Late-game Lost Ark content necessitates that players bring their absolute best to each and every fight.
This means bringing optimized skills, optimized gear, optimized Ability Stones, and, to those fortunate in their RNG rolls, the best card decks available.
The Card Catalog
Lost Ark features a supplemental deck-building element that can provide players with passive statistical boosts.
These cards, depicting many of Lost Ark’s characters and varying in rarity, are often given to players as quest rewards, or in rarity-based card packs that will select a new card at random.
The statistical bonuses applied to the player through the deck change depending on the card book to which the active cards in the deck belong, and increase in strength with every book-related card added to the deck.
Related: Lost Ark PvE Classes Tier List – The Best Characters for PvE
Books: Six of a kind
Individual cards connect to other similar cards in collections known as books.
The cards in a book often carry an overarching theme that ties them together, such as the Pirate Generation book featuring six of Lost Ark’s pirate characters. Managing to collect every card in a themed book will grant a passive buff, no matter what cards a player has equipped in their active deck.
In addition, upgrading the Awakening Level of all cards in a book will provide additional buffs that increment based on how many Awakening Levels all cards have in total.
Related: How to unlock sailing and how it works in Lost Ark
Upgrading cards’ Awakening Levels
Players will notice a series of five hollow gems at the bottoms of cards, with each gem accounting for a total of five Awakening Levels.
Under the Enhance tab of the Card Catalog, players can select the card they wish to upgrade from the leftmost part of the menu.
Upgrading a card requires Card XP Enhancement Points, which can only be obtained through limited means.
- Deleting cards
- Obtaining Card XP Packs (occasional login reward)
Once a card’s required Card XP has been maximized, a duplicate card of that type is required to proceed with the Awakening. This can be exceptionally difficult to accomplish with higher-rarity cards, as they are often much harder to find.
Related: How to change dungeon difficulty in Lost Ark
The hows and whys of deck-building
From the Card Catalog, players can build a deck of up to six individual cards by right-clicking on the cards they wish to activate.
For every two cards of a particular book that are included in the player’s active deck, a passive effect unique to the book will begin to take effect.
Regarding the previously mentioned Pirate Generation book, for example, For every two pirates added to the active deck, the player will deal an additional 100% damage to the “Lucky” boss monsters found randomly throughout Arkesia.
These effects can activate whether or not the player has collected the entirety of a book, has included the entirety of a book in their deck, or has even applied the maximum total of six cards. This means that players are free to incorporate members of several different books into a deck in order to simultaneously apply several different effect types.
Where adding four of six pirate cards would apply a 200% damage bonus to Lucky monsters, completing the six-card deck with two Field Boss II cards would contribute an additional 4% boost to overall health.
At the price of in-game gold, players can unlock multiple deck presets, allowing them to build highly specialized decks to better suit different gameplay situations, and be able to swap through them as needed.
Related: The best locations to farm upgrade materials in Lost Ark
