Soulhold

Soulhold is a homespun TCG that was developed by Adam Austin as a passion project to surprise a group of friends at a bachelor party. He was trying to create a good gift for his friends and ended up creating a whole TCG instead.

This website is just an attempt to immortalize the act of creating this game as well as host the rules and the cards. The personalized player cards that were gifts are not currently listed out of respect for the nature of them as gifts.

- Adam

Rules

1. The game is played with two Players.
2. The game is divided into phases

• Gather
• Planning
• Battle

4. Players have multiple resources:

• Life points - Representing the vitality of the player, reducing this to 0 will result in an immediate loss. Each player starts with 20.
• Energy - is used to pay for cards to add to your battle deck.

5. Players have five places where cards can reside:

• deck - All cards start in the deck and can be drawn during the gather phase.
• hand - Cards in the hand can be added to the battle deck by paying their Binding Cost.
• graveyard - Cards destroyed during battle are sent here to be dug up for resources.
• battle deck - Cards played are placed in the battle deck. The battle deck is used during the Battle and Planning phase.

6. The game starts with the Gather phase.
   1. Players gain energy equal to the turn number it is, with a maximum gain of 5.:
      1. Turn 1 = 1 energy
      2. Turn 2 =2 energy etc.
      3. Turn 6 = 5 energy etc.

• Players consolidate the bonuses of cards that were destroyed during the last combat phase. Each player sums up the bonuses of each card in their graveyard and resolves any necessary card effects. Players then draw a card from their deck as well as any additional cards as a result of card effects.
• The cards from the graveyard are shuffled back into the deck.

7. Then the game progresses to the Planning phase.

• Players can spend their energy to place new cards in their battle deck.
• Players can move cards from their battle deck to their hand Note: doing so will require them to *repay the binding cost to add the card back to the battle deck.
• Players may re-order their battle deck however they like.[^2]

8. Once all players are done Planning -- the Battle Phase commences.

• Players both flip the top card of their battle deck and resolve any card effects.

• The power of each card is compared, and the card with the higher power is put on the bottom of the battledeck (to be drawn again), while the lower card is sent to the graveyard.

  • In the event of a tie both cards are sent to the graveyard.

• Battle is over when one player is unable to flip a new card from the top of their deck.

  • If, one player is unable to flip a card, but another player is - The card is flipped, and the player without a card on the field loses Life Points equal to the Power of the flipped card + The number of remaining Non-Artifact Cards in the winners deck.
  • If both players are unable to flip a card -- and the battle ends.

9. Cards have various properties:

• They have a Name and a Type, both of these things are able to be referenced by other abilities.
• They have a Power: Which determines how powerful they are during Battle.
• They have an Binding Cost -- Which determines how much energy they cost to add to your battle deck
• They have a Return Bonus which determines what bonuses you get from retrieving them from the graveyard
• They might (optionally) have an effect that can be activated at various stages of the game. Each effect explains its activation criteria and what to do when resolving it.

10. Decks must be constructed according to the following parameters:

• Common, Court, Monarch, or Unique.
• You can have up to 4 copies of the same Common Card.
• You can have up to 2 copies of the same Court Card.
• You can have only one copy of a Monarch card.
• Unique means only one copy always.

11. Decks have the following limits:

• 2 Monarch Cards
• 6 Court Cards
• 10-15 Common Cards
• Decks are traditionally composed of between 20-25 cards.