A BABEL card is the canon record of a thing that happened: type, rank, level, four attributes and a registry ID the story itself has to obey. Rarity is not a sticker we print on top. It decides how much of the object exists, and how much of the object you get.
Five tiers, plus one card that is not sold at all. Every tier prints the same card master; from UNCOMMON up, each tier adds to it, and every tier is hard-capped at a number published with the set. Nothing here is a random pull. You always know what you are buying before you buy it.
The world's furniture: the objects everyone steps over, and the faces everyone has already seen. In BABEL, common is a horror genre. A Lumen-class stone lights a house for a decade and nobody asks what it was before it was a battery. The most photographed climber alive prints at the same tier, twice as many of her as any RARE in the set.
Named, indexed, and load-bearing: the props and side players a scene cannot run without. Uncommon is where a set stops being a poster and starts being a database.
The characters and machines a reader can name after one issue. RARE is the first tier that moves: a foil loop rendered from the same master, parallax and holo shimmer over the art, six to ten seconds, seamless both ways.
Reserved for the card the issue is actually about. One EPIC per issue, ever. It carries the arc: when the character changes, the EPIC is the card that gets a new printing, and your old one stops being replaceable.
Only for canon that breaks the chart. LEGENDARY prints as a real object: a die-cut 3D card with thickness, foil normal map and edge light you can rotate. Issue #001 has exactly one, and its stat block is redacted because the Registry has not finished arguing about it.
A Lexicon card is a Word, and a Word is a key. You cannot buy AVRA. You read the issue, you learn the Word the way Sckye did, and you speak it at the door. Your claim number is your serial, and the claim closes when Issue #002 ships.
Print-proportioned 63:88, full-bleed art under the frame, every plate legible at full size. Common to Legendary, the master is the same quality. Rarity never means a worse picture.
A six to ten second palindrome rendered from your card's own master: parallax on the art, holo shimmer across the die-cut, glyph glow on the plates. It is the card breathing, not a filter.
A real object with thickness and a foil normal map, built to spin and catch the light on its edge. The chart said it could not exist; the LEGENDARY printing is where it stops being a picture.
Every living thing in BABEL is keyed to a stone, and every stone answers to another one. Six classes, one loop. Your class is your camp long before it is your strategy.
Clarity, revelation, exposure. The light that shows you what you took.
Memory, patience, preservation. What the Tower kept while it waited.
Change, erosion, inevitability. Nothing up there stays the shape it was.
Fury, hunger, transformation. The floors nobody films twice.
Order, weight, endurance. The Registry's favourite kind of answer.
Resonance, precision, the Words. Where the tongue lives.
Collecting is not open yet. Ten slides are free to read right now, and when the first printing opens, low numbers go to whoever is standing there. One email the day it opens. After that, only when RETKON ships something.
Read ten slides of Issue #1 for nothing. When the first printing opens, LEXICON 001 is a free claim and your claim number becomes your serial, worldwide, forever, and low numbers never stop meaning you were here first. We will tell you the day it opens.