Color Synergy

A passive bonus provided by Block cards to adjacent same-color Creatures. Currently under testing.

Purpose

Color Synergy gives Block cards a role beyond pure positional obstruction. Without it, Blocks are easy to overlook in deck building — they block, and that is it. With Color Synergy, running Blocks of a specific element becomes a deliberate strategy: they protect and boost same-element Creatures nearby. Choosing to run few or no Blocks becomes an equally deliberate tradeoff in favor of other approaches.

Previous iterations tied the bonus to Creature-to-Creature adjacency. Those versions were tested and found to create unintuitive clustering incentives with too much calculation overhead at placement time. Sourcing the synergy from Blocks keeps activation discrete and readable on the board.

Rule

A Block card grants +1 ATK and +1 DEF to each orthogonally adjacent Creature card that satisfies all of the following conditions:

• The Creature shares the same element as the Block.
• The Creature is owned by the same player as the Block — both cards are currently flipped toward that player.

This bonus applies during conflict resolution. It does not permanently alter the card's printed stats and is recalculated each time a conflict occurs.

Adjacency

Orthogonal adjacency only: up, down, left, right. Diagonal cells do not count. A Block can simultaneously provide the bonus to up to four Creatures if all four orthogonal neighbors meet the conditions. A Creature adjacent to multiple qualifying Blocks of the same element receives the bonus once per qualifying Block (bonuses stack).

Example

Player 1 controls a Fire Block at C3. Player 1 also controls Fire Creatures at B3 and C4. Both Creatures are orthogonally adjacent to the Block and share its element, so both receive +1 ATK / +1 DEF during any conflict in which those stats are evaluated. A Fire Creature at C5 is not adjacent to the Block and receives no bonus. A Water Creature at C2 is adjacent but does not share the element and receives no bonus.