Official Rulebook

[Shadow Era]

A tome long forgotten, shrouded in mystery and rumor, has finally been recovered. Behold! The official Shadow Era rulebook!

[Fortana]

Nice!

[Nizaris]

It looks amazing.

*btw, did you mean tome instead of tomb?

[Bayushi]

Cool! Is it downloadable?

[Direwulven]

It looks amazing.

*btw, did you mean tome instead of tomb?

A tomb containing a tome possibly.

Nice work. Any physical book available for pre-order?

[Shadow Era]

A tomb containing a tome possibly.

That's exactly what I meant.

If you click on the image you can download the pdf. It's also linked on the official rules page.

[Roo]

Now when are we getting new cards?!
Only kidding, looks great.

[Awer]

The rulebook is certainly a very welcome resource, and I've read through it. And as can be expected, I also came up with some things that could maybe be considered for future versions:

-Make a plain text or .html version too, since generally they're more "user-friendly" to read in the browser.

-Mention the version number of the rules at the beginning of the document. (It's only in the filename at the moment.)

-When listing the different classes, display the graphical icon for each class. (Currently, it's actually difficult to find them all at a single place.)

-Explain the concepts of "controller" and "owner", and the differences between them. If needed, use "in-game-examples" involving cards like Dimension Ripper and Retreat.

-Explain the concepts of "friendly" and "opposing". These will matter especially in the upcoming team-games. (The difference between "friendly" allies and allies you "control" is notable.)

-Explain the concept of "originator" (or whatever it's really called). By this I mean that some actions that the player takes are considered to "originate" from their hero, while others "originate" from allies. For example, when a player kills Deathbone with Fireball, then that player's hero is the "killer". On the other hand, if Deathbone is killed due to damage from being poisoned by a Cobra Demon, then it's the Cobra Demon who's the "killer". Also, if the ally isn't in play anymore, then the "originator" switches to the hero whose owner controlled the ally. (If that's the way it happens.)

-The card "anatomy" section doesn't make note of the rarity and set-information of a card. Though these are not relevant to play the game, it might be good to explain their meaning somewhere too.

-On several occasions, the rulebook mentions the graveyard. Sometimes a card goes to "the graveyard", sometimes to "your graveyard" etc. If a card always goes to its owner's graveyard, then the mentioned instances could be rephrased to reflect that aspect.

-The "preparing for the physical game"-section is not as detailed as it could be. For example, players might also need ways to keep track of the maximum health of heroes and allies, extra resources due to "Stop, Thief", indicators for "which ally is responsible for what" etc. Also, the order in which some actions are performed might become relevant later in the game, in certain myriad situations - though I can't say that for certain, since my understanding about some aspects of the game isn't clear enough yet (I'll work on that). The point is that if players of the physical version aren't keeping track of things meticulously enough, they might end up in a situation where they would need to know something related to what happened several turns ago, but they've forgotten it "by now".

-Is the definition of "Protector" precise and up-to-date? It used to be something like this: "When you control an ally with Protector, your opponents may not target allies you control that do not have the Protector ability."

-To my understanding, players can play against the AI with a 30-card deck. If this feature is not bound to be removed, they might make a note of it in the rulebook.

(-I might write more later...)

Nice work. Any physical book available for pre-order?

If MTG is any indicator, these kind of documents get updated periodically, so a physical version might get outdated at some point. (Though it might not matter for collectors .)

Lol, the last pic is from "300"

Hopefully it's something they can't get sued for...

[Awer]

... the order in which some actions are performed might become relevant later in the game, in certain myriad situations ...

For example, there might be a situation where, due to various events, a Deathbone has been poisoned by a Cobra Demon and has been set ablaze by a Molten Destroyer, and that Deathbone is at 2 health when his controller's turn begins.

Ablaze and poison's DOTs will be resolved in the order they were played. So, if your ally was poisoned first and then ablazed afterwards, it will take the poison tick first followed by the ablazed tick.

Above I've quoted the kind of myriad situation I was referring to previously that players of the physical version have to "keep an eye on". In my opinion, a comprehensive rulebook (if the current rulebook is supposed to be one) should give such detailed instructions that players are able to handle these kind of situations and prepare for them advance, so that during the game, they know "what to keep track of".

I presume that the readers are aware of what the comprehensive rules for MTG look like. As far as I understand, even if the current Shadow Era rulebook isn't "supposed" to be so comprehensive, sooner or later a rulebook of such level of detail should ideally be made available, since it's possible that people who have never played any kind of card game before would walk into a game store, buy Shadow Era packs, go home and try to play the game. Without comprehensive rules, they'll encounter terminology and possibly situations that aren't covered by the rules. Even judges in physical tournaments might have trouble making rulings without detailed material to help them. And when new cards are introduced to the game, it's likely that the chances for "myriad" situations will increase.

With all that said, I'd like to emphasize that even though my writing style might tend to look like complaintive, what I'm really trying to do is to make the game better for everyone. I have the best interests of Shadow Era at heart, and that is the driving force that motivates me to point out areas where I believe improvement might be possible to achieve.

[Zhou86]

Lol, the last pic is from "300"