There is a version of this article that takes nine seconds to write. Imperion, the debut set for Parhelion Studio's Echoes of Astra, arrives in October 2026. Boosters come 24 to a box. There are three starter decks. Done, go pre-order.
The trouble is that two of the game's own official distributors published their product sheets on the same day in April and cannot agree on which day in October it is. So before anything else, let's deal with that.
The release date, and why you keep seeing two of them
Both dates are real, both are official, and neither is a typo somebody made on a forum.
Coqui Hobby Distribution's Imperion listing gives the release date as 20 October 2026. PHD Games' listing, posted the same day, carrying identical product specs down to the cent, says "Releases October 28, 2026." It says it twice, once under the booster box and once under the starter deck bundle.
Everything else on the two sheets matches exactly. The card counts match. The pack configuration matches. The MSRPs match. It is the same document with one field different, which is the signature of a street date that moved somewhere between the two distributors' publishing runs and did not get corrected in both places.
What that means for you, practically: October 2026 is safe, the specific day is not. If you are planning a launch event or a midnight pre-order alarm, the number to trust is the one your own distributor or local store is working from, because that is the one that governs when boxes are allowed off the shelf. If you are simply wondering whether the set lands this autumn, it does.
Parhelion's own site has not settled it. As of this writing the front page of echoesofastra.com says only that the "retail launch of Imperion is coming soon!" and points readers at the distributor list. Our own Imperion set page currently carries the date as "to be announced" for the same reason: we would rather show you nothing than pick a winner between two official sources.
What a booster box actually contains
Here the two sheets are in perfect agreement, which makes this the part you can plan a budget around.
| Cards per pack | 12 |
| Packs per display (booster box) | 24 |
| Displays per case | 6 |
| Booster box MSRP | $109.99 |
That is 288 cards to a box, at a shade over $4.50 a pack at MSRP. For a debut set from a studio with no back catalogue, the configuration is conventional in a way that is quietly reassuring: 24-pack displays are the standard unit that store shelving, draft pods and distributor allocations are all built around, and Parhelion has not tried to reinvent the box.
The three starter decks
Three preconstructed decks ship alongside the boosters, each 50 cards, each built on a pair of affinities:
| Deck | Affinities |
|---|---|
| Blood Pact | Nox / Solara |
| Unity | Lux / Terra |
| Righteous Order | Caelum / Terra |
They are also sold as a Starter Deck Display Bundle at an MSRP of $143.91, which contains three copies of each of the three decks. Nine decks: the shape a store buys rather than a player.
One thing worth noticing before you pick: the pairings are not symmetrical. Terra appears in two of the three decks, and Caelum in only one. If you specifically want to learn Caelum, Righteous Order is your only preconstructed on-ramp. If you want Terra, you have a choice, and the deck you pick will be deciding your other affinity more than your main one.
What's inside the set
And now the number that does not line up.
Parhelion's own store-locator page describes Imperion as "165 unique cards plus foil variants", and both distributor sheets print "165 Unique Cards, 170 Foil Variations." Our Imperion catalogue holds 160 cards, numbered IMP-001 through IMP-160, with no gaps in the sequence.
We are not going to guess at the missing five. They could be a promo tier, a numbering convention that counts something we don't, or five cards simply not yet spoiled at the time our ingest ran. What we can tell you is exactly what the 160 we do hold look like, because we hold them.
The set is organised in solid blocks by affinity, in a fixed order, which makes the numbering genuinely navigable:
| Affinity | Card numbers | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Nox | IMP-001 – IMP-032 | 32 |
| Lux | IMP-033 – IMP-063 | 31 |
| Caelum | IMP-064 – IMP-095 | 32 |
| Solara | IMP-096 – IMP-126 | 31 |
| Terra | IMP-127 – IMP-158 | 32 |
| Neutral | IMP-159 – IMP-160 | 2 |
Five affinities at 31 or 32 cards apiece, and a Neutral slice of exactly two. That is a deliberately balanced debut, and it tells you something about how Parhelion wants the first format to feel: nobody's affinity is short-changed, and there is almost no neutral glue to smooth over an awkward two-affinity build.
Inside each block the cards run in type groups, alphabetically within each group, so once you know an affinity's opening number you can find things by eye. Terra is the clean example: units run from Akeno, Noble Samurai at IMP-127 through Yako Illusionist at IMP-144, Coordinated Strike opens the tactics at IMP-145, the equipment sits in the low 150s, and the territories close the block out.
What a card tells you
Our catalogue filters Imperion on four card types: Unit, Item, Territory and Tactic. Every card carries a supply cost. Units add attack, health and an influence value on top, and so, it turns out, does equipment.
Five real examples:
- Assimilating Abomination (IMP-001) — Nox Unit, Automaton Monster, Rare. Costs 6, is a 4/6, influence 2, and reads "Sacrifice another unit: Ready this unit." Card number one in the set is a card that eats your other cards, which is either a mission statement or a coincidence.
- Coordinated Strike (IMP-145) — Terra Tactic, Common, cost 3: "Exhaust two friendly units. If you do, deal damage equal to their combined attack to target unit in a combat zone."
- Lifecycle Katana (IMP-153) — Terra, Rare, supply cost 2, printing attack 2, health 1 and influence 1. Here is the label to watch: the card page types it Equipment, not Item. It reads "When equipped unit dies while defending, you may return it from the graveyard to the top of your deck."
- Entangling Wilds (IMP-156) — Terra Territory, Uncommon, cost 1: "At the end of each turn, exhaust any enemy unit that controls this combat zone."
- Seraphiel, Herald of Light (IMP-048) — Lux Unit, Angel Primal, Legendary and flagged ★Renowned. Costs 7, a 5/5 with influence 2, carrying both an On Score trigger that returns a unit from your graveyard and an On Death trigger that puts itself on the bottom of your deck.
Rarity runs Common, Uncommon, Rare and Legendary, with a separate ★Renowned marker sitting on top for cards singled out within the set. The distributor sheets list 170 foil variations against 165 unique cards, which reads as foiling close to card-for-card rather than a thin premium tier.
Read those five together and the game's vocabulary starts to show through. Units ready and exhaust. Cards trigger On Score, On Attack and On Death. Territories and units both care about a combat zone, and Excavator (IMP-159), one of the two Neutral cards, can destroy a territory in the zone it attacks into. Parhelion's own summary is that you "capture combat zones to score victory points" — the cards back that up: this is a game about holding contested ground rather than reducing an opponent's life total.
Where this came from
Imperion is a debut set with an unusually large audience already waiting for it. Echoes of Astra ran a 30-day Kickstarter campaign that closed on 9 October 2025 against a $50,000 goal. Kickstarter's own project page returns a 403 to automated readers, so we can only give you the trackers: Kicktraq records $741,193 from 1,780 backers, and Tabletop Analytics records $741,440 from 1,781. The small gap between them is the ordinary result of two trackers snapshotting at slightly different moments. Either way, roughly fifteen times the goal.
That is the context for the October launch: this is not a studio hoping to find players in stores. It is a studio bringing a funded, already-backed game to retail.
The short version
- Release: October 2026. Coqui says the 20th, PHD says the 28th, and Parhelion has not published a date of its own. Ask your store.
- Booster box: 24 packs, 12 cards each, $109.99 MSRP. Six boxes to a case.
- Starter decks: three, 50 cards each. Blood Pact (Nox/Solara), Unity (Lux/Terra), Righteous Order (Caelum/Terra). The nine-deck display bundle is $143.91.
- The set: 165 unique cards announced, 160 in our catalogue today, split into near-even blocks of 31 or 32 per affinity with two Neutral cards.
Every card in Imperion that we hold is already searchable, filterable by affinity, type, supply cost, subtype and combat stats, on our card database. Nobody has posted a public decklist yet, which means the first person to build one gets to be the reason the rest of us have somewhere to start.
Card data in this article comes from our own Imperion catalogue, read on 1 September 2026, when it held 160 of the set's cards. Product configuration, pricing and release dates come from the two official distributor sheets linked above and from Parhelion Studio's own site. Where sources disagree, we have shown you both rather than picking one. Deck construction rules (legal deck size, copy limits, victory point totals) live in Parhelion's online ruleset, which we have not transcribed here, so nothing in this article should be read as a deck-building rule.