Guilds and events

A guild is where Arcanum stops being a single-player collection. Guilds pool cards and currency into shared perks, run cooperative raids against bosses no one clears alone, and fight other guilds over territory across a season. This guide covers what each of those actually asks of you.

Some of what follows runs on a season or opens in stages, so what you can see today depends on what is currently running.

Joining a guild

You join one guild at a time, either openly or through a request the leadership reviews. Membership starts at 30 places and grows with the guild's level, up to 50.

Ranks are leader, officer and member. Officers and the leader can act on behalf of the guild — registering it for a war, reviewing join requests — and they see a management view of the roster, including who has gone quiet. Ordinary members do not; a hidden username stays hidden from everyone but the two ranks that can act on it.

Levelling the guild

Guild level runs on a shared experience pool, and there are two ways to feed it.

Donate cards. Copies you do not need are destroyed for guild experience, at a rate that rises with rarity. The donation is guaranteed — no failure roll — so it is strictly better than disenchanting first and donating the essence. Your favourites, listed cards, cards in a deck, on an expedition or in a chat are never touched, and mythic and chromatic are excluded.

Donate essence. The soulbound currency from disenchanting goes into the same pool.

Both paths pay you guild seals as well, a personal currency spent in the guild shop. The shop's stock is gated by guild level, so levelling the guild is what unlocks what you can buy — coins, gems, packs, frames, banners and themes, including guild banner presets that unlock for every member at once.

The level itself pays out in live multipliers: a capped bonus to experience on everything you do and to the coins you win from battles, plus the member cap above.

Raids

A raid is three to ten guildmates against one enormous boss card, each bringing their own eight-card deck.

The central rule is that the boss never hits you in the face. Its damage goes into your field cards, front to back, and any overkill burns. You cannot die. What you can do is run out: when your field, hand and deck are all empty you are exhausted — still in the raid, still watching, unable to act until a healer brings cards back.

That makes composition matter. A raid needs at least one tank and at least one healer to start, and role eligibility is checked against your deck: a tank needs at least three earth or water cards, a healer at least three light or water. Tanks taunt and soak; healers restore field cards, return the top of a teammate's graveyard to the bottom of their deck, and once per raid can pull an exhausted player back into the fight; damage dealers do the damage.

Failure is a clock, not a wipe. From five rounds before the limit the boss enrages, gaining attack every round and adding board-wide damage; at the limit the raid ends. Before that, the boss telegraphs its next round — who it is aiming at and for how much — so a tank has something concrete to taunt away.

Rewards split 40% evenly across the party and 60% by contribution, where contribution counts damage dealt, damage absorbed and healing done. A guild's first kill of a boss doubles everyone's seals. Three raids a week per player are rewarded in full, resetting Monday; beyond that you may keep playing, at a fraction of the payout.

The hex war

The hex war is a monthly guild meta-game on a hexagonal map. A season is one calendar month and three weekly wars, each on a freshly generated map of 120 to 180 cells, with eight to twelve guilds fighting on it at once.

Your guild starts from a headquarters and expands supplied territory outward: claiming empty cells, beating neutral guardians in a fight, and besieging land another guild holds. Actions cost personal war energy, which caps at four points and refills one every four hours, so the war rewards a guild that shows up in shifts rather than one player with a free weekend.

A few rules shape everything else. Land cut off from your headquarters keeps its owner but scores half and cannot be used to claim from. Sieges can be ordered around the clock but only resolve inside your league's three-hour PvP window, chosen at registration in the league's own time zone. Combat is asynchronous: you fight the defending garrison's deck, driven by the game's own opponent AI, so nobody has to be online at the same moment as you.

War score counts supplied territory at double weight and cut-off territory at half. Holding an overwhelming share of the map for long enough ends a war early. Across the season, the number of wars won outranks everything else — two wins out of three takes the league.

Registration is done by a leader or officer, needs at least five members, and the roster is frozen before each war.

Seasonal events

Beyond the standing guild content, Arcanum runs a calendar of its own.

Festivals and faction events are time-boxed campaigns with their own currency. In a faction event you pick a side once, earn personal tokens and faction points from daily quests and a lore quiz, push a shared score bar toward milestones that pay every member of the faction that reached them, and spend tokens in an event shop that rotates limited cards, packs and cosmetics through the run.

The events calendar lays out the game's year as a grid of in-world holidays, each linking into whatever system it belongs to.

Expeditions send a party of cards away for hours in exchange for coins. Runs resolve stage by stage, so the outcome screen replays the journey and tells you which card fell where. Higher tiers pay far better and risk far more: on the permanent tiers a card that fails its roll is destroyed for good, and rarity protects it less than you would like. Some event expeditions soften that — a failed card comes home wounded instead, paying the price in wear — and every run's rules are frozen at departure, so a run that has set out always completes on the terms it left under.