How to play The Demon’s Hand

If you’re a fan of deck-builders like Balatro, you’ll feel right at home with the new League of Legends mini-game, The Demon’s Hand. Use your deck, equip powerful sigils catered to your style, and fight through enemy encounters with limited resources. Here’s everything you need to know about playing The Demon’s Hand mini-game in League of Legends.

The Demon’s Hand mini-game explained

The Demon’s Hand mini-game is a limited-time mini-game that will be available for the next 40 days, along with some exclusive rewards for the League of Legends client.

Your deck

You play using a standard deck of 52 cards. Anyone familiar with cards will know the format. You’re looking at four Suits (Moon, Fire, Sun, Rock) with 13 cards each. There are 10 standard cards, and then 10 unnumbered cards called the Command cards. These are essentially your deck’s Joker, Queen, King, and Ace, and their numbers correspond to 11, 12, 13, and 14.

Combat

Combat consists of facing an enemy unit with a fixed amount of health, an attack value, an attack timer, and a unique effect. You deal damage equal to the number on your card and you can deal bonus damage using card combinations. Your goal is to get the enemy’s health down to zero. Pay attention to the turn timer on the left side, indicating how many turns you have remaining before the enemy attacks. Unique effects are varied, such as disabling sigils and having resistance to certain cards. You can check these unique effects by hovering over the enemy.

Combinations

If you want to rack up high damage numbers quickly, you need to learn and use the many powerful combinations available. Instead of just one card, you can select multiple cards, and if you create a combination, you gain some bonus damage along with the sum of the numbers on all the selected cards. For example, a Dryad combination of two 10s gets you 20+10+10 damage. If you’re close to a combination but don’t have the exact cards, you can try to discard your unnecessary cards in hopes of drawing useful ones. Here’s a list of all combinations:

Note that even if you select multiple cards, only the highest-value card will be counted in the attack if you don’t make a combination. For example, selecting the cards one, four, five, six, and nine with no matching suits will result in the first four getting discarded and only the nine card attacking. This can be useful when you run out of Discards.

Discards

Discards are a way to quickly try and reshuffle your hand by getting rid of up to five selected cards and then drawing the same amount. You are allowed three Discards per encounter, but some modifiers, such as enemy modifiers or Sigils, can change this. Use your Discards wisely to try and set up Combinations.

Health

You’ll have a fixed amount of 100 health at the start of your Demon’s Hand game. You do not naturally recover health after combat. The only way to recover health is through certain defensive Sigils or by making it to the rest spots around the map marked with a tent. Here you will restore 40 percent of your missing health.

Sigils

You have six Sigil slots and there are a total of 73 Sigils in the Demon’s Hand game. There are five types of Sigils:

• Damage – 43
• Defense – 5
• Utility – 13
• Economy – 5
• Other – 7

To get Sigils you must purchase them using Gold earned from battles at the shops nodes on the map marked with the coin icons. You can also sell your existing Sigils but they will only sell for two Gold. Initially, only 49 of these Sigils will be available, with 24 locked. For beginners trying to clear the story mode, be sure to prioritize powerful Damage Sigils.

Critical chance

Another important stat you need to know is the Critical Strike chance. This is the chance of a card you draw being a Critical card. Critical cards have a purple glow, adding +25 percent to your total damage number at the end of calculations.

Stacking up several critical cards in big combination attacks can quickly get you a ton of damage, so you shouldn’t underestimate them. You can increase your Critical Chance through Sigils or by defeating Elite enemies, optional extra strong enemies that give permanent Critical Chance bonus.

That’s all you need to know about The Demon’s Hand mini-game in League of Legends.