Update 0.26 just landed, and it’s a big one; a new game mode, a full national team drop, and one of the busiest balance patches we’ve seen so far. I’ve gone through every change below, along with what I think it actually means for deck building and the current meta, rather than just repeating the patch notes back at you.
Friendly Match: finally a way to test decks without the stakes
The headline non-card feature is Friendly Match: private, invite-only games against a friend that don’t touch your ranked progress or league standing. You create or join a lobby and play as normal, but nothing is on the line.
This has been one of the more requested features in the community, and for good reason. Before 0.26, the only way to test a new deck idea was to queue into ranked and hope you didn’t get farmed by a meta deck while you were still figuring out your curve. Now you can actually workshop a formation, try out a wildcard swap, or test one of the new Greek cards against a friend’s counter-deck without burning trophies if it goes badly.
My advice: use it. If you build something in our Deck Builder that you’re not sure about, get a friend into a Friendly Match before you take it into Ranked. It’s the single fastest way to find out whether a synergy actually works in practice rather than just on paper.
The Greece National Team arrives
Greece is the latest national team to join the roster, and it’s a big one; 18 new players, all built around abilities that lean into the “underdog” identity Greek football is known for: disruption, resilience when behind, and punishing opponents for overcommitting.
A few of these stand out as genuinely build-around cards rather than just roster filler.
Christos Tzolis (5 Cost / 4 Power, FW) drops the cost of every card in your deck by 1 the moment he’s played. This is the kind of On Appear effect that rewrites your whole curve in one turn — play him early and your whole hand gets cheaper for the rest of the match. Expect this to become a staple in fast, low-curve decks almost immediately.
Giannis Konstantelias (6 Cost / 8 Power, MF) is a comeback card — he gains +5 Power if you’re losing when he’s played, turning into an 8-cost, 13-power monster at the right moment. He’s dead weight if you’re already ahead, so he rewards patient, reactive deck styles rather than aggressive ones.
Charalampos Kostoulas (6 Cost / 7 Power, FW) gets cheaper for every card you played the previous turn, which makes him a natural finisher for decks that dump their hand early and then drop a big Forward once the discount stacks up.
Konstantinos Tsimikas (5 Cost / 4 Power, DF) is a zone-support piece — sit him in the left zone and every card you play elsewhere gets +1 Power. Quietly one of the strongest cards in the set for wide, multi-zone decks rather than ones stacked into a single lane.
Odysseas Vlachodimos (4 Cost / 1 Power, GK) is a bit of a gamble — his Power becomes equal to whatever Defender you last played. Pair him with a high-power late DF and he’s excellent value; play him too early and he’s a 4-cost card with 1 Power sitting on the pitch. This one needs sequencing to work, so I wouldn’t build around him until you’ve tested the order in a Friendly Match first.
The rest of the new Greek roster:
A couple of quick notes on the rest of the set: Zafeiris copying your opponent’s last played card straight to your hand is a genuinely strong tempo swing against decks that lead with their best card, and Ntoi rewarding you with 2 cards when discarded means he’s a natural fit for any deck already running discard synergies rather than a card you’d play for his stats alone.
Balance changes: the winners and losers of 0.26
This is the biggest balance pass we’ve had in a while. 15 cards touched, and it’s not subtle. Here’s how I’d sort it into winners and losers, and what it means for the current meta.
Buffed
Skov Olsen got the biggest rework in the patch — dropping from 3 Cost to just 1 Cost while keeping his 5 Power, plus a new ability that changes his cost every month. At 1 Cost for 5 Power he’s an efficiency outlier even before the monthly variance kicks in, and I’d expect him to show up in curve-out decks almost immediately.
Ashour picked up a brand-new Active ability, gaining +1 Power for every Egyptian card you have in play. This single-handedly makes an Egypt-tagged deck a real archetype for the first time — worth watching if Birch keeps expanding that nationality’s card pool.
Davinson Sánchez dropped from 2 Cost to 1 Cost for the same 2 Power — a straightforward efficiency buff that makes him a much easier include in low-curve Defender lines.
Harry Kane (+2 Power), Rúben Dias (+2 Power), Nicolò Barella (+2 Power), Lautaro Martínez (+2 Power), Bernardo Silva (+1 Power), Bruno Fernandes (+1 Power), and Daniel Muñoz (+1 Power, plus a Rating bump to 82) all got straight power buffs. Barella and Lautaro stand out the most here — a jump from 5 to 7 Power and 3 to 5 Power respectively is a big enough swing to push both back into high-cost slot conversations if they weren’t already there.
Nuno Mendes didn’t change on the pitch, but his Rating moved up to 86 — worth noting if you’re chasing Rating-gated rewards or collection milestones.
Nerfed or reworked
Trossard lost a Power (6 → 5) and his ability changed entirely — he now moves once and replaces his zone with a new one when he does, rather than his old effect. This is a rework more than a straight nerf, and it actually opens up some interesting zone-manipulation lines, but it’s a real loss of raw stats if you were running him purely as a body.
James Rodríguez (9 → 8 Power), Scott McTominay (5 → 4 Power), and Watanabe (3 → 2 Power) all took straight power cuts. None of these are devastating on their own, but McTominay in particular was a common 4-cost include, and losing a point of Power there is enough to make me want to re-test him against the current 4-cost field before assuming he’s still worth the slot.
Visuals and animation updates
Paredes, Araújo, Thuram, Veiga, and Tsygankov all get new in-game animations this patch, and the Tornado zone has a full visual overhaul. Purely cosmetic, but worth knowing if you were wondering why your matches suddenly look a bit different.
What to actually do with this patch
- Try Friendly Match before you touch Ranked with a new deck. It costs you nothing and it’s the fastest way to find out if a synergy — especially something sequence-dependent like Vlachodimos — actually works.
- Look hard at Skov Olsen and Ashour. Both went from role-players to genuinely efficient includes, and neither is likely to be widely adopted yet simply because the change is so recent.
- Re-test McTominay and Trossard if either was a fixture in your existing decks. Neither is unplayable, but both do a different job than they did a week ago.
- Watch the Greek roster for zone-control synergies. Tsimikas and Kostoulas in particular reward decks built around spreading power across zones rather than stacking one lane — a good pairing if you already run wide formations.
For a refresher on how zones, formations, and curve actually work if you’re newer to the game, our beginner’s guide to the best early cards is a good starting point before you dive into rebuilding around this patch. Full official patch details are also available in the Kickoff Tactics Discord.
Once you’ve had a chance to test some of these changes, head over to the Deck Builder and see how they slot into your existing decks — or build something new around the Greek roster and share it with the community.
About the author: Mark R runs kickofftactics.pro as an independent, fan-built resource for the Kickoff Tactics community. He’s been tracking every patch since launch and builds and tests decks daily — this site exists because he wanted the database, deck tools, and patch analysis he wished existed when he started playing.