In just seven days, the much-awaited presale of Conclave Arcana's mini-set, Escalation, will finally take place, which will bring us a new batch of cards, along with a new set of abilities that will change the game's meta. As we head close to the release date, many of the cards are revealed to us, along with some of the must-have cards, as in one look alone, looking at their stats and abilities, we can see how their absence and presence in your team can change the result of the battle. At the same time, playing around with those new abilities seems to be a lot of fun.
A few days ago, I wrote a post about some of the currently known abilities that come with Escalation, and now, this will be the second half of that post.
New Abilities from Escalation
Supposed to be, Escalation was meant to come in December 2025, but maybe because of the many new stuff that the team has been added to the game, its release was moved to February 10th, 2026, and I think it's for the best because they were able iron out the mechanics of the set, like with the adjusted Conflicts and how it will be distributed, and it will also be good for everyone that specifically bought Rebellion, because their stay in modern ranked has been extended. That said, the team has not fully left us in the dark, because before they left for the winter holiday, they showed us the icons, of the upcoming Escalation abilities, albeit their names and descriptions remain a secret. But with that, we have concluded that at least 9 new abilities are coming into the game. But if we combined the abilities that I will list in this post and the abilities listed in my previous one, the total was only 8, so we are 1 ability short. For some reason, none of the revealed cards or in the original Mini-set post says anything about the last ability, which we can only guess to be due to the ability either in the conflict Archons or scrapped by the team.
With that said, here are the second half of the set's new abilities.
Decoy is a new Escalation ability, which draws attacks from enemy units with Snipe, Apex Strike, and Opportunity. As it stands, this ability was quite similar to Taunt. But Taunt forces all able cards to attack a certain card, and will likely be ignored by Apex Strike. Decoy, on the other hand, only forces cards with certain abilities to target the card with this ability.
Some questions, though, regarding this ability are why it does not include Sneak, since it was also like part of the Opportunity focus when we still had different focuses for claiming rewards. I was also wondering how this ability will behave in case a unit has both Sneak and Apex Strike.
Reprisal, on the other hand, was an ability that would give an enemy unit the Taunt ability if it inflicted more than 5 damage in a single round. At the same time, if the unit was Camouflaged, the card will be revealed instead.
By the abilities definition, any attacks by the enemy that are more than 5 will cause them to gain Taunt, so it could mean that a single attack, or it could be damage that is inflicted due to an ability, such as Double Strike, Armored Strike, Execute, Trample and Retaliate. But I wonder if damage from Blast also counts to it.
Among the new abilities, Flame Fed is the ability that I am most excited about. During Burning, instead of losing health, the card that has this ability will gain +1 health at the beginning of each round.
This ability will absolutely change how we play when using cards with Incendiary debilitation, as well as when playing under Global Warming modifier. On the other hand, once the card with this ability has got the Burning debilitation, you do not want the debilitation to be removed by Cleanse and Cleanse Rearguard.
One question that I have on this ability is how it will behave when it gets an Affliction, since it prevents the card from healing. Would Flame Fed still heal the card or not, and if not, would it now lose health due to the Burning debilitation?
Before I forgot, the ability icon from Flame Fed was changed, and is now this flame icon with a hearth and an up arrow inside, which, if I were to choose, I prefer the first icon as it is more in line with the other ability icon designs.
Closing
And those were the last three new abilities for Escalation. Overall, I think that the new abilities are interesting and can be really fun to use.
Anyway, if you were wondering what the missing 9th ability, I will put the image below. It says ability_e on it's name, but I could only wonder what that is.
Thank you, and see you on the next post!
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