Grail Card Tier List

This list only ranks cards we can name from patch notes and launch footage. The cardopedia has 300-plus entries; inventing the rest would be fan fiction. If a card is missing, it is unranked, not bad. Fill pips first. Energy and cards is the real S-tier page.

S — engine seeds

• Toothpick (Ratagnan) — bleed 3/4/5/6. The cheapest honest plan in the game.
• Cheese + poison pair (Mabel / Ratagnan poison saves) — heal, poison, and a trait hook. When you have both halves, shops get easy.
• Guardbot — 40 and your other cards gain +5; can play immediately when full. Auto-fire plus a thin deck is a run.
• Iconics in-pool — Rapier of the Rat, Carrot roast dinner, Johanna’s prosthetic. S only on the hero that owns them.

A — default good

• Bayonet — 10/20/30/40 and +50% on trigger after 0.39. Needs a trigger; still A.
• Apple / Guda-style heals — one-pip, strip 10% of heal. You sell them late, not day 1.
• Stilettos — 27 twice. Burst that also double-taps bleed.
• Lance — 36 plus extra per card in the opponent’s draw and discard. Punishes fat snapshots.
• Old city canal — poison 50/75/100/125 track. A if you committed to shuffle, C if you are a bleed chipper.
• Steam pack (Zappy, 1.0) — gadget seed.
• Halter weight / Carrot bites (Mabel, 1.0) — food seeds.
• Plier (Zappy, 0.39) — gadget seed.
• Copper wire — small shock apply. A as a seed, not as the only card.

B — combo pieces

• Marron glacé — Ratagnan food. B unless you needed strip this fight.
• Lazy larry — gold over time. B when you have a shop plan, C when you are dying this node.
• Lil baby — support rider in footage. B in a named combo.
• Cheddar / Soup Anatomy — multipliers and weird food. B if the rest of the plate exists.
• Rosary necklace — small gain plus stars in one clip. B until you know the rest of the text in-game.
• Practice-duel upgrades — not cards, but attack +N from a node. B when attacks already play.

C — filler and traps

• Jab after you have a real attacker — sell it.
• Any 3–4 pip rare that did not play last fight — C until income rises.
• Off-pool souvenirs — if it is not in your hero’s cardopedia filter, it is not a card, it is a memory of PvP.
• Random commons from the free-three node when you are already at 12 cards — C for the deck even if the card is A in a vacuum.

Iconic row

Card	Hero	Rank if it drops
Rapier of the Rat	Ratagnan	S
Carrot roast dinner	Mabel	S
Johanna’s prosthetic	Zappy	S

If it does not drop, do not wait. Builds on the starter builds page assume you may never see them.

Pip override

Any S-card with unfilled pips is a C-card for that fight. Rank the resolved text, not the shop portrait. Upgrade ladders (the slashes in patch notes) move a card along its row; they do not change its letter if you never play it. Upgrades and enchantments is the anvil rule.

How to use this in a shop

1. Filter by hero pool in your head.
2. If you do not have an engine seed, buy a seed (Toothpick, cheese, Steam pack).
3. If you have a seed, buy the cheapest card that detonates it.
4. If the shop is all C, leave or sell.
5. If you are about to take PvP, prefer A cards that play on cycle one over S cards that pose.

Cross-check statuses on status effects so you do not buy a poison canal into a bleed Toothpick on the same seven cards. Cross-check heroes on the character tier list. Missing names belong in the cardopedia, not in a fan fiction row.

This list will look silly after the first big number patch. That is fine. The pip override will not.