Plan multi-turn Rites
Each Rite has a beginning cost and a later completion condition. Losses or failed position requirements can interrupt that progress.
✦ Mystics · faction guide
Sacrifice now. Transform what remains.
Mystics bind, sacrifice, exchange, and recover cards while completing three public Rites that unlock increasingly powerful ways to use the Graveyard and the cards in hand.
- Victory
- Run the Gauntlet or complete Ritual
- System
- Three Rites · no tracked resource
- Leaders
- Alchemist · Spirit Walker
At the table
How the Mystics play.
Mystics treat every card zone as part of a larger ritual economy. Cards can be spent, bound, recovered, repeated, or transformed into battle strength while the three Rites create a visible race toward Ritual.
Use sacrifice as fuel
Mystics frequently place cards in the Graveyard deliberately, then use other effects to recover or exploit them.
Grow into new powers
The first completed Rite unlocks Invocation. The second unlocks Transmutation. The third unlocks Convergence and permission to begin the Ritual of Ascendance.
Signature system
The mechanics that define the faction.
The three Rites
Rite of Echoes rewards title planning, Rite of Blood rewards winning without normal battle cards, and Rite of Crossing rewards taking and holding enemy ground.
Invocation
After the first Rite, once per turn when you use an Arcane card, move one card from your Graveyard to your Discard Pile.
Transmutation
After the second Rite, once per turn before battle dice, sacrifice a card from hand and add its deckbuilding value to your battle total.
Victory
How the Mystics win.
Run the Gauntlet
Sacrifice, recovery, and Arcane battle effects can support a direct territorial win.
Ritual of Ascendance
Complete all three public Rites, then begin the Ritual by binding one Arcane card from your Hand, one from your Discard Pile, and one from your Graveyard. Initiate and win a battle while all three remain bound to complete the Ritual and win the game. Losing a battle first interrupts the Ritual.
Faction Leaders
Two ways to lead.
Each Leader uses the same faction card pool and core system, but pushes it toward a different tactical identity.
Sacrifice sequencing and card conversion
Alchemist
“Nothing is fixed. Everything can be transformed.”
The Alchemist replaces the first card deliberately sacrificed from hand through a Rite, Transmutation, or Arcane effect during the turn.
Leader ability
Materia Prima: the first qualifying sacrifice from hand on your turn draws one replacement card; during battle, draw after the battle resolves.
Ritual endurance and protective sacrifice
Spirit Walker
“The spirits remember what the living abandon.”
The Spirit Walker can sacrifice an Arcane card to protect a begun Rite from the first battle-loss interruption of the turn.
Leader ability
Guardians of the Circle: after the first qualifying loss on your turn, sacrifice an Arcane card to keep the Rite from being interrupted.
Archetype and setting
An institution—and a method of power.
Mystics represent experimental scholars, ritual practitioners, and traditions that work with powers only partly understood. They belong to Gauntlet’s early-modern world rather than a separate high-fantasy culture: the Alchemist experiments with matter; the Spirit Walker preserves through invocation.
Visual and archetypal influences: Occult science, laboratories, retorts and formulae, ritual circles, smoke, bone and wood charms, bound objects, partially understood powers, and disciplined sacrifice.
Gauntlet’s setting is still being developed. The six factions are institutions within a broadly shared civilization, not fixed nations or isolated cultures.
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