A fast head-to-head duel. A guided campaign with friends. One collection of cards built to be great at either table — and then built so you can never be priced out of it.
Forged in Fixed Numbers · Sealed Forever
Every card struck in a single audited run, then the plates are destroyed. No reprints. No power creep. No card sold twice. Serialized cards remember their own history — every battle fought, every hand they've passed through — so the game you play is written into the card forever.
Join the launch list now, then back a qualifying tier the day we go live on Kickstarter — and The First Ember is yours. Struck once for founding backers, never again.
Your cards, your call — no dice, no randomness deciding your fights.
Every game starts with a Warden — your hero, and the heart of your deck. Each Warden carries an always-on Passive quietly working in your favour every turn, and a once-per-game Ultimate: one massive, decisive play you're building toward from the moment the game starts.
Around your Warden, you command a team of creatures — Aetherkin — each with its own attack, health, and keyword abilities that change how a fight actually plays out. Feral creatures strike the instant they hit the table. Overrun creatures punch clean through a blocker and hit the enemy Warden for whatever's left over. Venom means one touch is a death sentence, however tough the target looks on paper. Every card teaches you something new about how to win.
No dice decide your fights. You do.
Don't take our word for it — we built a completely free print-and-play set. Real rules, a real deck, ready to cut out and play tonight, before you spend a cent.
Download the Free Print & Play →Every card carries its own serial number, struck once and sealed forever. Here's an early glimpse of the world you'll collect.
Artwork shown is early AI-generated concept art, used to explore the look and feel of the game. Final cards will feature original artwork commissioned from real artists.
The same cards, either way.
Drop into The Ashen Vale — a guided three-act campaign where your creatures grow, your choices matter, and the story remembers what you did. Gather your table, and go. No full-time DM required.
Pick your Warden, build your deck, and go head-to-head. Fast enough for one more game before anyone has to leave — deep enough that you'll want to.
Here's what makes it different from anything else: it's the same cards, and the same history, either way. Raise a creature through a Saga campaign, then bring it — and everything it survived — straight into a Clash duel. Nothing you build is ever locked to one way of playing.
You've seen how it plays. Here's how we make sure the cards you fall for never get diluted, devalued, or reprinted out from under you.
Every Aethermark card comes from a single fixed print run. When the run ends, the plates and the signing keys are destroyed. Reprinting isn't against the rules — it's cryptographically impossible.
Full-power cards in every booster. No card is weak because it's common.
A hard ceiling per design. Once they're in the world, that's all there will ever be.
Four figures, worldwide, for all time. The rarest cards you can still open from a pack.
Seeded at random into boosters. Not for sale — only for discovery. There is exactly one.
A Mythic is rarer than a common — never stronger. Power never rises with rarity. What you chase is beauty, history, and scarcity, so the game stays fair for everyone at the table. This is written into the constitution and can't be changed.
Every serialized Aethermark card holds a banknote-grade NFC chip — the same tamper-resistant tech used to make currency hard to fake. Tap it, and the card tells you its story.
Wins, losses, tournaments, the decks it beat — every battle it fights is recorded and tied to the card, tap after tap.
Who owned it. What legendary match it survived. A card that won a championship is worth more because it can prove it did.
The same chip class that protects banknotes protects your collection. A fake has no forge signature — and no memory.
A card's saga makes it precious, not overpowered. Its battle record never changes what it does on the table.
The cards that hold value over decades share three traits: a genuinely fixed supply, provable authenticity, and a game people actually want to play. Aethermark is engineered for all three from day one.
The heartbreak of collectors is the surprise reprint. Aethermark makes that impossible by design — audited runs, destroyed plates, no second printing, ever.
The chip is proof of origin and record of play. No third-party slab required to know a card is real and what it's done.
Cards hold worth because people want to play with them. Two full game modes keep the collection in play, not just in binders.
Aethermark is a game and a collectible, not a financial product. Rarity and demand can make cards sought-after, but no future resale value is promised or guaranteed. Collect what you love to play.
Aethermark is built by people who care about the same things collectors and players do: a game that stays fair, and cards that stay rare.
Justin is a maker at heart, drawn to the things that spark the imagination — sprawling games, fire-breathing dragons, and the weathered charm of the olde world. He grew up chasing that feeling of stepping into somewhere vast and unknown, and these days he chases it by building it himself. Aethermark is his answer to the worlds he always wanted to wander through: part craft, part obsession, and wholly made from a love of creating. Give him a blank page, a good myth, and a dragon or two, and he's happy.
Bernard has spent 35 years in media and entertainment. His career started on the press floor — hands-on work in press operation, graphic design, and art layout across small independent print shops — and later moved into procurement, where years spent sourcing and importing goods internationally, including public sector work, gave him a practical understanding of supply chains, quality control, and overseas manufacturing timelines. It's a combination that maps directly onto what Aethermark's single audited run requires: real craft on the card, and real discipline getting it made and delivered.
He's logged over 30 years playing fantasy and combat games, and that's the lens he brings to design and art direction — not just what looks good on a card, but what a table actually wants to keep playing. A practical grounding in security and verification systems also informs his thinking on the game's card-authentication approach. His network across printing, sourcing, and the tabletop community shapes how Aethermark gets built, and who it gets built with.
Aethermark is being built in the open. Follow the milestones here — and join the Discord to help shape what comes next.
Where new cards drop first, the Veil gets solved, and the game takes shape.
Join our DiscordAethermark is struck in a single secret European facility — The Hidden Forge. Its location is known to almost no one, and for good reason. But hidden across this campaign is a puzzle. Solve The Veil, and you don't get an address — you get escorted passage to the Forge itself.
The first cipher is already here. Most backers will scroll past it. A few will read the smoke — and the fire remembers what the eye forgets.
Nine stones stand round the fire and hold the first ember.
In forge-dark the marks may burn, yet the ninth deceives.
Not loud flame but low coal cradles one stone unseen.
Ember by ember the slow truth of it is revealed.
Five you plainly see, yet the ninth is not shown.
Only the turning ring may ever come name a lie.
Listen, the rising smoke will slowly spell one stone unspoken.
Descend now, solver: Ninefold marks the ninth of each line.
First read the smoke — the marks of fire name the ring. That name is not the answer; it is the key. Do as the ring instructs, and the true words will rise. Speak them at the gate.
Our Kickstarter pre-launch page is live. Tap "Notify me on launch" there and Kickstarter alerts you the instant we go live — then join our list below for everything in between: ember drops, Veil clues, and your path to The First Ember, the founder's card, yours when you back at launch.
Follow on Kickstarter — Notify Me on Launch →No spam — launch news, ember drops, and Veil clues only. Signing up puts you in line; backing at launch earns the card.
Tiers shown are launch-day pricing. Early-followers lock the best price and the exclusive card.