Meet the Four Heroes of Deckalypse
Every run in Deckalypse is built around a party of four survivors. Each one is a full deck-building class with their own role, signature mechanic, and starting cards. You deploy a subset of the party into each fight, and the whole game is about how the four play off each other.
Before the heroes themselves, three rules of the table matter:
- Energy is shared. The whole party draws from a single energy pool each turn. A cheap setup card on one hero leaves more energy for a big finisher on another.
- Rows and range matter. Heroes sit in a front row or a back row. Enemies attack across bands of distance (melee, mid, far). Front-row bodies soak hits. Back-row heroes stay safe but rely on range and positioning.
- Statuses are currency. Debuffs you stack on an enemy (Vulnerable, Weak, Root, Burn, Bleed) help every hero attacking it. Buffs (Strength, Regen) and protection (Block, Taunt) flow across the party the same way.
That shared layer is the reason the four heroes below are designed to lean on one another.
Bulwark — The Tank
The wall. Highest HP in the party, plants himself in the front row, and forces the horde to swing at him instead of the people behind him.
Bulwark is the only hero who can directly control who the enemy attacks. His Taunt status forces enemies to focus him, pulling damage off your fragile back line. He pairs that with heavy Block generation, so most of the hits he attracts bounce off. On top of pure defense, he has positioning tools (pull, push) and Root, letting him drag dangerous enemies around the board or pin them in place.
Late-game cards like Juggernaut and Immovable turn him from a pure shield into a real threat. Strength stacked on a tank who's already attracting every attack is a quiet menace.
How he connects with the others: Bulwark is the floor the rest of the party stands on. The Marksman and the Medic survive because Bulwark eats the hits meant for them. The Gunslinger can stand in the front row and swing for max value because the tank is soaking aggro. His pull and push also set up your damage dealers' range requirements.
Without him, the squishy heroes are not playable. With him, they get to be reckless.
Gunslinger — The DPS
The trigger-happy killer. Builds up aim, then deletes a target.
Gunslinger is the party's single-target wrecking ball. Her damage scales with Strength, a buff that adds flat damage to every attack she makes, so the longer a fight runs the harder each shot lands. She backs that up with Exhaust finishers: expensive cards that hit enormously hard but leave the deck for the rest of combat, keeping them rare and impactful.
She trades durability for raw output. Lower HP, fewer defensive options, but the highest ceiling on killing one thing fast. Cards like Reckless Aim push that further, more Strength at the cost of self-Vulnerable, a trap without a tank and a bargain with one.
How she connects with the others: Gunslinger is the payoff hero. Marksman's Vulnerable turns her big hits into bigger ones. The shared energy pool means a teammate's cheap turn can bankroll her expensive finisher in the same round. And she only gets to greedily stack Strength because Bulwark is taunting and Medic is healing. The squad buys her the time she needs to ramp.
Marksman — The Ranged
The sniper. Marks the target, makes it take more from everyone, and never gets touched.
Marksman is the party's damage amplifier. His Vulnerable debuff makes a target take 1.5× damage from all sources, so a single Mark boosts every other hero attacking that enemy. Many of his attacks have "any range," meaning he can fire from the safety of the back row regardless of where the enemy is, and Reposition lets him bounce back to safety if anything closes in.
He also brings control tools: Root to stop enemy advances, Burn and Bleed for damage over time, and party-wide AoE debuffs to soften a whole pack at once.
How he connects with the others: Marksman is the multiplier that makes everyone else's numbers bigger. He doesn't need to land the killing blow, he makes sure Gunslinger's and Bulwark's blows land harder. His AoE Vulnerable plus Weak is a force multiplier for the entire team's turn.
The catch: he's the most fragile hero in the party, so he absolutely depends on Bulwark's Taunt and Medic's healing to stay standing while he sets the table.
Medic — The Support
The glue. Keeps everyone breathing, brings the fallen back, and quietly buffs the squad.
Medic is the only hero who can revive a downed ally, which fundamentally changes how aggressively the rest of the party can play. Beyond raw healing (single-target, AoE, and Regen over time) she brings utility the others lack: Cleanse to strip debuffs off allies, ally Block grants, card draw and energy generation to accelerate the party's tempo, and crowd control like Sleep and Root.
She's not a damage dealer. She's the reason the other three can take risks.
Late-game cards like War Horn (Strength to all allies) and Phoenix Rite (revive at high HP) turn a heal-bot into a damage enabler and an insurance policy against disaster.
How she connects with the others: Medic is the enabler that makes the party's aggression safe. Marksman and Gunslinger can play their low-HP, high-risk game because Medic backstops their health and can revive them if it goes wrong. Her energy and draw generation feeds the shared pool, literally paying for someone else's finisher.
Where Bulwark protects by absorbing, Medic protects by restoring. Together they let the damage dealers go all-in.
How the four come together
The party isn't four decks side by side, it's one machine with four moving parts:
- Bulwark decides who gets hit and absorbs it.
- Marksman decides how much damage that target takes.
- Gunslinger converts that setup into a dead target.
- Medic keeps the whole thing alive and pays for the big turns.
A textbook combo turn reads like this. Medic spends a cheap card to generate energy and draw. Marksman applies Vulnerable to the priority target. Bulwark holds Taunt so nobody on the back line gets punished. And Gunslinger spends the pooled energy on a finisher that's now hitting a Vulnerable target with stacked Strength.
Each hero's contribution is mediocre alone and lethal together, which is the entire point of building a party rather than a single deck.
Because you deploy only a subset of the four into each fight, part of the strategy is choosing the right pairing for the encounter. A tank-plus-medic core for attrition fights. A marksman-plus-gunslinger core for burst. Different combinations as your decks grow through card rewards and boss drops.
Try them yourself
All four heroes are playable right now in the Deckalypse Playtest. The first chapter of the dead city is open, and you can request access from the store page above.
When you get in, tell me in the discussions which hero you mained, which combo turn made you stand up, and which card you tried to abuse. That's the kind of feedback that shapes balance.
- Jazz