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Lost Ark card guide - card books, decks, upgrades, and more
The late-game content of Lost Ark requires players to put in their best effort in every fight. This means providing optimized skills, gear, and ability gems, and, for those lucky enough to roll an RNG, the best decks of cards are available.
Map Catalog
The Lost Ark has an additional deckbuilding element that can give players passive stat bonuses.
These cards feature many of the Lost Ark characters of various rarities often given to players as rewards for completing quests or in card sets based on rarity that randomly selects a new card.
Stat bonuses applied to a player through a deck vary depending on the card book that the active cards in the deck belong to and increase with each card associated with the book added to the deck.
Books: Six identical
Individual cards are connected to other similar cards in collections known as books.
The cards in the book often have a common theme that ties them together, such as in the book "Generation of Pirates," which features six pirate characters from Lost Ark. Collecting each card in the themed book will grant you a passive buff, regardless of which cards the player has used in their active deck.
Additionally, increasing the awakening level of all cards in the book will grant additional buffs based on the total number of awakening levels of all cards.
Increasing Card Awakening Levels
Players will notice a row of five hollow gems at the bottom of the cards, each corresponding to five levels of Awakening.
In the 'Upgrade' tab of the map catalog, players can select the map they want to upgrade from the far left side of the menu.
Upgrading a map requires Map Experience Upgrade Points, which can only be obtained with limited funds:
- Deleting cards
- Earning card experience packs (sometimes a login reward)
Once the required card experience is maxed out, a duplicate card of that type will be necessary to continue the Awakening. This can be extremely difficult to do with higher rarity cards, as they are often much harder to find.
How and why to create decks?
Players can build a deck of six individual cards in the card catalog by right-clicking on the cards they wish to activate.
A passive effect unique to that book begins for every two cards of a specific book included in a player's active deck.
For example, regarding the Pirate Generation book, for every two pirates added to the active deck, the player will deal an additional 100% damage to "lucky" boss monsters randomly found throughout Arcezia.
These effects can activate whether the player has collected the entire book, included it in their deck, or even used a maximum of six cards. This means that players can consist of characters from several different books in their deck to simultaneously apply several different types of effects.
Adding four of the six pirate cards will apply a 200% damage bonus to lucky monsters. Completing a six-card deck with two Field Boss II cards will contribute an additional 4% total health increase.
With Lost Ark gold, players can unlock several pre-installed decks, allowing them to create highly specialized decks that are better suited to different game situations and switch between them as needed.