First separate “never offered” from “offered but cannot be placed” — they have different fixes. A card is never offered when it is not permanently unlocked yet, or when it is unlocked but outside the pool your current milestone stage draws from; rerolls only re-roll inside the current stage’s pool, they do not jump you into a later one. A separate problem is the card that does get offered but has no legal tile — that is a board-space issue, and clearing space changes whether you can take offers, not what the pool offers you.
Check the three gates separately
Players mapping the draft pool describe layers rather than one big deck: permanent unlocks set what can ever appear for you; the milestone stage changes the pool and rarity you draw from mid-run; and legal placement decides whether an offered card can even be played. The first two gates decide what gets offered; the third only decides whether you can take an offer that already happened. Diagnosing the wrong gate wastes rerolls — rerolling for a card you never unlocked is as pointless as unlocking a card your board cannot hold.
Three gates · the third sits after the offer
Duplicates and rerolls are not bugs
Drawing the same starter cards repeatedly is the reported normal behaviour of a stage-based pool, not proof your run is broken — the starting-buildings thread asks exactly that and gets exactly that answer. Rerolls re-draw inside the current stage’s pool: they are for finding a better option now, not for pulling later-stage cards early. If every reroll returns the same family of cards, that is gate 2 telling you what stage you are in — the fix is progressing the milestone, not more rerolls.
Keep a legal footprint for what the pool can give
The thread’s practical advice: the pool can only help if offered cards have somewhere to stand. Players recommend deliberately leaving buildable space — including the repeated footprints that duplicate buildings need — rather than packing the board edge to edge, because an offer with no legal tile is an offer wasted. This is gate 3, and it is the one gate fully in your control: keep terrain-appropriate tiles open for the cards your stage can actually produce, and reserve the special ones — Rocks-adjacent spots for cards like the Mine, and actual water tiles for cards like the Fishing Boat that must stand on water.
Gate 3 in practice · same offer, two boards
Use the Compendium instead of your memory
The official v1.0.5 patch added a current-run Compendium covering buildings, heirlooms and councillors — including buildings you dismissed this run. When a card seems absent, check there before concluding anything: it answers “what has this run already seen”, which separates a card you dismissed from one the pool never offered. What it cannot prove is the permanent side — an absence from the current-run Compendium is not proof a card was never unlocked, because the Compendium documents this run, not your account unlocks. If the pool genuinely cannot help the current milestone, play for the foundation that gets you to the next stage — the milestone timing page covers that pivot, and guild unlocks covers the permanent side of gate 1.
The layered pool model comes from the draft-pool thread (Sep 26, 2026) and the starting-buildings thread (Aug 31–Sep 2, 2026); the Compendium from the official news feed (v1.0.5), all read Oct 5, 2026. Exact starter counts and rarity percentages are player-recorded and unverified here — no current-client test.