Team Cards

Team Cards turns a Minecraft server into a contest between rival teams, each drawing on the power of a single playing card.

Players claim one of a fixed number of team slots, up to four players to a team. Claiming a slot deals that team a random suit — Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds or Spades — which they then level up to unlock progressively stronger team-wide abilities. A fifth card, the Joker, is rare and behaves unlike any of the others.

The mod is built for small servers where players fight each other. Every mechanic assumes teams are rivals, and several exist specifically to make betrayal costly.

The cards

Each suit grants passive buffs at Levels 1 and 2, and an activated ability at Level MAX bound to a keybind.

Hearts — bonus maximum health and extra saturation from food. At MAX, a burst of temporary health and regeneration.
Clubs — bonus damage with axes and maces, and a mace reworked to swing at axe speed. Entirely passive; Clubs has no activated ability.
Diamonds — Haste and Fortune behaviour on diamond tools without enchanting them, Speed from a full diamond set, and a Turtle Master burst at MAX.
Spades — immunity to fall damage, then to explosion damage, and at MAX an upward wind burst that scatters enemies and shreds cobwebs.
Joker — rare and ritual-only. It has no Level 1 or 2 at all. Instead, every member of a Joker team individually chooses one of three personal abilities: Ghost Blocks that only your own team can see or stand on, Remote Redstone that toggles a placed block from any distance and any dimension, or a One Inch Punch that lands your next bare-fist hit with enormous knockback. A Joker team is a handful of specialists rather than four copies of the same buff.

Levelling and rerolling

Cards are raised by crafting and consuming totems. Levels cannot be skipped, and totems are freely tradeable — including to rival teams, if you think that is a good idea.

Changing your suit requires building a Ritual Altar and gathering every member of your team inside its zone for a full minute, marked by a visible particle boundary. The reroll deals a new random suit, but resets the card back to Level 0. That reset is the real cost of rerolling, not the altar.

Built against betrayal

Teammates can still hit each other, so sparring and weapon testing work normally. But a single hit can never take a teammate below half a heart, and dealing too much damage to one inside a short window hits the attacker with Slowness and Weakness.

Leaving a team, being kicked, or disbanding starts a deserter lockout. During it you cannot join another team, and — importantly — you are still damage-capped and still take the betrayal penalty against your former teammates, while they may hit you freely. New members also receive no card buffs for a short warm-up period, so a maxed team cannot swap a specialist in mid-fight.

Interface

A three-tab menu showing every team on the server with full rosters, your own card and its effects at every level, and all the mod's crafting recipes.
A HUD timer showing your ability's remaining duration and cooldown, which hides itself entirely when you have no ability to use.
Team colours applied to nametags, chat and the player list.
An animated card reveal whenever your team is dealt or upgrades a card.

Server configuration

Every balance value in the mod is exposed in the server config file — 46 settings across eight sections. Cooldowns, ability durations, health bonuses, damage numbers, push strengths, the ritual length and radius, the deserter lockout, and the Joker's draw chance can all be retuned without recompiling anything. Durations are written in seconds, and every entry carries a comment explaining what it does.

Operators get commands for resizing the team pool, forcing a team's card, kicking players from any team, adding members, and reassigning team managers.

Requirements

Minecraft 26.2
NeoForge
Must be installed on the server and every client — it adds a custom interface, a HUD overlay and keybinds, so it cannot run server-side only. Keep versions matched.

FAQ

Can I include this in a modpack? Yes. You may include Team Cards in any modpack, public or private, without asking. Please link back to this project page.

Will you update it for newer Minecraft versions? Possibly. This mod is built primarily for my own server, and updates happen when I have time and reason to make them. Please treat any update as a bonus rather than an expectation.

Can I request a feature? You are welcome to ask, and requests will be read and considered at my own convenience. I make no commitment to implement anything, and features that do not suit a small PvP server are unlikely to be added.

Will you fix bugs? Genuine bugs are worth reporting and I will look at them when I can. Reports that include the server log and clear steps to reproduce are far more likely to get fixed.

Is it compatible with other mods? It should be, but it has only been tested in a lightly modded environment. Anything that deeply changes combat, attributes or chunk rendering is the most likely source of conflict.

Can I use the code? See the project licence.

Does it work in singleplayer? It loads and runs, but the mod is designed around several players competing. Most of it will not be meaningful alone.