Five cards for every Aethermon so you’re never unprepared!
Last lesson we discussed Star/Heart Value, a simple metric to easily ascertain which cards are more powerful (how many stars) and how much additional health your Aethermon gains when learning that move (how many hearts).
This time we are discussing your starting hand.
At the beginning of Aethermon: Adventure, you choose your Aethermon companion, and with it you receive a starting hand of five cards:
- One ‘baby move’;
- Two basic moves called Tackle; and
- Two element-specific moves.
The ‘baby move’ isn’t very powerful (deal 2 damage to your opponent), but it has two unique properties:
- Unlike every other Battle Card, which is discarded once played, the ‘baby move’ always returns to your hand. This ensures that you always have at least one action during battle and are never unable to act.
- The ‘baby moves’ are the only zero-star Battle Cards in the game.
Although these moves may not have much firepower, they can still finish a fight early on – and leave you with more cards in your hand for the next one.
The two basic moves (Tackle) each deal four damage and are then discarded. Very simple. Very straightforward. These are a one-star move. Early in the game, these alone may be enough to vanquish some opponents, although not all, but by mid-game you’re going to need to be more strategic than that.
The two element-specific moves lean into the essential features of each element, and are thus all different, even though balanced to the same point on the power curve. For example, the Sunkissed Battle Card states “Deal 3 (P)ure damage.” You will recall from earlier that the designation (P)ure allows a move to pierce defense – Sunkissed isn’t the only Element to utilise this, but it is a big feature of their Elemental type. These are also one-star moves.
Finally to round things out, you may be wondering how many Health Points each Aethermon starts the game with – and despite all of these zero- and one-star moves, you don’t start the game with 21 health points.
You start with five.
But don’t worry – your opponents also have very low HP.
Next lesson we’ll be going over the basics of the battle process.