What changed in Emoji Battle

A combo detected at draft now re-checks its members the moment it fires. A fighter an enemy effect transformed or type-scrambled before the combo landed no longer counts toward it — the classic "polymorph counters combos" rule. Changes your own side makes (🪞 mirror copies, 🎰 jackpot) still count, and a member that already left the field still counts too, so demolition- and sinkhole-style combos keep firing over their own craters.

A content drop aimed at the catalogue's most overlooked emoji — clocks, zodiac signs, card suits, moon phases, trains, sports, professions, families, gestures, media buttons. ~110 new combos and 10 new specials landed, plus direct counters both ways:

• Emoji counters — specials built to answer a specific threat (a dragon-lance special vs. 🐉, a grounding special vs. electric, a new-moon special vs. light, and more).
• Combo counters — three new combo primitives: a counterspell that suppresses the enemy's combos for the round, a debuff that punishes combo-stacked drafts, and a shield-stripper for shield combos.

The biggest rules change since launch: the 15-type ring retired as the source of clash advantage. Every type is now a subtype of one of five elements — three subtypes each — and elements clash on a pentagram, where each element beats two and loses to two:

Same-element clashes are neutral by default and fall to power — except for seven named subtype exceptions that defy their own element:

No card was retyped and no combo or special changed — this is purely a clash-math overhaul. Online matches negotiated below v14 keep resolving on the old 15-type ring, bit-for-bit, so older opponents never see a rules change mid-match.

Two content drops developed in parallel, shipped as one version:

• Removal-combo overlap cap — removal combos staffed by separate fighters all remove in full; one that reuses a fighter an earlier removal combo already used is blunted to a flat power hit instead, so one cheap emoji can't anchor a whole removal barrage.
• Natural Enemies — 36 curated emoji pairs (🐱 corners 🐭, 🧄 clears 🧛) plus uniform tag-level food chains (person tames animal, animal eats food, food tempts person, …) are worth one extra winning pairing in a clash, bending close matchups without overriding the element chart.
• Initiative — a fighter with a strike-first ability, or a side whose combo seized initiative, now resolves ahead of the other side at every point effects are ordered. Below v15 it was always seat order.
• Duplicate-trigger fix — 34 combos that shared an identical member set with another combo (so both fired off one draft) are retired; the reported 🧜‍♀️+🎶 "Siren Song" / "Siren's Lure" pair is one of them. Below v15, both still fire exactly as they always did.
• Silence pre-pass — round start now resolves every silence on both sides before any other ability or combo, so a silence reliably counters what it's meant to counter.
• Knockouts — some abilities don't just remove a fighter, they ban that glyph from its owner's roster for the rest of the match.
• Traps — 16 new specials that arm quietly on entry and pay off once, on their own trigger event (last one standing, scoring a knockout, an ally falling, and more). Their blurb stays hidden in-battle until they spring — the wiki documents them in full.
• 12 secret combos — not documented anywhere until your account has seen each one play out.

Matches negotiated below v15 resolve every one of the above the old way, bit-for-bit — nothing already shipped ever moves.