Raising a card to Tier V
Only 7,082 players hold the Perfected badge. It is the cheapest power spike in the game and almost nobody finishes it. Here is the loop that gets one card there.
Concentrate every upgrade on one damage card until it hits Tier V, then start the second. Splitting upgrades across four cards leaves you with four mid cards and no carry.
7,082 players hold the Perfected badge — raise a card to Tier V. That is 11.9% of the 59,582 players who have finished the first quest, and it is the single cheapest source of power in Arcane 101. Almost nobody finishes it. This page is about how to be one of the people who do.
Why this badge matters more than it looks
Compare it to the map badges:
| Badge | What it takes | Players |
|---|---|---|
| First Lesson | Finish the first quest | 59,582 |
| Bramble Breaker | Clear the Forest | 57,121 |
| Perfected | Raise one card to Tier V | 7,082 |
| Frost Hunter | Clear Frostfang Pass | 13,742 |
| Legendary Find | Own legendary gear | 14,393 |
A player who has cleared Frostfang Pass is more common than a player who has a Tier V card. That is backwards from how most people play: they push maps and let upgrades happen incidentally. The people who got past the wall did the opposite — they finished the cheap, guaranteed upgrade before pushing content.
The loop, in order
- Pick one damage card and write its name down. Not four cards, not "whatever I have duplicates of". One card, chosen deliberately, before you spend anything.
- Stop upgrading every other card. This is the hard part. From now on, duplicates and upgrade material for other cards get held, not spent.
- Feed that one card every duplicate it can take. Upgrading consumes copies of the same card; if you do not have copies, you farm the content that drops that card's family.
- Check the tier after each upgrade and note which resource actually gated you — copies, currency, or a material. That tells you what to farm next instead of guessing.
- Push it to Tier V before you touch a second card. When it lands, you get the Perfected badge and, more importantly, a card that ends frost-land fights in two or three hits.
- Then start the second card, using the same discipline. Two Tier V cards will carry you through most of the campaign.
The failure mode to avoid
Spreading upgrades is the default because the game lets you do it. Four cards at Tier II feel like progress — you improved four things! What you actually have is four cards that each fail to end a fight before the enemy gets a turn. In a turn-based game, "not quite enough damage" and "no damage" cost the same number of turns.
The rule to hold: one card, all the way to Tier V, then the next one. If you feel bored, that is the upgrade working — the boredom is the absence of the decision-making you were doing instead of committing.
How to tell it is working
Use the same three-fight test as the Frostfang page, on Forest enemies where you know the baseline:
- Clear one Forest encounter and count the turns.
- Upgrade the card once.
- Clear the same encounter again and count again.
If the turn count dropped, the upgrade is doing what it should. If it did not, you upgraded the wrong card — the one that was not carrying your damage — and you should stop feeding it.
| Before | Expected after one tier | Read |
|---|---|---|
| 5 turns to clear a Forest fight | 4 turns | On track |
| 5 turns | 5 turns | You upgraded a support card, not your carry |
| 4 turns | 2 turns | Good — push the next tier and test again |
Where the materials come from
Materials and duplicates come from the content you are already doing: fights, chests and the chest-choice system. One purchase in the game's store directly interacts with this loop — Eye of Fortune changes chest opening so you get a choice of three items instead of one. That is relevant to card upgrading only insofar as more choice means better odds of the duplicate you need; it does not upgrade a card by itself, and we are not recommending you buy it.
The honest summary: the Tier V loop is free, slow, and boring, and it is the difference between the 13,742 who cleared Frostfang and the 43,379 who did not.
Related
- Frostfang Pass — the wall this upgrade gets you past.
- Gear and legendaries — the other power source, and why it is not a substitute.
- Mythic and Insane — where a Tier V card stops being enough.
