The gameplay in Whispers from the Maze revolves around your Reserve: you’ll be sending scouts to explore the depths of the Underground city, while establishing your camp and building up your resources at the surface.

This set introduces Passive Support Abilities: instead of one-off abilities, some cards now have abilities that can trigger multiple times in Reserve. Most of these abilities give boosts to your Characters in Reserve. If you take the time to trigger them, your Characters will grow stronger, as well as sometimes trigger powerful effects. Each faction has a different passive: keep this in mind during deckbuilding! Yzmir even has some spells that function similarly, gaining additional power from Reserve with Arcane counters.

These passives have a maximum number of counters they can give. A card with an ability that says “up to a max of 3” means that this ability can’t make that card gain its 4th counter. However, this passive ability doesn’t stop the card from gaining additional counters from another source.

Characters with Scout offer you two options when you play them from hand: play them normally, or play them for their cheaper Scout cost. The second option allows you to trigger their [Played from Hand] or [Played from anywhere] abilities, but you will need to send them to Reserve in exchange. Scout Characters give you added flexibility: they can be used similarly to cheap spells in the early game, but also offer powerful stats once you have access to more mana.

Quick note about the rules: when playing a Scout Character, you can choose in which order you resolve the [Played from Hand] / [Played from anywhere] ability or the send to reserve ability. In most cases this doesn’t matter, but for some cards like Swift Jinn, it’s quite relevant!

Augment is a new keyword that allows you to choose a card in play that already has counters, and give it an additional one of the same type. In Whispers from the Maze, there will be many relevant targets: Characters in Reserve that have gained boosts thanks to their passives, boosted Characters in your Expeditions, or the cycle of Landmarks in each faction that gain counters. It’s worth noting that Augment doesn’t work on heroes, however.

Use Subhash or Treyst to quickly put cards in your Reserve, to accelerate their Passive Support abilities and their [Played from Reserve] abilities.

Boost all your Characters with Basira, or activate Atsadi’s ability from the first turn of the game onwards using high mana cost Scout Characters.

Use Fen to set up your Passive Support abilities, or boost your artists with Nevenka to trigger their powerful abilities.

Build around Teija’s boost synergies, or use Rin to perfectly set up your Reserve each turn.

Slow down the game with a combination of Waru’s bureaucrats or Gulrang’s boosted tokens.

Set-up powerful spells with Arcane counters with Afanas, or play the tempo game with Scout Characters using Akesha.