Hi, thanks for checking out my game! The "allied swarm has < 4 cards" simply means having less than 4 of your cards on the field, like you thought, so I'm pretty sure it was activated (if the card shows non-0 points + has a green sprite & points-outline, it's activated), but you might just not have fully understood what that meant (it means the card will contribute points to your total attack power & make it so its neighboring enemies get attacked). I get that this kind of game really benefits from an in-game tutorial, but within the jam time limit that was sadly not something I could manage. Also, I'm a little confused on how you could possibly have 1 hp after the first turn though, since in encounter 1 there are only 4 attacking enemies, so you can only lose max 4 out of 8 of your cards.