Get ready for Into The Arcane by reading up on the newest TFT Mechanic - The Anomaly, as well as on Team-Up Augments and Opening Encounters!
The Anomaly
Charms are gone, but a new, fresh and exciting mechanic will be taking their place - The Anomaly. The Anomaly is a special event that occurs each game at exactly 4-6 which transforms a unit of your choice in one of exactly sixty ways. These changes can be more or less drastic - from simply but exponentially increasing a champion's health to gaining invisibility or no longer using Mana at all. Any single unit of yours, from a 1-cost Sniper to a 5-cost High Roller can be evolved.
Since the Anomaly occurs so late into the game there are a couple of things to keep in mind. Firstly, the Anomaly is a one-time event for no take backs. By this point into the game, you'll need to decide which unit of yours will be your carry, your main tank, or at least a mainstay in your comp. You can't change your mind and evolve a different champion at any other point.
Second, you can choose between evolving a lower cost unit (and thereby potentially levelling the playing field) or evolve 4 and 5-cost units, making them all the better. Of course, you'd need to get them by round 4-6, which can be somewhat unwieldy for a 5-cost, especially one you want. Rushing to a higher level, purchasing any high cost then centering the comp around them might be a good strategy!
Finally, you will initially only be offered one single Anomaly choice, and you have to use 1 gold to reroll for different options. Since there are sixty anomalies in the game to start, you may need to roll quite a bit to get exactly the Anomaly you desire. For this reason, make sure you've got gold in your piggy bank by the time 4-6 rolls up. Don't catch yourself rerolling down to 0 right before the Anomaly pops up!
List of Anomalies
New Augment Type - Team-Up Augments
Augments are being expanded on in Set 13. Not only is there now a pool of 300 Augments in the game (up from 270) but Riot has added a whole new category of Augments - "Team-Up Augments". When you pick up one of these new Augments and you field the teamed up units you will unlock a unique new Trait. These Augments give you a reason to play new and unusual comps, pairing champions that ordinarily don't synergize, like Jinx and Vi. The pairings are based on popular duos straight from the Arcane universe.
There are currently seven Team-Up augments but there is a chance for more to be added by the time PBE is through, and, as usual, the balancing may change as well before the set goes live.
Opening Encounters
As you may have read in our previous Upcoming TFT Quality of Life Changes article, Portals are going to be retired. Instead, during Set 13 (and likely onwards) the start of the game will feature an “Opening Encounter.” These are functionally very similar to Portals but without the voting round, and with far fewer options. Riot had noted that there was a wide gap between favourite and least favourite Portals, so they’ve cut the fat so to speak in the hopes that now any of the random 10 choices of Opening Encounter will be a welcome sight.
The ten Opening Encounters are listed below: