The “Triple Triad Power-Up Strategy” may appear straightforward, yet it leverages game mechanics that new players often overlook due to a lack of awareness regarding their importance.

This strategy proves crucial in enhancing your character’s stats and overall effectiveness in battles, underscoring the importance of recognizing and employing it early in the game.

The strategy has two important elements:

1. Playing Triple Triad often and early on to stockpile lower-level cards.
2. Using Quezacotl’s Card Mod ability to refine extra Triple Triad Cards into items that you can then further refine into powerful magic.

Becoming a Triple Triad Master

The first important step of this strategy involves getting reliably good at Triple Triad and playing this mini-game early and often as you progress your way through the earlier chapters of the story.

Triple Triad is not a difficult game to play. Check out the Triple Triad section for more information on the rules of the game:

You can begin playing Triple Triad as early as the very first chapter of the game, where you can pick up some free cards from the student on the second floor of Balamb Garden. It isn’t until after you have obtained your first high-level card (the Ifrit Card after completing the Fire Cavern) that you should really get into playing a lot of matches.

Even more importantly, though, is to complete the first Queen of Cards steps outlined on the page below so that you can increase the number of cards you win each match:

After that, it’s time to play as many Triple Triad card games as you can manage while you stockpile up important cards. Some things to consider:

• It’s always worth stocking up on Elnoyle Cards, as you can convert 10 of them into an Energy Crystal which is an essential and very rare item.
• Consider stocking up on some Blue Dragon Cards and turning 4 of them into a Fury Fragment.

So you’ve played a bunch of Triple Triad games, and you’re pretty good at it; you’ve managed to stockpile a vast array of low-leveled cards. Now what?

Refining Cards into Magic

Two refinement steps need to take place:

1. Have Quezacotl learn its Card Mod ability and use it on your extra cards to convert them into various refined items that will be added to your inventory.
2. Have your other Guardian Forces learn and use their Mag-RF abilities to convert these items into powerful magic. This includes the following refine abilities (to start):
   • F Mag-RF
   • I Mag-RF
   • L Mag-RF
   • ST Mag-RF
   • T Mag-RF
   • Time Mag-RF
3. Use the Junction functionality to have your characters start junctioning your magic to your abilities.

The more of each magic you have, going all the way up to having the maximum of 100 in stock, the more of an impact the junction will have on the stat. Therefore, you should push to have 100 of all the available magic on each of your characters.

Continue Refining

The Triple Triad cards that are available early in the game are fairly low lever, but more and more powerful cards become available as you progress through the game.

For example, in Galbadia Garden, there is one card player who plays with Level 6 Boss cards. You should challenge her to more games to get even more powerful items, which you can refine into even more powerful magic.

Too Powerful?

It’s worth mentioning that this strategy has the potential to make your characters absurdly powerful compared to the early game bosses and enemies that you will be facing, and some might say it even takes some of the challenge and the fun out of it.

That being said, the goal of any game should always be to maximize the efficiency and power of your characters rather than artificially making the game more difficult than it needs to be. It is just something worth considering.