22 July 2026

The first big drop: a new attack-slow upgrade, a smarter drafting system, a handful of unit-defining upgrades, and a pile of balance work.

13 units can now roll Concussive Shells: their attacks slow the target by 70% for about 2 seconds.
On splash / cleave / bounce / cone attackers, the slow hits EVERY target caught in the swing — Archon (splash), Colossus (beam line), Mutalisk (bounce), Hellion and Firebat (flame cone), Marauder, Void Ray, and more.
Hellbats keep it after transforming from a Hellion.
Massive units shrug it off.

Goliath — Ares-Class Weapons System: +3.5 anti-air range, +1.5 ground range.
Phoenix — Anion Pulse-Crystals: +2.5 weapon range (and the beam turns purple).
Liberator — Smart Servos: +50% move speed AND much faster transform to and from Defender Mode (~3.5s to ~1.4s).
Battlecruiser can now roll Yamato Cannon.
Cloak is now a rollable upgrade: the Wraith no longer starts cloaked (and is cheaper at 100/100); DuskWing cloak is a roll now too.
Chitinous Plating (Ultralisk, +2 armor) is no longer a free start — it is a roll.

You can no longer roll the same upgrade across too many of your units. This was to increase upgrade variety in each game.
Most upgrades cap at 2 units; some cap at 1 — Corrosive Bile, Yamato, Tactical Jump, Concussive Shells and every caster spell at 1.
The roller is also smarter about tight units — small-pool units (Archon, Void Ray, Sentry) will not get stranded with a blank slot.

Some units can now roll either a combat upgrade or a caster spell.
Pure casters (Sentry, Medic, Infestor, High Templar, Raven, Viper) only roll caster spells.
Fighter-casters — the Queen, Wraith, Phoenix, Corsair, and Ghost — pull from both pools: a Wraith might roll cloak, Guardian Shield, or Blink; a Queen might roll Corrosive Bile, Force Field, or Blink.

Queen added to Barracks slot 2 as a fighter-caster (keeps Transfusion; other Zerg-only abilities removed from its card).
Marine: cost raised to 50/25, and now starts with Combat Shield. At its old price the Marine was efficient enough to flatten the whole mode — instead of reacting to the hand you are dealt, the game collapsed into "mass Marines plus a couple of support units". Pricing it up restores the react-to-your-draft core that makes Wildcard Arena what it is.
Hydralisk: 100/50, now starts with Grooved Spines.
Archon: re-priced to 225/150.
Corrosive Bile pool narrowed — pulled off units where it was too cheap, too expensive, or useless.
Missile Pods reworked into a low-tier anti-air burst: flat 60 damage to all air (no more Light bonus), removed from the high-tier casters.
Barracks slot 2 retuned: Marine builds a touch faster (17s to 15s).

Build Auto Turret cast range increased (2 to 5) — actually placeable now when a ground unit rolls it.
Blink on a burrowed Lurker or sieged Siege Tank now blinks first, then auto-unburrows / unsieges at the destination. Burrowed blinking Lurkers were too hard for the opponent to keep track of.
The Stim visual flash now fires for any unit that rolled Stimpack.
Caster ability hotkeys deconflicted. No more having to click on an ability because an ability granted by an upgrade had the same hotkey.
Hotkey cleanup across production buildings — add-on builds moved to X, various train keys deconflicted.

Fixed D8 Charge (cluster bomb) not reaching Thor / War Hound (tag bug).
Fixed the range indicator (the ring on the ground) not growing when a Tempest or sieged Siege Tank researches its range upgrade.