Aether Summon is a time-restrained turn-based card game, played by two players taking turns using resources to power their magical scrolls. The objective of the game is to drive your opponent's life total to 0 or below, using your codex of magic scrolls, creatures and hexes. The first to do it wins the game.
Introduction
The game itself is between two players, each with a pre-chosen codex of 50 scrolls plus 7 recall scrolls. The codex is a list of scrolls that make up the deck the summoner uses to play.
A scroll can be of different types. These types affect at what times they can be played and what types of effect they create in the game. These scrolls are cast by using aether. Aether is a type of energy that is everywhere in the dimension of Alastria and can be channeled to power magic. But to be channeled it needs to be distilled into one of the 6 domains, air, earth, fire, light, void and water. This distillation is done through aether fluxes, which are specifically built armillary spheres that are capable of channeling this energy and making it available to the summoner. Each scroll has usually 1 or more domains, although some have none.
Types of scrolls
There are 5 types of scrolls with which to build your codex.
Fluxes
These are the basic resource that powers all other types of scrolls. There's one for each domain and they're materializations, meaning they stay in the game area when played. When played they don't change the active status (ACTIVE), you can play them in any turn and any time you are the active player (ACTIVE), but you can only play at most 1 per single turn.
When a flux enters the game it produces a unit of their associated domain automatically. This charge if unused will become stale at the beginning of your next turn (BYNT), and then discharged and replaced by a new one, also at the BYNT, which means you can't accumulate unused aether charges to use, but you can use it during your opponents turn, consequently meaning that at the beginning of your turn, barring any special game effects (GFXs), you'll have the same aether to use as the number of fluxes you have.
Although a special class of scrolls, they count towards the normal codex limit of 50, each one takes a slot, so you need to balance your resource requirements with your other scrolls costs.
Creatures
Creatures are scrolls that are summoned into the battle to fight on your side. They're, as fluxes and hexes, materializations. They have two special stats, strike and guard points, each one a numerical value, strike defining how much damage this creature can inflict in combat and guard how much it can take before it dematerializes. Creatures can then be used to strike your opponent and guard against their strikers. Creatures also have an additional qualifier called class, that can be one or more words that can affect how it or other spells interact with this creature. Other than that they can have any ruleset text plus creature-only qualifiers/conditions, such as materializing, exhausted, flying, berserk, impetuous, paralysis or mastery, we'll dive deeper into those, for now just think of them as permanent spells (materializations) that stay on the table until they're destroyed and are the backbone of driving your opponent's life points to 0 and guard your own.
Hexes
Hexes are scrolls that are materializations like fluxes and creatures. When played they remain in the game and although all ruleset text is possible, usually they create effects that are global to the game, to a player, to a type of scroll or provide GIFT abilities for the player to use while they remain in game. You can think of them as permanent enchantations that remain until destroyed.
Nimbles
Nimble spells are scrolls that can be played at any time you are ACTIVE, even on your opponent's turn, and even if there are other spells waiting resolution in the stack. They're not materializations, so they run their effect and are immediately upon resolution placed on the tomb of the player who played it. They can have any ruleset so they can effectively create materializations, but that is a side effect.
Conjurations
Conjuration spells are like heavier versions of what a nimble spell is. They require more focus to execute because their effects are usually stronger, which means they can only be played during your turn, when you're active, during your main or post phases, and only if there's no other scroll or effect waiting to be resolved in the stack.
Portals
Portals aren't a type of scroll per-se, instead a state scrolls can be in. It's an inter-dimensional portal that links a scroll to the dimension of Alastria, in the battlefield the summoner is in. A portal has a numeric value associated and at the beginning of its summoner's turn this value is decreased automatically by one. When the portal reaches 0 or less it materializes, which means, if it's associated with a materialization that materialization is put in game as if it was just now played (a portal associated with a materialization holds the scroll itself in it), and if with any other spell then the spell causes its effects to be applied (isn't placed in the tomb because it was already there, the portal only holds the effects to be executed).
What makes a scroll?
A scroll is composed by its name, scroll cost (SC) , type, class(es) plus strike and guard points in case the type is creature, ruleset text, image and lore. From these only image and lore doesn't affect game-play. Lore is something you can read if you open the scroll-viewer by holding command/meta key on any scroll line or materialization. Below the scroll depiction you'll find a box of text that pertains to the lore of Aether Summon.
Scroll Cost
The scroll cost (SC, sometimes also referred to as "spell cost") is the aether energy charges and/or life points you need to spend in order to cast that scroll. The scroll can have additional costs specified in the ruleset text, even different types, in addition to this cost, but for any calculation alluding to the "scroll cost" (SC), this is the cost that is to be used.
Scroll Type
The type dictates when the scroll can be played and what it does once it is and once it resolves. The resolution of a scroll involves understanding a bit more the mechanics of the game, and touches on a very important aspect of it, the "stack" which we will explain shortly after. Nonetheless, simplifying it, if you suceed in casting the spell and your opponent doesn't destroy it somehow, that's when the spell actually "resolves" and then the type tells you what happens. If a creature, hex or flux, its put into the game, otherwise it executes its ruleset text and is already in the tomb of the player who played it.
Scroll Classes
Classes are additional "tags" scrolls can have. All creatures have at least one class, and right now only creatures have classes although that isn't a rule. Each class a scroll has can potentially interact with other spells, for instance, if a creature has a class of "frog", then there might be spells that only affect "frogs", or creatures with "mastery" over "frogs", or "immunity" to "frogs", or hexes that bolster "frogs". A special type of class any scroll can have is "unique". A scroll with this "class" has associated one or more additional keywords, usually a unique reference to the element of the scroll, let's imagine a powerful character, a dragon, named Krotax. If this scroll had the class "unique" for the keyword "krotax", it would mean that only a scroll that has this unique keyword association can be in play at any given time. This means different scrolls can have the same unique association, showing different stages of the same character in the game universe, while only allowing one of its representations to be in play and only by a single player at a time.
Strike and Guard
Strike and Guard points are only related to creatures. They define how much damage the creature can cause in combat and how much damage it can receive before dying.
We'll dive into the turn sequence and specifically into battle later on.
Ruleset text
The ruleset text is the arbitrary text that tells you what the spell does, or any extra costs, abilities or GIFTS it might have.
The ruleset text in materializations can contain static abilities, conditional abilities, GIFTs, additional casting costs or special conditions, static, global, single or multi-time effects. We'll explain what GIFTs and EGEs (enter the game effect) are but others are mostly combinations of smaller game mechanics and components, they're very understandable once you play the game.
GIFTs
GIFTs are a specific type of ability some materializations have. This is symbolized visually by a box surrounding a part of the ruleset text. There can be more than one in a scroll. Each GIFT button has the cost icons, followed by the GIFT name in golden letters, followed by the GIFT ruleset. When you can activate a GIFT the background of the button is green, otherwise a dashed red background is shown on scroll preview. To activate the GIFT you need to open the scroll-viewer for the scroll and then click on the GIFT, pay its full costs and choose targets if any. The GIFT effect goes into the stack as if it was a scroll played from the tome. Destroying somehow the effect on the stack doesn't destroy the scroll that had the GIFT activated from, they're connected but not in the same way as the scroll played from a tome regularly.
EGEs, LGE, BYNT, etc
EGEs, short-hand for Enter the Game Effect, and effectively you can think of others such as LGE for Leave the Game Effect, BYNT for Beginning of Your Next Turn, etc, are simply descriptive names for familiar effects - they have defined specifications and are solved internally by the engine, and they're called that in the ruleset, their rules or effects pertain to a scroll entering, leaving or changing areas in the game, so these "descriptions" encapsulate their effect. They're just short ways to reference some familiar mechanic and you might find them used in different places so it's good to understand their meaning.
How to play?
To play the game each players brings with him a codex, which is nothing more than their choice of 50 scrolls to play plus 7 additional ones that are put into a special area, called RECALL. To build a codex go to the library from your personal area navigation.
Each player starts the game with the full 50 scrolls unlocked and playable, and 7 scrolls in the recall area. No player can look at other player's scrolls while they're in the player's tome or recall area.
What is a Codex?
A codex is basically your playable list of scrolls plus your recall scrolls.
A codex can be assembled by going to the library tab, choosing the appropriate mode of play (playground, competitive and chaos brawl) and then creating (or editing) a codex. You can include up to 3 copies of the same scroll, across your tome (the starting playable 50 scroll list) and recall areas, except fluxes, which you can have any number of the same you wish, but none in the recall area (because you always have fluxes available too choose from when recalling).
Playground codexes can be created at will, up to a reasonable number of saved codexes, with any scrolls of your choice from the existing scrolls in the Aether Summon universe. Competitive on the other hand needs you to have the scrolls you want to play in your collection so if you try to create a new codex you won't be able to choose any scrolls other than fluxes for it. Chaos Brawl codexes only show up when you have an open chaos brawl gauntlet, after you've finished the draft portion, then each chaos brawl will have its associated codex list here without you needing to create them - when editing them you will have access to all your drafted scrolls for that brawl, the list of all your picks is called the bag of scrolls, as in chaos brawl bag, once you save your valid codex you can play matches on that gauntlet.
How to start?
You join from the lobby any type of duel you have a valid codex for and enough resources to cover the fee if needed.
A random player is automatically chosen for starting the game and the game starts. Once it starts it's always the same sequence.
The game: turn
A turn is defined by 5 different phases. They are the start, main, battle, post and end phases. Start and end phases are automatically done, and a player can't do anything during them unless prompted, they deal with refreshing and cleaning up the game effects. There's an additional phase, RECALL that only happens every once in a while so we don't consider it part of the "normal" turn, it's explained after the other ones.
The start phase
As the player turn starts, we enter that player's start phase. It's an automatically executed phase, where all existing aether in the active turn player's fluxes is discharged and then the fluxes of that player each generates a charge of their domain.
After the re-charging, maintenance effects for the active player are triggered and the player is prompted to pay them or let go of the scroll requiring maintenance. Afterwards all portals tick one value down and if they reach 0 or less, they materialize.
After these steps it concludes with any general effects or triggers for the start phase being applied and it moves to the main phase. The only interactions possible are from triggers effects (usually portals materializing) or maintenance prompts.
The main phase
The main phase is one of the phases in which a summoner can cast any type of spell as long as he can cover its costs, has valid targets for it (if required) and he's active with no other effect on the stack. Along with the post phase they're the only phases where summoners can cast creatures, conjurations or hexes.
The difference between the main and post is that after the main phase you go to battle and after post you end the turn, hence why main is called main. Once main phase is completed the turn enters the battle phase.
The battle phase
The battle phase is actually divided into three dependent phases and is entirely skipped if the player whose turn it is has no valid strikers. In that case the turn moves directly to the post phase. If on the other hand there's valid strikers the turn moves into the first phase of the battle, the strike phase.
In this sub-phase the active turn player has to decide with which creatures to strike. If he decides to not strike at all, then the turn moves directly into the post phase. If he chooses to strike with any creature he just selects them as strikers and confirms the choice. There's no other actions possible for any player.
When there's strikers the turn moves to the second battle phase, the guard phase. If the opponent (the player who isn't in its active turn) has no valid guards for any of the strikers, the turn moves directly into the clash phase of the battle, otherwise the opponent can select which creatures to guard which strikers and then the turn moves into the clash phase. If there's more than 1 guarder assigned to any single striker, then the striking playeris prompted to choose/confirm the order of guards, allowing the striking player to choose the order the striking points are applied to the guards. Besides that, as with the strike phase, no other actions can be taken by any of the players.
The clash phase starts with priority for the striking player, where he has a chance to cast nimble spells or creatures with ambush, the opponent can react as regular, he also gets his chance at priority before the 'clash' occurs and can play ambush creatures. Once both players have exchanged priority the clash happens, every striking creature assigns its striking points as damage to the guarders or opponent in case the striker went unguarded, and the guarders cause their striking points as damage to the strikers, simultaneously, meaning both strikers and guarders always assign damage to each other, even if they would die from the damage, unless stated otherwise. Automatically any creature whose damage points is equal or higher than their guard points is removed from the game-area and put into their controller's tomb (the creature is 'entombed'), any effect triggered by the damage, strike, or battle phase conclusion plays out.
The post phase
Then we reach the post phase. This is the regrouping phase after a strike, the summoner who is the active turn player can once again play any valid scroll in this phase, including creatures, conjurations and hexes. Once both players pass their priority, starting by the active turn player, we enter the end phase.
The end phase
The end phase is automatically executed, similarly to the start phase. Here the active turn player's creatures all heal damage points equal to their healing ability. Then all effects that are until the end of turn (EOT) are removed and lastly any trigger or global effects for the End of Turn (EOT) execute.
Notice that creatures might die in this phase too. For instance if you have a 1/1 creature, that has a +2/+2 EOT effect, making it a 3/3, a healing value of 1 and 2 damage inflicted (virtually making it for the time being a 3/1), when we reach the EOT, the creature heals 1 points of damage (becoming 3/2), so only has 1 point of damage left, and then the EOT effect is removed, leaving it again as a 1/1 creature, but because there's still 1 unhealed point of damage the creature effectively dies since now its guard value is back to just 1, and so is entombed.
Once this plays out, the turn effectively ends and the opponent starts their own turn, doing exactly the same phases, but now being him the active turn player.
Players keep doing this until either one of them falls down to 0 life or one of the player's time ends. The player who reaches any of these looses the game.
The RECALL phase
Additionally, every 3rd turn there's a speciall phase called RECALL. This phase always triggers simultaneously for both players, in this phase each player has to pick 1 scroll from the original set of scrolls they chose as their RECALL when building the codex, remove it from the recall area and place it in their tome. You can instead pick any flux of the 6 basic domains, always, every recall phase. No player sees what the opponent chose nor the scrolls they have there. Both players have to make their pick and once its done the turn properly begins as normal. No actions other than selecting a scroll or flux from recall can be done during this phase and you need to choose one or the other.
The recall phase follows a switching pattern in which the first time it triggers on the starting player's turn (by the 3rd turn), and the second time (by the 6th turn) it triggers on the other player's turn. Both players choose a recall scroll each time nonetheless.
The recall section of your codex, and this phase, are a way of you preparing your codex for unseen, or expected threats that you don't deem important enough to make room for in the main codex, either because they're situational, relatively small number in the meta but expected, etc. They give one more layer of interaction, planning and codex building for players.
Stack
The concept of a stack is central to many of the game mechanics you'll need to navigate. Because summoner's need to be able to react to each others scrolls and spell casting, we need a way to differentiate between the summoner casting a scroll and being sucessful at it, because there's many ways to twarth your opponents plans.
So when a player casts a scroll, or activates a GIFT, that action goes into what is called the "stack", an in-order list of the actions being done. Once the action is there, your opponent now has a chance to react to it, so game priority is switched to him, and he becomes the active player. He can either pass without doing anything, in which case the action in the stack is resolved, or he can take an action himself, such as playing a scroll or activating himself a GIFT. Because the action is in the stack, a player can interact with it as well and this is the way by which some spells can nullify others.
When the opponent does an action instead of passing, then that action goes into the stack as well, but on top of the previous action. Both are there and their effects haven't materialized yet. Because the opponent also took an action priority once again changes hands to the originally active player. He has the same options, pass or cast a scroll or GIFT. Nonetheless, even if both players decide to keep reacting to each other actions, it's guaranteed that at some point, either or both will run out of valid actions to do or aether to power them, so eventually both players will have to pass instead. At this point the actions that are in the stack start being resolved one by one. Notice that priority keeps changing as the resolution happens, and players might, if they have resources, re-engage with each others unresolved actions in the stack.
To imagine this, picture that we have any amount of aether needed and we have a creature that we want to give flying so we can strike cleanly. To do that we cast a creature, Royal Gryphus, that has an EGE, when it enters the game it can give flying to another creature you control. We pay the scroll cost, cast the spell and then automatically the scroll is put in the stack and our opponent gains priority. At this point the creature hasn't entered play and so its EGE hasn't triggered yet. Now if the opponent plays a scroll that kills the creature I want to give flying to, I can't retract my spell, I will just not be able to give the ability to what I want. This means that in some cases a well placed counter-action can make your opponent's spells backfire.
Aether
As said before, aether is present everywhere in Alastria and it's the main resource to power the casting of scrolls in Aether Summon. To be usable by a summoner it first needs to be distilled from its pure incorporeal flows to one of the 6 domains, air, earth, fire, light, void or water, that can then be properly used to power spells.
The armillary spheres that compose an aether flux rotate and align themselves with the flow of aether in that particular point and by doing that they gather enough aether to be distilled for further use. They can only keep one charge of aether at any time, and it lasts until the beginning of your next turn counting from the moment of generation.
Once played it immediately generates a charge, because it was already channeling aether, and then immediately starts re-gathering aether so that at the beginning of your next turn (BYNT) it generates another charge of aether.
You can have as many fluxes as you wish and as such generate whatever amount of aether you want but fluxes and aether by themselves do nothing, you need other scrolls to take advantage of that energy. Usually you will mount a strategy around a couple of domains, in order to streamline your aether. Remember that each flux you play in your tome takes a slot that could otherwise be a scroll, remember also that there's scrolls that destroy fluxes and that during recall you can always choose any flux scroll instead of any of the scrolls you have for recall to bring into your tome.
Timers
During a duel both players have each an individual timer that has a total running clock of 25 min. Whenever a player is given priority their timer becomes active. For each interaction the player might take up to 1 minute each time. In case he doesn't take action during that minute the game automatically passes on his behalf. Each action, resets the 1 minute action timer, so it starts again, but not the individual player timer, that keeps ticking down.
A player might be punished with smaller action windows if he plays overly slow or exhibits uncompetitive behaviour, as that can be tracked, averaged and compared across different players. Soon there will be an additional control for time, in the form of time gems. During duels each player will have 5 time gems that he can use to extend the action window for 1 additional minute per gem spent, every player starts the duel with them, and they won't extend the 25 minutes total time, just the current 1min timer if you need more time to think some play through.
Chaos Brawls
Chaos Brawls are draft and playing queues that you can join from the lobby under their specific window. They have their own help center page you can read, but since they also have part of game-play we will touch on it here.
They have an entry-fee contrary to normal duels.
A Chaos Brawl is basically a 3 match tournament where you play with a codex that you construct through a multiplayer draft that happens at the start of the chaos brawl itself. Notice that joining a playground chaos brawl queue will start the chaos brawl immediately because it's against bot opponents for the draft section. For other playmodes once you hit Join be ready to start because you could have been the last player to join and the draft will fire immediately. Otherwise you have the option to leave the queue when it's not full.
This game play is the most interesting and skill intensive of Aether Summoning, because it's an open format puzzle, in that, instead of assembling your codex with a given list of scrolls that you planned and then joining a tournament, you join a queue for a draft and once the 8 draft slots are filled you and the other 7 players are given 3 tomes of scrolls, each containing a random but balanced distribution of scrolls from all 6 domains. Each player opens one tome, picks a scroll and then passes the tome he opened to the next player and receives from the player behind him another tome, again all players choose a scroll and then pass the tome. Players repeat this until all scrolls are picked and then repeat with the next tome until all 3 tomes are picked.
The draft is timed, for each tome that is opened the timer is reset. At first pick of each tome the timer counts to 2 min. On each subsequent pick the timer looses 6 seconds, this allows more time when the tome has more options to pick from and keeps shortening as the options shorten too.
Once this is done the draft is concluded and you don't have to worry about time anymore, since you'll have a chaos brawl bag in the lobby with all your picked scrolls and a summary of your gauntlet record.
Now you move to part two, where with the collection of scrolls you gathered throughout this draft you build an actual playable codex to duel the 3 match gauntlet against other players that are also in a chaos brawl. You can only use the scrolls you picked for the codex in these 3 matches. Each tome having 20 scrolls means you'll pick 60 scrolls in total. You need a codex of 50 scrolls plus 7 recall scrolls, if we account for a normal number of fluxes it means you should have 6, 7, slack picks, but every other pick should, ideally, fit your plan because it will need to go into your codex.
Once you have a codex you can now join the gauntlet for your specific draft. You will only play against other players that are using a chaos brawl codex themselves, Aether Summon doesn't use bots for the duels, only for the draft portion of playground brawls.
Additionally you will only play against other players that are:
- in the same type of gauntlet as you (
playground,only owner,competitive) - have the same track record for their chaos brawl - meaning, if you loose your first match, you're 0-1, and for your second you will only play against other players that are 0-1 too - this record is per chaos-brawl, every chaos-brawl you join starts at 0-0. You can join as many chaos brawls as you want but they have a 30 day validity. If you don't play your gauntlet in those 30 days your chaos brawl is closed with whatever record it has.