Shroom and Gloom cards
A run revolves around two main decks, one to explore and one to fight, and it is as much about rebuilding the cards you already hold as it is about picking up new ones. Here is how that works, what the official card count means, and where to look up a specific card.
One run, two decks
Two decks, two jobs
| Deck | What the store page says it is for | Where players meet it |
|---|---|---|
| Combat | “Use the combat deck to survive fierce battles!” | The fight rooms, against whatever stands between you and the next exploration phase. |
| Explore | “Use the explore deck to navigate dungeons, modify your cards, and unlock new weapons and abilities!” | The rooms between fights, where a reviewer describes using it “to try and get upgrades for your health and cards” (in a Steam user review) |
The decks feed each other. One reviewer points out that encounter rewards tend to hand you cards for the explore deck rather than new combat cards, and that the explore deck is where combat cards get improved (in a Steam user review). What happens when you rest in those rooms, and why players disagree about it, has its own page: resting and camp.
During the demo, Team Lazerbeam gave each kind of card its own card base: “combat, explore, curse, forsight or shroom” (demo patch notes, Steam announcement: 80K Wishlists, Demo update and NorthernLion! Shroom and Gloom Aug 2025 Dev Log!). Foresight cards sit outside both decks; they get their own page at Foresight.
Growing and modifying cards
The store page makes a lot of this: “Grow low level starting cards into over-powered attacks, or modify rare cards into game-breaking super-weapons!” The developers have explained two of the modifiers in their own words, replying to players on the Janitor:
- Gunk makes a card cost more, and the design tweaks are about “making gunk cards playable (at a higher cost)” rather than dead.
- Sparkling cards hit twice. In the same reply the developers asked whether players had noticed that “using a cleaning card on an already clean card would make it sparkling” (Team Lazerbeam, replying in Steam discussion: Love the game, hate the janitor).
Card text is not fixed. Explaining why translations take so long, Team Lazerbeam said the wording on each card is generated from its rules, so it changes as you modify the card (replying in Steam discussion: Brazilian Portuguese translation!). Read the card again after each upgrade rather than trusting what it said when you took it. Patch 0.6.39 also added Dice, which reroll some card choices and have their own bugs, on the Dice page.
How far a single card can be pushed is not published. One reviewer believes “There is no limit to how strong you can make a card” and adds, unsure, that there may be a cap on how many perks it holds (in a Steam user review). The demo patch notes did say the game has “no cap on how many cards you can hold” (demo patch notes, Steam announcement: 2 months of demo updates lead to this! Shroom and Gloom 0.4.71 is here!), and the Heavy Handed achievement for holding 20 cards in one hand is held by 31.4% of players.
What “resets healing” means
A player asked about this wording on the Steam forum, adding that they had never taken a card with it (in Steam discussion: What does "resets healing" on a card mean?). Two players answered and the developers did not. Between them the thread establishes this much:
| The thread says | The thread does not say |
|---|---|
| The card “builds up healing potential, then when you use it, it resets to 0”, and you build it up again. | Which cards carry the wording, or how fast the healing grows. |
| With an example of “heal 5 and reset healing”, playing the card heals and then drops the stored healing back to 0. | Whether every card with the wording works the same way. |
| One player’s advice: such cards are meant to Linger in your hand until the reset is worth it, and adding Gunk helps keep them there. | Any confirmation from Team Lazerbeam. |
A player on a separate thread about Janitor healing describes a card of this kind that heals more for the food eaten while it is in your hand, then resets (in Steam discussion: Janitor needs healing potential). That fits the explanation above, but it is still a player’s account.
How many cards there are
| Where | Wording | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Store page description | “Unleash cards to hack, slash and roast” | No count at all. This line used to promise hundreds of cards; the number has since been taken out. |
| Store page, Early Access notes | “~300 explore and combat cards per pathway” | Roughly 300 per pathway, with both decks counted together. |
| August 2026 dev log | “Two separate paths to reach the Gloom, each with entirely unique card pools.” (in Steam announcement: Release Date Reveal! Shroom and Gloom Aug Dev Log!) | Each pathway has its own pool. |
| A player on the forum | “there is cross over on cards but there is also cards unique to each” (in Steam discussion: Is there a good amount of variety yet?) | Some cards may turn up on both. |
Put together, two pathways do not simply mean 600 different cards, and Team Lazerbeam has not published a total. Steam’s Collector achievement, for picking up 100 different cards, is held by 59.8% of players; the rest of the list is on the achievements page.
Looking up a specific card
NiaMeowDB is an unofficial fan database, not connected to Team Lazerbeam or Devolver Digital, that pulls card data out of the Early Access game files. It is the place to search a card by name or effect. Two things to keep in mind: a card being in the files does not guarantee you can find it in a normal run, and its numbers follow the build it last read, so a patch can change them.
Cards named in official material:
| Cards | Where the name appears | Build |
|---|---|---|
| Camp Fire, Rat Jerky, Key, Bash | An explore hand in a Steam store screenshot | Early Access store page |
| Shovel | A six-card explore hand in a Steam store screenshot | Early Access store page |
| Inferno | A card reward screen in a Steam store screenshot | Early Access store page |
| Hollow Hamster, Flambé, Rumbly Tummy, Self Loathing, Grand Maul, Absorb, Cravings, Satisfying Nibble, Dread, Relief, Wrecking Ball | Listed in Steam announcement: Shroom and Gloom bursts into Turn Based Fest with monsterous update! | Demo, June 2025 |
Names from the demo era may have changed or been cut since.
Reading cards on a small screen
Early Access added two things for this. Cards now show what they target: “Each card now indicates if it’ll hit a single enemies, multiple enemies, or apply a buff to you.” And there is a card inspector, which the developers said “should help when playing the game on handheld devices” (announced in Steam announcement: Shroom and Gloom explodes into Early Access!). How the game runs on handhelds is covered on Steam Deck.