At 18:00 CEST tonight, Season 3 closes. Nobody has to click anything. The ladder reads itself, picks the pilots who earned a seat, and drops them into a bracket with 20,000 SGC and a Fighter nobody can buy sitting at the end of it.
That is the first Season Crown. It has never run before.
And on Monday, a second thing starts: Guild Brawls, which shipped this morning, put every enrolled guild against rival guilds every single week. Two competitive layers, four days apart. Here is exactly how both work, including the parts that are not finished.
The ladder settles something tonight
For three seasons the ranked ladder has been a leaderboard. You climbed it, you looked at it, the season rolled over, and that was the whole ceremony.
From tonight it settles something.
The moment Season 3 closes, the top pilots on the ladder are seeded automatically into a knockout tournament. There is no sign-up form, no registration window, no lobby to sit in. If you placed high enough, you are already entered, and a notification lands the moment you qualify:
You qualified for the Season 3 Gold Championship. Standby for deployment.
Who is actually in
Two gates decide the field, and both are worth knowing before you plan your next season.
- You need 100 rated matches in that league family this season. This is an anti-snipe gate. You cannot parachute in at hour twenty-three with a hot rating and take a seat off someone who ground the whole week.
- You need to finish in the top 50 of your family by peak rating. From those, the top 32 by placement take the bracket seats.
Collection size does not gate this. The Collection-Power entry check is switched off for the alpha on purpose, because most pilots are drafting out of the ghost pool and own almost nothing yet. Your record gets you in, not your wallet.
As of this morning, 14 pilots have cleared the 100-match gate this season. The bracket needs at least 8 to run, so it runs.
That MATCHES column shipped this week for exactly this reason. It used to show an ambiguous "Qualifying" tag that displayed nothing at all once you had actually qualified. Now it shows a green check when you are in, and a plain count like 40/100 while you are still climbing.
One open question
That gate exists to stop rating snipers, and it did its job. It also means the Season Crown field is a fraction of the ladder.
Would you rather we keep the gate high so the bracket stays all grinders, or lower it so more pilots get a shot at a crown, wider but softer? We have not decided, and we would rather hear it from the people playing the season than argue it internally.
Tell us in the Discord. We are reading.
The format, honestly stated
Our own v0.33.0 patch notes called this a single-elimination knockout. That is only true for a small field, and this field is not small enough.
At 14 pilots, the bracket runs the hybrid shape instead:
- The top 4 seeds bye straight into the knockout.
- Everyone else fights a group qualifier, best-of-three, top two per group advance.
- The survivors merge with the reserved seeds into a double-elimination knockout, also best-of-three.
Double elimination means one bad draft does not end your night. You get a second road.
Every round has a 24-hour deadline, and once a game opens you get six minutes to draft your seven. Miss the window and you forfeit that game, not the series.
One bad matchup is a lesson. Two is a pattern. That is the whole reason the knockout is double elimination.
What is on the table
Only the Gold family is active this season, so there is one bracket and one pot: 20,000 SGC.
It does not all go to the winner. It pays sixteen places deep, and the field is fourteen, so every pilot who gets seeded gets paid something.
| Place | Share | SGC |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | 25% | 5,000 |
| 2nd | 18% | 3,600 |
| 3rd | 13% | 2,600 |
| 4th to 6th | 8% each | 1,600 each |
| 7th to 16th | 2% each | 400 each |
To put that in something you can hold: a Genesis pack costs 1,000 SGC in the shop right now. The pot is twenty packs of buying power, and the winner's share alone is five.
Vashk, the Emberwither
The other half of the prize is a Fighter you cannot open, buy, or trade for.
Vashk is an Epic Pyrenari fire-duelist, six mana, fast and fragile, built to hit first and break a tank before it acts. From level one she carries Blight-Touch: on a hit, there is a 75% chance the target's next heal fires and restores nothing at all. She does not just take a healer out of the fight, she makes the healer waste their turn. Her flavour line is the whole design brief:
"The wound she opens will not close. Fire remembers what it burned."
She is a promo card. She never appears in a pack, never lands in a starter grant, and never hits the market. Every copy minted is soulbound to the pilot who earned it, permanently.
One accuracy note, because the v0.33.0 notes overstated this and we would rather correct it than let it ride: Vashk is not champion-exclusive. She is minted down to 16th place. What the champion alone takes is the gold-foil mythic copy at four BCX, plus the season champion title and banner. Second and third also get gold foil. Everyone from 4th to 16th gets a regular copy.
So meeting her across the board does not mean you are facing a champion. It means you are facing someone who finished a season in the top sixteen. That is still a sentence worth being able to say.
The bracket appears at stellarch.io/en/tournaments once the season closes. It is empty right now. That is not a bug, the season simply has not closed yet. Check back after 18:00 CEST.
Guild Brawls opened this morning
The second thing is bigger, and it repeats.
Guild Brawls shipped with v0.34.0 today. Every week your guild is matched against rival guilds in a pod, you claim a fray, and once battle opens you fight every enemy pilot in your fray one match each, round-robin. Every win banks points and Merit. The guilds at the top of the cycle split a Crown pot into their treasury.
A fray is a constraint lane, not a match: its own mana cap, its own allowed affinities and rarities, its own foil and edition rules. Ten of them, from Bronze Skirmish up to Champion Mythic Pinnacle. Some are wide open. Others demand Genesis-edition cards, or a real gold-foil copy you actually own. Picking which fray you claim is a real decision, because you only get one per cycle across every guild you belong to.
The rhythm is automatic. There is no lobby to babysit.
| When | What happens |
|---|---|
| Monday 2026-08-17 | Cycle opens. Officers can start assigning frays. |
| Tuesday 00:00 UTC | Ordinary members can claim their own fray. |
| Thursday 2026-08-20 | Combat opens. Fight everyone in your fray. |
| Sunday 20:00 UTC | Scoring. Crown and Merit pay out. |
Merit is yours, Crown is the guild's. You bank 10 Merit for a win and 4 for showing up and losing, plus a share of the pod's Merit pot at the end. Merit buys Gladiator packs at 2,500, 5,000, and 10,000. Crown pays for guild buildings.
Shipped today, treat it that way
Brawls went live this morning. The first cycle has never run with real guilds in it.
We expect rough edges. Not as a figure of speech: a system this size, on its first real week, with pods, frozen schedules, per-game pick timers, and a scoring pass at the end of it, will have something wrong with it that no amount of testing caught.
If you hit something broken, weird, or just unclear, tell us in Discord. A screenshot and the time it happened is enough. We would much rather fix it during cycle one than read about it in cycle four.
That is also why we are not gating anything behind it yet. Play it, break it, tell us.
Your guild needs bodies by Thursday
Eleven guilds are live right now. Every single one of them shows 0 won brawls, because no cycle has run. That column stops being decorative on Thursday.
Here is the practical part, and it is not a slogan. A guild that has claimed fewer than half its fray slots when combat opens is withdrawn from the cycle. No pod, no pot, nothing. Guilds get seven base fray slots right now, so that means four claimed slots, four pilots who actually show up, or your guild sits the week out.
So if your roster is thin, this week is the week to fix it.
The Referral Rally helps you do both at once. It runs until 30 September, and it pays two different ways:
- 5% of your recruit's store spend, for as long as they play. Not a signup bounty, a lifetime cut.
- A leaderboard on top of that, ranked by referral points.
| Rally rank | Reward |
|---|---|
| 1st | 5 reward packs, 50,000 KRED, 5,000 STEL, 100 mythic potions, 100 legendary shards |
| 2nd to 10th | 3 reward packs, 20,000 KRED, 2,000 STEL, 40 mythic potions, 40 legendary shards |
| 11th to 50th | 1 reward pack, 5,000 KRED, 500 STEL, 10 mythic potions, 10 legendary shards |
| Raffle, 10 winners | 1 reward pack, 10,000 KRED, 1,000 STEL, 25 mythic potions, 25 legendary shards |
Recruit the pilots you actually want in your fray line and you fill the roster, hold the 50% gate, and climb the rally at the same time. The rules are public at stellarch.io/en/referrals/rules, and your personal link is on your referrals page once you sign in.
Rather watch the build than run a guild? Back our Product Hunt Coming Soon page so you get pinged on launch day, and hang around the Discord.
Tonight
Season 3 closes at 18:00 CEST. The bracket seeds itself. Somebody gets a crown, a banner, a title, and a gold-foil Fighter that will never be in a pack.
Then Monday, it all starts again, and this time your guild is in it.
Sign up and play now → https://stellarch.io/en
Enlist & stay in the loop
- Sign up and play now → https://stellarch.io/en
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@stellarch on Hive → @stellarch
- Join the Discord → https://discord.gg/K3geA9hD28
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Latest dispatches from Stellarch
- Tutorial Live: Help Us Break It
- Recruit a Pilot, Earn 5% of Their Store Spend Forever
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Stellarch 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 guilds