Common Terms

This is a guide for some cipher-specific and general card game terms. It doesn’t include basic terms that you have to know to play the game, such as Bond, Orb, and Main Character.

**Aggro:** A deck archetype that revolves around killing the opponent quickly. Typically has low cost deploys for the early game and a Main Character that can help them hit, deploy more low costs, or has some other way of pressuring the opponent. Will often ignore the board and just attack the opponent’s Main Character.

**Big Yellow:** A type of yellow deck that wants to ramp a lot and use Yellow’s bond skills and other bond-centric abilities to get a large number of bonds, then deploy a bunch of high deployment yellow units (typically using B10 Leif’s skill “Unifier of Thracia”) and then pick up a bunch of their bonds (typically using B08 Seliph’s skill “Holy War’s End”).

**Bridge:** A promotion for a Main Character that isn’t the Main Promo.

**Control:** A deck archetype that tries to control the pace of the game by clearing the opponent’s board and generating more value than the opponent to win the long game. They typically won’t attack the opponent’s Main Character at all until late game when they have already established a strong board and hand size.

**Counterpick:** A deck that has an extremely strong matchup into another deck that is played just to beat that other deck. Also used as a verb- "He counterpicked me."

**Cycle:** Usually refers to discarding a card to draw a card.

**Heal:** Usually means adding a card from your Retreat Area to your hand, can also refer to adding a card to your orbs (though this will usually be specified as “healing an orb”).

**Kete (noun):** Short for Manaketes, more specifically cards with the “Dragonkin Emblem” support skill.

**Kete (verb):** When you support a unit with “Dragonkin Emblem” and use it to add a card to your bond area (see “ramp”).

**Main Promo:** The intended promotion for a deck’s Main Character.

**Meta:** The decks that are currently considered the strongest and most popular make up the meta.

**Midrange:** A deck archetype that is a bit slower than aggro, but not as slow as control. Typically wants to clear the opponent’s board and then use whatever remaining attacks to hit the opponent’s Main Character. Midrange Main Characters usually generate some kind of value so they have units to deploy throughout the game.

**Mill**: Getting cards from the deck to the Retreat Area. Usually useful in Cipher since many skills deal with getting cards from the Retreat Area.

**Ramp:** Anything that increases your number of bonds outside of your one bond per turn. Often used in slower decks to get to high-value plays faster or hit some bond threshold, and in aggro decks that want to deploy more stuff faster than the opponent can keep up with.

**Sack:** To beat someone one-sidedly, usually by rushing them down with an aggro deck.

**Splash:** Including cards of a different color as your Main Character in your deck.

**Synergy:** When cards work well together or compliment each other.

**Tech/Tech Card**: A card or cards that are included in a deck to counter a specific thing, usually a weakness of the deck they are put in or a strong meta threat. For example, a slow deck like Deirdre hates having her cards discarded by faster purple decks like Roy, so she might include a Robin 1 that when discarded heals an orb.

**Tempo:** Deploying units via the effect of skills. It is called tempo because deploying multiple units a turn typically speeds up the game.

**Top Deck:** When a card that is extremely beneficial to the current game state is drawn blindly.

**Value:** A broad term that generally boils down to “acquiring cards for a cost”. For example, a card is said to “generate value” if it draws you a card with a certain condition, such as flipping a bond face-down. Value doesn’t have to be just cards in hand though- getting cards into your bonds is also valuable depending on the deck, like maybe you have the ability to add cards from your bonds to your hand, or you want to deploy a high deployment cost card sooner.

**Vanilla:** Used to describe a card that doesn't do anything, usually because its skills are not good enough to spend resources on compared to other cards.