SPAM card game card abilities — Effects and Cooldowns

The action system

The supplied beginner guide describes a four-card board with no hand or draw sequence. Every ability that is ready can be used during your turn, and you can choose the order of those casts. The central questions are therefore what is ready, what it affects, and what later actions benefit from using it first.

After use, the cooldown returns to its full value and decreases at the end of each of your turns. The guide uses cooldown 1 for an every-turn ability and cooldown 3 for an every-third-turn ability. Those examples explain the system; they do not assign a cooldown to a card whose own ability sheet was not supplied.

Separate damage from setup

Abilities may build element points rather than simply dealing immediate damage. The beginner guide says each point adds 10% to damage of the corresponding element and that the bonus applies immediately. An action that adds points can therefore change the outcome of a later attack in the same turn.

The deck-building excerpt identifies the six Spirits as engines that add one point every turn. It also describes Mistress of Tints as adding three in each element every three turns. These are source examples of recurring setup, not a complete catalog of every ability or an assurance of current competitive strength.

Identify the actual attack element

Resistance is checked against the ability's element rather than the card's displayed element. A unit's label can be useful for finding it in a directory, but it does not replace reading each action. Ether damage is described by the beginner guide as bypassing resistances, a separate mechanic from an ordinary Water or Light attack.

Sky Dragon illustrates the difference especially clearly. The directory identifies it as a Light card, while Patch 1.21 gives it a Nature attack hitting all opposing cards and a Nature bonus of four. That later official description must take precedence over an older tornado-breath reference.

A documented ability revision

Patch 1.21 is dated October 9, 2026, and its Sky Dragon entry is supplied in French. In English, the new effect attacks every enemy card for 30 Nature and adds four Nature bonus; the removed ability is the tornado-breath action. The excerpt does not give the replacement's cooldown, so no cooldown is asserted here.

Patch 1.23, dated October 15, changes Glacial Laser on Sovereign of the Ether Falls from 10 to 10–15 Water. A range must be preserved as a range rather than replaced by a guessed average. This change alone does not establish that card's complete rotation or damage per turn.

Talents are a separate layer

A talent is a chosen bonus, with one active from the card's three available options. It may affect an ability's critical chance, alter starting element points, or trigger from an event. The talent guide says the opponent cannot see the selected talent, which limits certainty when interpreting an enemy's future actions.

Counter, with a capital C, is one particular talent documented in the supplied counter excerpt. Once per game, when its card takes damage while below 25% HP, it retaliates by using all its abilities on the attacker. This is different from asking which opponent or strategy counters a card in a matchup.

Event triggers need exact wording

An event-triggered talent cannot be evaluated by treating it as a guaranteed extra cast every turn. Counter requires its stated health and damage conditions, while Ultimate Reset requires the card's attack to defeat an enemy. Whether those events happen depends on the actual sequence of a match.

Patch 1.23 also fixes cards killed at the start of a turn by poison or Fatigue incorrectly returning through HP-restoring effects. For a card such as Golden Boar, whose options include Vital Surge, that fix matters to interpreting a low-health recovery plan. Healing at a threshold should not be described as resurrection after death.

Upgrades and cooldown effects

The Tox Shop supplies passives that can modify how cards perform during a match. The beginner guide places the shop on even turns and describes one purchase from three offers. That is a different decision layer from choosing the card's pre-match talent.

Some talent descriptions reference Temporality, which decreases cooldowns by one, and Eternity, which increases them by one. A mechanics-based inference is that these effects can alter the spacing of later actions. Their value on a specific card still requires that card's actual cooldowns and an accurate account of the triggering condition.

How to read an incomplete profile

The supplied Flesh-Melding Chimera entry gives identity fields and the talent index supplies its talent options. Neither excerpt supplies the card's complete active ability text. Its Water label therefore cannot establish whether every action deals Water damage, whether it hits several targets, or how often it attacks.

The same caution applies to unlabeled numbers in directory rows. A hexagon value can be identified as income through the beginner guide, but a trailing letter or list number is not an ability statistic. Missing mechanics remain Pending confirmation instead of being reconstructed from a name or illustration.

Destruction and protection

Patch 1.23 says an attack that destroys a card counts as a fatal hit for Tenacity. The card stays at one HP unless it was already there, with the notes naming Black Widow and Engulfment as examples. This interaction shows why a short effect label can miss a later protection rule and why versioned descriptions matter when predicting whether an action removes a target.

Starting passives can be documented elsewhere

A sparse card directory is not the only source of a card's mechanics in the supplied material. The Tox directories explicitly identify Flesh-Melding Chimera as a starting Mimicry and Vampirism carrier. Those passive definitions can be documented even though its complete active ability sheet remains absent.

Mimicry generates one matching point when the opponent generates one or more of that element, while Vampirism restores a percentage of damage dealt to the target. The directories do not specify Chimera's starting Vampirism tier, and they differ on whether the general ladder includes a Legendary tier. That separates a known passive association from an unknown starting amount.

Sources and version scope

This explanation uses the supplied card directory, beginner guide, talent index, Counter definition and official Patch 1.21–1.25 excerpts. Detailed talent pages identify a v1.20 extraction from October 7, 2026; later patch changes are identified above rather than silently merged into that old snapshot. For specific observations, continue to Sky Dragon or the card directory guide.