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It's been a while since HD received some new cards. Over the past couple weeks i've been working on a set of 48 cards. The first 8 of these will be added alongside a new gamemode.
The primary purpose of this entire set is to make sure that more dual-color combos are viable. Some combos already have plenty of cards between them, but others (like CA/TM) were lacking. As such, all 48 cards are going to be dual-color cards, and each subset of 8 cards focusses on a single theme. The first set of 8 cards are going to be variations of the existing 'engineer' style ships. These dual color cruiser-sized ships will have no minor race cost, but they'll generate minor race energy each turn, and have an acti ability to generate 2 more minor race (for a cost of 2 major race energy).

Here are the images of these 8 cards :

The new gamemode will initially be the only place where these new cards can be obtained. With nearly 500 cards in the game, the odds of getting one of these new cards is relatively low, so instead of adding these cards to the regular droppools right away, for a while they'll have 100% droprate through this new game mode.
The plan is that the 48 new cards will be added in small sets whenever a subset is ready, but still allowing enough time for players to collect the previous set. Whenever a new set of cards is added this way, the previous set will be added to the regular pools, which also means they can show up in generated decks and can be chosen as rewards through exploration.

The Blueprint gamemode was added in a recent HD3 update. It's an event-only gamemode that's centered around two new passives :
Blueprint X : a card with this passive basically creates a copy of itself when played, and each time this happens the 'X' counter goes down by 1. The card itself remains in hand. When X reaches zero, no more copies are created. For ships and structures with this passive, the created copy that enters play is a spawn, so it won't go to scrap or deck and simply dissapears when removed from play. Actions don't exist on the board, so the action's effect is simply applied to the board or to the action's target.
Protected : a card with this passive can't be removed from owner's hand by an ability that's owned by an opponent. This means that when your opponent plays a discard action that removes a random card from your hand, and the randomly chosen card has this passive, that it won't be removed at all.

Opponents in the Blueprint gamemode only have 8 cards in their deck, but each card has the 'Blueprint 9' and 'Protected' passives. The Protected passive wasn't present from the start, but during testing it became clear that discards were very powerful against an opponent in the blueprint game mode.

Similar to Ambush, a player's first victory against a Blueprint opponent will result in a guaranteed card reward. One new Blueprint game will be created each day and will remain active for 24 hours. The shedule for Ambush games was altered however : instead of having one regular Ambush game every 12 hours (and lasting 24 hours), there's now only one Ambush game every 24 hours. The removed Ambush game is essentially replaced by a Blueprint game.