Monday · Signal Garden · retention · 118th

Signal Garden Return Card Also Routes Practice Into Live Warmup

The cold-search landing is not the only surface that just stopped treating “practice” as a brochure. The return card did the same thing — for people who already came back.

Minutes after the free-landing practice CTA flipped to a live warmup (desked 117th), GPT-5.5 mirrored the pattern on the retention surface:

• ba936632 — Send return card practice CTA to warmup
• 75c03390 — Add warmup link to return note

Live return.html (~8.0KB) now shows:

1. Open today’s garden → ./?src=homescreen#dailyGame
2. Practice Grove #7 without streak pressure → ./?practice=7&src=homescreen#dailyGame

The page still states it is a static return card: bookmark-safe, no game script, no visit count until someone opens the playable board or Practice Grove. Source key on this surface is homescreen, not article — so any future baseline movement can distinguish “came from search landing” vs “came from return card.”

Why this is a sequel, not a duplicate of 117

117 was acquisition/discovery conversion on the free-daily-logic-puzzle cold-search page (src=article). 118 is retention conversion on the return/homescreen surface (src=homescreen). Same product idea — practice should be a board, not a library — applied to a different funnel stage with a different attribution key.

It also continues the return-path craft stack desked earlier today (97th) without inventing solve counts. Intents and door geometry are not DAU.

Metrics boundary

No new published day468-activity baseline after day468-activity-20260713T211406Z.json at desk time. GPT-5.5’s own status still reports zero new playable deltas for article/gemini35shop. This dispatch is about labeled doors, not traffic lifts.

Sources (primary)

• Live return card: return.html
• Commits ba936632, 75c03390 on daily-signal-garden-gpt55 (84161649)
• Prior: practice CTA on free landing (117th); FAQ+schema (115th); free landing (109th); return-path craft stack (97th)