Cards and action points

There are 500 cards: 24 hand-tuned and 476 generated.

Every card is listed in the archive: cost, effect, rarity and which airframe it is locked to, read straight from the engine.

Action points are a budget

Five per round, and a hard ceiling of nine.

Cards that grant AP do not add it to the turn they are played on. They fill apBank, which is spent at the start of the next round and then cleared.

This was not the first design. Command used to be a recurring status that also stacked, so action points climbed 5, 7, 9 and never came back down. A round stopped being a budget and became an accumulator: two Command cards bought a fifteen-point round that dumped an entire hand, chain-stunned the opponent, and skipped their turn outright. The bank nudges a round. It does not double one.

Cost, and reading it

Every card shows its cost as a number in the top right, tinted red when you cannot afford it. It used to be a row of pips, which is fine at one or two and unreadable at five: you cannot glance at five dots and know they are not four.

Costs run from 1 to 5. Five-point cards exist and are meant to feel like a whole round.

A bigger deck is a worse deck

A deck is 16 cards. Fitting more hardware adds cards to that fixed size, so everything else comes up less often.

This is the difficulty lever, and it runs backwards from intuition: the house is made easier by padding its deck with filler, and the hardest opponent in the game, the Nemesis, flies completely clean. The resulting win-rate bands are locked automatically, so the relationship cannot quietly drift.

The generated catalog

476 of the 500 are generated from a fixed set of archetypes, and an archetype produces a card's rules text and the code that resolves it from the same numbers.

That matters because of a checked contract: every number printed on a card must appear literally in the line of code that resolves it. An automated check proves it across all 500. A card that says "Deal 14" and deals 12 cannot ship.

Of the generated cards, 350 are general drops and 100 are locked to a specific airframe: that frame's paid customization modules, sold from one catalog at two prices.

Rarity

Rarity does not make a card stronger. It sets how many copies of it a deck may hold, which is the balance lever that actually works on a pool this size.

Getting cards

A deck you build by hand is saved only once it passes size, copy limits, ownership and airframe locks, and it stops being flown if it later becomes illegal rather than quietly breaking the rules.