Warbandry Lexicon

Warbandry · for everyone

Lexicon

The words we use, and what each one means exactly. The last section separates four pairs of terms that are easy to run together, and where running them together changes what is true.

The collection

What you own

Creature
One entry of the roster, and the thing you own. It is born from one roll and owned from that moment until forever, whatever state it is in. There are fifty-four, and a creature carries its own rarity.
Roll
Every 1,000 coins ever bought mints one creature. The counter is gross: selling does not undo it. Buy ten thousand, sell everything, buy one thousand more — the eleventh creature is born.
Seed
The number a creature is decoded from. Written once at the roll and never rewritten. Nothing in the system rerolls a creature.
Rarity
Common, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary, mythic. Eighteen creatures per faction, laddered four, four, four, three, two, one.
Trait
An optional modifier on a single stat, rolled separately from the creature. Roughly half of all creatures carry none.
Faction
The Order, the Pact, the Wilds. Eighteen creatures each.

States and the market

What you can do with it

Warband
A frozen set of up to sixteen creatures — sixteen is a ceiling, not a target, and at most six of them can be the same creature. Five more can wait beside them in reserve. Freezing locks 1,000 coins per member inside it, which is what gives it a floor.
Bench
Creatures you own that are not in a warband and not on display. They are not lost and not idle in any sense that costs you anything.
Frozen
In a warband, with its coins locked. One of the three states, alongside display and bench.
Melt
Dissolving a warband. The coins come back; a 2% exit fee is burned, not collected by us.
Floor
members × 1,000 × (1 − melt fee). It reads immutable state only, so it can be computed before you buy and no owner action can change it.
Card
Extracting one creature on its own. A real transaction that moves it out of the warband.
Pin
Free, and display only. It chooses what is shown. It moves nothing and costs nothing.

The game

What happens in a fight

The ring
The cycle the whole duel is built on. Might beats Vitality beats Magic beats Guard beats Speed beats Leadership beats Might. Every way of fighting beats one other and loses to one other.
Corner
One of the six stats, taken as a direction to build toward. A warband that commits to a corner buys a strong position and pays for it against that corner's answer.
Attack
The share of a stat your warband holds above the average line. A stat at the line answers an attack but does not press one — so committing to a shape is what gives a warband its attacks, and refusing to commit leaves it with none.
Battle stats
Might, Guard, Speed, Magic, Vitality, Leadership. Luck is not one of them — it sits outside the duel and only shifts the final roll.
Ability
What a creature does beyond its stats. One at tier 2 or more defines an archetype and never stacks. One at tier 1 reads the opponent or reshapes its own warband, and may never simply add strength.
Signature
A rare's ability. It reads deliberate structure in the warband, never the bare presence of a type, and pays a pile exactly nothing.
Basic synergy
What the game pays for a composition on its own: faction ranks, purity, creature stacks, named recipes, type kinship, breadth. Anyone finds it, and it is worth the same to everyone.
Ability synergy
A creature's ability paying other creatures under a condition. It takes reading to see.
Build
Several synergies assembled into a whole that holds together. Finding the best one is the game, and a build always beats a pile of basic synergies of the same budget.
Recipe
A named set of specific creatures that pays when all of them stand together.
Kinship
What members sharing a type earn — beasts, undead, blades, and six more.
Purity
A warband entirely of one faction.
Tech creature
A creature whose ability reads the opponent's shape. It pays when the read is right and costs when it is wrong, so it belongs in the reserve first: brought in against a warband already on screen, the read never misses.
Reservethe only word for it
The five creatures a warband carries beside its sixteen, hidden from the opponent, that may come in during a match. Five is where it starts, and the bench confirms it. Reserve is the word everywhere it is written down, whatever a table calls it out loud.
Adjustment
The swaps a player makes for one match, three at most, each one a reserve creature replacing a fielded one. The warband it produces has to be legal in the bracket, exactly as the composed one is.
Manual mode
The warband's owner sees the opponent's sixteen after the pairing and sends the adjustment inside a window. Silence plays the base warband, and nothing is forfeited.
Automatic mode
The adjustment is written in advance, as one condition about the opponent and a fixed set of swaps, and the contract applies it at settlement.
Base warband
The sixteen as composed, before any adjustment. It is what the lobby's odds are computed on, and what plays whenever an adjustment is absent or refused.
Adjustment window
The time both players have to send a sealed adjustment. A bracket parameter, one minute to start; at zero the bracket is automatic only.
Prestigerarity score
What a warband is worth in rarity. It is the number a listing shows, and nothing else.

Distinctions

Four pairs that are not the same thing

Each pair below is routinely run together, and each time it is, something true stops being true.

Owning

You own a creature from its roll until forever, in any of the three states. Nothing takes that away.

Keeping

A warband is a particular set held together. Selling one separates its creatures — the bench follows whoever withdraws. Ownership is permanent; a given set of creatures is not.

Carding

Moving one creature out on its own. A real transaction, with everything that implies.

Pinning

Free, and display only. It chooses what is shown and moves nothing.

The collection

The thing you own. It exists from day zero and stands on its own.

The game

Fights are the first mode of play on top of the collection, not the collection's reason to exist.

Prestige

What a warband is worth in rarity — the number a listing shows.

Rating

What ranked play pairs on. Two players of the same rating can field very differently priced warbands, and prestige never decides who meets whom.