Lost Ark – Cards & Card Sets Guide

Cards & Card Sets

Cards are collectible items that both provide small stat bonuses for collecting them, as well as equippable on a new equipment tab in your character info.

Cards are part of collections in the Encyclopedia, and when you complete that collection by owning all the cards in that collection, you gain a very small bonus to your stats. It’s really small, granted the bonus can be increased by having the cards Awakened. However there are bonuses to stats that you normally can’t really get, such as damage to a certain type of enemy here.

It’s not enough to have the card in your inventory, you must use the card to have it part of the collection. This means that you may need to expand your card collection capacity, as there are many cards.

In addition to the collections, certain cards are part of sets that can be equipped to the player. On their own, not a single card has benefits to the player, but when you equip multiple cards of a set, they grant additional stats to the player. Note that not all card collection sets (the things that provide small bonuses previously mentioned) can also be equipped.

You can equip up to 6 cards. Card sets activate their bonuses at either 2, 3, 4, or 6. 

Generally speaking, most card sets only offer defensive traits for their set bonuses, such as HP or elemental resistance. However, cards can also be leveled up through an Awakening system. Oftentimes, they have offensive traits if you can Awaken cards enough times from a set.

When using Card Experience cards from your inventory, they will be added to a bank of card EXP that you can allocate to your cards freely.

To Awaken a card, feed it EXP from the EXP bank. This costs Silver. Then, once you have maxed out the EXP, you must use duplicates of the base card in order to Awaken it. The number of duplicates needed increases with each Awakening stage, as well as the needed EXP. Cards can be Awakened up to 5 times each, requiring a total of 15 extra copies of the card to max.

There are a few card sets at the moment which are generally pursued.

• Abandoned Cliff’s of Wind (12): 7% Crit Chance
• This card set is pursued because Seria (blue card) can be obtained without RNG from traveling merchants in Luterra and Solas (green card) can be obtained from running the main story on a new character to level 34 (right after defeating Kakul-Saydon in East Luterra). Darren Aman can also be obtained from 10 Ignea Token.
• This card set is the initial goal for all DPS players since very little RNG can be involved in raising it.
• This card set is also the final best-in-slot card set for supporter types, as the 30 awakening bonus increases the damage taken by targets of holy property-type damage by 3.5%, which should boost the damage of all players due to a majority using the Esthers of Light set long-term.

• Esthers of Light (12 or better): Damage conversion to Light Property, Additional Light Damage
• This card set is pursued because it provides a large damage bonus relative to other sets and also converts all of your damage to Light Property, which further increases damage bonus against enemies weak to this (a few endgame encounters).
• Abandoned Cliffs of Wind with 12 awakenings is better than Esthers of Light before you reach 18 awakenings on it. The exception is against enemies weak to light, where Esthers of Light is stronger starting from 12 awakenings.

• Hope to See You Again: Reduced damage taken when under 50% HP.
• Sometimes used by support players in PVE and everyone in GVG for survivability.
• Highly efficient on Madness Berserker.

• Silent Giant’s Forest: Increased healing from battle items and Additional Physical/Magical Defense.
• Sometimes used by support players in PVE and everyone in GVG for survivability.

If you are a support player, your initial goal for a card set is just normal HP increasing cards. Aim for +12% Max HP from your cards. Fortunately, you don’t have to awaken any cards to obtain this, making this process way easier than DPS classes. This is because your heals scale off of your own max HP, so by increasing your health, you can keep allies alive better.

Cards come from weekly content, traveling merchants, raids, events, voyage coins, and achievements. It is possible to obtain a Legendary Selection Card Pack from Challenge Abyssal Dungeon from both personal loot as well as bid loot, and it is not guaranteed to appear in any given week.

There is one way that you can grind cards. On the 3rd floor of both cruise liners, there is a luxury merchant who will sell 7 card packs for 2,000 Pirate Coins each. That’s a total of 28,000 Pirate Coins to buy all 14. This merchant’s stock is per character, so you can burn a nearly unlimited amount of Pirate Coins on this. People who do a lot of Cooperative Sea Voyage missions to grind these cards will have an advantage when it comes to obtaining and upgrading their cards.

The cruise liners are located in the above locations.

Even though both cruise ships look exactly the same, the weekly stock for these merchants is different.

Still, card defensive boons shouldn’t be looked down on. They can make an encounter that is otherwise too difficult to survive in more manageable by providing a lot of additional HP or resistances.

Do not throw out cards. Keep them stored in one of your characters’ warehouses if you somehow run out of space in your card album.