Deckbuilding in Aethermancer

Deckbuilding in Aethermancer is a bit different from most other games. You play every game with 20 cards, and only 4 of them (your Aether cards) are ones you bring with you in your deck!

That said, Aether cards are very important, and thus different decks will feel very different despite consisting of 4 cards.

Example Deck:

Each deck must contain exactly one Zero card. Your Zero card is the core of your character.

- Your Zero card is a spell, may always be played, and costs nothing. This ensures you always have a legal action for your action phase.

- Your Zero card determines your starting life total.

- Some Zero cards can affect the game without even being played! Only Zero cards can do this!

Here, Healing Circle is our Zero card. This means that when we want healing, or we simply do not want to commit more mana to the board, we can use it for free to heal our creatures 3! Note that this still costs our action phase, so we don't want to overuse it.

Class Levels

See how Healing Circle says starting life 46? In this case, we actually start with only 40 life. This is because we must be a Cleric 4 / Warrior 2 to meet the requirements for all of our cards, and each class level is bought with 1 life.

Our opponents will know our class levels, but not the specific cards.

Note how the same class level can satisfy the requirements of multiple cards. This means that we start with more life by staying in 1 class. There is, however a tradeoff. Consider this:

Mech punishes wide boards. If we are Mech 6, our opponent can play around this by playing fewer and stronger creatures.

Illusion punishes high attack creatures. If we are Illusion 6, our opponent will try to play many creatures, none too powerful.

By multiclassing Mech 6 / Illusion 6, we start with 6 fewer life, but we are more prepared for whatever our opponent does.

Enjoy navigating the trade-off between specialization and diversification!