Palworld TCG Card Types Explained
Palworld uses five card types and a handful of numbers that are easy to mix up. This is what each one means, taken from Bushiroad’s Comprehensive Rules.
The five card types
- Pal – the creatures you deploy to your base. They battle and form the core of a deck.
- Structure – deployed to your base for ongoing effects. Pals can be assigned to work at them.
- Gear – fielded to assist your Pals.
- Event – single-use cards that resolve an effect and then go to the graveyard.
- Soul – the cards in your separate 10-card soul deck, used to pay costs.
Power, durability and strike
Power is the damage a Pal deals to other Pals and structures, and the threshold of damage it can absorb before it goes to the graveyard. On a structure the same number is called durability. Strike is a separate number: the damage that Pal deals to a player. A big Pal that trades well in combat is not automatically a fast clock, because those are two different values.
Normal Pals and Lucky Pals
Pals come in two subtypes. A Lucky Pal carries the Lucky Icon, which does nothing while on the board but cancels incoming damage when it is flipped off the top of your deck during a damage check. Deck construction allows at most 8 of them.
Colour, cost and elements
The colours are red, blue, green and purple, shown by the background colour of the cost. Some cards are colorless, and the rules are precise that this means they have no colour assigned rather than having colorless as a colour, which is why they slot into any deck without using up one of your 2 colour slots. Separately, every card has one of nine elements: Neutral, Fire, Water, Grass, Electric, Ground, Ice, Dark or Dragon. Neutral is a real element, not an absence of one.
Work suitability
Pals also carry a work suitability such as Kindling, Electricity, Cooling, Harvesting, Crafting, Collecting, Farming or Transporting, echoing the video game. It is a tag rather than a mechanic on its own: it does nothing until a card’s text refers to it, which the rules mark with corner brackets or quotation marks.