Arcana — overview

Arcanum (pl. arcana). What other deckbuilders call jokers. Don’t call them jokers.

The Pale Jack catalog is 109 arcana, each a small object in the dealer’s pocket or on his table. Every arcanum has a stable id, a tier, a trigger set, and a single small piece of behavior that bends the cascade or the engine.

Catalog by phase

Phase	Theme	Count	Trigger
Baseline	The starter set	12	various
1	Chain (onArcanum)	10	onArcanum
2	Drawback (constraints)	12	various, +UI gate
3	Build identity	16	per-archetype
4	Per-card scored	12	onScore
5	Mercy (cap shaping)	9	onResolve
8	Heavy Marks	6	onWin (compositional)
9	Withdrawal	4	onSurrender
10	Reckless Hand (Plunger)	4	onWin (post-double)
11	Splintered Pair (Twinned)	4	onWin (post-split)
Total		109

Catalog by tier

Tier	Count	Shop price
Common	~32	30
Uncommon	~38	60
Rare	~24	100
Mythic	~15	200

The build axes (Phase 3 onward)

Axis	Charms	What it pushes you toward
Patient	stationmasters_bell, quiet_hour, acolytes_patience, final_card	Stand discipline.
Iron	riveted_coat, iron_year, iron_missalbook	Hard-hand totals.
Cup	threadbare_cup, holy_pour, refused_cup	Sanity / Refusal economy.
Vow	strangers_vow + the chair Vow stack	Voluntary constraints.
Bold / Twinned	twin_coins, mirror_pair, owed_coin	Splits + symmetry.
Late-night	late_bird, tin_halo, crown_naturals	Naturals + post-midnight.
Heavy Marks	pair_hunter, long_walk_home, three_of_a_kind, seven_seeker, court_calls, slow_bleed	Compositional deviation.
Withdrawal	pawn_ticket, bell_pull, empty_sleeve, vow_of_withdrawal	Surrender as banking.
Plunger	open_hand, last_coin, doubled_wager, vow_of_plunger	Reckless doubling.
Twinned	cracked_vow, splintered_mirror, twin_marks, strangers_half	Wrong-pair splits.

How an arcanum fires

1. The engine resolves a hand. State is captured.
2. ArcanaRunner.run() walks the tray and dispatches per-trigger.
3. Each Arcanum.apply(trigger, ctx) returns an ArcanumEffect with chipDelta, multDelta, multMultiplier, flagsToSet.
4. Effects feed the cascade resolver. Flags persist in runStateFlags for the next hand / room / night.
5. onArcanum chain re-entry walks fired charms in order, with a maxChainDepth guard at 8.

Where this lives

• lib/sim/arcana/arcana.dart — the catalog (3000+ lines).
• lib/sim/arcana_runner.dart — the dispatcher.
• lib/data/meta_progression.dart — arcanaUnlocked (the player’s starter pool).
• assets/arcana/<id>.png — per-charm icon. 1:1 with the registry.

Each charm

Per-charm pages aren’t yet wiki-ed (109 pages would be a lot to maintain by hand). For now: see the per-build pages (Heavy Marks, Withdrawal, Plunger, Twinned, Drawbacks) for grouped detail. The full catalog source is in lib/sim/arcana/arcana.dart and is the canonical document until per-charm pages get authored.