The Necrobinder is a Spireborn lich who fights alongside her left hand: Osty, a permanent minion. Every engine in her 88-card pool converts one resource into another — HP into block, cards into Souls, Souls into summons — and the game's own card data prices each engine in advance.
The summon/soul economy from the kit
The starter kit is Bodyguard (1-cost Basic, Summon 5), Unleash (1-cost Basic: Osty deals damage plus additional damage equal to Osty's current HP), Strike and Defend. The starter relic Bound Phylactery adds a baseline — at the start of your turn, Summon 1. Summons are not stored anywhere; Osty's HP is the resource bar, which is why the pool keeps paying you for spending it: Sacrifice kills him for block equal to double his Max HP, Unleash converts his current HP into bonus damage.
Ten cards carry a Summon value: Invoke 2, Cleanse 3, Dirge 3, Spur 3, Pull Aggro 4, Bodyguard 5, Necro Mastery 5, Afterlife 6, Legion of Bone 6, Reanimate 20. Reanimate's 20 is the ceiling of the whole economy — and it Exhausts to pay for it.
The Soul engine, counted
Souls are tokens: the SOUL card is a 0-cost Skill that draws 2 and Exhausts. Ten Necrobinder cards reference Souls by name; they split into producers and payoffs:
| Role | Cards |
|---|---|
| Produce Souls | Capture Spirit (3 into draw pile), Grave Warden (1), Reave (1), Severance (one each into draw/hand/discard), Seance (transform a draw-pile card), Dirge (X into draw pile, upgraded adds Souls+), Glimpse Beyond (ALL players add 3) |
| Pay off Souls | Devour Life (whenever you play a Soul, Summon 1), Haunt (random enemy loses 6 HP whenever you play a Soul), Soul Storm (+2 damage per Soul in your Exhaust Pile, base 9) |
The producers mostly live in the draw pile; the payoffs key off playing or exhausting them. Soul Storm is the cleanest read of the design: its damage scales with how many Souls have already been spent this combat.
Exhaust-as-payoff identity (counted)
Exactly 13 Necrobinder cards carry the Exhaust keyword, against Ethereal 8, Retain 5 and Eternal 1 across the same 88-card pool. For most characters Exhaust is a cost; here it is frequently the point:
- Dirge (0-cost): Summon 3, then add X Souls into your draw pile — a card that wants to leave so its tokens can stay.
- Wisp (0-cost): gain 1 energy, Exhaust — a battery, not a loss.
- Afterlife / Reanimate: pure Summon payoffs that self-remove to keep the deck from clogging with dead scaling.
- Glimpse Beyond and Legion of Bone are both ALL-players effects — see what multiplayer removes.
The identity: Necrobinder's exhaust pile is a scoreboard. Soul Storm pays per Soul in it; Devour Life triggers as Souls land in it. A card leaving play is often the trigger, not the sacrifice.
Ethereal risk pricing
Eight cards are Ethereal. The pool concentrates the keyword on cheap, aggressive tempo: Defile, Fear (damage + Vulnerable), Enfeebling Touch (Strength down), Parse (draw 3), Defy (block + Weak), Seance, and Demesne — Demesne being the priced one: at the start of your turn, gain 1 energy and draw 1 additional card… if you still hold it. An Ethereal Demesne you don't curve into is a card you paid 3 mana for and never touched. That is the risk premium the game charges for the strongest ramp in the pool.
Seance is the interesting case: Ethereal and a Rare — transform any draw pile card into a Soul before it evaporates. The card is designed to be used on the turn it dies.
Retain synergy
Five Retain cards: Eradicate (0-cost, deal 11 damage X times), Reap (3-cost, 27 damage), Sow (8 to ALL enemies), Sacrifice, Spur. Four of five are attacks or payoffs that want to sit in hand until their turn comes — Retain here means "hold your finisher", and Eradicate at cost 0 with Retain is a persistent X-times damage spell once drawn.
The fifth, Forbidden Grimoire, carries the pool's only Eternal edge — the same keyword StS2 puts on unremovable afflictions like AscendersBane. It is the one Necrobinder card that never leaves the deck, because its effect is deck surgery: "At the end of combat, you may remove a card from your Deck." It is also Ancient rarity, a tier shared across the pool file with cards like Corruption and Apparition.
Enchantment targets that fix the curve
The enchantment system reaches into every deck — the enchantment slot covers the mechanics. For this pool the relevant question is which enchantments repair a 54-cards-at-1-mana curve. The enchantment/card-type pairings answer by type: Attack-only enchantments (Sharp, Corrupted, Instinct, Momentum, Vigorous) narrow onto the 35 attacks; Skill-legal ones (Imbued, Royally Approved) touch the 35 skills; everything else lands anywhere legal. Goopy adds Exhaust and grows Block permanently — a natural fit for a pool that already treats Exhaust as progression. Tezcatara's Ember makes its host cost 0 and grants Eternal — the only enchantment that manufactures the pool's rarest keyword.
What multiplayer removes
Two Necrobinder cards are multiplayer-only: Glimpse Beyond and Legion of Bone — precisely the two ALL-players Soul/Summon effects. Solo, the pool drops to 86; the Soul engine loses its only mass producer (Glimpse Beyond adds 3 Souls to every player's draw pile) but keeps every payoff. In co-op, Legion of Bone hands every player a Summon 6 — the strongest reason the character has to be the table's support player.