Introducing CardMan Mode: Highscores for Cardcore Runs

We've added a new highscores board — CardMan Mode — for players running the community's self-imposed Cardcore challenge. It's a card-collection leaderboard we gate partly by hand, so a run that plays by the rules stands next to others that do the same. Here's what the mode is, the rules it's built on, and how our board works.

What is Cardcore?

Cardcore turns Old School into an unlock puzzle. You start fresh and can only use an item — or fight a monster — once you've pulled its card from an OSRS TCG pack. Open packs, pull cards, and the game opens up one piece at a time. A steel sword, a spade, a single air rune: each becomes a genuine drop-of-the-day moment.

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Steel sword! Omg finally a weapon.

The mode was popularised by Faux (his Exfauxdia TCG-locked hardcore ironman series), and the community organised fast — a clan, shared world, and a running debate about the finer rules. It's played on top of the OSRS TCG plugin with a bronzeman-style item lock, and, as Faux himself has said, the ruleset isn't a perfect science — edge cases get resolved by logic, fairness and chat feedback as they come up.

Some of the rules

There is no single official rulebook, but a common core has settled out. The big ones players run:

• Card-gated use. You can't equip, wield or use an item until you've pulled its card.
• Card-gated combat. You can't attack a monster without its card. Faux's approach prevents combat rather than all interaction, so a handful of quest interactions (like marking the Varlamore guard in Children of the Sun) still work — but slayer masters need their card.
• Foils unlock more. A foil tends to unlock the item and lower tiers in the same progression — e.g. a foil wrath rune covering lower catalytic runes, or a foil mage-leg card covering the tiers beneath it. Bosses can unlock their unique rewards. Exactly how far a foil reaches is the community's favourite argument.
• Coiner vs no-coiner. Whether you've unlocked the Coins card decides if you can buy from shops. No-coiners gather everything the hard way — world-hopping item spawns instead of buying.
• Quest items are cards too. You unlock a quest's items before you can complete it; many players gather everything first, then start.
• Dupes-only trading. A widely-held community honour code is that you only trade or sell duplicate cards — your collection should reflect what you pulled. Worth stressing: this isn't part of Faux's Cardcore ruleset — Faux plays a solo, no-trade hardcore ironman. Dupes-only is a convention the wider trading community layered on top. More on it in Trading, Collecting & the Unwritten Rules.

How the CardMan Mode board is gated

Because there's no official mode, there's nothing to technically enforce a Cardcore run — so our board is partially, manually gated. It's the moderated counterpart to the ungated Everyone card board:

• Analysis of total level and cards unlocked. We look at the relationship between an account's total level and the cards it has actually unlocked; entries that don't add up (a high level with an implausible unlock history) are held for a human to look at.
• Multiplier rates filtered out. Runs using custom drop/credit multipliers are kept off CardMan Mode — they aren't comparable to standard rates.
• A human in the loop. Held and suspicious entries are reviewed by moderators. Removals and reinstatements are a person's call, not a silent algorithm.

More modes to come

CardMan Mode is the first of what we'd like to be several ways to play. As the community invents new rulesets and challenges around the TCG, we want thecardexchange to be the place they're tracked, compared and celebrated. If there's a mode you'd like to see on the boards, let us know.