Beat the guardian. Keep the slab.
Real graded cards in Vailen come from one place: the Keepers' Trials, boss fights you win on skill. This page explains the world, binding, the Trials, the slab roll and its fairness proof, and how the card ends up in your wallet.
1. The world
Five islands in a chain, each one a chapter. Wreckwater Cove, a broken crater round a lagoon, teaches the bind on practice creatures. Cinderhold, a walled citadel on a cliff plateau, has the commons. The Gloamroot Terraces, the volcanic Slagmaw Shelves and the Shattered Crown follow, with rarer creatures and harder Trials.
Creatures roam the coloured zones on your minimap. Rarer tiers need higher levels to bind, and the portal to each new island opens when you pass that island's Trial.
2. Binding
Walk up to a creature and press E. The two of you lock into an encounter and the camera swings to the side. Pick a binding sigil, and a rune ring starts shrinking on the ground under the creature.
Release with Space when the ring sits inside the green band. The closer to the centre, the better the cast. The server times the release from its own clock with your latency removed, so a slow connection never costs you.
A held bind pays XP, crafting materials (hide, and crystal from rares up) and a page in your Bestiary. Wild creatures carry no card. Any creature can also be fought instead of bound, press F, for Combat XP and hide.
Bind odds depend on the creature's tier and your sigil, scaled from 0.8 (a bad cast) to 1.1 (a perfect one), capped at 90%:
55% on a common, 22% on a rare, long odds above. Free ones come from the Bank every day.
78% on a common, 45% on a rare, 22% on an epic.
Binds commons, 72% on a rare, 48% on an epic, 25% on a legendary.
A sure bind on any Common or Rare. Level rewards only, never sold.
A failed bind can make the creature flee; slow creatures always vanish after a miss.
3. The Trials
Each island's Keeper (Seris, Vael, Brann) sends a guardian into the arena in front of their Trial hall: Seris's Briarhound, Vael's Slagborn, Brann's Obsidian Wyrm. It is your fight alone; anyone nearby can watch but not join. You have HP (more with level and a better sword) and four moves:
A three-swing combo; the third hits hardest. You turn to face the guardian. Damage comes from your sword and your Combat level.
A roll with a moment where nothing can hit you. Roll through a blow as it lands.
One heavy two-handed blow, on an 8 second cooldown.
A short blink the way you are moving, on a 10 second cooldown.
Every guardian attack is telegraphed: a red shape on the ground (a cone, a circle, a lane, a ring) fills up, and when it is full the blow lands on whoever is inside. Each guardian has its own moves and changes phase as its HP falls, and enrages if the fight drags on. Fall and the Keeper pulls you back to the hall; try again after a short wait. The server runs the whole fight on its own clock: it checks every swing's range and timing and decides every hit.
4. The slab roll
From level 5, beating a guardian rolls for a slab from that Trial's pool: Watchfort pays Common or Rare (Rare on a roll under 25%), Rootdeep Rare or Epic (Epic under 20%), Caldera Epic or Legendary (Legendary under 10%). The vault holds one slab of each tier for you while you fight, and gives them back if you lose.
One roll per Trial per day, two a day in all. Repeat clears still pay XP and Combat XP. The victory screen shows the roll against the number it needed, with a link to check it.
The slab is a real graded card, tokenised by Collector Crypt and held in their insured vault. Open the Bag to keep it, list it on the Trading Post, or press Withdraw to send the token to the Solana wallet attached to your account.
5. Provably fair
At the start of every day the server publishes a commitment to a secret seed. Each roll (a bind, a slab roll) is computed from that seed, your own seed, and a counter, and the secret is revealed the next day. Press P in the game to see today's commitment, your rolls, and the revealed seeds, and recompute any roll yourself. The server cannot change a roll after the fact without the arithmetic failing.
6. Everything else
Every species you have bound, with medals at 3, 10 and 25 binds.
Rare variants marked by the rift, violet and lit from within. Everyone on the island is told when one appears. First to bind it keeps the entry.
Side skills that pay XP and materials. Craft better tools, and a better sword for the Trials, at a workbench.
Three quests a day, free sigils from the Bank, a first-bind streak, waystones in every zone, a slab roll at each Trial.
List any slab for other players to buy. Buy theirs.
7. Where the slabs come from
The team put up the money for the first slabs. We buy them on Collector Crypt's marketplace and deposit them into the game's vault, where the Trials draw from them. When the vault is out of a tier, a win pays the other tier in the pool, or XP only if it holds neither.
From there the vault feeds itself. Every sale on the Trading Post carries a 3% fee, and 80% of those fees are committed to buying more slabs for the vault. The remaining 20% keeps the servers on.
Nobody is asked to deposit anything this season. Binding sigils are earned, not bought with real money, and the in-game SOL is play credit.