Palworld TCG Pal Cards - Power and Strike by Cost

Sixty per cent of this card game is Pals. One hundred of the 166 distinct cards in the launch pool are Pal cards, and for most of them the two numbers along the bottom edge, Power and Strike, are the whole card. So the question every deckbuilder ends up asking is whether the thing in their hand is paying rate.

I pulled all 256 rows out of Bushiroad's card database on 20 August 2026, collapsed the parallel printings and the nine promo reprints, and sorted the 91 unique Pal designs by soul cost. The pool answers more bluntly than I expected. Strike is barely a design lever at all: it is a straight function of cost, with three exceptions in the entire set. Power is the only stat Bushiroad negotiates, and it negotiates in increments of 100.

What is actually in the Pal pool

The 166 distinct cards break down as 100 Pals, 26 structures, 17 events, 14 gear and 9 souls. Nine of those Pals are PR2026 promos, and the promo set is reprints field for field, so the number that matters for deckbuilding is 91 unique Pal designs: 67 Normal Pals and 24 Lucky Pals.

Two things about the edges of the cost range are worth having before anything else.

No Pal costs 1. The cheapest Pal in the game costs 2 souls. Three structures cost 1 (Stone Pit, Berry Plantation and Antique Mirror), and they are the only 1-cost cards in the set, so a turn-one play on 2 souls is a 2-cost Pal, a cheap structure, or nothing.

No Pal costs more than 8, even though your souls climb to 10. That ceiling matters more than it looks, and I come back to it below.

Cost decides Strike, and there are three exceptions

Here is the whole ladder. Every one of the 91 unique Pal designs, grouped by what it costs.

Eighty-eight of the 91 sit exactly on that ladder. Strike 1 across the cheap half of the curve, Strike 2 through the middle, Strike 3 at the top. There is no 2-cost Pal that hits a player for 2, and no 8-cost Pal that hits for 1.

The three cards that break it are Grizzbolt (Rumbling Tank) at cost 7 with 1600 Power and Strike 4, and at cost 8 both Jormuntide Ignis (Savage Lava Dragon) at 1700 Power and Mammorest (Roar of the Wilds) at 2000. All three are Lucky Pals, a pattern the Lucky Pal guide already picked up inside that subtype. What the full sort adds is the other half of the sentence: because Strike is welded to cost everywhere else, those three are the only Pals in the set that are ahead of the curve on the stat that actually moves a life total.

The practical version is that you cannot buy a faster clock by paying more souls inside a band. A 5-cost Pal and a 6-cost Pal both hit the player for 2. Choosing between them is a choice about Power and text, never about speed.

The textless Pal sets the Power ceiling

Thirteen of the 91 Pals have no rules text at all. Not one of them costs more than 6, and each is the highest-Power card at its cost in the entire pool.

Five costs, five times the same gap. The best-statted Normal Pal that has an ability sits exactly 100 Power below the blank-text body at the same cost. That is the price list, and it is unusually tidy for a first set.

Two cards take the benchmark body and an ability anyway, and both are Lucky Pals: Chillet (Dragon Whisperer) at cost 5, 900 Power, with a top-of-deck Dragon cheat, and Azurobe (Water Dragon Waltz) at cost 6, 1200 Power, with a card draw and a rest on deploy. Nothing else at costs 2 to 6 reaches the ceiling while carrying text.

Pyrin (Cinder Steed) is the cleanest single card for this. Blank text box, 1200 Power at cost 6, and it is a Common. All 13 textless Pals are Commons or trial-deck cards, five of the former and eight of the latter, with no rare among them. The cards that set the rate are the cheapest in the game to acquire, which was not a given.

Text is worth 100 Power, until it is worth 900

The median Pal at each cost lands exactly one step below the benchmark for the first four rungs, then the discount widens fast.

At the bottom of the curve an ability costs a single 100-point step and the bodies stay bunched. From cost 6 upward the spread blows open, and a top-end Pal can be less than half the size of the biggest card at its own cost.

The furthest below rate in the pool is Helzephyr (Wings of the Moonless Night): cost 7, 700 Power, 900 short of the 1600 ceiling at that cost, paying all of it for Nocturnal and a removal trigger on your Nocturnal deploys. Astegon (Aegis Wyvern of Death) and Reptyro Cryst (Glacial Devourer) each give up 800 at cost 8.

The one to hand a new player is Cawgnito (Looming Shadow), because it is the clearest exchange rate in the set. Cost 4, Strike 2 like every other 4-drop, and one line of text: Stealth, meaning it cannot be blocked. That keyword costs 400 Power measured against Surfent (Swift Swimmer) at the same cost. Whether an unblockable 2 a turn is worth being the smallest body on the board is a genuine question, and Bushiroad has priced it as though the answer is yes.

The Pal that beats its own cost

Every printed Power above is at or under the benchmark for its cost. Conditional text is the only way past it, and the clearest case is a 2-drop.

Depresso (Late Night Hustler) is a 2-cost Purple Normal Pal with 100 Power, the smallest body in the game. Its entire text box is the Nocturnal keyword printed twice, each instance reading "if it is night, this card gets Power +300". Official Q&A #91 confirms that both instances apply: at night, Depresso receives a total of Power +600.

That makes it a 700-Power 2-drop. The benchmark at cost 2 is 300, so Depresso at night is 400 clear of the best blank-text Pal at its own cost, and level with Surfent (Swift Swimmer), the benchmark 4-drop.

The condition is the cost. Night is a named game state under rule 5.3, but the rules never switch it on by themselves - cards do, and there are six of them in the launch pool: Shadowbeak (Seed of Despair) and Maraith (Twilight Messenger) while they are resting, plus the structures Lamp and Shoddy Bed, the gear Daedream's Necklace and the event Black Marketeer. Every one of the six is Purple, and so is every card in the set that mentions night at all. The colours guide covers what committing to that colour costs you. As an Uncommon in a 2-cost slot, Depresso is the clearest evidence that Bushiroad is willing to break its own price list, but only behind a deckbuilding tax.

What your souls actually buy, turn by turn

Souls are the reason the cost ladder stops at 8. Your soul deck holds 10 cards (rule 6.1.2.1), the soul phase moves 2 of them into your soul area every turn (7.4.2.1), the stand phase stands the whole soul area again (7.2.1) so nothing is ever spent permanently, and the player going second places 1 soul before the game starts (6.2.1.5). Official Q&A #76 confirms 10 is a hard cap no effect can push past.

That gives a fixed, public schedule. No ramp, no screw.

Read that against the cost ladder and the odd numbers do all the work. The player on the draw reaches every odd cost a full turn before the player on the play: a 3-drop on turn one, a 5-drop on turn two, a 7-drop on turn three. That, plus the extra card from not skipping a draw phase (rule 7.3.1 skips it only for the player going first), is the entire compensation package for going second.

The other consequence sits at the top. Because no Pal costs more than 8 and both players reach 8 souls on their fourth turn, souls nine and ten never buy a bigger Pal. They buy a second card in the same turn, or they go into the rules-level draw any player can use by resting 3 souls once per main phase. Exactly one card is built to notice: Digtoise (Seismic Drillback) gets Power +1000 and Strike +1 while you have 10 or more souls, the only card in the pool that turns a full soul area into Power and Strike. One structure, Feed Box, also checks the 10-soul mark, but it pays out in standing souls rather than stats.

Strike is a clock, and almost nothing moves it

Both players start on 10 life (rule 6.2.1.8) and lose at 0 or below (11.3.1). Strike is the damage a Pal deals to a player and nothing else (rule 2.9.1), so each Strike value is a number of connections.

Those are floor numbers, not expected numbers, because Strike is also how many cards the defending player mills in Player Damage Resolution, and any Lucky icon among them cancels the hit outright. The Lucky Pal guide has the cancel maths; the short version is that a bigger Strike gets checked against more cards, so the division above always flatters the attacker.

What is surprising is how immovable the number is. Across the 150 unique non-promo cards in the launch pool, only nine modify a Strike value at all: five Pals (Ragnahawk, Wumpo, Digtoise Seismic Drillback, Katress and Mammorest Cryst, every one of them a Lucky Pal), two structures (Weapon Workbench, Antique Dresser) and two events (Crystal Breath, The Adventure Begins). Everything else in the set fights over Power.

Strike can be pushed below zero, and official Q&A #64 says what happens. With Wumpo (Frostpeak Sentinel) resting, opposing Pals get Strike -1, and if damage would be dealt to a player while Strike is 0 or less, that damage is not dealt. That switches off a 29-card slice of the pool, every Strike 1 Pal in the game, for as long as the card stays sideways.

Power is a threshold, not a hit point pool

Power does two jobs at once (rule 2.8.1): it is the damage a Pal deals to other Pals and structures, and it decides whether the Pal survives damage it receives. It is not a pool that drains.

Rule 11.4.1 sets the removal condition. A Pal goes to the graveyard when it has taken greater than 0 damage and that damage is equal to or greater than its Power. Damage on every Pal resets to 0 in the end phase (7.6.3), so a 1200-Power body is never worn down across two turns. You clear the bar this turn or you achieved nothing.

That is why the three Power-reduction effects in the Pal pool are worded the way they are. All three are Purple, and all three print the same bracketed reminder:

• Astegon (Aegis Wyvern of Death), cost 8, on deploy: one Pal gets Power -1000 until end of turn.
• Vanwyrm (Marauder of the Skies), cost 4, on deploy: one Pal gets Power -300 until end of turn.
• Maraith (Twilight Messenger), cost 6: if it is night, all opposing Pals get Power -200.

Each says the Pal is not put into the graveyard even if its Power becomes 0 or less, and official Q&A #92 confirms the rule underneath: a Pal is not removed simply because its Power hit 0. Q&A #93 completes it from the other side. If a Pal has already taken damage and an effect drops its Power to at or below that damage, it goes immediately. Q&A #74 applies the same logic when a continuous buff stops applying.

So Power reduction is not removal in this game. It is a discount on removal, and it only cashes out if you have damage on the board in the same turn.

Three Pals per colour per cost, almost

One more thing falls out of sorting the pool this way. Deck construction allows up to two colours plus colourless cards (official Q&A #17), so the curve you actually get to build is two of these columns.

Red, Blue and Green each get exactly three Pals at every cost from 2 to 8. Purple gets the same plus one extra 5-drop. The Lucky Pal guide found the same mirroring inside the 24 Lucky Pals; it holds across the whole Pal pool.

Colourless is the exception that shapes early turns: six Pals, four of them 2-drops, nothing above cost 4. Any deck can play them, none of them will carry a game, and that matches what the colours guide says about treating colourless as filler.

Worth knowing before you plan a curve: nothing forces you to run other card types. Official Q&A #3 says you may build a deck of 50 Pal cards if you want, subject only to the 50-card total, the four-copies-per-name limit (which counts across artworks and rarities, per Q&A #2) and the eight Lucky icons. The Pal limit of 5 in your base (rule 4.4.5.2) is not a hard stop on deploying either: Q&A #11 lets you deploy a sixth Pal and then bin down to five afterwards.

Every Pal in the launch pool, by cost

All 91 unique Pal designs from Booster Pack "Dawn of Palpagos" and both launch trial decks, read off the official card database on 20 August 2026. Promo reprints are left out because they duplicate entries already here, and parallel treatments (SR, SP, SSP, OSR, TSR, TSP) are collapsed into their base card because they do not change a stat line.

What Bushiroad has not published

Everything above describes one set. The 166-card pool is Booster Pack "Dawn of Palpagos", the two launch trial decks and the promos, and nothing beyond it is public.

Booster Pack "Legends Awaken" is dated 30 October 2026, and on 19 August 2026 Bushiroad opened preorders for two further trial decks, Eternal Ascent Red-Green and Eternal Ascent Blue-Purple, releasing 18 December 2026 with the same 60-card contents as the launch decks. No stat line from any of them is public. A second 8-cost Pal at Strike 4, or the first 1-cost Pal, would change the shape of the ladder above, and there is no way to know from here.

Bushiroad has also not said whether the cost-2 floor and cost-8 ceiling are a permanent design constraint or a first-set decision, and there is no restricted or banned list beyond the deck construction limits in rule 6.1.1.

Quick reference

• 91 unique Pal designs in the launch pool: 67 Normal Pals, 24 Lucky Pals. Nine further Pal cards are PR2026 promo reprints.
• Cost sets Strike. Strike 1 at costs 2 and 3, Strike 2 at costs 4, 5 and 6, Strike 3 at costs 7 and 8. Eighty-eight of 91 Pals sit on that ladder.
• Three Pals break it, all Lucky and all Strike 4: Grizzbolt (Rumbling Tank) at cost 7, Jormuntide Ignis (Savage Lava Dragon) and Mammorest (Roar of the Wilds) at cost 8.
• The textless Pal is the benchmark: 300 at cost 2, 500 at 3, 700 at 4, 900 at 5, 1200 at 6. All 13 are Commons or trial-deck cards, and no Pal in the pool exceeds the benchmark for its cost.
• An ability costs exactly 100 Power at the top of every band from cost 2 to cost 6. The median discount widens to 300 at cost 6 and 400 at costs 7 and 8.
• No Pal costs 1 or more than 8. Three structures cost 1; souls nine and ten buy a second play, not a bigger one.
• The player on the draw hits every odd cost a turn early, at 3 souls on turn one, 5 on turn two and 7 on turn three.
• Only nine cards in the 150-card non-promo pool touch a Strike number, five of them Lucky Pals, and Q&A #64 confirms Strike 0 or less deals no damage to a player.
• Power is a threshold (rule 11.4.1): damage must be above 0 and at or above Power in the same turn, and Q&A #92 confirms a Pal on 0 Power with no damage on it lives.

The set is still small enough that the price list is visible inside it, and that will not survive contact with a second booster. Learn the benchmark at each cost now, and every card in "Legends Awaken" grades itself the moment you read it.