Daggerheart is a card game: how to get the whole deck on your table

Most tabletop RPGs are books you consult. Daggerheart is a game you hold a hand of.

That is not a stylistic observation — it is structural. Domain cards are chosen, held, swapped and spent. What a character can do right now is literally the cards in front of them. Run the game from a PDF and you get all the rules and none of the ergonomics, which is a bit like playing poker by reading a list of your cards off a screen.

If your group is coming to Daggerheart from D&D, the shift is the most interesting part of the system, and it is worth setting up properly.

What the piles are

The system splits into ten distinct card types, and they do genuinely different jobs.

Domain cards are the heart of it — the abilities characters take, organised across nine domains. A character draws from the domains their class grants, and the hand they are holding is their current capability. This is the pile that most needs to be physical.

Ancestries and communities define where a character comes from, mechanically and socially. Two small piles, referenced constantly during character creation and rarely afterwards.

Classes and subclasses carry the frame each character is built on.

Adversaries are the GM’s side of the table — the equivalent of a monster stat block, but as a card you can lay out in front of you and rearrange as the scene changes.

Environments are the piece D&D has no real equivalent for: the scene itself as a mechanical object, with its own features and pressures.

Weapons, armour, loot and consumables are the equipment layer, and the one most often left in the book because it feels like inventory. It works far better as cards a player can physically hand over or spend.

Beastforms cover shapeshifting, where holding the card is clearly better than remembering which form you are in.

Why the whole set beats a starter set

Partial card sets create a two-tier table. The abilities that got printed are the ones people use, because those are the ones sitting in front of them, and the rest quietly stop existing. Players optimise towards whatever is physically present.

Printing the complete set removes that bias. Every option is equally available, and the GM is not mentally rationing which adversaries are “the ones we have cards for.”

From the shop

Daggerheart Compatible Complete Card Bundle — 797 Cards

$61 $18.30

Browse on Etsy →

The MakeMythic bundle is the complete SRD as cards: 797 cards across the ten piles, printing as 1,063 faces — 189 domain cards, 129 adversaries, 192 weapons, 120 loot and consumables, 63 classes and subclasses, 19 environments, 34 armour, 24 beastforms, 18 ancestries and 9 communities. Nothing sampled or abbreviated.

The sorting problem, and how to solve it

Ten piles of poker cards on one table will get mixed. The obvious answer is to colour-code them, and the obvious answer is not quite good enough.

Colour fails in two common situations: printing in greyscale to save ink, and players with colour vision deficiency. Either way, your sorting system silently stops working and somebody spends five minutes at the end of the session separating weapons from Blade domain cards.

The robust solution is a second channel. Give each pile its own spine pattern as well as its own colour — a visual texture along the card edge that survives a black and white print and does not depend on hue. Then colour becomes a convenience rather than the mechanism.

A related trick: named backs. Printing each card’s own name on its back lets you sort a face-down pile without turning every card over, which is worth more than it sounds at pack-down time. Matching backs still look better in play, so having both options is ideal.

Printing them properly

Print at poker size, 2.5 by 3.5 inches. This is the standard, and it means ordinary sleeves fit. Sleeving domain cards is worth it — they are handled constantly.

Use the right file for the right route. Home printing wants nine-up sheets with cards butted edge to edge so one cut serves two cards. A print-on-demand card service wants individual files at around 2.74 by 3.74 inches with full bleed, uploaded without scaling or cropping.

Duplex alignment is the hard part. Print one test sheet, hold it to a light, and check the backs line up before committing to 1,000 faces. Every printer’s duplex offset is slightly different.

Cardstock at 250-300gsm. Lighter stock curls and shows through; heavier stock is hard to cut cleanly by hand.

Consider printing in waves. You do not need all 797 cards before session one. Print domains, ancestries, communities and classes first — that is character creation. Adversaries and environments can follow before the first real encounter.

Using them online too

Individual card images at trim size drop into Roll20, Foundry or Owlbear Rodeo as handouts, so one purchase covers both an in-person table and a remote one. If your group runs hybrid, that matters — the same principle applies to tokens and battlemaps.

Coming from D&D

If you are bringing a 5e group across, the adjustment worth naming out loud at Session 0 is that Daggerheart expects players to make narrative decisions the GM would normally make. Cards help with that, because the options are visible rather than buried.

Our Session 0 guide transfers cleanly, and if you are comparing systems more broadly, Pathfinder 2e for D&D players covers the other common jump.

Print the domains first, sleeve them, and deal a hand. The system explains itself from there.