Monthly Cup Results

Last Saturday our second Monthly Cup concluded, and we've crowned a new champion! The Monthly Cup is our official $3300 tournament that comes around at the end of every ladder season.

If you missed the live stream and want to see some of the matches, make sure to head over to this forum thread to watch the highlights.

The next qualifying season for the Monthly Cup is already underway. Make sure to track it at https://esports.faeria.com/ and remember to Vote for your Favorite player!

Free-to-play announcement

If you're reading this and are a new player, welcome!

Our Free-to-play announcement and celebration has brought in quite a few new faces. If you're looking for some help or want to make some new friends, the best place for that is by engaging with us in our official Discord channel, which you can also find by clicking the button in the lower left of your friends list in-game. If you're more inclined to read some articles or find some strategy guides to digest, try heading to Playfaeria.com. Lastly, don't forget to visit our Official Boards which you can access using your existing Faeria account. There's no shortage of helpful resources to get you started.

Go ahead, do a little exploring.

First-move advantage

First-move advantage, or "first turn advantage", is the inherent edge the first player to act receives in most turn-based strategy or card games. Chess, for example, has a generally accepted advantage of about 54% given to the White player. We've taken a lot of steps to mitigate this factor as much as reasonably possible, the most recent of which was adding a bonus of 2 Faeria to the Explore card earlier this year. The effects of this change impressed even us, as we observed win ratios hover comfortably close to 50% across the board.

However, a lot of you have been asking for a more detailed breakdown of these numbers, and we are more than happy to provide. Something interesting you'll notice is that as the Elo of the player rises, the advantage slightly increases.

Click the image above to open a more detailed infographic on exactly where we stand right now on first-move advantage.

Upgrading to the Early Access bundle

A common question we've been getting is how to upgrade your free account into one with the Early Access bundle that has the exclusive cosmetics and booster packs. While there's currently no easy way to do this without a coupon from outside of Steam, we are planning on making some upgrades to our in-game store that should arrive by version 0.8 on August 24th.

You'll be able to easily purchase this upgrade in-game with a click of a button, if that's something you're into. No pressure.

Solo Content Preview

As you see above, Hoaka will be part of the heavy amount of Solo content bundled into our August 24th update. He's pretty clever - or at least he thinks he is.

The new Solo experience will be centered around Epic quests and challenges like this one, which will introduce you to new characters and tell you a little more about some of the major players in the Faeria universe. After the update, there should be over 20 hours of solo content, including the introduction of 30 tricky puzzles for you to solve.

Make no mistake: All Solo content in the next update will be completely free and require no extra purchase.

Pretty cool, no?

• Gary(@Atmaz)