What changed in Emoji Battle

• Skip is there for the whole round, so you can jump ahead any time.
• The end of game and story screens now fill to the bottom edge on every iPhone and iPad.

• Smoother battle animations. Hits and knockouts are easier to see.
• Chats feel more alive.
• Fixed the round number shown after a match ends.

• Story Season Two, "Round 2". Ten new chapters with Juno and Gus, Echo's mirror match and a best of five finale. It opens once you win the Season One finale.
• Replies between rounds. Characters answer your exact picks, and you can reply between rounds for small extras.
• Group battles in Messages play each of your battles back like a 2 player round, with Skip to Results.
• One team picker everywhere: your fighters first, type chips, sort, and search in your language.
• Press and hold a fighter, then slide up to open its Wiki entry.
• Search ignores case and accents and matches the start of words.
• iPhone Duo: unfolding mid battle keeps the latest bubbles in view.

• Story mode is now The Thread. Twelve chapters about a mystery stranger who texts everyone at 3:03 AM. Group chats with your friends, choices they remember, a new finale and an ending that leaves room for more. From chapter 8 on you battle with your own fighters.
• Bubble Color. Pick the color of your own messages in Settings, in the app and in Messages.
• Easter Eggs has a fresh look, and How to Play now lives in Settings.
• Rex's gym really is types off: raw power decides every clash.
• Seasonal events nod to the story.
• iPhone Duo: the cover screen puts controls in the side bar with a Messages style battle, and the open screen splits New Battle, Story and Level & Rewards across the fold.
• After a round, tap a fighter to open its Wiki entry.

1.7.0 to 1.7.3 all ship content v17, so matches play out exactly as they do in 1.4.0. Rex's gym is a story chapter rule, not a change to the ruleset.

• Story mode. A 10 chapter campaign told through chats: text with a cast of characters, battle with the fighters they lend you and keep the conversation going.
• Rewards. Win chapters to earn new fighters. Finish the campaign for bonus XP and the Midnight bubble theme.
• Seasonal events. Haunted Group Chat around Halloween, Snow Day over the winter holidays and Lantern Nights for the Lunar New Year, each with its own chapters, fighters and bubble theme, open on their dates.
• Every effect gets its own animation. Fire burns, ice freezes and shatters, lightning strikes, shields rise, poison bubbles and heals glow. Knockouts, clashes, combos and specials hit harder.
• Full effects in Messages. Battles played in an iMessage thread get the same animations, and the Animations, Reduce Motion and Dim Flashing Lights settings are respected.

Ships content v17, so matches play out exactly as they do in 1.4.0. The animation overhaul that was submitted as 1.5.0 reached the App Store in this release.

• Tap any fighter at the top of the battle to see everything that happened to it this turn. Big teams fold into a +N chip.
• iPhone Duo: a full arena on the inner screen, a hinge power up and team drag and drop.
• Every combo now has its own celebration and haptic.
• Hidden easter eggs to find in the app and in Messages.
• Now in 16 languages, and runs on iOS 17 and later.
• A rebalanced type chart and a cleaner end of game screen.

Ships content v17. The rebalance is the v16 and v17 rules below; the elements, the pentagram and the seven exceptions are unchanged.

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. This is 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, but 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.

A correctness pass with no new content. v15 initiative promised that whoever holds it acts first everywhere the two sides' effects are ordered, but four spots still ran in seat order, which over iMessage just means whoever started the match. At v16 they all follow the initiative:

• State traps (last one standing, outnumbered, silenced). Two lone Final Gambits no longer hand the round to side 0.
• On-defeat effects after a mutual knockout, which always ran side 1's first.
• Per-clash venom and survivor effects (Soul Siphon, Caltrops, Slow Burn, Wildcard, Reroll, Metamorphosis, Hatch), which always ran side 0's first.
• Land Mine sprung by a mutual knockout now takes its killer instead of the innocent fighter behind it.
• Initiative cue is announced when the order changes, not before every clash.
• "Wolf in Sheep's Clothing" (ordered 🐺🐑) is retired: forming it always formed "Wolf on the Flock" too, so both fired. 1,047 combos stay documented.

Matches negotiated at v15 or lower resolve exactly as before.

The owner's calls on the nineteen balance questions the v16 pass left open. Live with v16 in app version 1.4.0.

• Honest initiative. Only the front fighter's own strike-first ability counts, at round start and before each clash. A combo's claim counts only if the combo will fire: not suppressed by an enemy counterspell, and still formed after the opening abilities.
• Frozen fronts. Beating a frozen or disabled front pays the winner like any clash win: Lifesteal, on-win abilities and "scores a knockout" traps all fire.
• Element targeting. Extinguish, Fire Extinguisher, Chill Touch and Magnetize read a fighter's element type, so every fire-typed or metal-typed fighter counts. Extinguish spares its own fire-typed 🧑‍🚒.
• Plants are not animals. 25 flowers, trees and leaves lose the animal tag and gain plant, which affects Pack Leader, the natural-enemies food chain and animal buffs. Greenhouse, Wildgrowth and Sprout now buff plants.
• Tag-buff combos line up. 16 combos buffed a tag their own members lacked. Either the members now carry it (🦀 is an animal, 🔨 is metal, 🌾 is food) or the buff moved to one they do: Rock Star and Concert buff objects; Rock On, Headliner, Disco Fever, Master Chef, Farm to Table and Lab Partners buff people; Freight Run, Downtown Loft and Pit Crew buff vehicles and places.
• Eight new carriers. Abilities no fighter carried now each have one: 🦇 Lifesteal, 🎯 Mark, 🐡 Last Blast, 🥷 Hush, 🪩 Mirror Ward, 🦪 Encase, ⛽ Pump, 🤧 Infect.
• Silence traps spring on the silence. Feedback Loop and Counter-Ambush fire right after the effect that silenced them, not at the start of the next clash.
• No copies of entry abilities. Echo and Mimic skip entry abilities, which had already fired; Mimic falls back to its +2.
• Steals and swaps spend the removal cap. A blunted steal or swap costs the enemy it would have taken 3 power instead.
• Half-step power. Power runs from 0 to 11 in half steps. Every change is clamped and rounded to the nearest half, including Revive and Splitter halves and Gluttony's meal.
• Distinct names. The newer combo of each of 15 name-sharing pairs is renamed: Frog Hex, Harvest Moon, Love Is Love, Everything Is Fine, Taco Night, Teapot Gossip, Worm Catcher, Shell Reef, Red Flag, Lab Grown, Wasteland, Pit Stop, Log Off, Pirate's Loot and Bat Colony. The specials Knockout and Whalesong are now Out for the Match and Pod Song.
• Text that matches the rules. Lullaby lasts "for its next clash", Wildcard rolls "after each clash it survives", and Bodyguard "guards" rather than shields.

Matches negotiated at v16 or lower resolve exactly as before, and keep the old combo names in their battle log.