What are Dark Gifts?
A Dark Gift is a permanent bonus effect attached to a minion. Unlike a Tavern spell that buffs a minion once, a Dark Gift changes what that minion does for the rest of the game — granting keywords, retroactive scaling, extra triggers, or outright copies. Dark Gifts are a global mechanic. There is no hero requirement, no lobby requirement, and no anomaly needed. Every player in every game gets access to them through the Dark Discovery button.| Unlocks | Turn 3, for every player |
| Cost | 3 Gold per use |
| Frequency | Once per turn, 3 times per game |
| Offer | Discover 1 of 3 minions, each with a different Dark Gift |
| Permanence | The gift stays on the minion for the rest of the game |
Spending early vs. holding
This is the whole mechanic in one sentence: both the minion tier and the gift pool improve every turn you wait.Spend on Turn 3 and you get a Tier 2 minion with an early-game gift like Fortitude (+5/+5). Hold until Turn 9 and you can get a Tier 6 minion carrying Golemancy or Persisting Horror. You only get three uses all game, so each one is a real tempo-versus-scaling decision.
Minion tier by turn
The tier of minions offered by the Dark Discovery button improves on the following schedule. From Turn 11 onward, the offer stays at the Turn 10 range.
| Turn | Minion tier offered |
|---|---|
| 3 | Tier 2 |
| 4 | Tier 2 or Tier 3 |
| 5 | Tier 3 |
| 6 | Tier 3 or Tier 4 |
| 7 | Tier 4 |
| 8 | Tier 4 or Tier 5 |
| 9 | Tier 4, Tier 5 or Tier 6 |
| 10 | Tier 5 or Tier 6 |
Which minions can be offered
The offering pool is filtered so that Dark Discovery gives you something usable rather than a random dud:
- Battlecry and Choose One minions cannot appear before Turn 5. Their value is front-loaded, so early offers would be weak.
- Magnetic minions are never offered.
- "When you sell this" minions are never offered — Freedealing Gambler, Fire Baller, Patient Scout, and similar. A permanent gift on a minion you're meant to sell would be wasted.
- Hand-oriented minions are never offered — Old Soul, Bream Counter, and similar.
- From Turn 6 onward, one of the three minions is guaranteed to match your most common minion type. Committing to a tribe directly improves your Dark Discovery quality.
- A handful of minions are excluded for balance, such as Leeroy the Reckless, Deadly Spore and Boom-in-a-Box.
Gift timing windows
Every Dark Gift has its own offering window, and several ship in two versions — a weaker early variant and a stronger late one. Battle Scars, Death's Embrace, Spell Siphon, and Dexterity all follow this pattern, so the same gift name can mean very different things depending on when you saw it.
A few gifts sit far outside the normal curve:
- Steady Growth scales with the turn you take it — +2/+2 on Turn 3, +2/+3 on Turn 4, +3/+4 on Turn 5.
- Persisting Horror is Turn 10+.
- Titanic Strength (+1000 Attack) is Turn 11+.
- Invulnerability is Turn 12+ and rare — realistically a late-game lottery ticket.
Every Battlegrounds Dark Gift, searchable and filterable by the turn it can be offered, with all offering conditions.