Heroes Hub · Series Guide
Heroes of Might and Magic is the turn-based strategy franchise that shaped Might & Magic: Duel of Champions from the ground up, and this Heroes of Might and Magic series guide traces where that framework came from, how long the series has run, and how Duel of Champions' six factions map back onto it.
Heroes of Might and Magic is a turn-based strategy series built around three linked systems: building up a town, recruiting a hero to lead an army out of it, and fighting tactical battles against rival heroes and neutral monster stacks. A player spends part of each turn managing a home base, queuing buildings, training troops, researching upgrades, and the rest of it moving a hero across an overworld map, picking up resources and visiting dwellings before eventually colliding with an opponent. When two armies meet, the game drops into a separate tactical battle screen where units fight it out on a grid, and the outcome of that fight can decide the whole game.
Exploration matters as much as combat, especially early on. A hero uncovers the map turn by turn, picks up loose resources, and visits dwellings that add fresh troops to an army before it's strong enough to contest anything meaningful. That opening phase, more scouting than fighting, is part of what gives the series its particular pace, and it's one of the pieces a card game format like Duel of Champions had no direct way to reproduce.
That combination, town-building layered under hero-led armies layered under grid combat, is what people usually mean when they describe a game as playing like Heroes of Might and Magic. It's slower and more deliberate than a real-time strategy title. A single turn can take several minutes while a player weighs which building to queue against which army to field, and the series built its reputation on that pace, not in spite of it. Duel of Champions carried the same patience into a card-game format two decades later, trading the overworld map for a lane-based board but keeping the same idea: commit to a plan before you see exactly how the fight plays out.
Might and Magic is the older, broader property. A separate line of first-person role-playing games carried the Might and Magic name well before the strategy spin-off existed. Heroes of Might and Magic borrowed that world and its lore and turned it into a strategy series instead of an RPG, and it's that strategy side of the family, not the RPG side, that Duel of Champions descends from.
The series began in the 1990s under New World Computing and grew across several numbered entries and spin-offs through the 2000s and 2010s, changing hands along the way as the broader Might and Magic property passed to new owners. Ubisoft has held and published the franchise for most of its more recent history, releasing new mainline entries, expansions, and spin-off projects under the Heroes of Might and Magic name well into the 2010s, and again in the 2020s.
Reception across that many entries hasn't been uniform. Some releases are remembered as high points for the strategy genre generally, others landed with less enthusiasm, and the series has gone quiet for stretches before returning with something new. What's stayed consistent is the core loop and the visual identity that recurs across entries: dragons, griffins, undead legions, angelic knights, orc warbands, all carried forward even as the technology and the business model around them changed underneath.
The franchise has also branched beyond the mainline numbered games over the years, into spin-offs, mobile projects, and licensed adaptations that used the Heroes of Might and Magic name and world without necessarily being a direct numbered sequel. Duel of Champions itself was one of those branches: a card game built around the same universe, not another turn-based strategy entry, aimed at a different session length and a different kind of player entirely.
The two most visible recent chapters, Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era and a from-the-ground-up remake of Heroes of Might and Magic III, both landed real news coverage in 2026. That's a big part of why this Heroes of Might and Magic guide exists in the first place. Both are covered in full further down this page, with their own dedicated pages linked below.
The Heroes of Might and Magic games have used a consistent set of town alignments since the mid-1990s, and Duel of Champions borrowed that same roster instead of inventing a new one from scratch. Academy, Haven, Inferno, Necropolis, Sanctuary, and Stronghold, the six factions covered on this site's faction pages, are Duel of Champions' own take on town types the mainline strategy games have used for decades: a mage-focused tower faction, a human knight-and-cleric stronghold, a demon-infested pit, an undead necropolis, a naga-led water faction, and an orc warcamp.
None of the six are exact copies of a single mainline town. Card games rarely translate a strategy game's mechanics literally, and Duel of Champions reworked each faction's toolkit to fit a two-player card format instead of a hundred-turn campaign. What carried over is identity: the same broad archetype, the same visual language, and often the same faction name. A closer, faction-by-faction breakdown of where each one traces back to lives on the faction origins page, and the factions hub covers how each one actually played inside Duel of Champions itself.
Necropolis is the clearest example. The mainline games have used that exact name for their undead town for most of the series' history, and Duel of Champions kept both the name and the undead-attrition identity that comes with it. Other factions took a slightly more indirect route, keeping the archetype and the visual language while adjusting the name or the specific creature roster to fit a smaller, card-sized cast, which is exactly the kind of case-by-case detail the faction origins page walks through.
Duel of Champions shut down its official servers years ago, but the Heroes of Might and Magic series it drew from never fully went away. Ubisoft kept publishing new entries and spin-offs under that name through the 2010s, and the two 2026 stories covered on this page, an early-access prequel and a full remake of the series' most beloved entry, are the clearest sign yet that the franchise is still a going concern, not something left to rest.
For someone who spent time with Duel of Champions specifically, that matters for a simple reason. A lot of what made the card game recognizable, the faction names, the creature designs, the general tone of a world split between angelic knights, demonic legions, and everything in between, comes directly from this series. Following what's happening in Heroes of Might and Magic now is, in a real sense, following what happens next to the wider world Duel of Champions borrowed its whole identity from.
That's also why this site treats the Heroes Hub as more than a tangent. A reader who wants the card game's lore to make sense benefits from knowing where it came from, and a reader who arrived from a Heroes of Might and Magic search with no Duel of Champions history at all will still find two useful, self-contained news pages here.
None of that requires picking a side between the games. Someone can care about Duel of Champions and have zero interest in ever playing a full Heroes of Might and Magic campaign, and the reverse is just as common. The two are close enough in lineage that following one naturally surfaces the other, without either one being a prerequisite for enjoying what's actually in front of a reader.
Two pages round out this Heroes of Might and Magic series guide. The Olden Era page covers Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era, a prequel that launched into early access in April 2026 and sold well enough in its first day to reportedly cover its own development costs. The III Remake page covers the full remake of Heroes of Might and Magic III that Ubisoft announced later the same year, rebuilding the series' most celebrated entry in a modern 3D engine.
Anyone who arrived here from a Duel of Champions faction page already has a head start: the same six-way roster, the same rough identities, and a lot of the same visual DNA carry across. The faction origins page is the deepest crossover piece on this site, walking through each faction's mainline ancestry one at a time. Newcomers who want to see where the Heroes of Might and Magic games are headed next should start with the two pages above; longtime Duel of Champions players who just want the lore connections should start with faction origins instead. Either way, the Duel of Champions guide and the how-to-play page are still the fastest routes back to the card game itself.
Heroes of Might and Magic is a turn-based strategy franchise built around three linked systems: building up a home town, leading a hero-commanded army across an overworld map, and fighting tactical battles on a separate grid when armies collide. It began in the 1990s and has continued, under different owners and across many entries, into the 2020s.
No. Might & Magic: Duel of Champions is a card game that borrowed the wider franchise's faction lineup, art style, and lore rather than being a numbered entry in the mainline strategy series itself. It shares a universe and a faction roster with Heroes of Might and Magic, not a genre.
The series spans multiple numbered mainline entries plus a number of expansions and spin-off projects released across three decades. This guide doesn't try to catalogue every release; it focuses on what the series is, how long it has run, and the two most recent entries that are actively making news right now.
Academy pulls from the series' long-running mage and wizard town tradition, a faction built around magic research and spellcraft rather than raw force. The full breakdown of how all six Duel of Champions factions map to their Heroes of Might and Magic counterparts is on the faction origins page.
Yes. Two separate projects under the Heroes of Might and Magic name generated real news coverage in 2026: an early-access prequel called Olden Era, and an announced full remake of Heroes of Might and Magic III. Both are covered in depth on their own pages linked from this guide.
It's a turn-based strategy series, sometimes described as 4X-adjacent for its exploration and empire-building elements, distinct from real-time strategy games and from the separate line of Might and Magic role-playing games that predate it.
No. Duel of Champions was built as a standalone card game and explains its own rules and factions without requiring familiarity with the mainline strategy series. Knowing the wider franchise adds context, particularly around faction identities, but it was never a prerequisite.
Olden Era is a prequel, set earlier in the franchise's timeline than the mainline numbered entries, and it launched into early access rather than a traditional full release. The Olden Era page covers its launch, its reception, and what it is actually about.
Not directly. It's a separate, unrelated project rebuilding a specific mainline strategy entry rather than anything to do with Duel of Champions' card game format. The connection is the shared universe and faction lineage, covered on the III Remake page and the faction origins page.
Start with what interests you: the faction origins page if the Duel of Champions connection is the draw, or the Olden Era and III Remake pages if it's the current news cycle. There's no required reading order, and none of the four Heroes Hub pages assume you've read the others first.