Start a two-player game and play 11 battle game stages. The 12th battle board is a multi-floored stage containing 14 blue Question Blocks and a pair of ladders in the center. After they are kicked, the Question Blocks can be "collected" by either Mario or Luigi if Player One pauses the game when the block passes behind one of the characters. The block will disappear, and a flame will appear in that character's first card slot. (The "flame" is made up of two battle game fireball tails.) For a real challenge, try to steal a collected flame card. When it pops out, the blue block doesn't stay in the level like a normal card, so you'll have only one chance to position the other character under it and pause the game at the right moment.

On the map screen, the flame card is represented by what looks like a Japanese "hi" katakana character in the bottom right-hand corner of the card slot. (Interestingly, "hi" is Japanese for "fire.") If you open and close your item inventory, it changes to a mixture of small sprites. Inside a level, flame cards are blank, and they are considered their own card type. In other words, if you collect one flame card and two Star cards, you only get 1-Up, whereas three Star cards give you 5-Up.

Collecting three cards in the battle game can lead to a bunch of extra lives when one or more cards is a flame. For example, matching three flame cards adds 74 lives! You can actually amass more than 99 extra lives in the battle game, but once the total passes 255, it rolls over to zero. Because of the way lives are stored, you might encounter an interesting side-effect: If you have more than 127 lives and win the battle round, the game will assume you're dead, and your turn will be skipped for the rest of the game. However, if you have more than 127 lives and lose the battle round, or if you have anywhere from 100 to 127 lives after the battle round (win or lose), your lives will be set to 99.

The following table shows the extra lives awarded when a flame is part of your set of three cards in the battle game. Order does not matter.

Combination	Extra lives
or or	74
or or	144
or or *	3
	254

* A "3UP" icon appears above your character for these combos. No icon appears for the other combos.