The Sorcery Player's Guide

The four-deck box is the way in

The preconstructed box carries one deck per element and needs no deckbuilding. Cardboard Guide puts it around forty to sixty dollars.

Gothic booster boxes ran 209 to 220 dollars on a retailer check dated 2026-09-10, with everything under 180 sold out. Nothing about a booster box teaches you the game faster than the precon box does.

You will build two decks, and neither is optional

A constructed setup is sixty cards in the Spellbook, thirty sites in the Atlas, a ten card Collection, and exactly one Avatar. The Avatar sits outside both deck counts.

Games are best of one, so the Collection does a different job from a Magic sideboard.

Find the game before you buy the cards

Every source in the corpus names the same risk, which is having nobody to play against. A store owner quoted by Collector Arthouse ranked Sorcery last among all trading card games from a retailer's point of view.

Check the official Play Network for a store near you before spending on sealed product.

You draw three sites and three spells

The opening draw is three from the Atlas and three from the Spellbook, kept separate.

The mulligan is three cards total, not three from each deck

You may mulligan up to three cards in any combination across the two hands. Sending back three spells means you keep all three sites.

Cards you mulligan go to the bottom of their own deck, and you redraw from that same deck.

Your opening hand is a larger share of your Atlas than of your Spellbook

Three of sixty is five percent of the Spellbook. Three of thirty is ten percent of the Atlas. Your site draw is twice as representative as your spell draw.

TCG TALK estimates you see roughly fifteen to twenty Spellbook cards across a whole game. Build for the cards you will realistically draw.

The second player gets a look

Competitive play lets the second player look at the top card of one deck and choose to keep it there or send it to the bottom.

Adjacent and nearby are different words

Adjacent means the square a unit stands on plus the four squares orthogonally touching it.

Nearby means the full three by three block centred on that unit, so it includes the diagonals. Cards use both words deliberately.

Sites come in land and water

A site carrying a water threshold symbol is a water site. Everything else is a land site. Several keywords read off that distinction.

Three layers, and the void

Burrowing moves under land sites. Submerge moves under water sites. Voidwalk survives the empty squares.

A unit sitting in a region it cannot legally occupy dies. The void is a hazard rather than scenery.

Connected sites form bodies of water and terrain

Water sites touching each other count as one body of water, and cards read that whole body as a single thing.

Start, Main, End

There is no combat phase. Attacks happen during your Main phase, in whatever order your untapped units allow.

Every site pays you, automatically

At the start of your turn each site you control provides one mana. You never tap a site for mana.

A site you play mid-turn provides its mana immediately. Mana left unspent at end of turn is gone.

Threshold is checked, never spent

Threshold counts the elemental symbols on sites you control. Meeting the requirement consumes nothing.

One fire site lets you cast every one-fire-threshold card in your hand on the same turn, budget permitting.

Only your own sites count

An opponent's site never contributes to your threshold, even when your unit is standing on it.

Attacking means moving there and tapping

A unit taps to attack, and it must reach the target square. Move and Attack is a single action where the movement resolves first.

Defending costs a tap too

A defender taps and moves one square to intervene, and it must already be adjacent to the site it defends.

The defender absorbs the damage in place of the target.

Summoning sickness blocks tapping

A minion that arrived this turn cannot tap, which rules out moving, attacking and tap abilities alike. Charge removes the restriction.

Lance strikes first, then breaks

A lance grants plus one damage and striking first, then it is gone. Two lances give plus two, and both break.

When both fighters carry a lance, they trade normally and both lances break. Lances are artifacts, so a unit may drop them and another may pick them up, once each per turn.

Projectiles travel in a line and hit the first legal thing

Magic Missiles fires three projectiles one at a time in one direction. Units sitting on the caster's own square are ignored.

Where several units share a square you choose which one each projectile hits, so three damage can be split across them.

Snowball collects what it passes

A snowball picks up every unit along its path and stops at the last site. It then deals damage to everything caught equal to how many units it caught.

Whirlwind rotates the board

You choose clockwise or counterclockwise, then every unit and artifact moves that way. It reshapes both armies at once.

Auras sit on the intersection of four sites

A normal aura is cast where four sites meet and affects all four. Wall of Fire is an exception, cast between two sites where you must control one.

Airborne changes who can touch it

Airborne units move and attack to nearby sites, diagonals included, and units without ranged cannot attack them. They can still be defended against, because they have to land to attack.

Death's door comes first

An Avatar reduced to zero life is at death's door. It cannot gain life again and it is immune to damage for the rest of that turn.

The death blow has to be direct

After death's door, damage dealt directly to the Avatar finishes the game. Attacking sites makes the Avatar lose life without dealing it damage, so site attacks can never close.

Hold a direct-damage card for this. A one damage burn spell wins games that a board full of minions cannot.

There is no true aggro, only tempo

TCG TALK argues the aggro corner does not exist here. Charge, Lance and overstated vanilla bodies buy early tempo instead.

Bosstroll costs two with an earth threshold and attacks for three, which is the shape to look for.

Control cannot hold up answers

Interaction on the opponent's turn is Defend and Intercept and very little else. You cannot counter, bounce or sweep in response.

The conversation happens through positioning across turns rather than through responses inside one.

Value trading is the through-line

With so little card draw, the reliable plan is making the opponent spend two cards to answer one of yours. Area effects and tokens are the usual tools.

Strike is how you attack without being hit back

Strike effects let an ally hit without the target hitting back. Whirling Blades moves an ally up to two steps and strikes every enemy along the path.

Reading nearby as adjacent

The diagonals belong to nearby only. Misreading this loses attacks you thought were legal and blocks defences you thought you had.

Walking your own units into a shark

A creature that fights whatever enters its body of water fights your units too. Check the water before you move through it.

Treating Genesis as optional

A Genesis ability triggers whether you want it or not unless the card prints the word may.

Expecting tokens to behave like minions after death

A token that would go to the cemetery is removed from the game instead. Plans that recur your dead minions skip tokens.

Reading Ward as the Magic keyword

Sorcery Ward absorbs one qualifying opposing interaction and then disappears. It taxes nothing.

Piling minions onto one site

Any number of minions may share a site, and the rulebook warns against it. One area effect answers the entire pile.

The corpus

46 transcripts, 226,322 words, pulled with the yt-transcripts toolchain and stored at ~/Projects/_outputs/yt-transcripts/sorcery-contested-realm-eval/.

Rules claims were checked across separate teaching videos before being written down. Where one video contradicted the rulebook walkthroughs, the walkthroughs won.

What a transcript cannot settle

Community video is a good teacher and a poor rulebook. For the printed wording on a specific interaction, read the official December 2025 rulebook, which the companion rules page cites by page number.

One example of the gap: a popular tutorial says a freshly summoned minion "can't do anything". The printed rule is narrower, being that it cannot tap. Moving and attacking both need a tap, so the table result matches while the wording does not.

Prices drift

The sealed-product figures in section 1 come from a retailer check dated 2026-09-10 and will not stay accurate.