Patch notes

Dispatches from the trenches

Every new card, hero, balance change and fix. Newest at the top, with the reasoning behind each balance call written in.

v0.10.1 July 3, 2026 Latest

The Row Holds

A real Seeker and a real iPhone found what our test frames missed. Board rows now hold their minions on every phone, and tapping any card on the board reads it.

Features

  • Tap to read, everywhere. A plain tap on any board minion, yours or theirs, opens its full card. Long-press still works; targeting taps still target.
  • The wall answers back. Tapping the enemy hero while a Firewall stands flashes the wall and names the rule instead of ignoring you.

Bug Fixes

  • Enemy minions no longer overflow their board row into the opponent's rail on phone screens.
    From the forgeThe resting hand was quietly eating the board rows' height at short and mid frames, so a 78-pixel card was living in a 52-pixel row. Rows now hold their cards at every real phone size. Verified on actual Seeker hardware.
  • Hero intro lines on the choose-your-hero screen read in full on taller phones instead of cutting mid-sentence.
v0.10.0 July 3, 2026

Read the Trenches

The game learns to explain itself. A deck viewer joins the menu, every trigger says when it fires, the enemy's spells show their text as they resolve, and the tutorial stops contradicting its own lesson.

Features

  • Deck viewer. A new Decks screen off the main menu: browse each hero's 30 by mana curve or the whole 37-card pool, tap any row for full art, rules, and flavor.
  • Hero powers explain themselves. Hover or hold the protocol button to read what it does, cost and all, even before you can afford it.
  • Enemy plays are readable. The opponent's cast reveal now shows the card's rules text and holds a beat longer.
  • Rug announces itself. A bone-gold RUG floater fires at the moment of death, and every trigger chip now carries its timing: Deploy on play, Rug on death.
  • The tutorial teaches honestly. When it says Trencher can attack right now, it now lets you do exactly that. Twenty steps, same lethal finish, and the coach card stays clear of whatever it points at on every screen size.
  • Every hero owns a genesis card. Firedancer, Run the Validators, Top Signal, and Rootkit now wear the top gild; Wen Moon trades iron for gold.
    From the forgeRarity is presentation, not power. The frames moved so each hero has one showpiece; no stats changed.
  • The world got a lore page and a patch-notes page on the site, and the menu holds its frame rate on weaker phones by easing its own effects.

Bug Fixes

  • AoE volleys no longer stack one damage burst per target into a single clipped slam.
    From the forgeFour simultaneous hits summed past full scale, which is why board wipes sounded like a dropped drum kit. One volley, one crack, and a limiter on the bus.
  • Impact sounds softened across the family: rounder attack, fuller damage, death keeps its weight.
  • The draw animation swings about a third less. It still reads as a draw, it just stops trying to be a ride.
  • Fatigue no longer double-fires its sound and flash with the damage it deals.
  • The mulligan clicks: replace and confirm now sound and buzz like every other button, and the opening hand deals in instead of appearing.
  • Opponent turns render roughly twice as fast on slow devices, and the lowest effects tier sheds the heaviest animation work automatically.
  • iOS Safari landscape stops crowding the bottom rail: your hero, HP, and End Turn clear the home indicator at every real browser height.
  • A trial fix for the disappearing-card-text report on some desktop GPUs. If your rules text ever vanished mid-hover, tell us if it still does.

Known Issues

  • The desktop text-drop fix is a trial. It is provably harmless on healthy GPUs and needs the affected hardware to confirm the cure.
  • At the very shortest phone frames, a raised card can tuck partly behind the tutorial coach while you read it. It stays playable.
v0.9.3 July 3, 2026

The Brainrot Tribe

Three new bodies wander into the trenches, the set reaches 37 cards, and the balance spread pulls in tighter than it has ever been.

Features

  • The teaser trailer on the site now carries its finished orchestral score. The video stream is byte-identical otherwise.

New Cards

  • Zzz Zzz Zanzara — 2-cost 2/2 with Lifesteal. The tribe's cheap blood-for-life trade.
  • Tikka Tikka Tarantella — 3-cost 2/3. Deploy: give your other minions +1 Attack for the turn.
  • Blocko Blocko Giraffone — 4-cost 4/5. The set's first honest 4-cost body, and a plain one.

Balance

  • First-player win rate 60.5% → 58.2% across 500 games per pairing.
    From the forgeThe set had no clean 4-cost body, so the player behind on tempo had nothing to spend a catch-up turn on. Giraffone fills that row, and the coin's edge drops again.
  • Four-hero spread: Toly 47.3% / Mert 48.5% / Ansem 51.9% / Ghost 52.3%. The tightest band yet.

Bug Fixes

  • iPhone landscape: reclaimed the bottom home-bar inset and added a sub-320px tier so the smallest phones stop clipping the board.
  • Hero-select respects the side safe-areas on notched devices.

Known Issues

  • The player on the coin still wins above the ideal 50%. A second-player Gas-Rebate buff is being dialled in to close the rest of the gap.
  • Ranked PvP is not live yet. Every match today is against the AI. Real duels are the next headline.
  • No deckbuilder yet. Each hero plays a fixed 30-card deck for now.
v0.9.2 July 3, 2026

Pocket Reality

A pass built for the phone in your hand, not the 844×390 ideal. The board now fits the height the URL bar actually leaves you, the whole match loop works from a keyboard, and a struggling device eases off on its own.

Features

  • Reality frame: the board now measures the visible viewport, not the browser's optimistic full height. A dedicated tier keeps the hand legible and the hero gems un-clipped once a phone drops to ~330px tall.
  • In-match pause menu: the top-bar Menu now opens Resume / Settings / Concede / Main Menu. Audio, haptics, effects and reduce-motion are all adjustable over the board, and no single tap can wipe a live game.
  • Full keyboard play: Tab between zones, Enter or Space to play and attack, arrows to move within a zone, Escape to back out. The whole loop is now operable without a pointer (WCAG 2.1.1).
  • Install coaching: after your first win on a phone, the menu offers the right install path — a one-tap Install on Android, an Add-to-Home-Screen card on iPhone.
  • Fatigue telegraph: the deck pile now visibly thins toward empty, and running out of cards floats a labelled FATIGUE hit so escalating Life loss reads as a rule, not a bug.
  • Smoothness watchdog: if the frame-rate holds low for a few seconds, the effects tier eases down one step on its own, with a single quiet note explaining why. It never ratchets back up mid-match.

Bug Fixes

  • Touch floors: the match top-bar, game-over buttons and wallet pill are all at least 44px now.
  • The resting hand fan no longer swallows taps meant for the board minion beneath it.
  • Attack targeting reads as a designed forged-ember ring instead of a raw debug outline, and it wins over the rare-card foil.
  • The rotate-to-landscape notice now also covers the shared match deep link.
  • In-app reduce-motion actually reduces motion now.
  • Removed dead shell chrome — the disabled "Open Pack" is gone, replaced by a live "Get a Wallet".
v0.9.1 July 3, 2026

Boot Camp

Two ways in for a new player: a real opening-hand mulligan, and a guided first match that is paced instead of a wall of text.

Features

  • The Mulligan: your opening hand now fans out large before turn one. Tap the cards you want gone, then commit the whole swap at once. Replaced cards are set aside before the redraw, so a card you toss can't bounce straight back — the Hearthstone rule.
  • Guided first match: the on-rails tutorial now breathes. Steps cross-fade, the opponent lingers after its move so you aren't outrun, a two-tap skip guards against a mis-tap, and it resumes at the right step if you close the tab mid-lesson.

Balance

  • First-player win rate 61.3% → 60.5%.
    From the forgeThe player on the coin was winning too often. A mulligan lets the one on the draw fix a stuck curve, and that alone shaves a point off the coin's edge.

Bug Fixes

  • The tutorial coach card never covers the thing it is pointing at now.
  • Leaving the tutorial on purpose clears the saved step. Only a crash or reload resumes it.
v0.9.0 July 2, 2026

The Ghost Update

A fourth hero enters the trenches — Ghost, who doesn't build a board so much as take yours apart. Two new neutrals join the shared pool alongside him.

Features

  • Ghost, the fourth hero. Hero power Nerf: permanently cut an enemy minion's Attack. A disruption protocol, not a race.

New Cards

  • Ghost's four-card kit: Kill -9, Rootkit, Sandbox and Stack Trace — a disruption package that shrinks Attack, walls up, and picks off the small bodies.
  • Jotchua — 1-cost 1/1. Rug: draw a card.
  • Unstable Coin — 2-cost 1/1. Deploy: gain +2 Attack, +2 Health, or both, at random.

Balance

  • Rootkit 4/6 → 4/5.
    From the forgeA 4/6 Shielded body that also declawed the whole enemy board was doing two jobs for one card. The wall stays, the grip loosens, and Ghost settles from 60% toward the pack.
  • Stack Trace 2-cost deal 1 → 3-cost deal 3.
    From the forgeAt 2 cost it was just a pricier version of the 1-cost neutral. Three damage buys the 3-health breakpoint that the cheap removal can't reach, and gives Ghost's curve its own shape.
  • Four-hero band held at ~47–54% per hero, 500 games per pairing.

Bug Fixes

  • Hero-select recomposed so four heroes fit the frame cleanly.
  • The hand waits for its art to be ready before it deals in, and board minions gained a tap-to-inspect panel.
v0.8.0 July 2, 2026

Forged in the Trenches

Where this log begins. The offline core, polished end to end: the full illustrated set, the reskin into The Trenches, an AI that plays to win, and the first public face of the game.

Features

  • The Trenches reskin: real, current Solana-ecosystem meme names and flavor on the cards and heroes, plain rules vocabulary underneath.
  • AAA visual pass and premium card presentation: set-stone cost and stat gems, a beveled art window, an escalating rarity gild, holo-foil on the rares.
  • A cinematic Trench Vista main menu, rendered hero portraits, and a GPU particle overlay for embers and win fountains.
  • Connect-only wallet plumbing (wallet discovery and connect only — no signing, no transactions), behind a strict content-security policy.
  • The public face: the solbound.gg marketing site, a full card compendium, and a teaser trailer.

New Cards

  • A fully illustrated 28-card set plus two tokens, in the Obsidian & Solar art direction. One clear subject per card, no stock filler.
  • Three heroes to start: Toly, Mert and Ansem, each with a signature hero power.

Bug Fixes

  • Match-UI correctness pass: real opponent names in the log, working targeting-cancel affordances, animation de-duplication, and a closed double-click race.
Who builds this

Made in the trenches

Solbound is built by a small independent crew who play these games and got tired of warm-body opponents and filler art. No publisher steering the ship, no roadmap handed down from above.

Just a Solana card game we wanted to exist, shipped one honest update at a time. Everything you play was made by hand: the rules engine, the AI that reads the board, and every painted card.

The build happens in the open. Patch notes land here first, and the day-to-day runs on X.

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