Culdcept Begins: Best Cards For Neutral Decks
Ryan has served multiple times on the jury for the Indie Cup awards, and has mentored many emerging writers in the games industry. He has covered some of the biggest releases of recent years, including leading the site's coverage of Baldur's Gate 3, Dragon's Dogma 2, and plenty of other massive RPGs.
Every element in Culdcept Begins asks for commitment, and that commitment comes with a cost. Sooner or later a Fire deck draws a body it can't deploy, or a Water deck meets a job its colour handles poorly. Neutral cards patch both problems.
They deploy on any land without penalty, and their effects fire the same whatever element you've built around, which makes them a toolkit worth raiding rather than an archetype of their own. The best of them handle the economy and removal a committed deck often lacks. Here is why they belong in almost every book, and the specific cards to reach for.
Why Every Culdcept Deck Should Run Neutral Cards
Two traits make a Neutral card universal. The first is deployment. A Neutral creature ignores land restrictions completely, so it plugs the gap on any turn when your hand and the open square refuse to cooperate. The second is independence. A Neutral ability leans on raw stats or a triggered effect instead of elemental synergy, so it performs identically in a Fire book or a Water one.
There is a trade-off, though: Most Neutral creatures skip the land HP bonus that lets an elemental wall balloon past 100 HP on high-level territory, so they rarely make the best long-term anchors. Treat them as role-players and insurance instead. Let your chosen element hold the fortresses, and lean on Neutral cards for the jobs it covers badly, which usually means economy and removal a single colour struggles to supply.
The Best Neutral Cards To Add To Any Deck
The picks below cover the roles a committed deck most often needs help filling, from economy through to a defensive anchor that still scales. Costs are shown in G, and every card here performs at full strength no matter which element surrounds it.
| Card | Cost | Role | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Golden Totem | G0 | Economy | Its territory ability pays out G400 before self-destructing, bankrolling an early land grab or a summon your colour couldn't otherwise afford. |
| Bandit | G20 | Economy | Skims magic straight from an opponent's reserves on every successful attack, turning aggression into steady income. |
| Beacon Tower | G50 | Development | Has a territory ability that chains development across your board, ideal for any deck planning to build its lands high. |
| Goblin | G0 | Tempo | A free body for claiming territory early while your elemental creatures wait in hand for the right land. |
| Statue | G10 | Defence | A 50 HP wall for a very cheap price. |
| Wonder Wall | G10 + Discard | Defence | Shrugs off elemental attacks outright, handy tech against an enemy deck leaning hard on one colour. |
| Lunatic Hare | G20 | Disruption | Swaps an enemy's base attack and HP, gutting a glass cannon or flipping a fat wall into a pushover. |
| Giant Spider | G30 | Disruption | Paralyses on a successful hit for a bargain cost, stalling a dangerous attacker on the cheap. |
| Samurai | G50 | Removal | Instant death against any creature with a base attack of 40 or more at a 70% rate, answering heavy hitters. |
| Cleric | G50 | Removal | Guaranteed instant death for enemy neutrals makes it a precision sniper for the game's trickiest foes, ignoring HP entirely. |
| Tyrannosaurus | G60 + Discard | Anchor | Can't use armour or scrolls, but is a fantastically powerful and quite easy monster to summon. |
Two of these cards reward a closer look. Giant Spider is a defensive beast, letting you disable the toughest enemy cards (granted they don't snipe you with an Attacks First), opening them up for easy elimination. Cleric functions as an offensive mirror. Because its instant death ignores HP, it snipes exactly the expensive anchors that a stat-based attack can never crack, and it only sharpens as a game drags into its bloated late stages and the enemy fields some powerful neutrals.
Beyond those two, the guiding principle is restraint. Neutral cards smooth out your worst draws and hand you tools your element lacks, so a handful woven into a committed book does more than a deck stuffed with them. Work out which roles your colour plays poorly and fill those gaps with the cards above; your element can be trusted with the rest.
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