The starting hand

You start with 10 project cards and pay 3 MC for each one you keep. This is the first real decision of the game, and the most common beginner mistake has a name: keeping too many cards.

The discipline

Strong players routinely keep 3-5 cards from the opening ten. Every keep is 3 MC out of a starting bank you need for early production — keep eight cards and you’ve spent 24 MC on paper before playing a single thing.

Run each card through three questions:

1. Can I play it in the first 2-3 generations? Check the price against your actual money and the requirements against a bare planet (nothing needs oxygen 6% less than a gen-1 hand). A card you can’t play soon is a 3 MC loan to your future self at terrible interest.
2. Does it build my economy? Money production, cheap TR, steel/titanium production with cards that spend it, card draw. These are the gen-1 keeps.
3. Does it work with my corporation? The corp multiplies matching cards — see Choosing your corporation. A B-tier card that your corp loves outranks an A-tier card that fights it.

When in doubt, toss. The research phase brings four new cards every generation — you are never card-starved for long, and the 3 MC you didn’t spend is production you did.

The honest fine print: there’s no magic number (strong players have won keeping zero and keeping nine). The real constraint is buy only what you can deploy by generation 3, and check you can still play your best card in generation 1. And the opposite error exists too — you don’t have to spend every credit in gen 1. Floating cash into generation 2 so you can afford a big card is a legitimate, often strong play; big cards are where the deck’s bargains live.

What a good keep looks like

A typical strong opening keep: one or two economy cards you’ll play immediately, one cheap TR or ocean card, maybe one strong mid-game card that’s clearly worth holding (a premium engine piece or a big VP card your corp discounts). Total: 9-15 MC on cards, the rest of the bank aimed at getting production on the table in generation 1.

What a trap keep looks like

• Five cards “too good to pass” with a combined play cost over 80 MC — you’ve bought a museum.
• Requirement cards for the late game (high oxygen, high temperature) — you paid 3 MC each to store them for six generations.
• Beautiful VP engines (animals, microbes) with no economy beside them — the engine will start two generations late and never catch up.
• Zero-synergy keeps after picking a specialist corp — a titanium corp keeping plant cards is playing against itself.

The corp comes first

You choose your corporation and your keeps together — the hand is dealt before you commit. Read both corp options, then sort the ten cards by which corp they serve. The stronger combination wins, not the stronger corp in the abstract. A middling corp with four on-plan cards beats a top-tier corp with none of its fuel — this decision is covered properly in Choosing your corporation.