The best part of a card game like this is your guild. The worst part is running it.
For years those were the same sentence. Assigning people to brawl slots in a Discord thread. Chasing six players who forgot to submit. A results screen you could not actually read. We looked at all of it and decided the management layer is the product. So we built that first.
Guilds and brawls are where this genre is most fun and most neglected. We treated the clunk as the bug, not the price of admission.
A Stellarch guild is a small organization you build with other pilots. Not a name tag over a group chat. A colony with moving parts:
This whole system is built. It comes online when we open the closed alpha.
Roles are not a flat list either. Every rank is a grid of permissions you set yourself.
This is the bar: the quality of life you expect from software in 2026, not a web-1.0 spreadsheet with a submit button.
The management runs on settings, not on someone nagging the group chat:
That is the difference between a guild tool you tolerate and one you actually like. None of it is loud. All of it is the reason running a guild stops feeling like homework.
The money side is configured the same way, through settings, not spreadsheets.
We are building this in the open, and the Discord is where the guild and brawl design gets argued out in real time.
Brawls are the heartbeat. Guild versus guild, every week, your members fighting in parallel slots while the whole guild watches the score move. We held this one to a hard "no rough edges" bar. It is the centerpiece of what we are shipping next.
Here is the week.
Fill (Monday to Wednesday). Officers assign members to frays, the individual match slots, each with its own rules and mana cap. When you go to assign someone, you get a preview card: their collection for that league, their maxed cards, their past brawl record, their win rate, how many frays they have missed. You pick with data, not a guess in a DM. Members can claim leftover frays themselves, and a small reminder in the nav tells you when a slot is still open that you could take.
Battle (Thursday to Sunday). Every player previews their matchups (same rules, same mana, same seed for both sides), then submits all their teams blind. Some frays are best-of-one, some best-of-three, depending on the tier. Results stay hidden until you choose to see them.
The reveal. This is the beat we cared about most. You either hit reveal-all for the instant result, or you watch the match replay and let it land. Every replay is deterministic, byte-identical for everyone, so a brawl result is something you can rewatch and learn from, not a number that appeared.
The quality-of-life calls that matter here:
This is in the build now and switching on when the alpha opens. It is roadmap, stated plainly, not a live claim.
The guild economy gets the same treatment: make the money side legible and low-friction.
And founding a guild becomes a shared event instead of a solo button. A founder stakes 25,000 SGC and opens a seven-day petition. Co-founders sign on and chip in. Hit five signers and 100,000 SGC raised, and the guild forms on its own, whole founding roster already inside. Every screen says plainly what is at risk and what is non-refundable, because hiding that would be exactly the kind of thing we are trying to get away from.
Every feature above started the same way: the old way annoyed us, so we fixed it. That is the entire philosophy.
A card game lives or dies on its loop. A guild lives or dies on whether running it feels like a game or a second job. We think the second job is where this genre quietly lost people, and that getting it right is worth more than bolting on another mechanic.
The economics stay honest while we are at it. Every member fights, not just the whales. A sharp, well-built collection earns a brawl slot, not a four-figure one.
A real question for the Hive and TCG crowd: what guild or brawl chore do you want gone for good? We are still building this. Tell us where it still hurts.
on Hive → @stellarchStellarch is a deterministic trading-card game on Hive: draft a 7-card team, outplay your opponent, climb the ranked ladder. Browse the cards · Read the docs · See the leaderboard
