Day 5 Patch

Patch number five, and the biggest one yet. Two days of your reports went into
it and we've been fending off Cecilda's Assassins ever since, so the headline
is simple: the tavern stopped starving you. Decks recycle, fortresses buy
cards, every starter deck draws — and the game finally speaks up (with
subtitles) exactly when it should, and shuts up when it shouldn't.

Deck-out is dead (in the Tavern Gauntlet)

• Running out of cards no longer ends a gauntlet fight. When your deck empties, your discard pile reshuffles into a fresh deck at your next upkeep.
• The reshuffle is seeded — replays and shared seeds reproduce the exact same order.
• The deck and discard got a matching facelift: the deck is a physical stack of card backs with the count on top, the discard shows its top card face-up, draws fly to your hand on a spinning arc, and reshuffles play a card-spring flourish. Hover the discard for mini art thumbnails of everything in it.

Requisition: every fortress can buy a card

• Straight from the paper board game — all 11 fortresses gain Requisition: pay stored resource, draw a card. Your play step only, repeatable, and it never decks you out.
• Costs match the tabletop balance sheet: Demerzet 6 Energy, Etherium Spire 5 Energy, Bloodwater Bay 9 Gold, Golden Exchange 11 Gold, Bards 7 Songs, Nine of the Sacred 9 Divine Favor, Risen Kingdom 9 Souls, Sovereign 9 Blood.
• To feed it: Demerzet's storage cap rose 8 -> 10 and Etherium Spire's energy income 3/turn -> 4/turn.

Draw economy: fuel for the long game

• Built from reports of pure top-decking by turn 4. Infusion of Knowledge now keeps two of its three (draw 3, discard 1). Demerzet generates 5 energy per turn, Etherium Spire banks up to 8.
• Every starter deck now runs a real draw package: 2x Infusion of Knowledge (Technocrats), 2x Market Speculation (Merchant Coast), 2x Encore! (Bards).

Starter decks vs the Keeper

We ran overnight self-play benchmarks of every starter deck against the
gauntlet's bosses. Two decks were getting tabled; one was coasting.

• Merchant Coast (was winning 4% vs the Keeper): 2x Coastal Clipper and the Unfortunate Expenditure secret come in — an evasive clock plus an answer to the early rush. Henrik Giventide, Pay them off, and a Tit for Tat step out to the offer pool.
• Bards (was 8%, endless 30-turn grinds): Songspire Tower and 2x The Brown Note come in. The Keep deploys a Songspire Tower free at game start — the deck finally carries one — and Brown Note is its first real removal.
• Technocrats sat above every tier's win band on shield-doubled fortress burn: one Technotic Flare steps out for a second Drone Scout.

The game speaks when spoken to

• Subtitles for every character voice line — docked beside the speaker's fortress banner with their portrait, not plastered over your hand. Toggle them in the new Settings -> Accessibility tab.
• Tully talks less. Deck-out coaching is gone from the gauntlet (there is no deck-out anymore), along with the dead flavor around it.
• Respond windows with zero legal responses pass themselves — no more clicking Pass on an empty prompt. When you CAN respond, the castable cards pulse in your hand.
• Commander deploys are sorcery-speed: your own play step only, never flashed into a respond window.

A real pause menu

• Press Escape on the board (outside any action) to open settings as a pause menu — with a Concede option during a live match.
• Entering and leaving settings mid-fight is instant now; the fake loading screen on the way back is gone. The match suspends and resumes exactly where you left it.
• Settings reorganized into tabs. Privacy is its own first tab that says plainly whether telemetry is "Sending: ON" or "Sending: OFF" — and the consent toast no longer covers the cutscene Skip button.

Board honesty

• Every phase on the phase strip explains itself on hover — what happens, in engine order.
• Fortress tooltips state HP, shield, per-resource income, and storage caps; resource tooltips say the cap or "no cap" outright.
• Resource spend badges split upkeep from active spend, with a tooltip legend.
• Cards you can't play say why, right on the card. Short screens keep a slim stack list during responds.
• Forced discards read as mandatory and name the card forcing them.
• The boss celebration scene got the finale's ultrawide treatment — pillarboxed, not stretched.

As for Cecilda...

She's headlined every one of these announcements, and this weekend her Gambit
finally ran its three turns. The lady herself managed a swift retreat over the
harbor wall — cloak first, gold second, dignity somewhere in the bay. Her
assassins were dealt with the way the Coast deals with assassins: the Prized
Credenza in the corner has some handsome new trophies. She'll be passing the
cover-art spotlight to a new face for the next few patches. Knowing her,
she's already selling tickets to her own comeback.

Three major and 1 minor patch in 5 days, all of them built from your reports. If the demo is
treating you well (or not), we need to know! Back to the Tavern!!