There’s a lot of recent visitors to the Achroma world, so I thought I’d give a rundown of what you might consider buying if you were looking at getting in to this beautiful card game.

First up, some basics:

There are two types of decks or palettes in Achroma: canvas format and heroes format. Canvas is the standard format and has decks of 30 cards, while heroes decks are 40 cards and are a bit of a wild west, with far fewer deck building restritions.

When building a palette, you need to pick a realm. All cards in your palette have to come from that realm, or be realmless. You can tell which realm a card is from by the symbol in the top left corner. Cards with no fixed realm have no symbol, and can be included in any deck. Below are cards from the 4 realms and one realmless card.

Every realm initially had a release, called Chapter 1, containing 60 unique cards. Those 60 cards are split into 3 factions with about 20 cards each. Chapter 1 concluded with a box of expansion cards titled The Rise of the Realm Runners, which added 28 cards to each realm. Coming soon is Chapter 2, meaning we’ll have another 60 more cards for each realm in due course.

So what should you buy to get started?

Level 1: Getting started: First Edition boxes, £24-£28
The simplest way to dip your toes into the achromatic waters is to buy a single (or a couple of) First Edition Box. These boxes cost £24-£28 depending on the release, and contain 2 pre-constructed decks randomly chosen from the 6 for the Chaper. They will be from the same realm but different factions, and this gives you something immediately playable. I’ve bought a number of these for friends as gifts as not only are they a great way into the game, but they are stunningly presented.

If you want to play some games of Achroma, this is all you need to get started.

These editions are limited to only 1200 boxes, so the earliest releases have now sold out, but you can still get all the cards from these boxes if you buy the unlimited palettes (more on this later). At the time of writing, you can choose between The Fall of Flutterby, The Warriors of Wishwell, or you can pre-order A Conjuring at Curdle Cove. Follow the links in the text to pick your favourite.

One of the curiousities of these boxes is the decks you get are random. This makes them a fun thing to open, but does make it trickier if you want to collect and build decks with all the cards, and that brings us on to level 2.

Level 2: Complete Chapter 1 for any realm: £60-£80
You could keep buying First edition collections of course, and end up with a nice range of decks to play against each other. But I would recommend investing in completing the realm for a Chapter, meaning 60 unique cards that you can use to build custom decks. There’s two ways to do this:

1. Buy a First Edition collection, which guarantees you all 6 preconstructed decks for that realm.
2. Buy all 3 faction boxes from the Unlimited edition

At present since the first two releases, The Curse of Curdle Hill and The Siege of Draco Temple, have sold out of First Editions, if you want these cards you have to buy the Unlimited Editions. For The Fall of Flutterby and The Warriors of Wishwell you can choose either, and for A Conjuring at Curdle Cove you have to go for First Edition (since the Unlimited editions haven’t been released yet).

The key differences between these editions are:

1. Unlimited collections contain 120 cards as 3 canvas decks of 30 cards with 10 extra cards each to ensure you have all the cards from the release. First Edition collections contain 180 cards as 6 canvas decks. Both options give you all the cards you need to make any single deck you like, as deck restrictions prevent you from including more than 2 copies of any one card. The First Edition just gives you more repeats of some cards to allow you to have 6 palettes on the go right out of the box.
2. There were a few changes to cards after release, which are reflected in the Unlimited Editions. These are minor, but the Unlimited Editions are the most up-to-date wordings on all cards.
3. The Unlimited editions are slightly cheaper (£60 compared to £72-£80).
4. You can buy the Unlimited Editions faction by faction (a third of a Chapter) for £20 each, and pick up the missing ones whenever you like later on. This is a nice option if you want to pick and choose your factions, or aren’t ready to fully commit yet.

Unlimited Editions are available here.
First Edition Collections are available here.

It’s worth noting that The Curse of Curdle Hill and A Conjuring at Curdle Cove are both from the same realm. Therefore if you want to truly complete this realm, you’ll need to purchase both: an Unlimited set for the former, and a First Edition collection for the latter, for a total of £140.

A great addition to your collection, and especially if you decide to go for The Siege of Draco Temple, is Dexter, Master of Dragons. This is a beautiful card made for a beautiful reason. Please click the link to read more if you haven’t come across it already. All proceeds from sales of this card go to the Alice’s Arc children’s cancer charity.

Level 3: A complete realm: £100-£120
To fully complete the realm of your choice, you can expand your collection with the Rise of the Realm Runners expansion. Each realm has two decks containing a total of 28 different new cards for that realm. These are not playable decks, they are purely for expanding your collections and providing a huge increase in palette building options.

The decks are £20 each, and contain almost all the cards for their realm, with just 1 realm card being unique to each deck. However, both contain 1 copy only of many cards, so you would need both decks to give you access to the full range of possibilities in making custom palettes, for a total of £40. They also each contain several unique realmless cards, which can be played in any palette, including 1 character in each deck. To work out which decks you need for which realm, here’s a handy table:

The Curse of Curdle Hill: Phisto and Haruto
The Siege of Draco Temple: Ray and Mutans
The Fall of Flutterby: Yana and Hod
The Warriors of Wishwell: Niimi and Hissano

To buy these expansions, click here.

As before, if you want to complete the realm from which The Curse of Curdle Hill and A Conjuring at Curdle Cove come from (known as Salum Planum), you’d need both these releases as they share a realm.

Level 4: All the realms from Chapter 1: £240
To fully throw the door open to playing a wide range of achroma, why not get all the cards from Chapter 1? I would recommend the best way to do this would be to buy all the Unlimited Edition boxes (12 in total), as then all your cards come from the same releases and will have matching boxes, plus it’s slightly cheaper. However there’s nothing wrong with buying the First Edition of The Fall of Flutterby and The Warriors of Wishwell, especially if you’re a collector and the limited print run appeals to you.

As before, Unlimited Editions are available here and First Edition Collections are available here.

Level 5: All the cards: £508
You’ve decided to jump in with both feet and get everything. This means you’ll be getting:
A complete set of Unlimited Editions from chapter 1 (12 boxes), £240
The complete Rise of the Realm Runners expansion box, containing all 8 expansion decks, £160
The First Edition Collection for A Conjuring at Curdle Cove, £80
Dexter, Master of Dragons, £10
2 copies of each of the 3 shard cards, £18

The last cards on that list are playable cards that give you “shards” for use on the achroma app. You’ll need 2 copies of each if you want to give yourself access to literally every possible deck you could make in Achroma.

Welcome to Achroma.

I hope this article has been useful to new folks looking at getting in to the game. All the prices were correct on the Achroma store website as of the date of publishing. However, if you want to save a bit of money, you can use the exclusive discount code “dracotemple” at checkout to save 10% on all orders. This means you could save £2 on each £20 Unlimited box, or almost £50 on the full collection.

If you follow any of the links in this page, other than for the charity card Dexter, you should have this code automatically added to your basket.

Thanks for reading. More spoiler review articles coming soon.