The Number Cards
The eight plain number ranks that make up the bulk of every deck — no titles, no named abilities of their own, and yet the entire poker-hand engine that decides every Siege is built on them.
RULES
Number cards (every rank from 2 through 10 except 4, which is The Scout) carry no special ability of their own — they exist purely as raw material for Siege hands and for the shared actions any rank can use.
Pair Discard lets you discard two number cards of the same rank from your hand to draw 3 fresh cards (face-card pairs draw 4 instead) — a cheap way to cycle a hand that isn't shaping into anything useful.
In a Siege, number cards combine into every poker hand below a hand built entirely from face cards or wildcards: pairs, Two Pair, Three of a Kind, Straights, Flushes, Full Houses, Four of a Kind, and Straight/Royal Flushes when combined with the right face cards or the Royal Bounty Hunter.
If a number rank happens to be your personal Forbidden Rank (set by your Cursed Seal), that rank stops counting toward Straights and Flushes for you specifically, though it still counts normally toward pairs, trips, quads, and Full Houses.
LORE OF THE COURT
No history remembers a single number card by name, and every history is built on top of them regardless. They are the soldiers no one writes songs about, and the war does not happen without them.
The Court counts its face cards and its Aces and its one Joker as though they were the whole of the army. The number cards know better. They were there for every Siege that mattered, unnamed and unthanked, exactly as they expected to be.
There is no flavor text carved anywhere for a plain 7 or a plain 9. Perhaps that is its own kind of honesty — some things in a Kingdom simply do the work, and are not owed a legend for it.
STRATEGY
When to play it
Read your hand for the strongest poker structure available before committing to a Siege — a Straight or Flush you can already see beats a hope for a better draw next turn. Use Pair Discard aggressively early in a match to cycle dead number cards into a hand shaped toward an actual five-card structure.
Counters
Learning your own Forbidden Rank early tells you which Straights and Flushes are off the table for you specifically — don't build a Siege plan around a rank your Cursed Seal has already disqualified.
Synergies
The Scout searches specifically among number cards, making it the fastest way to complete a Straight or Flush you're one card short of. The Royal Bounty Hunter, as a full wildcard, can stand in for whichever number card a hand is still missing.