Patch v3.1.20 (18/07/2026)

Happy 1 Year Anniversary! 🎉

Duelyst: Blitz turns one — and we're celebrating with the two biggest features the game has ever shipped, landing together: a full Roguelike run mode, and a brand-new seasonal Battle Pass. On top of that, winning finally pays — every win drops gold, daily streaks build, jackpots exist — plus real notifications, cleaner card text, and major connectivity fixes.

ANNIVERSARY GIVEAWAY 🎁

To celebrate the anniversary we're running a 20 × 1000 Gold giveaway on the Duelyst: Blitz Discord — twenty winners, 1000 Gold each. Join in, and stay for the discussion and tournaments.

🗺️ The Roguelike, Reforged

Pick a General and journey through nine floors of a branching map — battles, elites, a final boss, merchants, treasures, and Mystery events. Your General's health carries between fights, and a single defeat ends the run. Every choice compounds.

1. The Map & the Run — nine floors, chosen a node at a time. Damage follows you from fight to fight; there is no reload, one death ends the run.
2. Archetypes — start on a path that grants a starting relic and shapes the cards you're offered: Vanguard (a raging 5/6 Golem at your side), Bulwark (two Bastions), Arcanist (+1 mana), or Warband (a loyal Jaxi).
3. Curve-aware starting decks — every run begins with a compact 10-card deck built to actually curve out, and the merchant lets you add, upgrade, swap, or remove exactly the card you pick — no more random deletions.
4. Relics that stack into builds — including General-forging ones: Warblade and Twin Fang artifacts, Blood Fury (+2 Attack every battle), Ironhide (+5 max Health every battle).
5. Amplifier Relics (new) — War Banner gives every relic minion +2/+2, and Overgrowth pumps all your minions an extra +1/+1 on top of any Empower bonuses. Weak alone, devastating in the right build.
6. Battlefields (new) — every fight rolls a mana-spring layout, revealed before you commit: Mana Surge (two extra springs), Central Nexus, Frontline, or Barren Waste (a single precious spring).
7. One Currency — run gold is your payout now. Earn it by winning fights, spend it at merchants, bank what's left when you leave — and clearing all nine floors adds a 150 gold completion bonus.
8. Pacing & Healing — the map's rhythm is up to RNG, but you can take at most two non-combat floors in a row before a fight finds you. And you now only heal after winning a battle — the safe path won't patch you up.
9. Ascension — clearing a run unlocks the next of five Ascension levels: enemies fight like they're a floor deeper, healing gets scarcer, and prize gold grows +15% per level.
10. Boss Variety — a far wider reinforcement pool, bosses wielding artifacts, and signature gimmicks (Grow / Frenzy / Forcefield / Blast / Ranged), tuned to be hard-but-fair.

BUILD AROUND IT

The relic pool is designed to combo. A few proven directions:

• The Warlord — Warblade + Twin Fang + Blood Fury + Ironhide → a General that ends games personally.
• The Swarm — Stone Guardian + Iron Wall + Blood Ritual + War Banner → a wall of buffed bodies from turn one.
• The Tempo — Arcane Battery + Mana Font → a huge mana lead, absurd on a Mana Surge battlefield.
• The Snowball — Greedy Pouch + Vampiric Idol → more gold per win, more healing per fight, deeper every run.

Quality of life across the whole mode: always-visible run-modifier chips, event result banners (no more silent rewards), accurate relic descriptions (Iron Wall really does say two Bastions now), a persistent best-run stat, a confirmation before abandoning a run, and the shop's Empower now states its full price up front: +1 Attack for your minions, at the cost of −1 max mana. One rule to respect: leaving a battle before it finishes forfeits the run — you keep your banked gold, but you don't get to retry a fight by fleeing it.

🏆 The Battle Pass (new)

An entirely new seasonal progression track. Every month is a fresh season, every game moves you forward, and every tier pays out.

1. Every game counts. Finish any scored match and earn Pass XP — 250 for a win, 100 for a loss, scaled by game length so a real match pays full and an instant concede pays a sliver. No mode grinding required: just play.
2. 30 tiers per season, 1,000 XP each, with a fresh season every 30 days.
3. The Free Track is for everyone: gold at most tiers, Spirit every third, and a Spirit Orb every tenth tier — just for playing.
4. The Premium Track (750 diamonds) doesn't replace the Free Track — you claim both rewards at every tier. It layers on bigger gold, more Spirit, an extra orb every fifth tier, and a tier-30 finale of 250 diamonds + 2 Spirit Orbs. Claim it all and you get back roughly double what you paid.
5. You'll never miss a reward — a badge lights up in the menu whenever something is waiting to be claimed.

💰 Winning Pays Now

The reward system got a full overhaul — playing well (and playing daily) finally shows up in your gold count:

1. Every win drops gold. Each scored win rolls a bonus that starts at 1 gold minimum and curves up — most wins pay small, some pay surprisingly well.
2. Jackpots are real. Every win has a rare chance to hit the jackpot: 100–250 gold in one shot.
3. Daily win streaks. Your first win each day pays 15 gold, +5 for every consecutive day you keep the streak alive, up to 8 days — a 50-gold first win at full streak. Miss a day, and the streak resets.
4. The free card of the day can now be any rarity. It's usually a common — but a rare, an epic, or even a legendary might be waiting for you.

✦ Card & Keyword Changes

"Summon Surge" is retired as a keyword. Those cards now read plainly — "Whenever you summon a minion, …" — same effect, no jargon.

Balance pass:

Card	Before	After
Portal Guardian	1/6	1/5
Khanuum-ka	3/3	2/4
Swarmking Scarab	5/7	2/5

Swarmking's Scarabytes also scuttle about 1.6× faster, so swarm turns don't drag.

🔔 Notifications

1. Match-found alerts. Queue up, switch apps, and your phone tells you the moment a ranked match is ready — no more babysitting the search screen.
2. A live "Searching for a ranked match…" notification sits in your notification bar while you queue in the background.

◉ Connectivity & Performance

1. Reconnects actually reconnect now. Drop mid-match — an idle timeout, your phone waking up, a network blip — and the game forces a full state re-sync on return. No more dead board, cards, or mulligan that needed an app restart.
2. Smooth highlights at 30 FPS. Hovering a unit to see its reachable tiles no longer flickers or lights up unevenly on the 30 FPS setting.
3. Matchmaking that stays put. The "Searching" banner survives menu navigation, and tougher server timeouts stop won games from being dropped.
4. Future updates install themselves. From this version on, most patches download quietly in the background and apply on the next launch — no store round-trip.

🛠 Small but Nice

1. Chat got civilized: timestamps finally render, and messages are capped at 500 characters.
2. Mana Forger's challenge hint no longer pretends to know what it's doing.

Summary

A new game mode and a new progression system in one patch — built to be replayed, season after season. Dive into the roguelike, climb the pass, find a broken combo, and let us know what feels too strong (or too cruel) on the Duelyst: Blitz Discord.

And happy anniversary once more — don't forget the 20 × 1000 Gold giveaway running on Discord. See you on the board!