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Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://pcmtg.mintlify.app/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

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3.1 Card Typologies & Strategic Purpose

In PCMTG, a player’s deck is a curated portfolio of their Quadrant’s specific humor, grievances, and political weapons. The cards are divided into three distinct typologies, each serving a highly specific mechanical purpose within the 60-second Core Minigame.

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1. Meme Cards (The Base Argument)

  • Function: Meme Cards are the foundational pillar of a player’s turn. You must play exactly one Meme Card per round. They represent the broad, sweeping ideological argument a player is making in response to the News Stub.
  • Vector Shift: They apply massive, blunt-force shifts to the spatial coordinates. For example, the “Cope and Seethe” card applies a strict -3 to the X and Y axes.
  • Rarity: Meme Cards scale based on rarity (Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Legendary). A Legendary card acts as a multiplier, amplifying mathematical weight and generating significantly more GIPs upon victory.
  • Concealment: Played face-down to ensure the esoteric math remains hidden until the resolution phase.

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2. Item Cards (The Modifiers)

  • Function: Item Cards are the scalpel, representing hyper-specific cultural touchstones and providing surgical coordinate tweaks.
  • Economy Sink: Playing an Item Card is strictly optional. If deployed, players must spend their native currency (e.g., spending Pronouns or Monke) to cover the cost, forcing a choice between winning a hand and long-term economic stability.
  • Melted Archetypes: To maintain backend balance, the item economy uses a “melted” archetype system. A card providing a base vector shift of (2,2,0) costing $20 renders dynamically based on who holds it:
    • AuthRight: “Whataboutism”
    • AuthLeft: “Bread Line”
    • LibLeft: “Purple Hair Dye”
    • LibRight: “Silver Ingot”

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3. Policy Cards (The Rule Benders)

  • Function: Policy Cards are the rarest assets. They do not shift vectors; they execute a global script that supersedes standard game rules and fundamentally alters the physics of the minigame.
  • Visibility: Because they alter the rules of engagement, Policy Cards are always played face-up.
  • Examples: An AuthRight “Defense Production Act” completely freezes the vertical Auth/Lib axis for all players, while an AuthLeft “Centralized Resource Allocation” waives currency costs but consumes every card played.

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3.2 Player Progression & The Hidden ELO System

Progression is not a linear grind; a player’s account reflects their strategic choices, market acumen, and ideological behavior.

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The Hidden ELO

  • Mechanics: The core competitive standing is an ELO rating starting at a baseline of 1000. Winning the Euclidean distance calculation yields positive ELO, scaled by table difficulty, while losing slowly drains it.
  • Anti-Meta Enforcement: Raw ELO scores are strictly hidden from the player base to prevent rating inflation, ladder anxiety, and meta-gaming.
  • The Matchmaker: The Cloud Run matchmaking service uses this hidden integer to populate the 4-player Poker Tables, ensuring tactical players are seated with equally ruthless opponents.
  • Utter Humiliation: The ELO system is bound to the Prisoner’s Dilemma; hitting the “Based” button alone inflicts a catastrophic, hidden ELO penalty.

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The Z-Axis Profile & ELO Scalar

  • The Fingerprint: Based on successfully deployed cards, players permanently accumulate points in the eight hidden Z-Axis categories (e.g., HONOR vs. FAITH, PRIDE vs. KARMA).
  • The Scalar: A player’s hidden ELO acts as a scalar multiplier on their Z-Axis stats. The ideological weight of a high-ranked player is mathematically heavier than a lower-ranked player.
  • Public Tracking: If a high-ELO player consistently relies on populist tactics, their account’s “HONOR” stat scales massively, creating a public ideological fingerprint opponents can inspect.