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!!