A third deck that the marketing does not mention
The official description of this game is a double-deckbuilder, and that is accurate about the two decks you build: Explore for moving through the world and modifying cards, Combat for the fights. Foresight is a third set that the game itself tracks separately.
The distinction matters because Foresight cards are not played. You do not spend energy on them and they do not take up a hand slot. They sit in your run and trigger on a condition: when combat starts, when you gain a stat, when you would die.
Calling them passive is the useful mental model. Where a Combat card is a decision you make this turn, a Foresight card is a rule that is now true for the rest of the run.
Where Foresight cards come from
The starter deck list is explicit that it contains no Foresight cards, and that they must be acquired through gameplay. So the first question on a run is not which one to take, it is whether you have found one at all.
The way they enter a run is through reward moments rather than shops. Player write-ups list Foresight alongside combat rewards, shop visits, health and boss encounters as the types of room you walk into, and describe its offer as a passive that lasts the whole run.
They are also rare enough that players comment on it in both directions, with one reviewer calling them powerful but very rare and another saying there seem to be too few of them in the game. A third set of reports places at least one behind a hidden door partway along a route, which is covered on this site's secrets page rather than resolved here.
Characters are reported to begin a run with a Foresight card already attached. If you are looking for one in the opening hand, that is the confusion: it is a passive on the character rather than a card in the deck.
How big the pool is, and how it is tiered
A community database built against the Early Access build lists 31 Foresight cards, split into STARTER 6, TIER 1 with 18, TIER 2 with 2 and TIER 3 with 5. The spread is the useful part of that number: most of the pool sits in one tier and only a handful sit at the top.
STARTER here is a tier inside the Foresight pool, not the deck you begin a run with. That is the single most common misreading of this list, and it makes the totals look like they contradict the starter-deck rules when they do not.
Treat the total as a measurement of one build rather than a fixed count. The developers have not published a Foresight card count, and Early Access patches have already changed card text.
Cards and effects worth knowing
The effects below are drawn from a community database of the Early Access build, with three of them also confirmed in a gameplay recording. Paraphrasing is used where the database wording is terse, and the mechanics are what matter here rather than the exact sentence.
| Card | What it does | Confirmed by |
|---|---|---|
| Ready To Scrap | Draw an extra attack at the start of each combat. | Database and gameplay recording |
| Ready To Snack | Draw an edible at the start of each exploration. | Database and gameplay recording |
| Lazarus | If you would die, destroy this card and heal to 50 percent health instead. | Database and gameplay recording |
| Always Looking | Make a Keen Eye when you start exploring. | Database |
| Comfort Food | While below 30 percent health, draw a food card each turn. | Database |
| Healthy | Heal 3 health after combat. | Database |
| Generous | When you feed, draw a card. | Database |
| Patience | Card rarity increases when you decline cards. | Database |
| Insomniac | You can no longer rest while exploring, but you gain 4 energy and 4 cards. | Database |
| Life Support | If you would die in combat, become invincible. | Database |
| Unstoppable | When any If Fatal effect triggers, draw a card. | Database |
| Spring Into Action | Add a flykick to your hand for each unspent energy after exploring. | Database |
Read that list for the pattern rather than for a ranking. Several of the strongest entries change a rule instead of adding a number: Lazarus converts a lost run into a survivable one, Life Support stops a death outright, and Insomniac trades the ability to rest for a larger hand and more energy every turn.
The conditional ones reward the plan you already have. Bloodthirsty Butcher heals 2 whenever you kill an enemy, which is worth much more on a route that kills often, and Data Miner draws an extra Data at the start of combat, which only pays off if your deck is running on Data at all.
Cards whose text does not read as text
At least a few Foresight cards display their effect as unreadable characters rather than English. A gameplay recording from the demo build shows a player receiving one and asking whether the string translates to anything, and the community database records the same card with a garbled description.
For anyone trying to plan a run, the practical consequence is that some Foresight cards cannot be evaluated before you take them. That is worth knowing in advance, because the pool is small and a garbled card is a real portion of it.
- Some of these cards have readable effects and work like any other passive.
- Others display as symbols, so their behaviour has to be learned by playing them.
- Players have suggested the symbols form a message when the cards are lined up, which is a theory rather than a documented mechanic.
Card text changes between patches, and the demo build this recording comes from is older than the Early Access release. If a Foresight card behaves differently from a description you read, the in-game card is the version that counts, and the official Steam news hub is where text changes are announced.