All Arcana in Castlevania: Belmont's Curse: Tarot Card List & Effects

In most Castlevania games, killing a boss clears a path. In Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse, killing a boss becomes the path. Every major enemy Rose Belmont defeats is sealed into her tarot deck as an Arcana — a card that grants a spell, a skill or a movement power — and those cards are how you bend the non-linear 1499 map of Paris and Dracula’s Castle to your will. Konami has shown two cards so far, and the full deck is one of the game’s most awaited reveals. This page tracks every Arcana announced or shown, what each card does, and how the system compares to the ability systems it descends from.

How the Arcana system works

The loop is simple on paper and loaded with consequence in practice:

1. Find a boss. The map spans Dracula’s Castle and Paris, laid out non-linearly — which boss you chase first is, to a degree, your own call, and destructible secret walls hide routes between regions.
2. Win the fight. Combat is the readable, damage-number-forward style you would expect from the Dead Cells team at Evil Empire, with seven weapon classes each carrying distinct mechanics.
3. Seal the boss into the deck. The defeated boss is converted into a tarot card — an Arcana — added to Rose’s deck.
4. Wield it. The card grants a power: an attack, a skill, or a traversal ability that changes which parts of the map are reachable.

Two details elevate this above a standard “boss drops ability” loop. First, the tarot framing: a deck implies selection, order and combination — the vocabulary of builds, not just checklists. Second, the two revealed cards cover opposite poles of the kit: Holy Cross is a pure attack, while Holy Light is traversal that physically opens routes. That spread suggests the deck is meant to reshape both combat and exploration, the two halves of any metroidvania.

Every Arcana revealed so far

Card	Source boss	Type	Effect	Status
Holy Cross	The Fallen	Attack	A holy cross-shaped attack shown in official footage	Confirmed
Holy Light	Joan of Arc	Traversal	A light that carries Rose through the map and opens otherwise-unreachable paths	Confirmed
Medusa’s card	Medusa	Unknown	Not announced	Revealed at launch
Death’s card	Death	Unknown	Not announced	Revealed at launch
Carmilla’s card	Carmilla	Unknown	Not announced	Revealed at launch

That table will grow. The five bosses above are the full announced roster (see the boss list), and the total boss count — therefore the total card count — is not announced. If further bosses are revealed before October 15, their rows appear here within the day.

A note on what the two confirmed cards tell us: Holy Light matters most in the short term, because traversal cards are the skeleton keys of the genre — the moment you have one, every locked door you walked past becomes a to-do list. Holy Cross matters more in the long term, because it confirms the deck also carries offense, and offense cards are where damage builds live. A deck mixing both types is a deck you can build around.

How Arcana compares to Souls, Shards and subweapons

Ability-from-enemies systems are a Castlevania family tradition. Here is how Arcana sits against its ancestors:

System	Game	How you earn it	How Arcana differs
Tactical Souls	Castlevania: Aria / Dawn of Sorrow	Any enemy can drop a soul — hundreds of drops, heavy RNG	Arcana come from major bosses, not trash mobs — fewer cards, each a milestone
Shards	Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night	Enemy drops, farmed for rank-ups	Same lineage as Souls; Arcana stays boss-scoped and tarot-framed
Weapons + mutations	Dead Cells	Found per run, lost on death	Belmont’s Curse is a metroidvania, not a roguelite — cards are unlocks, not rolls
Subweapons	Classic Castlevania (1986 onward)	Candle pickups — axe, cross, holy water	A fixed shared kit; Arcana is your personal, growing, permanent deck

The comparison that matters most is the last row. Rose still descends from the whip-and-subweapon lineage — she carries the Vampire Killer itself — but where Simon Belmont found a cross in a candle, Rose makes her cross by defeating The Fallen. The series’ old consumable toolkit has been rebuilt as earned identity.

It is also worth saying plainly what Arcana is not: it is not a roguelite draft. Because Belmont’s Curse is a structured, story-driven metroidvania, your deck should persist across the whole game rather than resetting per run. Konami has not detailed the equip rules — whether cards are passively always-on or actively slotted — so mark that “not announced” until launch.

What the tarot framing might mean for builds

Speculation section, clearly labeled: nothing in this paragraph is confirmed. Rose’s arm carries a spreading curse, her tool of choice is a tarot deck, and the game’s tagline is “Despair or Salvation” — the imagery of divination and fate is everywhere in the marketing. A physical deck suggests draws, hands and spreads; tarot’s structure of major and minor arcana suggests rare boss cards and a deeper common pool. Damage numbers, seven weapon classes and boss weapons like Joan of Arc’s charged sword Fierbois (covered in the weapons guide) give the game plenty of combat dials for cards to turn.

None of that is a mechanic yet. What is mechanical, today, is the two-card spread above — and the guarantee that every boss in the announced roster has a card waiting to be named.

What is not announced yet

Beyond the three unnamed cards: whether Arcana can be upgraded or ranked, whether any card requires another card to reach, whether the deck interacts with the arm-curse story (a cursed arm sealing monsters into cards is suspicious fertile ground), and whether equipping cards carries any cost or trade-off. None of it is announced. We will not pretend otherwise.

Updated at launch — October 15

On October 15, 2026, this page becomes the complete Arcana compendium: every card in the finished game, its exact effect, damage values where measurable, its source boss, and where it sits in exploration routes and combat builds. The table above keeps its columns — new cards slot in beside Holy Cross and Holy Light the moment they are verified from the release build. If you are reading this before launch, the short version is: two cards confirmed, deck size unknown, and the pre-launch FAQ covers everything else confirmed so far.