Patch 0.18.1: The Bracket Opens

Tournaments are live. Sign up from the Tournaments page, pay the entry fee if the event has one, and you are on the bracket.

Three formats. Single elimination, double elimination, and group stages that cut down into a knockout. A tournament can chain stages together, so a 64 player event can open in groups and finish as a bracket.

You play on your own time. Each round opens a window rather than demanding you sit in a lobby. Submit your team for each game inside that window and the match resolves on its own. Miss the window and that game is forfeit, so the bracket never stalls waiting on one player.

Every game is its own puzzle. Mana cap, rulesets, and allowed affinities are frozen per game when the bracket is built, so game two of a series can ask something completely different from game one.

You draft blind. Neither side sees the other's team before the game resolves.

Restrictions. A tournament can lock the pool: a rarity, an edition, an affinity, or the ghost catalog at max level, so everyone brings the same quality of Fighter and the draft is the whole skill test.

Brackets update in place as rounds resolve, and you get a notification when your round opens, when your opponent has submitted, and when your round is done.

Registering asks you to confirm the entry fee explicitly before anything is charged, and the confirmation states the rule plainly: entry fees are not refunded when you withdraw. The only refund is a cancelled tournament, and a cancellation refunds every entrant automatically.

You can withdraw while registration is still open. Once the tournament starts, your spot is locked. Entry fees can be paid in SGC, STEL, or KRED, and the fee is held in escrow until the tournament settles.

Tournaments pay out to a placement table. Prizes can be currency, items, or cards, and the pool can come from the entry fees, from the house, or both.

Two rules worth knowing before you enter. Show up or get nothing: zero games actually played pays zero, no matter where the bracket happened to leave you. Partial runs are prorated: if you played some of your games and no showed the rest, your share scales to what you actually played.

Currency prizes land in your wallet directly when they are small. Larger prizes and every item prize appear on your Claim page to collect.

The docs are no longer a stack of scroll walls. All sixteen sections now open in a full width workspace with a list on the left and the detail on the right.

Abilities, Rulesets, Races, and the Glossary are lookups now. Filter the list, click an entry, read it in the detail pane. Finding one ability takes a keystroke instead of a scroll hunt.

Prose pages get a table of contents in the list pane that tracks where you are as you read. Cards keeps its filters inside the new shell. And the whole thing works on a phone.

The guild menu in the header is no longer a narrow dropdown. It is a full width panel that opens flush under the header and shows your guild at a glance: guild identity, whether a brawl is live, and your own pod's combat standings.

Signed in without a guild, the same panel becomes a recruiting surface pointing you at how to join one.

Hitting the pass maximum used to end the season for you. Now every level past 50, all the way to 100, pays out a potion cache for premium pass holders.

Your points were always being counted past the cap. Now they buy something.

The pass economy got a full pass. Points are bigger, they vary per match, and they only come from games that cost you energy.

A win now pays 25 to 35 points, a loss pays 8 to 12. The exact number is rolled per match, so two wins are not identical. The season total is 5000 points, roughly 250 energy games across the season, with each chapter asking a little more than the last. Only energy charged games accrue, so free games no longer feed the pass.

The old flat trickle made the bar feel frozen. It moves now.

The daily bonus wheel got the art it deserved. The plain dial is gone, replaced by the VOID CASINO: a real gambling hall face with radial segment labels, a weighted spin that decelerates onto your result, and a gold flash when it lands.

One free spin per day, straight from the WARPATH strip on the play deck. Every segment pays.

Each ten level chapter of the WARPATH track now carries its own backdrop, escalating from a calm distant approach at Chapter One to a full armada cataclysm at Chapter Five. The play strip shows the backdrop of the chapter you are currently in, so the surface behind your progress bar changes as you climb.

The pass info panel got its header and footer rebuilt into the Intel Ledger: a segmented readout across the top showing progress, access, season and claim, split by hairlines with the numbers in mono, and a two column fine print ledger at the bottom.

The track itself was tightened at the same time. The free row and the premium row now sit on two continuous lines across all fifty levels instead of wandering, the chapter bands share one height, and the dead gutters around the rail are gone. The you-are-here marker shows correctly at level 0 and no longer collides with the chapter title.

Tournaments now sit inside the Play dropdown, between Play and Collection, and carry a count badge when you have games waiting on your team.

The Play item itself grew a gold dot: if you have an active match or an outstanding tournament game, the dot tells you before you open anything. It updates live.

The shop's window prize panel and the product rail both got the previous and next arrows the pack opening screen already had, alongside their dot rows. Tap an arrow to move one slide, wrapping around at either end, and the auto advance timer restarts so it does not yank the panel out from under you.

On a touch screen, tapping a card in the draft picker opened its preview but never actually put it in a slot, which made drafting on a phone impossible.

Now the first tap on a tile opens the preview and the second tap places the card. This covers all three pickers: ranked, guild brawl, and the Battle Lab. Desktop is unchanged, one click still places immediately.

Opening the replay of a match that ended because a player did not field a team used to spin forever with overlapping text. It now shows a static terminal panel saying plainly that a player failed to field a team. Matches where both sides failed show the generic ended-before-combat message.

The normal waiting screen, for a match still assembling, is unchanged.

On a narrow phone the shop checkout's confirm button could sit above the cost summary, so you could tap it without ever seeing which currency you were spending or how much. Confirm is now inactive until the summary block, the currency, the total, and your balance after, has actually scrolled into view.

On a screen where the summary is already visible when the modal opens, nothing changes: confirm works immediately.

On a narrow phone the seven tab labels in the bottom bar had no gap between them and ran into each other. The bar now keeps its labels legible and its tabs inside the screen at 360 pixels wide, in English and in German, signed in or out.

On a phone, the fixed bottom navigation sat on top of the chat composer, so you could not see the text you were typing. Both the full page chat and the guild chat tab now reserve room for the nav bar.

The same clearance is applied at the layout level, so every full width screen (chat, replays, the draft picker, the brawl combat board) reserves it rather than each page fixing it separately.

On a touch device the react, reply and delete buttons on a chat bubble are always visible rather than appearing on hover, and they were sitting on top of the message text. Bubbles that carry a toolbar now reserve room for it, and every touch target in the chat is at the full 44 pixel minimum.

The bell panel was rendering as a cramped dropdown on a phone. It now opens as a full width sheet on mobile viewports, so your notifications are actually readable.

The Galactic Gate login and PIN setup modal did not fit a short landscape phone screen. It now drops its decorative art rail and reflows to a single column at those sizes, without shrinking any text or control. The PIN entry row also fits a narrow portrait screen now, with no sideways scrolling.

On a short landscape phone the header, the stations strip, the WARPATH strip and the bottom nav together left about 25 pixels of the actual play surface visible. The chrome now compacts at those sizes and lifts the active panel into view. No other screen size changes.

The sticky buy dock on the shop page overlapped the navigation on a phone and did not fit the viewport properly. It is hidden on mobile now, where the page already carries its own buy controls in flow.