Cards are no longer used for a card mini-game in Season 2. Instead, they 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. Most 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 Awaken system. Oftentimes, they have offensive traits if you can Awaken cards enough times from a set. To Awaken a card, you must use the card UI to drag it into the Growth area, and feed it EXP from either other cards or Card EXP cards. This costs Shillings. Then, once you have maxed out the EXP, you must use duplicates of the base card in order to Awaken it. The amount of duplicates needed increases with each

Awakening stage, as well as the needed EXP. Cards can be Awakened up to 5 times each. Most offensive traits require a large amount of Awakenings such as 12 or 30 (in the case of a set of 6). This means you have to Awaken multiple cards from that set to reach these points.

Most players, even whales, only use cards for their defensive traits right now, as consistently Awakening cards is an extremely RNG-gated system, strictly because of the acquisition method of cards. It is difficult to get Heroic and Legendary cards, and so Awakening them since so many duplicates are needed of a single card is very cumbersome. To give you an idea, raising a card to Awakening 1 costs one duplicate of the card, while raising it to Awakening 2 costs two…

Imagine having multiple copies of legendary cards.

Cards come from weekly contents, raids, achievements, and while you can buy them from the cash shop it is highly recommended against, due to the high cost and disgustingly large pool of cards weighted towards lower rarity. It is not a system you can whale, as there are only limited quantities ever present in the cash shop.

Still though, their 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.

In short, if you’re in it for the long haul, don’t toss out or use up low rarity card copies for EXP, just Awaken everything as you can when you can over a long period of time.

Credit by Saintone’s

This is information aggregated during my time playing Lost Ark on the Korean servers post-Season 2. As this is regional, some information may not apply to the RU, JP, or Global versions of the game. You can find gameplay of LAO Season 2 KR from my Twitch or YouTube channels. For corrections or questions you can reach me on Discord at Saintone#4599