Evolve, and the rarity mix-up that runs through every guide
Evolve is the top layer of the upgrade stack. It transforms a unit into a new named variant with new art, and that variant name is the word in brackets: Ascension, Unrivaled, Phantom, Apex, Genius and the rest.
That bracket is an evolution stage. It is not a rarity. The game tracks rarity as a separate property with its own values (Mythic, Legendary, Epic, Secret, Exclusive). Almost every guide for this game welds the two together, sorting evolution labels into a rarity ladder that does not exist. Once you keep them apart, a lot of the advice out there stops making sense, which is the point.
Two fields, not one
This is the correction the whole page is built around.
A unit in this game carries two separate descriptors that guides routinely mash into one.
- Evolution stage. The bracket after the name. Human Spider (Responsible). Symbiotic Alien (Apex). Iron Billionaire (Genius). It tells you which version of that character you are holding.
- Rarity. A separate property, with values like Mythic, Legendary, Epic, Secret, Exclusive. It tells you how the unit is classed, and it is the field that shows up as a Rarity column in unlock tables.
A unit has both at once. Ascension is not a rarity. Mythic is not an evolution. When a guide writes "Ascension is the highest rarity", it has taken a word from one field and filed it under the other, and everything built on top of that is unsound.
You can see the difference in how the two behave. Rarity is fixed by what the unit is. Evolution is something you do to a unit, using the Evolve system, which is what the rest of this page is about.
Every evolution label on the roster
Read straight off the unit names, not from another guide's table.
These are the bracket labels that actually appear on units in our roster data. Every one is an evolution stage. Not one of them is a rarity, and they do not sort into a ladder.
100%, Apex, Apprentice, Ascension, Beast, Blitz, Carrier, Cheater, Chief Emperor, Conqueror, Cursed, Cursed Love, Darkness, Death, Despair, Destroyer, Domain, Donut, Eclipse, Ego, Ember, Enraged, Father, Fearless, Fighterz, Finale, Fragrance, Frost, Genius, Grand Fist, Great War, Greatest, Healer, Hero, Holy, Hunter, Hydro, Ignition, Imperfect, Jackpot, Joker, Larper, Lightning, Lightning Assassin, Limit Breaker, Magma, Marked, Mercenary, Number One, Oblivion, Omega, Panther, Phantom, Precision, Primordial, Rage, Reanimated, Reawakened, Responsible, Risen, ROOM, Ruthless, Sage, Savage, Shadow Monarch, Silverite, Slayer, Spiral, Super Rage, Superstar, Surfer, Survivor, Tempered, Third Ascension, Thumb, Trapper, Unrivaled, Vengeance, Voyage, White Haze, World, Wrath.
Notice how varied they are. Some read like power levels, Ascension and Apex and Unrivaled. Some are pure flavour, Donut and Larper and Responsible. If these were a rarity ladder, the ladder would have to place Donut somewhere on it, which should tell you immediately that it is not a ladder.
Not verified yet. We can name every evolution label on the roster because it is in the unit name. What we cannot yet publish is the evolution path and material cost behind each one, because we have not logged them in game. That table is coming from our own runs.
What rarity actually is
A real field, and one we have deliberately not half-filled.
Rarity exists. Pro Game Guides' unlock table carries a Rarity column, and Destructoid tags individual units with it, which is how we know the values include Mythic, Legendary, Epic, Secret, Exclusive.
What does not exist anywhere we could find is a complete unit-by-unit rarity map. We have the vocabulary, not the mapping. So we have made a deliberate choice: our unit data has no rarity field at all rather than a rarity field that is null on most units. A mostly-empty column implies we looked and found nothing, when the truth is we have not finished looking.
This is also why you should be careful with any site showing you a full rarity table for all 115 units. Ask where the middle of that table came from, because the sources only tag a handful.
Reading a unit name correctly
Three habits that make you immune to the whole class of mistake.
Habit one: read the bracket as a version, not a score. Ice Queen (White Haze) is a specific version of Ice Queen. The bracket disambiguates. It does not rank.
Habit two: never compare two units by their brackets. If you catch yourself asking whether a Phantom unit beats an Apex unit, you have left the rails. Compare damage, range, role and element coverage. The bracket tells you nothing about any of those.
Habit three: when someone quotes a rarity, ask which field they mean. Mythic is a rarity. Boundless is not. If a page uses them interchangeably, that page has not opened the game, and you should weight the rest of it accordingly.
Why the mix-up is expensive
It is not a trivia error. It changes what you spend.
Suppose you believe the bracket labels are a rarity ladder. Each of the following follows, and each costs you something real.
- You point shards at the wrong units. A unit with an impressive-sounding bracket gets your Etherealization Shards over a unit that clears your wave, because the bracket read as a tier. Shards do not come back.
- You miss Synchro entirely. Every one of the nine confirmed Synchro pairs names a specific evolution stage. Human Spider (Responsible) fuses. If you are treating the bracket as decoration or as rarity, you will not notice that the stage is the thing gating the fusion.
- You misread the pity discussion. Mythic is a genuine rarity here, so the phrase "Mythic pity" is at least coherent. That does not make the 100 to 400 number true, and we take it apart on the pity page.
- You argue about the wrong axis. Every hour spent debating whether Unrivaled outranks Boundless is an hour not spent on element coverage, on Synchro pairs, or on the levelling you skipped.
Where Evolve sits in the stack
Last. Not first, not instead.
With the two fields separated, Evolve becomes a simple system. Level the unit, because that layer is free. Etherealize it once it has earned a permanent commitment, because that layer costs shards you cannot recover. Then Evolve, because it is the transformation that caps the unit off and gives it the bracket it will carry from then on.
People who read brackets as rarities often reach for Evolve first, since jumping a unit into a higher rarity would be an excellent move if that is what Evolve did. It is not. It does not skip levelling, it does not refund your shards, and it does not touch the rarity field, because rarity is not the thing it changes.
The full ordering argument, with the failure cases, is on the systems hub.
Last updated 2026-07-14 · Rarity and evolution split re-checked against Update 4.0