Refining cards question

[arcanedude34]

If I wanted to refine a card to get something useful out of it, is the card lost forever? I'm referring to character and GF cards, obviously.

[Karifean]

Actually, no. But you cannot get it back until the 4th disc, so I'd rather not.

[Iceglow]

Refining a [Character] or [GF] class card will destroy the original card in your inventory. In general it is not considered worth it to do this you can eventually refine items and cards upwards in to the items gained by doing a refined level [Character] or [GF] card though it will take a lot more time to do this.

As Karifean said, you can actually retrieve a [Character] or [GF] card refined on disc 4 however it is not so simple as they make it sound.

To begin, you must have completed both the Queen of Cards and the Garden Card Club side quests in full. This will be time consuming and also very difficult especially if you do not eradicate the card rules (excluding Same-Wall and Open plus a trade rule of your choice, these can stay since Same-Wall requires Same to be activate in the region to be actually used) in the world which you will likely need a FAQ on how to do and where to find the easiest/earliest possible changes you can make to a regions rules (such as changing Trabia Rules in Deling City ect)

Secondly you must find the Ragnorak on Disc 4 after Time Compression takes place when you find it you can use it to find the Queen of Cards in the compressed world.

Thirdly, Challenge her she will agree to play so long as she can randomly select the rules for the game. I believe she chooses a regions ruleset to use hence you need to eradicate the original rules in each region and spread only the beneficial open rule. I may be wrong and she actually uses completely random rules to play you but basically she will have access to any unique cards you refined throughout your game. I know some people have deliberately refined all but their "hand cards" and played for them back to give them a boost in the final battle this in my humble opinion is an overrated tactic since Ultimecia's castle is not hard by any means of the definition. The Queen of Cards will no longer be playing using "easy going" rules like she does in the quest when you give her cards to generate new ones she'll play decisively harder and with [Character] or high power [GF] cards in play will be a force to be reckoned with using the ALL rule is highly disadvised.

[Skyblade]

You are correct, Iceglow, the rules the Queen uses are randomly selected from the various regions. If you haven't abolished Random from everywhere, at the very least, you are going to get in a lot of trouble (for those who don't know, Random actually means: select 4 pathetic cards, and 1 unique card). Don't refine all your cards at once, that is a fairly foolish way to play. Refine one and win it back. You probably will have the "One" trade rule, so can only win one back at a time anyway, and it keeps her difficulty down.

But, yeah, don't bother with it unless you want to twink to perfection for some reason, because, as Iceglow said, the last dungeon is really not that hard.

[Iceglow]

Also if you're THAT close to the end of the game refining cards won't matter really the only people left in the world on disc 4 to play cards with are the CC members aboard the Ragnorak and the Queen of Cards herself. You could just refine all your cards and items and not have to think of winning them back.

Also like I said using the various refining options plus monsters you can on disc 3 and disc 4 get all the items available from refining cards by careful manipulation and hunting.

[Mo-Nercy]

...you can actually retrieve a [Character] or [GF] card refined on disc 4 however it is not so simple as they make it sound.

To begin, you must have completed both the Queen of Cards and the Garden Card Club side quests in full.
You don't need to have completed the Queen of Cards quest to get the CC Club on the Ragnarok in Disc 4. You only need to have done to the CC Club quest. I'm very sure of this because I never bothered to do the Queen of Cards quest properly, I always just challenge her outside her escape pod. Also, I do believe that if you challenge her in this way, she'll always use ALL rules existing in every region at the time so if you've only abolished Random in Trabia but not Dollet, it'll still come up.

I also rarely go through the tiresome ordeal of abolishing rules. In my opinion, Random isn't that bad of a rule. It makes the game interesting. If I lose a few good cards, I'll keep playing until I get them back. If I go on a really bad losing streak, I'll reset, but that's rarely the case because the good thing about places that have Random is that it's never a rule on it's own. It's always coupled with Same or Plus or both which can give normally pathetic cards the potential to be especially potent. Open generally spreads easily without any extra effort required of you, so strategy is easy to map out because the AI can be pretty dumb. Admittantly, playing the Queen at the escape pod is really hard with Random in place because she uses 5 rare cards whereas everyone else in the world will only use a maximum of one.

But in reference to the original question, I'd say it's worth it to refine cards like Laguna's (100 Heros), Bahamut's (100 Megalixers) and Brothers' (10 Adamantines). The former two really only if you plan on taking on Omega Weapon, for which they aren't a necessity but are useful nonetheless. The latter is good if you want to save a little bit of time getting the required items for Squall's and Selphie's best weapons. Refining any of the other cards isn't really worthwhile given the difficulty of reclaiming them from the CC Club on the Ragnarok though I think each player uses a different location's set of rules, so maybe the player who uses Balamb's rules can be targeted.