Making Cards

I've noticed over the past few months that a couple people have asked about how to properly make cards. It's not too complicated once you understand the math behind it - it's mostly about knowing how much your card is worth and how powerful you'd like it to be.

Note that, although when you start High Normals seem useful, you needn't bother building them correctly - you'll outgrow them quickly. Rares can be built well, but with High Rares so inexpensive it may not be worth the effort. High Rares and up should probably be built properly, though.

Evolving
This is the most basic component of building cards. The basis of evolving is that any card (except for Angel/Devil Queens, treasure cards, and certain event cards) can be evolved by 4 stages to its final form. By combining two base level cards - let's talk about Fighters, for example - you can create a Fighter+. After this, you can do 2 different things - you can either evolve the Fighter+ together with another base Fighter to create a Fighter++, or you can evolve 2 Fighter+'s together to create the same thing.

It may seem silly to use more cards, but when evolving, you keep a certain percent of the stats of the cards you used, so a Fighter++ made with a Fighter+ and a Fighter will be weaker than one made with 2 Fighter+'s.

When evolving cards, the stage will only ever go up by 1, which is why 2 Figher+'s don't make a [Veteran] Fighter. This means that you can create a very strong card by using 8 Fighters in total, or a base level one using just 4.

Enhancing
This is an important aspect of the game that - at least when I started - wasn't really addressed in the in-game introduction. Enhancing is the second most basic and most important aspect of building cards. As an experiment, go on the bazaar and look at the S Rare category. Pick a final form card. Then use the bazaar to search for it, and look at the different results. You'll probably notice that many of the cards there have similar attack and defense stats, but there are a few with much lower stats, usually cheaper than the others. This is the effect of enhancing.

When I talked about evolving, I mentioned that when you evolve cards, a percentage of the stats carries over. You can increase that percentage by enhancing the cards you're evolving with. With unenhanced cards, when you evolve them, 5% of their stats will carry over. When you enhance cards, they become stronger, and 10% of these stronger stats carry over. For most builds, you will need to enhance all your cards.  You'll notice the difference in the final form.

The Different Builds
There are a lot of different ways to build cards (so many odd ways to evolve), but there are a few standard ways that you'll see people talk about. Usually they're referred to as X-Y, where X is how many cards were used (anywhere from 4 to 8), and Y is how many times they were enhanced, including the final enhancement (anywhere from 0 or 1 to 15). Here are a few common builds: Note on build names: On the websites I've looked at, the naming conventions counted the final form enhancement as part of the number of enhancements, but some players don't, and they will refer to them as 4-6, 6-10, and 8-14 builds respectively.
 * 4-7 (or 4-max): the cheapest proper card build, using 4 cards, enhanced to max at every step
 * 6-6: an enhancing-efficient build, made by evolving two unenhanced bases to a +, enhancing that, and evolving with a maxed base, then evolving the result with another ++ of the same build
 * 6-11 (or 6-max): similar to the 6-6, only every base is enhanced before evolving
 * 8-15 (or 8-max): perfect evolution - every base is enhanced, then each pair are evolved to get four + forms, which are then enhanced and evolved into 2 ++ forms, then enhanced one last time and evolved to final form

Usually you will see 4-7 or 6-11 builds in well-made cards, with the occasional 6-6. You will sometimes see 8-15 builds, but people generally regard these as not worth the resources involved.

A note on "perfect" 8-15 builds: I don't advise it. It's the least efficient build in terms of value-to-stats. Just as an example, a 8-15 Paladin has a defense stat of 15,867, and a 6-11 has a defense stat of 15,936 - a difference of only 69 points for the price of 2 Paladins and 4 enhancements.

Other Information

 * The Rage of Bahamut Wiki (English) has a good guide on different card builds, complete with charts of how to put them together, here.
 * Ragetrades has really nice guide on this same thing here that's a lot more detailed about how the different builds work with screenshots to show how evolving and enhancing work together.