Every article about crypto gaming is a ranking of how much money you might make. I’ve read a dozen this month and they’re the same page with the token prices swapped out.
Almost nobody writes about the games themselves. What’s in the box, how deep the card pool goes, whether the collection is worth collecting. Which is odd, because that’s the only part players still care about once the price chart gets boring. The NFT games coverage in particular reads like a stock screener that wandered into the wrong hobby.
So here’s one written the other way round. Stellarch is a card battle game on Hive, it’s in closed alpha right now, and I want to talk about what’s actually in it.
Most web3 games ship twenty cards. This one has 290+
That was the surprise, honestly. Alpha usually means a placeholder set and a roadmap. Twenty cards and a Discord.
Stellarch is running 290+ Fighters and commanders. They spread across 8 affinities and 15 alien races, carrying 66 abilities between them, with a ruleset pool around 85 entries that changes what a good draft even looks like from one match to the next. Draft under a ruleset that shuts off a whole damage type and everything you learned in the previous game works against you.
For comparison, that’s a card pool on the scale of a mature digital card game rather than an alpha, and it’s a serious amount to have written and balanced before opening the doors. Illustrated, too. That’s its own mountain. Underneath it sits a deterministic combat engine, so a match resolves identically every time from the same seed, which is a hard thing to build early and basically impossible to retrofit later.
It plays in a browser. Nothing to download, no client, no launcher. You can sign in with email or Google if you’d rather not touch a wallet at all. Hive Keychain and EVM wallets are there for people who want them, but they’re an option rather than a turnstile.
The First Pilot was never sold to anyone
Here’s the reason I’d tell someone to get into this particular alpha rather than watch from outside.
There’s a card called The First Pilot. In the card data it carries a promo flag, and it’s the only seed card in the whole game that has one. In practice that means it has never appeared in a pack, never been bundled into a starter grant, and has never been sold to anybody at any price. There is no purchase path to it. There never was one.
Every confirmed closed alpha participant can claim exactly one. You open the claim page and click. Nothing is auto-granted against a snapshot you might have missed, which I prefer, because it means nobody loses out on a technicality they never knew about.
What mints is a gold foil Genesis copy at max level and max BCX. Genesis is the founding edition, so you end up holding a maxed premium copy from the game’s first printing that was structurally never purchasable.
I won’t put a number on it. Nobody honestly can, and the market for individual cards isn’t switched on anyway. What I’d say instead is that “was never for sale” is a property you cannot manufacture later. Either you were in the room or you weren’t.
Cosmetics that exist rather than sitting on a roadmap
Card foils are shipped and real. There’s a two step ladder, standard and a premium gold tinted tier, and The First Pilot lands on the premium one.
Profiles have proper depth too. You get an avatar, a banner and a worn title, and the avatar does something I liked, which is that you equip one of your own cards as your picture instead of uploading a jpeg. Titles carry render effects, and five are unlocked for everyone from day one. Plain, solid, a soft glow, a static gradient, and an accent underline.
I’ll be straight about the ceiling. More effects sit in the code behind an achievement system, and that system is not built yet. Five is what anyone has today. I’d rather say so than let you go hunting for an unlock screen that isn’t there.
A free TCG where you own nothing and still play everything
This is the part that makes the alpha worth entering rather than bookmarking.
A new Stellarch account mints zero cards. It doesn’t matter, because the draft picker never reads your collection. It builds from a virtual ghost catalog synthesized in memory that ignores ownership completely. You sign up, immediately draft a full legal seven card team, six Fighters plus a commander, and go battle with it.
No pack to open first. No starter bundle. Nothing at all between the signup form and a real match.
Ownership still counts for something. In standard and unranked play your own battle-usable cards get layered on top of that free floor for anything the floor doesn’t already cover. But it only ever adds. It is never the wall.
What is not live, because somebody should say it
This is a closed alpha with a waitlist, not a public launch, and glossing over that would be a disservice to anyone reading.
Deposits and withdrawals are off, so nothing moves in or out. The secondary card market is switched off in production, which means you cannot buy, sell, rent or flip an individual card today. Ranked token rewards are built but switched off. Staking, off. The referral program isn’t live either. If you turned up looking for an income stream, that is not what this is right now.
What you get instead is the game, the collection, and a founder card. For an alpha, that seems like the honest trade to me.
The free floor has an expiry date in the source
The ghost catalog runs on a flag, and that flag is registered to switch off at public launch alongside the other settings that change state on release day. It isn’t a promotion somebody might extend if the numbers look good. It’s a scheduled change sitting in the launch registry.
So the current arrangement, where you play a 290 card game while owning none of it, is specifically an alpha era condition. Everyone who gets in before the flip learns the whole game for free, drafts as much as they want, and walks out holding a founder card that was never on sale.
Waitlist is on the Stellarch homepage. Email or Google, no wallet needed, and you’re drafting a team a few minutes later.
Alpha doors close. This one has its closing date written into the code rather than a countdown banner.
