Patch 0.26.0: What You See Is What Happened

Ranked matchmaking falls back to an AI Trainer when no human is queued near your rating. That fallback was quietly the weakest opponent in the game. It skipped the trained team-picker entirely and drafted from the crude fixed-formula version, always at the same difficulty regardless of who it was facing, so a bronze pilot and a champion pilot got the identical opponent.
The Trainer now drafts with the trained picker, and its difficulty is resolved from the league you are actually in, stepping up as you climb. Ghost Ranked reads off your ghost rating instead, because a ghost ticket carries a placeholder league that says nothing about you. The Trainer will draft around the ruleset, cover its own weaknesses, and punish a lazy lineup in a way it simply did not before.
Together with the flat rating change below, expect ranked to feel meaningfully harder if the Trainer was carrying your climb. This one went live a little after the rest of the patch, so if you played ranked right at release you fought the old opponent.

The Live Match Showcase on the front page used to start running the moment the page loaded, so on a slower connection you arrived to a black rectangle that had already played half the clash. It now holds behind a loading curtain and starts its entrance the instant it is ready, which means you see the opening of the fight rather than the aftermath of it.

When a card's art was regenerated, the address of the image did not change, so your browser and our cache both kept happily serving the old picture. Card images are pinned for a year on purpose, which is great for speed and terrible for a card that just changed, so depending on where you were in the world you could be looking at a superseded version for a long time. Rebaking a card now moves its image to a fresh address, so the new art reaches you on the next load.

A replay tile could show a stat line that no Fighter in that battle ever had. The tile was reading the card's printed values rather than the exact level the engine resolved for that match, so anything that shifted a Fighter's level, a borrowed card or a league cap among them, made the tile and the fight disagree. The tile now reads the same resolved row the engine fought with, so the numbers on the card and the numbers in the battle are the same numbers.

Ranked matchmaking falls back to an AI Trainer when no human is queued near your rating. Those matches were being scored with the same upset table that rewards beating a much higher-rated human, so a win against the Trainer could pay a large bonus while a loss only ever cost the normal amount. The result was that farming the fallback was the most efficient way up the ladder, which is not what the ladder is for.
AI Trainer matches now settle flat: plus twenty on a win, minus twenty on a loss. Human matches are untouched and keep the full upset table. If the Trainer was quietly carrying your climb, expect ranked to feel slower from here.

In a Vital Suppression match, a commander that grants health had that grant dropped when the battle view worked out the starting bar, so a Fighter sitting at five of five would read as four of five and the last segment never filled. The engine had it right and the match played out on the correct numbers, so nothing about any past result changes. The bar now matches the fight.

On tablet-width screens the pre-battle versus screen and the preparing screen tucked their bottom controls underneath the mobile navigation bar, so the thing you needed to tap was the thing you could not reach. Both screens now reserve clearance for the nav all the way up to desktop width.

When a ruleset strips armor, the card tile kept displaying the Fighter's printed armor value, because it could not distinguish a Fighter whose armor had been reduced to zero from one that simply never had any. The tile now shows zero when the armor is gone, so an Unprotected board reads honestly instead of promising protection that is not there.

Overlays on a Collection card tile, the state badges and action chrome that sit on top of the art, could spill past the edge of the tile and over its neighbours, which made a dense grid look broken. They are contained now. The wallet panel also carries its proper Grand Vault title instead of going unnamed.

A tournament card prize could be handed out more than once for the same placing if the award path ran again. Prizes are now checked against the permanent grant record before anything is minted, so each entitlement pays out a single time and your prize history reads as what you actually won.