Final Fantasy IX

Tetra Master

Updated 2026-09-20

The rules, briefly

A card reads as four characters — 3M45 — in hexadecimal, so the digits run 0–9 then A–F.

• First digit: attack power.
• Letter: the battle class. P attacks the defender’s physical defence, M its magical defence, X whichever of the two is lower, and A whichever of all the defender’s numbers is lowest, using the attacker’s highest number to do it. A beats X beats M or P.
• Third: physical defence. Fourth: magical defence.

Arrows do the fighting. Cards go on a 4×4 grid; a card whose arrow points at an opponent’s card attacks it. If the defender has no arrow pointing back, it is captured without a fight. Where both point at each other, the attacker’s class-appropriate stat is rolled against the defender’s.

The stats are probabilities, not thresholds — a weak card beating a strong one is normal, and the game is much more random than it looks.

Scoring: play until both hands are empty, and whoever controls more cards wins and takes one. Control all of them and you take the lot.

Cards improve with use. Stats creep up, and a card has roughly a 1.56% chance per level-up of becoming an X, with an X having about 0.56% of becoming an A. You do not farm this; you just play.

Every card award in the game

This is the part that does not exist elsewhere.

Our field data marks forty-seven card awards, and we can now name all of them. Cards given by a script — not won from an opponent, not bought — so this is a checklist of cards the game hands you if you go to the right room.

Chocobo’s Paradise is where the collection is won or lost. Fifteen of the forty-seven are there, and they are the airships, the summons and the Fat Chocobo — the cards you cannot get any other way. It sits at the end of Chocobo Hot & Cold, after every Chocograph and every treasure.

Four things that fall out of the table

The jump rope pays four cards, and now they have names. Cactuar at 50 jumps, Genji at 100, Alexandria at 200, Tiger Racket at 300 — and the key item at 1,000. Our data holds exactly those four at the steeple, in one run.

The Daguerreo pair is a fork, not a set. Two card awards sit on that floor, each written three times for three game states, and they are the Meteor and Flare cards. That is the I Want to Be Your Canary argument: agree with the sales clerk and you get the Meteor, take the other side and you get the Flare. Two outcomes of one conversation, both declared in the same script. (The Namingway card is elsewhere in the building and is not one of these two.)

Conde Petie gives the Oglop card — which is the Oglop trade, and which is sealed along with the rest of Conde Petie at the Shimmering Island.

Two cards are named after things you can also hold. The Ribbon card at Alexandria and the Save the Queen card at Dr. Tot’s are not the items. Do not go hunting the Treno auction for a card.

The hundred, in order

Card numbers run 1–100 and the order is a structure, not a list: monsters first (1–54), then the bosses and superbosses, then spells and summons (57–70), then legendary weapons and items (71–80), then airships (81–88), then characters and oddments (89–100).

Which is why the rare cards cluster where they do. Everything from 81 up is an airship, a chocobo, a city or a moogle, and almost all of it is at Paradise.

How we named them

Our field awards for cards are bare numbers — an id in a hundred-wide band, with no name attached anywhere in our tables. Naming them took two steps and a piece of luck.

Step one: the game’s enemy table has a card column. Every monster record carries the index of the card it can yield, alongside that card’s name. Building that map gives sixty-two of the hundred, with no index mapping to two names — every card that some enemy drops. Subtract 512 from a field id and it lands on that index.

We confirmed that at three unrelated sites: the Tonberry card at the Knight’s House, where a publisher says the Griffin reward is the Tonberry Card; the Ozma card at the Air Garden, where the corpus says Mene hands one over; and the jump rope, where the published ladder has one enemy card and three non-enemy ones — and our four ids named exactly one and left exactly three blank.

Step two: the other thirty-eight. Those are cards no enemy drops — the summons, the airships, the characters — so the enemy table is silent on them. A published card list gives all hundred in card-number order, and our sixty-two anchors line up against it at every single point: thirteen of them fall inside the range where the two sources overlap, and thirteen of thirteen match.

That pins the offset for the whole band, and the remaining thirty-eight are determined.

Then the decisive check. With all hundred named, the jump rope’s four ids read Cactuar, Genji, Alexandria, Tiger Racket — the published ladder, in full, exactly. Four for four on a closed, ordered, independently documented prize list.

Everything else lands where it should afterwards: the Oglop card at the town with the Oglop trade, the Invincible card at the chocobo treasure a publisher says yields one, the Masamune, Dark Matter, Hilda Garde III and Cargo Ship cards all in the chocobo content where their Chocographs sit, and the Fat Chocobo at Paradise.

It was the longest-standing open item on this project — logged as the top remaining decode for five guides — and it came out of writing up a monster pit in a Treno basement, which is where the fourth reward turned out to be a card id we could suddenly read.