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Fire, wind, light and earth get to land the first blow again, and the silver sustain meta gets trimmed down to size.
This patch reopens the tempo game. Fire, wind, light and earth Fighters get their teeth back, mostly through speed and reach rather than raw numbers, so the fast, aggressive affinities can actually land their opening blows against the slow magic-sustain teams that had been grinding them down. The silver sustain meta gets reined in at its two engine pieces, and off the /play page, a queued match that starts now grabs you with a clickable strip instead of quietly vanishing.
When you queue for a match and then browse away from /play, the in-queue strip used to just disappear the instant your match was found, and it was easy to miss that the fight had started. Now a clickable "match started" strip takes its place, so wherever you are on the site you can jump straight into the battle instead of wondering where your queue went.
A commander that shaves a Fighter's armor could drive the number below zero in the math, and the battle log would then print a nonsensical negative armor loss. The commander armor effect is now floored at zero and the log reads correctly, so the numbers you see match what actually happened on the board.
Some of the ability-name labels the replay paints over a battle were built from raw internal names and shown in English no matter your language. They are localized now, so a German player sees German ability names in the replay instead of English fragments.
Opening a Gladiator pack did not appear in the packs page's Recent Acquisitions list the way every other pack does. Now it does, so your latest Gladiator opening shows up right where you expect it.
During the guided tutorial, hovering a card to read it could paint the card popover right over the narrator coach panel. The coach now stays on top, so the guidance is never hidden behind the card you are inspecting.
In the rare case a match failed to simulate, your profile Overview could keep showing stale numbers from before it. The Overview now refreshes correctly in that case, and a failed match is no longer pointlessly re-simulated when you open its replay.
In the collection grid, the multi-select checkboxes did not always wake up correctly when the page loaded. They hydrate reliably now, so selecting several cards at once behaves the way it should.
Fire is the aggression affinity, but its Fighters were arriving late and dying before they could land their opening blows, so the slow sustain teams simply out-lasted them. The fix is almost entirely speed, not raw damage: a faster Fighter acts sooner in the round and, because speed feeds the hit roll, connects more often too. A few glass bodies also get just enough Health to survive their first exchange. Same Fighters, back in the fight.
The cheapest fire sneaker was too slow and too fragile to ever land its strike. The extra Health and Speed let it act and survive long enough to matter.
A leap-striker that moves after the enemy front has already swung is a dead body. The extra Speed lets it strike first.
This Ironkin wall arrived last every round, so its team-shield landed after the alpha strike had already resolved. Now it acts in time to protect.
A trample body only pays off if it swings before the enemy front and survives the answer. It now does both.
A counter-punch tank that acts last eats the whole enemy round before it can punish anything. The extra Speed lets it hit back sooner. Its Mana is unchanged.
The snowball only starts if the first kill lands early and the body survives the reply, so this Fighter needed both the Health and the Speed.
A support tank that heals after the front has already fallen heals nothing. It now acts in time. It gains no new sustain, only the tempo to use what it has.
Already one of fire's fatter bodies, this bruiser did not need more Health, it needed to act sooner, so only its Speed moved.
Fire's flagship legendary was being out-paced by the very meta it exists to close out. The extra Speed puts it back in front.
Fire's anti-wall piercer was arriving late and dying on arrival, so its armor-punching never landed. More Health and Speed get it there.
This glass finisher's kill combo was locked behind Gold, so at Silver it was a body with no payoff. Its Killing-Blow now comes online a league earlier, so a Silver player drafts the finisher too.
Several affinity commanders were dead weight in the sustain meta, mostly because they handed out a generic Health buff nobody noticed. They now lean into what their affinity is for: speed, reach, and disruption.
Fire is the fast affinity, so its entry commander now scales the speed it is built around: the team-wide Speed buff goes from +1 to +2. It keeps its +1 Health, at the same Mana.
This commander was handing out a Health buff no one noticed. It drops that and grants the whole team Breach-Run instead, so its melee wing can strike from any position and reach the enemy back line where the sustain sits.
Its losing shape was never landing the first swing, and a Health buff does nothing about that. Its second team buff changes from +1 Health to +1 Speed. Same +1 Attack, same team Splash grant, but now the whole warband moves first.
This commander goes back to being a disruptor. It keeps its +1 Speed but trades the generic +1 Health for shaving 1 off every enemy ranged attacker, which is a live counter in the current meta in a way a Health buff was not.
A wave of under-drafted Fighters gets a reason to make the team. Light's paladins get a real swing, earth's control tanks get their tools a league earlier, and two of wind's bodies get something worth carrying.
A paladin with a 1-Attack swing is a passenger. Its Attack goes to 2, at the same Mana, so it actually chips at what it hits.
Same fix as its kin: the swing goes from 1 to 2 so the Fighter pulls its weight instead of standing there.
The vow-paladin's Attack goes from 3 to 4, so its front-line presence carries a real threat, not just a Reach poke.
This paladin's melee wing had no way past the enemy front to reach the sustain engine sitting behind it. It gains Breach-Run at Silver so it can strike from any position and end the grind instead of feeding it.
This Ironkin control tank's Shock was locked behind Gold, so at Silver it was a body with no lock. Shock now arrives a full league earlier.
The heaviest Ironkin chassis only got its kill-feeds-the-fight engine at its very top level, so almost no one ever saw it. Killstreak now comes online at Gold, which is where a heavy brawler earns its keep.
Wind's only real tank chassis was a threatless wall the enemy could hit for free. It gains Counterstrike at Silver, so trading blows into it now costs the attacker.
This Recon's damage-shrug did nothing against the magic-sustain teams farming it, and it only appeared at Champion. It trades Null-Shroud for Marrow-Rot, a compounding maximum-Health shred, and because the Recon strikes the back line, that shred lands on the sustain bodies where healing cannot undo it.
The other half of the patch reins in the silver magic-sustain teams at their two load-bearing pieces, without touching their maximum-level ceiling.
A never-missing caster whose Shock was online from the very first Bronze match, in the league where games end fastest. That lock now arrives at Gold, so lower-league bouts field a bare caster and the sustain shell loses its early control.
The hub of the silver control shell. Costing 1 more Mana does not touch any single game it plays, it makes the whole shell a tighter fit to build around your cap, which is exactly the point.
This is a tempo patch. The goal is to make more of the roster worth drafting and fewer games decided by who out-sustains whom. Keep sending us your replays, they are how we find the Fighters that are quietly winning or quietly dead.
