Meet Stellarch: A Card Game, Game First

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I'm Yixn. Some of you know me from Golem Overlord.

About three weeks ago I started building a card game. It's called Stellarch. This is the first thing I've written about it, so I'm going to take my time here: what it is, where it came from, what it costs, and where it's headed.

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Game first

I've made this mistake before, so let me start there.

With Golem Overlord, it crept in slowly. A decision here to prop up the economy, a feature there to keep the numbers looking healthy, and before long I was spending more time balancing an economy than making the game fun to play. I don't think I even noticed it happening until it already had.

So when I had an idea for an idle game, a GO successor, and I finally sat down to design it properly, I caught myself doing the exact same thing. Economy first. Every single decision I made there quietly boxed in what I could build later. Band-aid on band-aid, each one narrowing the next. I was chasing ghosts, trying to patch a foundation that was wrong from the start.

So I never really pursued it. I dropped it.

This time I'm building in the right order.

Game first. The economy comes second, and it serves the game, not the other way around.

No stacking a hundred little monetization systems, no never-ending FOMO machine. Just the parts I actually loved as a player, and the parts I've watched genuinely work.

And more than anything, I missed brawling. I wanted it back.

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Why a card game

I'm not going to act like this genre came out of nowhere, because it didn't.

Splinterlands got a lot right, and it deserves the credit. A card battler where you draft a team under a mana cap and a ruleset, then watch it fight itself out fairly. Cards you genuinely own, on chain. Brawls and guilds that gave people a reason to stick together. All of it running feeless on Hive, and still standing after years of bear markets that buried plenty of flashier things. I've put way too many hours into it to pretend the core isn't good. It is.

I just want to build one where the game comes first, and stays first. Where every decision after this one gets measured against one question: does it make the game better to play, or does it just move a number?

So that's what I'm doing. Not to replace anything, and not because I think I can do all of it better. Just another way to play on Hive, built around what I actually care about.

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No player bots

The thing that quietly wrecked a lot of games wasn't bots existing. It was player bots. People running scripts to auto-farm the rewards around the clock, draining the pool dry while the real players who actually showed up earned less and less for the same effort. It turns a game into a spreadsheet, and it punishes exactly the people you most want to keep.

Player bots are not allowed in Stellarch. Full stop. That's a line I have no interest in blurring.

The only bots here are mine, and they do one job. While we're still small, I run a handful of fair, clearly-marked bots so there's always someone to play when you sit down. They don't earn anything, they don't drain anything, they don't touch the economy at all. They exist so the queue isn't empty while the playerbase grows, and they fade out as real players fill it. A stopgap, not the plan.

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Let me be honest about money

I'm not going to sell you a fairy tale. Stellarch costs money. It's a real game with a real economy, real cards you buy and own, and yes, a stronger collection can give you an edge. I'd be lying if I told you otherwise, and I'd rather be straight with you from the first post than walk it back later.

But here's the part that actually matters to me: spending money is not the same as being good at this game.

Skill isn't only how you play a match out. A huge part of it is knowing the game well enough to know exactly which cards matter, and when. If you understand what you actually need, you can build a small, sharp collection on a tight budget and outrank someone who just bought one of everything.

A whale with a maxed set and no plan loses to a player who knows what they're doing.

I want that position to genuinely exist, the one where knowledge beats raw spend, and I'm designing for it on purpose, not hoping it happens by accident.

And I'll be clear about what your money buys, because that matters too. You're buying real cards. You own them, you can trade them, and they hold value. Not a subscription, not rented power that vanishes the second you stop paying. Packs are a dollar, not five, so the door in stays low. What you put in builds a collection that's actually yours, to keep, to sell, or to pass on.

Here's what I won't do:

• I won't gouge you, and I won't make a maxed-out collection the price of entry. You don't need the best of everything to compete. Maxing every card to its ceiling is a whale-of-whales flex, not the bar to play and win.
• I won't turn ranked into a second job. No grind wall you have to climb every single season just to stay relevant.
• I won't dump the core of the game on third parties and then treat them as an afterthought. The market, the tools, the trading, I build those myself.
• I ship what I show. I'd rather show you something small that works than promise you something huge and keep quietly pushing it back.

The economy serves the game. If a money decision ever makes the game worse, it's the wrong decision, and it goes.

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What Stellarch actually is

Underneath all of that, it's a card game on Hive. Here's how a match actually works.

You build a team of seven: six fighters and a commander, drafted under a mana cap and whatever ruleset that match throws at you. Then the fight plays out on a seeded engine, on its own, and you watch it happen.

The important part is that it's deterministic. The same teams and the same seed always produce the exact same fight, down to the frame. No luck of the server, no hidden dice you can't see. You can rewatch any match and check exactly what happened and why, step by step. Nobody can tell you a match went a way it didn't, because you can replay it yourself and watch it land the same every single time.

Almost 300 cards so far, spread across 8 affinities and 15 alien races, each with their own feel and their own tricks. It's not a mockup and it's not a trailer. It's real. I'm getting it ready for closed alpha right now.

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Built right, not bolted on

A lot of what should be core to a game like this ends up left to third parties to build. The market. Bids. Collection management. Guild tools. Safe trading. A real say in where the game goes. Players end up bouncing between five different community sites just to do basic things, and the people who built those tools get treated as an afterthought.

I'd rather build all of that myself, properly, from the start. Inside the game, not bolted on later, not something you need a separate website and a spreadsheet to manage.

I want a good game with a UX that respects you. Not one built to empty your pockets, and not one where only the biggest wallets get to compete.

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The economy, all of it

I said economy second, not no economy. So here's the whole thing, in the open, nothing hidden. Three tokens, all live on Hive Engine as of this week.

SGC is the in-game currency, and it has a real floor under it. I always take SGC back at $0.001 as payment for Stellarch's own products. That floor is the point: it means SGC can't just quietly inflate into nothing the way a reward token with nothing behind it does. It's worth something because I make it worth something.

STEL is the stake in the game, for governance and staking. I'll be upfront about the plan instead of dressing it up: SGC is the ranked reward at launch, and once the economy is actually stable, STEL becomes the reward and gets a path to burn down into SGC. I'd rather tell you the phased version now than over-promise where it is today.

GENESIS is the card pack itself, as a token. One token is one sealed pack. You open it in-game to get the cards inside.

And if you'd rather not touch crypto at all, there's a normal fiat onramp. You can pay how you want and still get exactly the same thing.

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What I'm building before closed alpha

This is the honest scope of what I'm working on right now, before alpha opens. It's a lot, and I'd rather show you the real list than wave vaguely at "more soon."

The competitive and social heart of it:

• Guilds, with proper guild management built in, not duct-taped on the side.
• Brawls. The thing I missed most, and the part I most want to get right.
• End-of-season tournaments.
• Season rewards and daily rewards, so showing up is worth it.

Ownership and the economy:

• Building whole decks, and renting, delegating or selling them as a single unit, not just card by card.
• Proper trading with double-sided accept, so a trade is safe by design and nobody gets tricked out of anything.
• STEL staking, and working out what governance should actually look like in practice.
• Battle passes.

The stuff that makes it feel like a real place, not a spreadsheet:

• Finishing the chat.
• A proper support system, so when something breaks you can actually reach a human.
• Avatars and profile pages.
• Skins.
• Maybe account levels and that kind of fun, optional progression.

Getting in, your way:

• More chain logins, and the option to create a Hive account right inside the game if you don't have one yet.

Some of this is close. Some of it is further out. And a few of these I'm honestly still working out, which I'll get to. But that's the real roadmap, not a teaser reel.

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I don't have everything figured out

And I'm not going to pretend I do, because pretending is exactly how you end up making promises you quietly bury later.

There's real stuff I haven't solved yet. How rewards should scale so a big collection doesn't just steamroll a new player. How the leagues should breathe so every tier feels worth playing. What governance should actually look like once STEL means something. A few other things. Some of it is built and running already, some of it is still a question mark on my own board.

That's fine, and it's on purpose. The best parts of Golem Overlord didn't come from me sitting alone in a room being clever. They came from building it with the people actually playing it, watching what they did, and listening when they told me something felt off. Same plan here. The open questions, we work out together.

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Want in?

Stellarch isn't open yet. I'm still getting it ready, and closed alpha is close.

Get on the waitlist at stellarch.io. Every confirmed pilot gets the free, max-level gold "First Pilot" card when we open the doors. It's yours, it's real, it's tradeable, and it carries through every phase from here on.

And come hang in the Discord while you wait. I'm building this whole thing in the open, the good calls and the messy ones, and I'd genuinely rather have you in the room for it than announce it at you later.

That's the post. That's the plan. Come build the rest of it with me.