedback form and shipped four hours later, near enough word for word. The finishes went out with no way to obtain them and the shape of the answer came from a report, not from us. The tester Prototype Stamp is not a token and never will be. It records that an account existed before the game shipped, and that is not something anyone should be able to buy. Two titles also went in: **Developer**, and **Creator** for the person whose game this is.

Fixed a prompt that could freeze a match

**If a timed prompt ran out in an online match, both players got stuck.** The countdown would reach zero, the buttons would stop responding, the prompt would never close, and there was no way out for either side — not even losing on time, because a prompt deliberately pauses the clock so it cannot eat your turn. That is fixed. When a prompt's timer expires, the server now closes it and declines on your behalf, and play carries on. Declining is always the safe answer: an unanswered prompt will never spend a card or pick a target for you. This only ever affected online matches. Practice and hotseat were closing their own prompts correctly the whole time, which is why it went unnoticed until a Bo3 hit it. **The wordmark is now the way back.** The Back button is gone from the top of every screen with the side rail — click **FOCUS** in the corner instead. The rail's own logo takes you home. One thing in that corner instead of two doing similar jobs.

Unranked matches are being saved again

Every match the server runs is recorded move by move, so it can be replayed exactly afterwards — that is how a bug gets reproduced from a report instead of guessed at, and how the practice opponent gets studied and improved. Unranked matches were being recorded and then discarded. The step that saved a finished match sat behind a ranked-only check, so a match with no ladder attached was captured in full and dropped the moment it ended. Nobody would have noticed from the outside: the game played perfectly, it just left nothing behind. Fixed. A match is now saved when it finishes, whether or not it was ranked, and a Bo3 is saved as one record covering the whole series rather than only its last game. This matters most for the matches that were least likely to be kept. Unranked is where practice happens, where testers try things, and where most series between friends get played — which is exactly the play worth learning from. Nothing changes in how you play, and no match you play from here needs anything from you to be recorded.

Look at the art properly

Inspect any card, then click the art — it opens full height in the middle of the screen and tilts as you move the pointer. The inspect panel is built for reading rules: a small card next to a column of keyword text. That is a good shape for text and a poor one for a painting. This is the other half of it. No rules, no panel, just the illustration as large as your window allows, with light moving across it. **If you own a finish for that card, you see it here.** This is the size where a foil is actually worth looking at — the stamped Leaders alpha testers were given show their grid, their registration marks and their serial in full. Middle-click works too, and so does clicking the art from anywhere you can already inspect a card. Escape closes the art and leaves the rules panel where it was. Reduce Motion is respected: the card holds still and keeps its finish.

The Operator ID is now a dossier

Your Operator ID has been rebuilt. Same card, reorganised into four regions so it reads like a service record rather than a list of fields. **Identity core.** Your avatar, name, title and rank tier now sit together as one block instead of being spread down the card. The title moved out from above the portrait to directly under your name — who you are, then what you go by. **Achievement array.** The six badge slots moved off the avatar and into a cluster beside it. The portrait gets its own space and each badge has room to be looked at. Hover one to see what it is. **Telemetry console.** Total wins and your ranked record — points, peak, win-loss — in a single panel. Nothing you have not played shows as a zero; it shows as a dash, because never having competed is a different thing from competing badly. **Signature node.** Your signature element and signature card are one block now. Both answer the same question, so they stopped being two unrelated rows. **Titles: twenty-one new ones, in six groups.** Team, Testers, Contributor, Competitive, Achievements and Element Mastery — each with its own colour, so a title says something at a glance. Only titles you actually hold appear in the picker. A few worth chasing: **Field Reporter** for three bug reports that lead to a fix — filing them is not enough, they have to be real. **Champion**, **Grandmaster** and **Undiluted** come with the achievements of the same name. And there is one per element for twenty-five wins with that element's Leader. The card also picked up a slow prismatic sheen along its edge. It respects Reduce Motion.

Pick which version of a card you play with

Click any card in the deck builder — the Leader panel, or anything in the pool — and a new overlay shows every version of that card you own. Choose one and that is how it renders from then on. Right now that means the standard art plus, for alpha testers, your stamped Leaders. It is the same picker whichever printings you end up owning. **Each option is shown live, not as a thumbnail.** Move your pointer across the previews before you commit — the whole point of a finish is what it does when the light moves, and a still image cannot tell you that. A few things worth knowing: - **Your choice follows you, not the deck.** It applies everywhere that card appears, in every deck. Opening the picker never changes a decklist, which is why it sits on a plain click in a screen where everything else adds or removes cards. - **Standard art is always an option.** Owning a finish does not mean being stuck with it — you can go back to the plain print whenever you like. - **Nothing was switched on for you.** Every card starts on its standard printing, including the stamped Leaders handed out last release. If you want the stamp, it is two clicks away.

Alpha testers, your Leaders are numbered

If you were playing Focus before it shipped, every Leader card in your collection now carries the **Prototype Stamp** — a blueprint grid, corner registration marks, and a serial running up the left edge reading `ALPHA · No. 007`. Your number is your place in line. Serials were issued in the order accounts were created, so the earliest tester holds No. 001. They are never reissued and never reassigned. **You didn't have to redeem anything.** Every account that existed has already been given one. There was no code to find and nothing to miss — a commemorative mark handed out by a shared secret stops meaning anything the moment the secret spreads, so this one is based on when you actually joined. Set a Leader as your signature card in **Profile → Edit Operator ID** and the stamp shows there too, on the card your opponent sees before a match. A new **Founder** title is unlocked for you in the same place. Leaders you haven't unlocked yet are already stamped, waiting — claim that element later and it arrives marked. This is cosmetic through and through. A stamped Leader is the same card with a different surface: identical in every deck, identical in every match, and it touches nothing about how the game plays.

Your achievements now show up on your Operator ID

The Operator ID card has six hex badge slots around your avatar. Until now exactly one thing could fill them: placing in an official tournament. Since no tournament has run yet, everybody's card was empty and there was nothing you could do about it. Achievements can now be pinned there too. Complete one — Contender for ten wins, Seasoned for a thousand cards played, and nine others — and it becomes a badge you can put on your card in **Profile → Edit Operator ID**. Pick any six; they show in the order you choose them. **They're visible to other players.** A badge nobody else can see isn't really a badge, so your completed achievements now appear on your card wherever your opponent sees it. Achievements you're only partway through stay private — a half-finished one is nobody's business but yours. Tournament commendations still work exactly as before, and sit in the same six slots. Champion and Finalist badges keep their gold and silver; achievement badges are coloured by tier. Hover any of them for the name. Nothing is retroactive — achievements only count matches played from here on.

Settings fits on one screen now

The Settings screen had grown to nine sections stacked in a single narrow column, which meant scrolling past most of the app to reach Privacy or About. It's two columns now on any reasonably wide window, and nearly all of it is visible at once. **The gear in the top-right corner is gone.** Settings was reachable from two places a few hundred pixels apart — that gear, and the button on the left rail. The rail already owns navigation, and the top-right corner is the busiest part of the menu, so the duplicate went. Settings is on the rail, where the rest of the navigation lives. Nothing changed about the settings themselves — same options, same values, same place in the rail.

The AI finally noticed it can hit your leader

A handful of cards say "deal damage to any target **card**" rather than "target unit" — and a leader is a card. Wind Tunnel at Skill Link 4 puts 6 straight into your leader's face. So does Tempest Arrow at SL 3, Shift in Polarity, Ice Blast's follow-up hit, and Magnus. The practice AI had never once done it. The way it picked targets, any unit on the board — even a healthy one it had no hope of killing — always looked more appealing than your leader. So it would dutifully chip at a wall of units while ignoring the thing that actually wins the game. It now takes the shot when a card offers it. **Wind feels like a real deck now.** Its whole Skill Link chain exists to set up that Wind Tunnel hit, and the AI was throwing the payoff away every time. Iris went from the weakest opponent in the game to squarely mid-pack. More generally, the gap between the strongest and weakest Leaders has been closing steadily this week — most of it turning out to be the AI failing to play the decks properly rather than the cards themselves being off. Five of the eight Leaders now sit within nine points of each other, where at the start of the week they were spread across thirty. If you play Wind, Ice, Magnetic or Black Flame, expect the opponent to suddenly start reaching past your board.

Zola's recommended deck was missing Water's whole game plan

If you loaded the recommended Water deck, you were handed a list that couldn't do the thing Water does. Water's plan is to sweep a column clear and push damage through the gap: **Double Drowned** clears every unit out of a column, **Osmosis** banks skills in your Focus, and **Wave Water Rush** cashes them in for 2 damage per skill sitting there. The recommended deck contained none of those three. That's fixed — the list is rebuilt around that plan, and it wins nearly twice as often as the old one. **How it got that way**, because it's a fair thing to know: those decks were tuned by having the AI play thousands of games with them and keeping what won. But the AI at the time could only think one move ahead, so it never got value out of a setup card — and the tuning quietly deleted every card whose payoff arrives a turn later. Double Drowned was cut to make room. Wave Water Rush was judged too expensive. The measurement was fine. The problem was that the thing doing the measuring couldn't play the deck. **Worth knowing if you use the other recommended decks:** the same thing probably applies to some of them. They were all built to be simple on purpose — no fiddly combo pieces — which is reasonable for a first deck, but it does mean a few of them are playing with one hand tied. They're a starting point, not a finished list, and the deck builder is right there.

The opponent now picks its targets properly

Following on from last release: the practice AI can plan a turn, but it was still choosing *what to hit* almost at random — literally the first valid target in the list. It now picks based on what it's actually casting: - **It finishes wounded units.** A unit sitting on 1 HP blocks a lane exactly as well as a healthy one, and the old opponent would happily ignore it and hit something fresh instead. - **Ice actually works now.** Icy Spear deals more for every ice counter on the target, and the overflow spills into your leader. The AI now aims it at the unit it's been freezing, instead of whichever one happened to come first. - **Heals go on its own damaged units** rather than being pointed at yours. - Given nothing worth removing, it goes for your leader. Measured against the previous build it's worth a few more percentage points — much smaller than last release's change, but it removes a specific kind of silliness you'd have noticed: the opponent leaving something on 1 HP to chip at a full-health unit next to it. **Heads up if you play Ice:** the AI is better at this too, and it will finish off a unit you've been stacking counters on before you get to cash it in. That matchup is genuinely harder now. Easy mode is still unchanged and still makes plenty of mistakes.

The practice opponent learned to plan

Fair warning: the practice AI is a lot harder now. **What changed.** It used to pick the best-looking move, one at a time. The trouble is that this game isn't played one move at a time — nearly every element wins with a small combination inside a single turn. Clear a column, then push damage through the gap. Stack ice counters, then spear the unit so the overkill spills into the leader. Kill a blocker with Jax, then drop a big skill in the lane it just opened. Every one of those setups looks *bad* on its own. Double Drowned "deals 3". Ice Trap deals nothing at all. So the old opponent never played them — it couldn't see the payoff, because the payoff wasn't there yet. It now thinks through the rest of its turn before committing to a move, which means it finds those combinations. Measured against the previous version it wins about 86% of the time. **What that feels like.** It will clear your board and immediately punish the gap. It will set up a turn in advance. It will finish you from a position that used to be safe. Emery in particular went from nearly harmless to genuinely dangerous, because its whole plan — shuffle your units around, bank cards in oblivion, cash them in later — needs three steps to pay off and the old opponent could only ever take the first. Games against it are noticeably shorter as a result. **Easy mode is unchanged.** If the new opponent is too much, Easy still plays the older, simpler way and makes plenty of mistakes. Normal and Hard both got the upgrade. It still only plans its *own* turn — it doesn't predict what you'll do in reply. So it can still be baited, and a well-timed Standby will still catch it out.

A tutorial correction, and your ID card counts for real

**The tutorial was misquoting a card.** The step teaching Standby Skills said Self Charge triggers "when your opponent's Return Phase would end". It doesn't — it triggers when your opponent *ends their Main Phase*. The card was always right; the tutorial was telling you otherwise, in quotation marks, while pointing at the card. That's the worst kind of tutorial mistake, because it teaches you not to trust the card text in front of you. Fixed, and there's now a check that compares every card the tutorial quotes against what the card actually prints, so this particular error can't come back. **Your Operator ID Card shows a real number.** The line under your signature element used to read "0 element wins" for everybody, always — a placeholder that had been sitting there looking like a statistic. It now shows how many matches you've actually won with that element. It only appears on your own card. The figure comes from your own match record, which means the game genuinely can't work it out for an opponent — so rather than print a zero it can't stand behind, their card just names the element. As with the profile chart, it counts from this week onward and only real matches.

Four more screens brought in line

Continuing last release's tidy-up, four more screens now match the Shop and Play screens. **Achievements** got the biggest change. Its list used to run as one long column with small headings between groups — the categories were there but weren't doing anything visually. Each category is now its own panel, so a long list reads as sections instead of a wall. **The card glossary** now has the frosted panels the rest of the game uses, and the set headers you click to expand light up properly on hover instead of going slightly paler. **Sign-in and the starter-element picker** — the first two screens anyone sees — were still on the older, flatter treatment. Both now match everything that follows them, which matters most on exactly those two screens. Nothing moved, nothing was renamed, and nothing about how any of it works has changed. Purely how it looks.

The rest of the menus caught up with the Shop

The Shop and the Play screen had been rebuilt with a frosted-glass, bevelled-panel look that the rest of the game hadn't picked up yet. Four more screens now match. **The end-of-match screen** got the most attention, because it's the one you see most — after every single game. Both Leader frames and the ranked result now sit in proper panels, and the Gold total in the middle has one too. It was the only thing on that screen with no frame around it, which left the middle of the screen looking less finished than its edges. **Ranked and Unranked** both had none of the new styling at all, which made stepping into a match feel like stepping into a different game. Fixed. **The cosmetics locker** now has the same angled corners as the Shop it sits next to. Selecting and equipping work exactly as before — only the corners changed. Nothing moved and nothing was renamed, so everything is exactly where you left it. Behind the scenes the styling now lives in one place instead of being copied per screen, which mostly matters because it stops the game slowly drifting into two slightly different looks.

Your profile now shows where you stand

The Record tab of your profile has been rebuilt into two halves: who you are on the left, and what you've actually done on the right. **Global rank.** The game has always known your placing on the season ladder — it just never showed it to you. It's now the headline of the panel, alongside your tier, points, peak this season, ranked win-loss and lifetime record. **Wins by element.** A new chart showing which elements you actually win with. If you keep taking Fire and keep winning, the shape leans that way; if Water keeps letting you down, you'll see that too. It counts real matches only — practice against the AI and local hotseat aren't included, since neither is a game against a person. Two honest notes about that chart. It counts from this week onward, because that's when the game started keeping the match records it's built from — there's no way to reconstruct your earlier games, so everyone starts from zero together. And until you've won a ranked match it'll sit empty, which is the correct answer rather than a broken one. **Card collection progress** is on there too, so you can see how much of the set you're missing at a glance. Things you might have expected that aren't there: account level, campaign progress and match history. None of those exist in the game yet, and a progress bar that can never move is worse than no bar at all — so they're left out until there's something real behind them.

Damage numbers now read at a glance, and the duelist moved in

Two visual changes. **Damage and healing numbers scale with how big they are.** Every floating number on the board used to be drawn at the same size, so a 22-damage Heavens Judgment and a 2-damage chip looked identical — the one number on screen worth noticing told you nothing without reading it. Bigger hits now land bigger. Small hits are unchanged, so nothing you're used to has shifted; it's only the heavy ones that grow. **The Play screen's operator banner has art in it.** The right side of your profile banner was empty space; the game's hooded duelist now stands in it, fireball and all, faded back behind your name and rank so nothing gets harder to read. It's the same illustration already on the Ranked tile, so it costs no extra loading — just a different crop of it. Nothing about how anything plays has changed.

Reporting a bug mid-match now saves the match with it

If you hit the report button during a match, the game now keeps a replay of that match alongside your report — the shuffle, both decks, and every move up to the moment you pressed it. **Why this needed fixing.** Last release added replays for ranked matches, but they were only saved when a match *finished*. Which is the wrong way round: the bugs worth reporting are the ones where something jams, loops, or goes wrong enough that the match never ends properly — exactly the matches that were saving nothing. The report you'd most want to chase arrived with the least to chase it with. Now the moment you file the report is the moment the match gets kept. A report that says "it froze here" comes with the game that froze. **What this means for you:** nothing to do differently. Write what happened and send it, same as before. It just means a vague report is now often enough — the moves are attached, so "something went wrong around turn twelve" can be replayed and watched rather than guessed at. **On data, same terms as last time.** The replay holds both players' decklists and the move order, and nobody can read it but the developer — not you, not your opponent. It's saved only for matches run on the game server, only when you actually file a report, and it's capped so a stuck client can't spam them. Practice against the AI and local hotseat aren't recorded at all. And if the report fails to send for any reason, that's still just a failed report — the extra step can't take it down with it.

Ranked matches are now recorded so bugs can be reproduced

Another data note, for the same reason as last time: this changes what gets stored. From this build, when a ranked match finishes, the server saves a **replay** of it — the shuffle seed, both decklists, and the order of moves both players made. Replayed together those reproduce the match exactly, turn for turn. **Why.** The worst bug report is one nobody can reproduce. "It froze on turn twelve" or "that card did the wrong thing" is almost impossible to act on after the fact, because the board it happened on is gone. With a replay, that report becomes something that can be re-run until it breaks again — and then fixed. **Who can see it.** Nobody but the developer. A replay contains both players' decklists and every move, so it isn't something one player should be able to pull up about another. The table is locked so that no account can read it — not yours, not your opponent's, not anyone's. There's no in-game replay viewer, and if one is ever built it'll be a separate decision with deck privacy thought through properly, not a switch flipped on this. **What's in it.** Only what the match itself consisted of: the seed, the two decks, the moves. No chat, no personal details beyond the account ids already attached to a ranked result. This applies to ranked matches on the game server. Practice games against the AI and local hotseat games aren't recorded. Unlike the anonymous stats setting, there's no toggle for this one — it's part of how a ranked match is run, the same way the result and rating change are. If that sits badly with you, say so through the feedback button; it's a fair thing to argue about while the game is small enough to change.

Anonymous match stats now include ranked games

A note about data, because this changes what gets collected. Focus has an **Anonymous Gameplay Analytics** setting (Settings → Privacy), on by default and switchable off at any time. When it's on, the end of a match sends a small anonymous record — which Leader you played, which you faced, who won, how many turns it took. It carries no account, no name and no match ID, so it can't be traced back to you. It turned out that record was never being sent for ranked matches. Ranked moved onto the game server a while back, and the analytics call was sitting inside a piece of code that correctly steps aside for server-run matches — so it stepped aside too, and went quiet along with it. That's now fixed, and ranked games send the same anonymous record everything else does. So if you have the setting on, slightly more is being collected than last week: your ranked results, on the same anonymous terms as your casual ones. If you'd rather it didn't, Settings → Privacy, and it stops immediately. Nothing about what's in the record changed — only which matches produce one. Practice games against the AI and local hotseat games still send nothing at all. Why it matters: this is the data that shows whether a Leader is too strong or an element is falling behind. Ranked is where the game is played most seriously, so it's the data most worth having — and it's been missing.

The practice opponent got noticeably smarter

Two fixes to how the practice AI thinks, both of which you'll feel most against the trickier Leaders. **It stopped wasting skills.** You can attach any Skill to any Unit, but a Unit can only ever *cast* a Skill it shares an element with. The AI didn't know that, so with a two- or three-element deck it would regularly park a Skill on a Unit that could never use it — the card just sat there until the Return Phase swept it away. Against Emery, Salume or Marco you were effectively playing an opponent throwing away part of its hand. **It stopped burning its hand on its Leader ability.** Most Leader abilities cost you cards, and the AI was paying that price every single turn it could — around ten times a game — whether the ability was worth it or not. It now weighs what the ability actually gives back, and won't spend down to an empty hand for one. It also picks which Unit casts a Skill rather than taking the first available lane, which matters a lot for cards that scale with the caster — Dehydration deals damage equal to the caster's health, so casting it through a Water Wizard instead of an Apprentice is the difference between 9 damage and 3. Alongside this, Zola's recommended deck has been rebuilt. Testing it across a few hundred games showed it was the weakest of the eight by a distance, because it had been built with the same balance of Units and Skills as the others — and Water is the one element whose damage comes directly from its Units. It now runs a lot more of them, and wins about two and a half times as often. The AI still plans only one move ahead, so it won't set up combos. Expect a better fight, not a different game.

Every Leader now comes with a deck you can just load

Building your first deck meant staring at 35 empty slots and guessing which cards mattered. Now every Leader has a complete, ready-to-play list behind one button. Pick a Leader and you'll see its recommended deck named right under it — so you know there's one waiting before you commit to anything. Open the builder and the empty deck list offers to load it. One click fills all 36 cards, names the deck, and it's legal and playable immediately. These are starting points, not fixed lists. The deck loads straight into the builder, so you can cut what you don't like, add what you do, and save it under any name. Nothing is locked, and nothing gets saved until you press Save. They're built to be easy to play rather than to win tournaments: cheap cards you can cast on the first few turns, enough Units to hold the board, and the Rally cards your Leader can run. The fiddlier combo pieces are left out on purpose — those are worth finding yourself once the game makes sense. The button only appears while your deck is empty, so loading one can never wipe out a deck you were already working on. Pair it with Test Simulation from last release and you can go from picking a Leader to playing a real match against the AI in about three clicks.

The practice board no longer swaps sides every turn

In practice matches, your board and the AI's were trading places on every turn pass — whoever was about to play got moved to the bottom of the screen. That behaviour is correct in local two-player games, where one device gets passed between two people and the board nearest you should be your own. Practice was quietly using the same rule, except there's nobody to pass to: it's you at your screen the whole game. So it was just picking your board up and putting it down somewhere else, twice a turn. Your side now stays at the bottom and the AI stays at the top, start to finish — the same way online matches and the tutorial already worked.

Rebuilt the deck builder, and you can test a deck before you save it

The deck builder is now three columns: your Leader, filters and deck stats on the left; the card pool in the middle; your deck on the right. Your Leader sits at the top of that left column now, instead of off beside the deck list. It's the biggest decision on the screen — it decides which cards you're allowed to run at all, and for some Leaders that's a pool of fifteen cards out of more than a hundred. It belongs next to the filters it controls. You can also filter the pool by card type now, so you can look at just Units, just Skills, or just Rally cards. Your deck list is sorted by Focus cost, one line per copy, with a remove button on each. Easier to read the shape of your curve, and easier to cut a single copy of something without touching the rest. **Legality now tells you what's wrong.** It used to say "over a copy limit somewhere" and leave you to go find it. Now there's a checklist of the four rules that actually matter — deck size, one Rally per subtype, copy limits, and whether you own everything — and the one you're breaking is the one that lights up. **Test Simulation.** There's a new button under your deck that drops you straight into a match against the practice AI, playing your list against itself. You don't have to save the deck first, so you can try an idea, see how it opens, and come back with your draft still waiting. It stays greyed out until the deck is a complete, legal 36 — the game can't deal an opening hand from anything less. Behind the scenes, the self-testing from last release now includes Rally cards. It had been playing thousands of games without ever drawing one, which meant a whole card type was going unchecked. Not any more.

Testing the rules against themselves

Nothing you can see changed in this one — it's groundwork, but the kind worth knowing about. The computer opponent added last release can now play the game to itself, and it does: every possible Leader matchup, thousands of games, before each release. While it plays, the game checks itself constantly — that cards are never duplicated or lost, that damage and healing stay within bounds, that nothing can reach a state where the game just stops. The point is the bugs you'd otherwise only find mid-match. A card that quietly loses you a card from your deck, or a combination that freezes the board, is miserable to hit as a player and nearly impossible to report usefully. Now those get caught by a machine playing 1,600 games in nine seconds instead of by you, on turn twelve, with a match on the line. Current run: clean across every matchup and difficulty.

Practice against the computer

NEW - SOLO → PRACTICE. Play a full match against a computer opponent. Pick your deck, pick the deck it plays, pick a difficulty, and go. Nothing is recorded — no Gold, no quest progress, no ranking — so it's a free place to try a deck out or learn the phases without a real opponent waiting on you. - Three difficulties. Easy misplays often and is a reasonable place to learn the turn structure. Normal misplays sometimes. Hard always takes the best move it can find. The opponent plays a real game by the real rules — it develops its board, casts what it draws, and uses removal on your units. It doesn't plan ahead, so it won't hold a card back for a better turn or set a trap. Expect a competent beginner rather than a challenge. ALSO - The deck builder can now be searched and filtered. There's a search box for card names and rules text, plus element and cost filters, so finding one card in your Leader's pool doesn't mean scrolling the whole thing.

A bigger board on smaller screens

CHANGED - On laptops and tablets with less vertical room, the space reserved for the hands now scales down with the screen instead of always being sized for a large monitor. The board gets that space back — about 8% larger on a 1024x768 display — and the cards in hand shrink slightly to match. On a full-size display nothing changes at all. The board still never resizes itself while you're playing. The hand space is worked out from your screen, not from how many cards you're holding, so drawing and playing cards leaves the board exactly where it is.

The main menu is now a dashboard

CHANGED - The main menu has been rebuilt around what's actually happening rather than four big buttons. Up top: your Operator profile, your rank and how far you are from the next one, and a Find Match button. Below that, your daily challenges and the next official tournament. Then your friends, your platoon, and your record. A row of shortcuts along the bottom for your profile, practice, a new deck and the season. - Navigation moved to the bar down the left, so everything is one click from anywhere instead of going back to the menu first. Nothing on the page is a placeholder — every number comes from your account. Where we don't track something yet, the card isn't there rather than showing you a made-up number.

Jump straight between screens

NEW - There's now a navigation bar down the left of every menu screen — Play, Decks, Solo, Shop, Profile and Settings. Getting from the Shop to your decks used to mean backing out to the main menu first; now it's one click. It highlights whichever screen you're on, and the Back button is still there on every screen. On narrower displays it steps aside so the layout keeps its full width. BEHIND THE SCENES - Bug reports now carry the exact build they came from again. They were only recording the version number, which doesn't say much when several updates ship in a day — so a report that's hard to reproduce is now much easier to pin to a specific build.

The Shop gets its glass

A visual pass over the Shop, no new items and nothing repriced. CHANGED - Shop cards, category tiles and the featured banner are now frosted glass — translucent panels with a blur, so the background reads through instead of sitting behind a flat box. Everything lifts slightly when you hover it. - Alternate art cards and the banner's showcase tilt towards your cursor in 3D. Alt-arts get it because how the art looks is the whole point of them; a deck box doesn't need to lean at you. All of it respects Reduce Motion in Settings — turn that on and the lift and the tilt simply don't happen.

A new Shop front page, and Liquid Copy asks where you want the copy

SHOP - The Shop has a front page. Instead of eight tabs that all looked equally worth opening, there's now a featured banner for the bundles, a Daily Featured row of four items that rotates at midnight UTC, and category tiles that tell you how many items are inside and what the cheapest one costs before you open them. - Daily Featured skips things you already own, so all four slots are always something you could actually buy. It's the same rotation for everyone on a given day — it won't reshuffle if you reload, so there's no point refreshing at it. FIXED - Liquid Copy now asks which of your Units to play the copied Skill on. It used to drop it into Liquid Copy's own lane without asking, which is rarely where you want it — the Unit a Skill sits on is the one that casts it, so the lane decides what it can target and which of your opponent's lanes an attack lands in. Found by Nouvelle. That's the last open report in the queue. Everything sent in so far has been fixed or answered — if you reported something and it's still wrong, please send it again.

Best-of-3 repaired, and the game stops choosing your Focus for you

Mostly fixes, and one of them was bad enough to be worth explaining properly. FIXED - BEST-OF-3 WAS BROKEN AFTER GAME 1. If a game ended while you had a prompt open — which is what a clock timeout does — two things went wrong at once in the next game. The deck you chose between games didn't take, so you were handed back the deck you had just played. And every prompt for the rest of the match went to your OPPONENT, so you couldn't pick targets for your own skills. Both came from the same dead prompt outliving the game it belonged to. Fixed, and a ranked series now behaves past game 1. - A Master of Black Flames, Magnus lets you choose which Focus to untap. It used to take the first tapped one. - Black Flame Novice, Millie and Lightning Smash had the same problem. Millie now asks which Focus, and Lightning Smash asks which Skill in your Focus. CHANGED - When an effect spends Focus, you now choose which cards pay. That covers Standby costs, Electromagnet Magi Clay, and Lightning Strike. It is one extra click, and it is deliberate: Focus cards aren't interchangeable, and which ones stay untapped decides what you can cast next. Lightning Smash untaps a Skill specifically, so having the game auto-spend your Skills could quietly leave it nothing to work with. NEW - Tablets. The board now scales to fit a smaller screen instead of running off the edge, and dragging cards works with touch. On a desktop nothing changes — the board stays exactly the size you set in Settings and still never resizes itself. Everything above except the tablet work came out of reports sent through the feedback button. Please keep sending them.

Unranked matchmaking, and quests that count again

The big one is a second way to find an opponent. The important one is an apology. NEW - UNRANKED MATCHMAKING. Duel → Unranked now finds you a stranger, not just a friend code. Same deck rules and the same turn clock as Ranked, but no points move and no result is recorded. It pairs you with whoever is closest rather than making you wait for someone in your rating band, it works between seasons, and Best of 1 is the default because a friendly is usually one game. Playing a friend by code is still right there on the same screen. - Feedback reports now have a "credit me in the patch notes" checkbox. Off by default, and it shows you exactly the name that would appear. Tick it and if your report leads to a fix, you get named here. FIXED - Quests, achievements and Gold were not being awarded for Ranked matches. This has been broken since Ranked moved to the dedicated match server: the ladder was paying out correctly, and everything else silently was not. It is fixed, and Unranked pays quest and achievement progress too (no Gold — nothing you can farm). We can't backfill the matches you played in between, and we're sorry about those. - Refreshing your browser mid-match no longer loses the game. Your match is still running on the server; you now rejoin it instead of landing on the main menu. - The board no longer resizes itself. It used to grow and shrink depending on what else was on screen — opening the match log, the hand tucking away, resizing the window — which moved everything under your cursor mid-turn. It is now drawn at exactly the size you set in Settings → Board Size, always. On a small window it scrolls rather than shrinking. - The match log could disappear permanently if you had dragged it while using a larger window. It now stays on screen wherever you left it. If something in here is wrong, the feedback button is in the top bar and in the bar under the board.

Two Black Flame fixes, straight from your reports

The first release shaped entirely by what testers sent through the feedback form. Both of these came out of a single match, and both were found by Nouvelle — thank you. FIXED - Black Flame Armor now protects your Leader. It reads "reduce the damage that would be dealt to black flame cards" — your Leader is a card, and Marco is usually the whole reason the Armor is in your deck. It was shielding your units and letting your Leader take the hit in full. - Explosion of Black Flame now lets you choose. When two of the three revealed cards are Black Flame, you pick which one goes to your hand and the other goes to your Drop. It used to pick for you and tell you afterwards. NEW - Every build now has a version number. It sits faintly in the bottom corner of the main menu, and in Settings under About with a button to copy it. Quote it when you report something — knowing exactly which build you were on is often the difference between a bug we can chase and one we can't. - Reports you send now carry your name, so we can come back to you about them instead of guessing who found what. Keep them coming.

A new Choose Your Duel, a louder Regen, and a way to tell us what broke

TELL US WHAT BREAKS There's a new "Send feedback" button — in the top bar of the main menu, and in the bar at the bottom of the board during a match. Pick a category, type what happened, send. The build version and where you were are attached automatically, so you don't have to describe any of that. There's a Discord link in there too. Reporting from inside a match doesn't cost you the match — it opens over the board. CHOOSE YOUR DUEL - Ranked and Official Tournament are now the two headline modes, side by side. - The Official Tournament card shows the NEXT scheduled event: its name, whether registration is open, when it starts, and the format — instead of a tile that said the same thing whether there was an event tomorrow or nothing all month. - "Play Remote" is now "Unranked". More relaxed matchmaking is on the way; for now it's still how you play a friend by code. - Local Hotseat has been retired from the duel menu. REGEN Running out of deck is the loudest thing that can happen to you, and it used to be a line in the log and a quiet HP change. Now your Drop streams back into your Deck as a fan of cards, the deck reforms on a shockwave, and your Leader takes the hit with the damage called out on it. The sound follows the same two beats — a riffle, then the impact — timed to land with the visuals.

Ranked Best-of-Three: choose your lead deck

A ranked series no longer just starts you on your first deck. CHOOSING DECKS - Before game 1 you see BOTH of your opponent's leaders, then choose which of your two decks to lead with. Both players choose at the same time and neither sees the other's pick until it's locked in — no counter-picking. - Between games the LOSER chooses which of their remaining decks to bring. The winner is locked onto their other deck, because a deck that wins is retired: you must win a game with each of your two decks to take the series. - Each pick has a timer. If it runs out, a deck is chosen for you and the game starts, so nobody can stall a series. PRE-MATCH - The pre-match screen is now yours and your opponent's Operator ID Cards, side by side, and nothing else. It's the "who am I facing" moment, and previously the cards were buried above a decision that needed making. - The mulligan has moved onto the board. You now decide whether to keep your opening hand with your leader, your Focus row and your opponent's side already laid out behind you.

Your match now survives a server restart

Updates used to cost you the game. Matches lived only in the server's memory, so every time we shipped a change, every match in progress was destroyed mid-turn — both players reconnected fine and landed in a brand new game. Matches are now saved as you play. When the server restarts you'll see "Reconnecting to the match…", and a few seconds later you'll be back on the same board, with the same hand, the same Focus and the same turn. ALSO FIXED - The reconnect banner used to disappear as soon as your connection came back, even when the match itself was gone — so you'd be left looking at a board that wasn't your game any more, with nothing saying so. It now clears only when you're genuinely back in, and if a match truly can't be resumed it says "Match could not be resumed" instead of quietly pretending. - If your opponent drops, their clock now STOPS for up to a minute while they reconnect, and you'll see "…disconnected — clock paused" with a countdown. A disconnect they didn't cause shouldn't cost them the match. After the minute the clock resumes whether they're back or not, so an abandoned game still ends normally. - When we deploy, the server now warns both clients first and saves every game before going down, instead of vanishing mid-turn.

Your opponent can no longer see what you are aiming at

When you were asked to choose a target, the board lit up every legal target with a gold outline — on BOTH screens. Your opponent could see exactly which cards you were being offered, and which one you had picked, before you confirmed it. Target highlights are now private to the player being asked to choose. Your opponent still sees that a prompt is open and whose it is — they can't act while you're deciding, so they need to know why the game is waiting — but the targets themselves are yours alone. This was fixed on the wire as well as on screen: the list of legal targets is no longer sent to the other player's client at all, so it isn't just hidden, it isn't there. Reactive prompts are handled the same way. When a trigger of yours fires during your opponent's turn, the highlights belong to you, not to them.

Cards that now do what they say

We swept every printed card in the set against what the game actually does, and fixed what didn't match. CARD FIXES - "This card cannot be destroyed" now means it. Heavens Judgment and Lightning Smash both print that line, and Flash Freeze Wall — the only card that destroys a Skill — was ignoring it and binning them anyway. Flash Freeze Wall still triggers and still places its ice counters; it just can't destroy those two. - Iris, Breath Incarnate's Surge ("reduce damage dealt to this card by 1") now also reduces Regen damage. Regen was the one source it was missing, so a surged Iris takes 4 from a Regen instead of 5. - Gather Wind now finishes resolving before anything reacts to it. Its "deal 2" could destroy a Fire Apprentice, and the Apprentice's discard prompt cut in ahead of Gather Wind's own "[SL 1-2] put this on the bottom, draw 1". Effects now complete, then reactions resolve. ACTIVATING ABILITIES An ability is now gated only by whether you can pay its COST — never by whether it will find anything to do. - Electromagnet Magi, Clay can be activated with no Magnetic card in your Oblivion. You pay the Focus and nothing happens. - Midnight Freeze, Salume can be activated with no units on the board. Same deal: the Focus is spent, the use is spent, no counters land. - Ice Blast can be discarded from hand even with no unit to freeze. This is a rules correction, not a nerf: declaring an ability, paying for it, and having it fizzle is a legal play, and the game was previously deciding for you whether you were allowed to try. RANKED FIX - A Rally card set face-down in a ranked match stays face-down. It was being silently returned to your hand at the end of the turn.

Board customization, new settings, and fixes

A big update focused on making the board yours, more control in Settings, and a batch of fixes. NEW - Board backgrounds: the board now sits in an animated 3D arena. Drift Field is the default; Grid Run, Orbit, and the colourful Event Horizon black hole are selectable in Profile → Locker → Board Background. Clicking empty board space ripples the surface. - Playmats: a set of built-in mats now render under your half of the board, including the etched Astrolabe. Pick one in Profile → Locker. - New settings: Board Size and Animation Speed sliders, a real High Contrast mode, and Confirm Before Attacking. The old single "Confirm Actions" is now separate toggles for deck saves, ending your turn, and unplayable skills. - Gameplay Analytics: an anonymous, opt-out setting that helps us balance cards. Never linked to your account. IMPROVED - The board scales up to fill a wide screen, and the hand is larger and rests over the playmat. - The Profile page is reorganized into tabs — Record, Edit Profile, Locker, and Account. - Ranked and tournaments now use your registered Best-of-3 pairings, and there's a Next Round button after a bracket match. MAGNETIC BALANCE (playtesting) - Angie, Dan, Marco, and Emery HP adjustments. - Emery, Electromagnet Magi Clay, and Forceful Repel abilities reworked. - Updated Magnetic card art. FIXES - Fixed sometimes starting a game with too much Focus. - Fixed being unable to discard your hand between turns. - The Fire leader ability now highlights both leaders as targets. - Charcoal Reuse and Magus Dracostar's Surge now let you choose which Focus to untap. - Healing can now take a card above its printed HP. - The Lightning rally can play tapped attack skills from your Focus, not just untapped ones.

Launch weekend tournament

Casual brackets all weekend — invite friends straight from the lobby.

July 24, 2026 – July 27, 2026

Ranked goes server-authoritative

Ranked matches now run on the server: no host, no lobby, and the timer is always on. Bo1 and Bo3 are both available.

Season 1 is live

The ladder is open. Win a game with each of your two decks to take a Bo3 series.