Challengers is a card drafting auto-battler game. Naturally the cards you are offered and the order in which your deck appears is based on luck, but there are still many important and often difficult decisions to be made which will impact how successful you are.

General Strategy

The goal of the draft is to maximize your deck's power/size while minimizing the likelihood of "benching out" (7th bench card). This is an oversimplification but a good first principle to work from. With that in mind, the following is implied:

• Drafting duplicates is crucial. These will increase your deck size and power while not making you bench out. Ignoring synergy a pair of 2-power cards is generally as good as 1 4-power card. The 2-power cards are sometimes better on the attack but worse on defense. The 4-power is sometimes worse on attack but better on defense
• Synergy is key. Cards like Vendor, A.I., Stable Boy, Make-up Artist, Band, Blacksmith, etc can be extremely strong if the rest of your deck support them. Learning what all the cards do and what your "outs" are to improve your deck is crucial
• Winning the later rounds is way more important than the early rounds. It's okay to take losses with a bloated deck early to maximize your odds of getting lucky with a later draft. Winning only rounds 5, 6, and 7 will almost always get you into the final
• Know when to reroll. This is probably the most skill-testing part of the entire game. If your deck has a lot of one-ofs, you probably need to reroll when you're not offered any duplicates
• Know when to cut. Generally speaking, you want 6 or 7 unique cards. Until the last few rounds of the game, sticking at 7 or 8 can be okay to have more potential pair opportunities on the next draft. In the last round or two, you should hopefully have doubled up on enough of your deck that having more than 6 cards is too risky to be worth it. If your decks overall power is low, you may need to sit at 7 and hope you draw a single as the last card
• Relying on bench cleaners sometimes works but is very risky. If you roll your bench cleaners before any singletons, then their effect is wasted. Usually you're better off cutting the one-of Vacuum Cleaner or Butler. Only consider playing them in duplicates
• Check which set is removed at the beginning of the game. This can influence your early picks in so far as what to look for and what to avoid

Sets

Very rough/general breakdown of each set which realistically is not all that useful - keeping in mind individual card effects will be much more helpful:

• City (Light Blue) - Cards in this set tend to depend on cards in other sets to boost them.
• Castle (Dark Blue) - Cards in this set tend to boost cards in other sets.
• Film Studio (Green) - Cards in this set tend to focus on the attack.
• Funfair (Yellow) - Cards in this set tend to focus on rearranging your deck.
• Haunted House (Orange) - Cards in this set tend to remove cards from your bench (either to your deck or to your exhaust pile).
• Outer Space (Red) - Cards in this set tend to replace themselves or other cards in your deck.
• Shipwreck (Purple) - Cards in this set tend to give defensive boosts.

There are cross-over cards in each set, but your early picks tend to reflect these themes.

Lastly, non-Starter cards have 4 copies in the game, unless it says otherwise in description.