Card Mod: what your cards are worth off the board
Published
In Final Fantasy VIII, a card you win is not just for playing. With the right ability it turns into items, and some cards are worth far more that way than in your hand.
Quezacotl and Card Mod
One of the game’s first two Guardian Forces, Quezacotl, teaches two card abilities. The Card battle command turns a weakened monster into a card: the lower its HP, the better the chance, and most bosses are immune. Card Mod, for its part, is used from the menu: it turns a card into items.
Every card has its own fixed rate. An ordinary monster card gives a few common items. The rare cards, those of the Guardian Forces and the characters, give items that can hardly be found anywhere else.
Six rare cards, and what Card Mod makes of them:
| Card | Card Mod |
|---|---|
| Gilgamesh | 10 Holy War |
| Bahamut | 100 Megalixir |
| Laguna | 100 Hero |
| Quezacotl | 100 Dynamo Stone |
| Shiva | 100 North Wind |
| Ward | 3 Gaea’s Ring |
A few famous rates
The Gilgamesh card gives ten Holy War, an item that makes the whole party invincible for a while. The Laguna card gives a hundred Hero, the single-character version of the same effect. A hundred Heroes is a safety net for the rest of the game.
The Bahamut card gives a hundred Megalixirs. The Quezacotl card gives a hundred Dynamo Stones, the Shiva card a hundred North Winds: items that other abilities then refine into powerful magic to stock and junction — each North Wind becomes twenty Blizzaga. Character cards give fewer, rarer things: three Gaea’s Rings for Ward, three Samantha Souls for Quistis.
The temptation is strong. It has a price: a modded card leaves the collection, and a rare card exists only once.
The Queen of Cards
Final Fantasy VIII planned for regrets. The Queen of Cards, a travelling player, moves from town to town as the story goes on and spreads new rules in whichever region she settles. She also has a father, a painter in Dollet, and a son.
Lose certain rare cards to her, and her father takes them as inspiration for a new card, which then turns up with another player somewhere in the world. Losing Mini Mog brings Kiros into being, held by a man in Deling City. Losing Sacred brings Irvine, found in Fisherman’s Horizon. Five rare cards come into being this way.
Mini Mog gives Kiros, Sacred gives Irvine, Chicobo gives Chubby Chocobo, Alexander gives Doomtrain, and Doomtrain gives Phoenix: left of each arrow, the card to lose; right of it, the one the Queen’s father draws next.
The lost card is not gone for good: her son holds it in Dollet, at the painter’s house, and you can win it back from him until the end of disc 3.
Almost everything comes back
On disc 4, a second chance opens. Any rare card you modded, lost at the table or never picked up can be won back from the Queen of Cards, or from the Diamond twins of the CC Group aboard the Ragnarok — provided you beat all seven members of the club at Balamb Garden before that point. One card is the exception: Pupu, which nothing brings back once modded.
For anyone who finished the CC Group quest, the arithmetic is simple: mod a rare card early, enjoy the items, win it back at the end. Everyone else should think twice before giving up a Laguna.
And in Triple Triad Online
The Queen of Cards has kept her seat, under the name Ishtar, in the Final Fantasy VIII standard format, playing Random and Roulette. The board, for its part, turns no card into items. Duplicates sell for MGP, and “Sell duplicates” always keeps one copy of every card: nobody gives up their last Laguna by mistake. The rules of every format are on the rules page.