Battle Cards Are Playable — Trial Battles Only
Battle Cards are live and playable in Trial battles. Every card is one combat effect, copies are the multiplier, and four of a kind ends it. Ranked and squad play are untouched.
Battle Cards are playable. They deal in Trial battles only — ranked, squad and campaign play are completely untouched, and that is deliberate: this is a beta, and a beta belongs where losing costs you nothing.
The deck also changed shape since the preview. The poker version is gone — no ranks, no hands, no percentage bonuses. A card is now one combat effect wearing one gesture suit, named after exactly what it does. The only number that matters is how many copies of the same card you play.
How a round works
- Shape your hand. You hold five cards. Throw away any number of them once, and draw that many back.
- Pick your move. Attack, magic, dodge or recover, exactly as in any battle. Your move still decides who wins the exchange.
- The move plays your cards. Committing a gesture plays *every* card of that suit you hold — you never pick cards individually.
Only the biggest stack of one card scores. A lone Bleed held beside a pair of Wounds is spent for nothing when you attack, which is the whole reason the throw-away step exists. The four move buttons now print what each one would play, so you can read all four prices before you tap.
Copies are the multiplier
- One copy — the card at face value.
- Two — double. Three — triple.
- Four — the absolute. On anything you spend on your opponent that ends the battle outright; on a healing card it fills your HP bar instead.
The four cards in the test deck
The catalogue prints sixteen, but a battle currently deals four — one per suit — so each of the engine's four card paths can be watched on its own rather than hiding behind a dozen others:
- 🩸 Bleed (⚔️ attack) — hits, and bleeds for 4 turns.
- 🌀 Stun (✨ magic) — takes their next turn. They are immune the turn after, so it never chains.
- 🛡️ Shield (💨 dodge) — soaks incoming damage and bleed ticks until spent. A new shield replaces the old one.
- 💚 Heal (❤️ recover) — HP straight back.
The remaining twelve are parked, not cut, and the whole catalogue is browsable on the Battle Cards page. All species share the same pile of 64 — four copies of each card, no per-species decks, no unlocks, nothing to collect. When the pile runs dry the discards shuffle back in, so a spent card comes around again.
Fixed in this release
Four Heals no longer kill your opponent. A full stack used to end the battle on every card in the deck, healing ones included — which quietly meant a recover hand could win a fight without throwing a single punch. It now restores you to full HP, which is what the absolute version of a heal should be.
The round also reads better on a phone. Card effects moved onto the four move buttons instead of sitting in a separate row above your hand, the hand step hands the screen back to the board as soon as you have seen what you drew, and a long press on any card opens its full rules.
Everything here is an opening position. Trial data decides whether this reaches ranked at all — and if the answer is no, nothing you rely on today changes.
Balance changes
🃏 Battle Cards (Trial battles only)
- ● Battle Cards: design preview → playable in Trial battles
- ● Four copies of a healing card: kills the opponent → restores you to full HP