Hades 2 Arcana Cards explained and the best cards to use
May. 6, 2024The Hades 2 Arcana Cards system is the main way to increase Melinoe’s overall power
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Using a good selection of Hades 2 Arcana Cards will massively boost Melinoe’s power with passive buffs and new abilities, helping your chances of success each night. You need to unlock cards at the Altar of Ashes in the Crossroads, but the system gets complicated when you have to factor in Melinoe’s Grasp level, forcing you to make tough choices about your build inHades 2. To help you understand how Arcana Cards work, which cards are best in Hades 2, and how you can upgrade them, I’ve laid out everything I know below.
How to unlock and activate Hades 2 Arcana Cards
After finishing your first run in Hades 2,head to the Altar of Ashes at the entrance to the Crossroad’s training areaand here you can start unlocking Arcana Cards from the Altar menu.Arcana Cards cost varying amounts of Ashes and sometimes rare resources to unlock. Buying a card also reveals other cards in the adjacent spaces below and to the right, gradually filling out the entire 5x5 Arcana Card grid.
However, unlocked Arcana Cards will only grant their buffs and benefits if they are activated, which is done by selecting a card. You’ll notice that thisfills Melinoe’s Grasp gauge on the right of the Altar menu. Each card has a number and the green hand Grasp icon in the top-right corner, which indicates how much Grasp the card uses. Since Melinoe’s starting Grasp is only 10, you are very limited in the number of Arcana Cards you can activate at once, soincreasing Melinoe’s maximum Grasp by spending any Psyche is crucial to letting you activate as many Arcana Cards as possible.
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Each Grasp upgrade increases your Grasp by two but costs more and more Psyche. You still won’t be able activate that many Arcana Cards after several upgrades, but you will have space for a good mix of low and high-Grasp cards for a range of buffs.You can also freely activate and deactivate your Arcana Cardswhenever you use the Altar between runs to change your buffs, so long as you don’t exceed Melinoe’s Grasp limit.
Additionally,some Arcana Cards cost 0 Grasp but will automatically activate if a specific condition is met instead– these are marked asAwakening Cardsand they’re usually pretty powerful. The Awakening conditions are based on the other Arcana Cards you activate (for example, one Awakening Card requires you to activate all five cards in a row while another activates only if the three cards surrounding it are also active), so you can try and build your deck to activate as many Awakening cards as possible, though you might end up with a less focused build.
Now that you’ve grasped the basics of the Arcana Card system in Hades 2, it helps to know which cards are worth activating to boost Melinoe’s strength. Here are the Arcana Cards I’ve found to be best in Hades 2, thanks to the incredibly useful buffs or extra abilities they provide:
As you keep playing the game, you’ll eventually unlock the"Consecration of Ashes" Incantation at the Crossroads cauldron that grants the ability to upgrade your Arcana Cards with Moon Dust. I learned this Incantation from Hecate on my fifth time defeating her, and it requires these ingredients:
Cast the Incantation then head over to the Altar and follow the ‘Insights’ button prompt to switch to the upgrade mode.When you select a card, you can spend Moon Dust to increase its effectiveness, with higher-Grasp Arcana Cards generally requiring more Moon Dust to upgrade and sometimes rare resources.
While casting the Incantation automatically gives you three Moon Dust to get you started, you canget more Moon Dust by trading 80 Bones for 1 Moon Dust with the Wretched Brokerat the Crossroads camp, redeeming some from Charon’s Gold Rewards, or brewing it at the Crossroads Cauldron with two alchemy recipes. You can alsoupgrade cards a second time to increase their effectiveness even more, but the upgrade costs are substantially higherwith a lot more Moon Dust needed and often very rare resources too.© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.
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