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Drawing powers from a deck instead of picking them off a list — Ascend, a free build generator (keep or scrap every card)
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♠️ Critical Nexus ✊🏿 reddthat.com PumpkinDrama@reddthat.com
Joined: 2023-09-23
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Ascend — https://ascend.polarisocial.xyz/ — Discord: https://discord.gg/AmE93m23dW

The idea is one sentence long: instead of picking perks off a jump's list, you draw them from a deck and have to live with what comes out.

How a run goes:

  • Pick a deck. There are 8 right now, about 250 cards between them: Shinobi Ascension, Cultivation Codex, System Apocalypse, Parahuman Protocol, Urban Masquerade, Grimoire of Stars, Chaos Gambit, plus a starter deck.
  • Each deck has its own draw rule. Uniform (every card equal), rarity-weighted (the good drops are rare and you will feel it), draft-pick (three cards, keep one, the others are gone and do not wait), and chaos. Some decks gate by tier, so the heavens do not hand a mortal an immortal's art.
  • Every draw is keep or scrap. Keep puts the card on your wall at your current tier. Scrap writes it into the log as a thing you refused. You cannot keep everything, and honestly the log is the better half. A build is as much what you turned down as what you took.
  • Draws move you up a tier ladder: Unawakened → F → E → D → C → B → A → S → Mythic. The power curve falls out of the run instead of being assigned up front, so you find out what kind of jumper you are by drawing.
  • What you end up with is a build page: tier, cards kept, cards refused, a share link, fork, and compare against someone else's build (shared cards, unique cards, rarity score).

Three sites, three different shapes, and I use the other two myself:

  • chaosgacha.com — one enormous pool, roll, and see what fate hands you. Perfect when you want a surprise. Ascend's decks are small and curated on purpose, so a run feels like one coherent power system instead of one wild pull.
  • celestial.decaded.dev (Celestial Gambler) — filters across dozens of Celestial docs and throws you a perk you'd never have found in the spreadsheets. Brilliant for discovery. Ascend is not a doc index: every card is written for this site, so it will never have that breadth.
  • Ascend is the third shape: a deck you draw from under pressure, and a record of what you kept.

What it is not: a jump doc. There is no CP, no drawback budget, no chain tracking, and nothing here replaces a jump. It generates the character a jump gives you a budget for. Treat it as a supplement.

Honest state of it, since I'd rather say it than have you find out:

  • Early, solo-built, hand-written original decks. No borrowed text from anyone's doc.
  • Drawing, forging a build, keep/scrap, fork and compare all work with no account at all.
  • Publishing a build, creating a deck, and posting to the fic directory unlock once an account has a little activity behind it. That is anti-spam, and it does mean the site starts quiet.
  • The fic directory is empty right now. It exists for writing that uses these builds, and nobody has posted one yet.

What I actually want from this post:

  1. Tell me which decks to build next. Jumpchain-shaped decks are the obvious gap: a Generic-First-Jump-style deck, a chain-long perk deck, drawback decks you draw from to punish yourself. I would much rather build what this sub asks for than guess.
  2. Tell me where the draw rules feel wrong. Uniform vs weighted, how many cards a build should hold before it stops being a character and becomes a shopping list, whether scrapping should cost you something.
  3. Bugs, clearly. It is a small site and it will have some.

Community, if you want to hang around and argue about decks: the Discord above. Deck ideas and build sharing go there, and I post what changed.

No ads, no tracking, no email needed to try it.

Mods: if a tool post isn't welcome here, remove it and I'll take the hint. But I'd love to know where it belongs instead.


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