How Deployment Phase Works in Monster Train 2

Every battle in Monster Train 2 begins with a Deployment Phase during which players will play their first batch of units, and maybe even some Equipment and Room cards. While there is nothing particularly confusing about the playing of those cards, there are some subtleties to the Deployment Phase that are worth understanding. This guide is here to elaborate upon those subtleties, and it will give players a good sense of exactly what is happening during Monster Train 2's Deployment Phase.

While this guide briefly touches upon the act of playing cards during the Deployment Phase, it does not go into how to do so strategically. Instead, the primary focus here is on how the cards that are drawn during the Deployment Phase are determined and what happens to undeployed cards when the phase ends.

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Monster Train 2 - Deployment Phase, Explained

Drawing

Players are guaranteed to draw several types of cards from their decks during Monster Train 2's Deployment Phase, and they are as follows:

Cards that are augmented by Artifacts in order to be drawn during the Deployment Phase. The Artifacts that perform that type of augmentation are Attuned Whetstone (On Deployment Phase, draw an Equipment card from your deck. Reduce its cost to 0.) And Dante's Footstool (On Deployment Phase, draw a Room card from your deck. Reduce its cost to 0.).
The selected Champion.
Banner units. These units in Monster Train 2 have a blue banner beneath their Ember cost, and all of them are drawn during the Deployment Phase.
Equipment and Room cards that have been made Deployable through upgrades.

Furthermore, the cards are drawn in the aforementioned order, with cards augmented by Artifacts being drawn first and Deployable Equipment and Room cards being drawn last. This is important to understand because the maximum hand size in Monster Train 2 is 10, which means that players will not draw more than 10 cards during the Deployment Phase. As such, if a player has a ton of banner units in their deck, they could technically hit the 10-card maximum before they draw all of them, preventing them from drawing any Deployable Equipment or Room cards.

Playing Cards

While players will have a lot of decisions to make when choosing how to play their cards during the Deployment Phase, there are only a couple of limitations to know about:

The total Ember cost of the cards played cannot exceed the total Deployment Ember. The available Deployment Ember appears in the bottom-left corner of the screen, and it can be modified in a variety of ways. For example, the Artifical Pyrestone Artifact gives +3 Deployment Ember, while the Odi's Totem Artifact gives -3 Deployment Ember.
The total size of the units placed on a floor cannot exceed the floor's maximum capacity. By default, floors have a maximum capacity of five, and a unit's size is indicated by the yellow ovals at the top of the card.

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Ending Phase

After a player has played their cards, they can end the Deployment Phase by pressing "End Turn" in the bottom-right corner of the screen. Upon ending the turn, all the cards that were still in hand are shuffled back into the deck. This means that players could draw undeployed banner units and Deployable Equipment/Room cards as soon as the first wave, but they are certainly not guaranteed to do so. Additionally, it is possible to draw an undeployed Champion in Monster Train 2 immediately after the Deployment Phase, though players are very unlikely to be ending the setup phase with that type of card in hand.

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