How to play The Music Deck, start to finish — objective, cards, deck building, and how a festival battle is won.
Two players each bring a saved track list into a festival battle. Both sides fill active slots with songs, build stacks, and trigger synergies to push a single shared Vibe gauge toward their side. The first player to swing the gauge fully to their side wins.
A track list is built from three card types: Song cards, the core collectible; Artist cards, which buff linked songs; and Special cards — albums, shiny full-art, and legendary cards. Songs can appear as variants — remix, cover, live, acoustic, and more — which stack onto their base song without costing an extra active slot. The battle itself is scored on the Vibe gauge, a single meter that starts at 0 and swings between the two players as the match plays out.
Every card exposes four stats that stacking, synergy, and matchup rules read from during resolution: Popularity (a 1-9 award-tier rating of reach), Intensity (pop, soft, experimental, or hardcore — set by the card's genre or subgenre), and an Advantage / Weakness pair naming genres the card is strong or weak against.
Full frame breakdown with all variant art: Cards — Anatomy.
Cards are printed at four rarity tiers — Legendary, Classic, Banger, and Niche — each with a fixed accent colour independent of genre. Rarity signals collector value and, for some tiers, competitive weight, but a Niche card played well can outscore a Legendary one played badly.
Full tier breakdown with examples: Rarities.
Before battling, players assemble a track list of exactly 60 cards. You can build and name as many track lists as you like, and save deck presets — frozen lineup configurations for different battle contexts — that get validated against your current collection when loaded.
Builder and full spec: Track Lists.
Each turn follows a fixed order: draw, play, resolve effects, then end phase. Stacks, synergies, and matchup modifiers are all applied during the resolve step, and Vibe shifts once at the end of that window based on the turn's outcome.
Fuller visual walkthrough: Battles — Game turns.
A festival battle uses 10 active slots. Multiple cards from the same artist, the same album, or the same song family (a track and its variants) can be stacked into a single slot instead of each taking their own. Each stack scores off its strongest card, and every supplementary stacked card on top adds a +15% bonusto that stack's value — two supplementary cards add +30% total.
On top of stack value, lineups gain bonus from coherent genre synergy, artist- or album-linked stacking, and favourable genre matchups, and lose points for weak matchups or an incoherent genre spread — genres work like a wheel of advantages and weaknesses. All of this nets into a single shift applied to the Vibe gauge each turn.
Stat reference: Battles — Card attributes. Full advantage/weakness matrix per genre: Genres — Associations.
The battle ends the instant either player's side of the Vibe gauge reaches 100% — that player wins on the spot, with no fixed turn count and no waiting for a track list to run out.