Before starting a game of Blades of Ash: Clash of Legends, players must complete several preliminary steps.

During this phase, players select their faction, choose the heroes that will participate in the skirmish, and build their action deck. These steps determine the resources available to each player during the game.

Faction, Heroes, and Action Deck Selection

Before starting to play, each player must select a faction. Selecting this faction will restrict the action cards available for building the action deck and the selection of heroes: the available action cards and heroes will be those belonging to said faction and, also, the action cards and heroes from the Mercenaries faction (which will always be available to combine with all factions).

Once the faction selection is made, each player selects 5 heroes to form their hero list. The only restriction for selecting them is their faction restriction (all must belong to the same faction or to the Mercenaries faction).

Likewise, action cards must also be selected to form an action deck of at least 30 cards. In addition to respecting the faction limitation when selecting these action cards, it must also be taken into account that for each action card there can only be a maximum of 2 identical copies in each action deck.

The selection of action cards and heroes must be done privately, without players having knowledge of their rivals' choices.

Hero Draft

Although each player starts with a selection of 5 heroes, Espadas de Ceniza: Clash of Legends matches are played in 3 versus 3 skirmishes.

In this phase, each player reveals the 5 heroes from their hero list to their rival. Once the rival has been able to read and check each of them, each player hides the 5 heroes again. Without the rival knowing which ones they are, privately, each player chooses 3 of their heroes to compete in the skirmish and discards the other two.

Initial Hand Draw

Both players shuffle their action deck and draw the first 5 action cards to form their initial hand.

Each player may now discard any number of action cards from their hand, placing them face up and visible in the graveyard, and draw as many as they have discarded. This discard and draw of action cards can only be done once and all action cards that are to be replaced must be discarded before drawing the new cards.

Each player will form with the discarded action cards a pile visible to both players where they will place, face up, visible and in order, the action cards they use or discard. We will call this pile the graveyard. Any player may look at, at any time, the action cards in their graveyard or their rival's graveyard.

Although you start with an initial hand of 5 action cards, the maximum number of action cards you can have in your hand is 7. At the end of each singular combat you will have to discard as many action cards as necessary to meet this condition.

Once all preparations are made, with the heroes who will compete in the skirmish selected and the initial hand prepared, it is time to play the skirmish.

Blades of Ash: Clash of Legends represents a small skirmish between champions. This skirmish is divided into battle rounds and these rounds, in turn, into singular combats. Let's see how each of these phases is divided and completed.

Determine Attacker and Defender

At the beginning of the first battle round, players will randomly determine who is the attacking player and who is the defending player (for example, by each rolling a die and seeing who gets a higher number). The winner of the draw may decide to be the attacker or the defender.

Starting from the second battle round, this will not be determined randomly, but will alternate: the player who was the attacking player in the previous round will now be the defending player and the player who was the defending player will now be the attacking player.

The Clashes

Once the pairings are made, we proceed to the resolution of the Clashes.

We will call active heroes the heroes participating in the Clash we are resolving at that moment and inactive heroes the rest.

Starting with the first one and in order, to resolve each of the Clashes we will have to perform the following subphases:

Prepare Action Dice

Each player has a reserve of Action Dice with which they can pay for cards and abilities. The reserve consists of 5 colored dice as a base, and this amount can be modified by abilities or other effects from heroes or cards.

Starting with the attacking player, each player rolls their reserve of Action Dice.

Once the first roll is made, the player can decide to reroll any number of dice, keeping in mind that they must keep at least 1 of the results (if they rolled 5 dice they can reroll 1, 2, 3 or 4 dice, but not all 5). This reroll must be done at once: choose how many dice to reroll and roll them all at once.

If due to some effect or ability the player could make more rerolls, these rerolls will be done in the same way as the first reroll, but keeping in mind that in each reroll they must keep, at minimum, 1 more die than in the previous one.

After making these rolls each player will keep their dice as a reserve of Prepared Dice. We will also say that we have prepared our Action Dice.

Determine Initiative

Both players roll 1d6 and add the result to their active hero's Agility, also taking into account the different modifiers, abilities or effects that may influence. The player with the highest sum will be the player with Initiative for this Clash.

In case of a tie, the player whose hero has more Agility will win the combat's Initiative. If there is still a tie, the attacking player will win Initiative.

Counter Cleanup

Each player removes from their active hero 1 counter of each type they have on them. This way, if a hero had, for example, 1 bane counter: Poisoned and 2 boon counters: Swiftness they will be left with 1 boon counter: Swiftness and no bane counter: Poisoned.

Action Resolution

Once both players have prepared their Action Dice, Initiative has been determined and the corresponding counters have been cleaned, action resolution phase will begin (resolution of cards and abilities), the phase in which active heroes will try to knock their rivals out of combat and protect their allies alternating activations.

An action is playing a card from hand, activating a hero or equipment ability or using the special action Draw a Card.

An Activation is the moment when a player begins performing actions. During their activation, only that player may play normal cards and abilities. The opposing player may only take actions if the card or ability they wish to play is a Reaction or explicitly states that it can be played at that time (for example, within a specific timing window).

Starting with the player with Initiative and alternating, players will take turns of activation to have the opportunity to pay the cost of an ability or card and resolve its effects, play actions. To pay the cost of said ability or card they will have to spend dice from their reserve of Prepared Dice so that they equal in number and color the cost of the ability or card they want to play and, then, its effects will be resolved.

Dice used to pay costs are considered Spent Dice.

In this way, players alternate activations, resolving actions until neither can, or wants to, resolve more actions. Even if one of the heroes is knocked out of combat, the player whose hero is still active can continue spending their Prepared Dice to play cards or abilities, with the exception that they cannot play those that directly target the paired rival hero.

Some cards or abilities can be played reacting to the Clash situations. If any action or other effect is played or must be resolved at the same time as another, the last effect to come into play is resolved first (effects, abilities and cards are put in a resolution stack and the stack is resolved from last to first). Actions that have been put on the stack are resolved even if their caster has been knocked out of combat before they begin to resolve.

Some passive class or hero abilities, as well as certain cards with persistent effects, may have effects that trigger when a condition is met or an event occurs. These effects are Triggered Actions and are placed on the stack and resolved in the same way, except they do so automatically.

If two actions or effects want to be put on the stack simultaneously, the player whose turn is being played will choose in what order they are put and when an action or effect begins to resolve, all its text will be resolved, in order, before another can begin to resolve or another action or effect can be put on the resolution stack.

Resolving Attacks

Some cards and hero abilities can deal damage to other heroes. We call these actions attacks.

To resolve attacks, in addition to taking into account their description, you must take into account other characteristics of both the action itself and the attributes of the rival hero, in a closely related way.

As we can see in the hero card description, they have the attributes Will and Armor that represent strength against magical and physical attacks, respectively.

Translating this to the game rules, you must look at whether the damage action or attack is a magical attack or physical attack. If it is a magical attack we subtract from the damage specified in the action description the Will of the hero receiving the attack. If it is a physical attack we subtract the Armor of the hero receiving the attack.

This mechanism is part of the base damage calculation of the attack and is not considered a damage reduction. If an effect states that the damage of an attack cannot be reduced, that effect does not apply to this base calculation.