Opus 5 Legend Review

Hey guys, it's a new set and time for me to review some Legends. As always, everything I say here is my opinion and predictions, and I don't have magic crystal-ball powers to see into the future meta to see exactly how good these will be. More importantly, I'm not totally sure where the meta will start and that can make it a lot harder to predict what will be good and when. Anyhow, this batch of Legends are much harder judge than the previous round! A lot of our cards are much more unique and seem to be edging into the realm of meta-dependency, whereas a lot of our previous Legends could be considered weak, strong, or inbetween based on the potency of their effects and mana efficiency alone. 

In any case, I've switched up my rating system a little bit to try and condense my scores into some more reasonable numbers, especially because on my previous one I don't think it was possible for a card to reach a perfect score even if it were the best card in the game. Here's the new one:

5/5 Meta Defining, Can Give an Archetype Success by Itself, Great CP Efficiency

                Ex. Al-Cid, Lenna, Locke, Genesis

4/5 Strengthens Existing Archetypes, Excellent Additions Depending on Existing Deck Structures

                Ex. Gau, Opus 4 Lightning, Celes, Fat Chocobo

3/5 Meta Dependent Additions, May be Strong but CAN Suffer from Bad Meta Placement or Mana Efficiency Problems

                Ex. Opus 4 Shantotto, Raubahn, Kefka L, Onion Knight L

2/5 Relatively Tight Niche Use Cards

                Ex. Marche, Zangetsu, Hauyn, Umaro

1/5 Suffers from Noticeable/Severe Mana Efficiency Problems or Unclear Usage

                Ex. Ezel, Doned, Quina

Palom – 2/5

When Palom enters the Field, if you control Card Name Porom, draw 1 card.

When Palom enters the field, choose 1 Forward. Deal it 7000 damage.

(2), dull 1 active Forward: Choose 1 Forward. Deal it 1000 damage.

Played with only the text on the card, Palom is a little lackluster. His mediocre 4000 power doesn’t do much to contest a board, 5 CP is pretty difficult to work with when every card is growing in importance, and most importantly his 7000 burn falls a little short of the evasive 8000 we so desire. The good news about his burn is that he can pay 1 to dull himself and (or someone else I suppose) and finish off the last 1000 to hit that 8000 mark, though this is really expensive when looked at all together. This is why having a Porom to get the Auto Ability draw will be very important as to how good this card can realistically be. We’ll get to the Porom Legend in a bit, but forcing yourself Palom/Porom slots in the Fire/Water archetype is honestly asking for a lot, and I’m not really sold on its competitive viability as a decktype. 

Additionally, Palom/Porom decks necessarily require a lot of cards with the same name, and neither of the Legends introduced into this set have S abilities to fully utilize this downside, making it difficult to think about this deck over a long tournament format. However, this does mean we have a wide variety of options in supporting this card, the 1 Cost Palom being the obvious way to combo burn or damage and cheat this card out for a massive tempo swing. The 1 Cost Porom is nice protection to aid the viability of the combo and can be sac’d off later for the Legend Porom to avoid being useless. Still, the additional copies you draw are nothing but vanilla CP and the number of slots this engine will take is hard to gloss over.  

Phoenix – 4/5

Choose 1 Forward of cost 3 or less in your Break Zone and up to 1 Forward opponent controls. Play the former onto the field dull and deal the latter 8000 damage.

Bahamut R, but you also get to play a 3 Cost Forward from your Break Zone. This is a really, really strong card that has a lot of implications on the coming meta. First and foremost, we’re hitting 8000 on a CP efficient Summon (read: does more than just break even). Let me explain: we can trade with 4 Cost 8000 Forwards and generate a +2 net CP retrieving the 3 Cost Forward without actually losing a card from our hand that would be the Forward. This effect would be quite solid if activated in the Main Phase, but at the risk of being painfully obvious, because this card is a Summon we can do all sorts of shenanigans during our opponent’s turn or during our own battle phase. Clearing attackers  and being able to use CIP Auto Abilities of 3 CP Forwards on your opponent's turn is nothing to turn your nose up at. There is so much potential for this card, and because it has no elemental restriction there are TONS of amazing targets both inherent in Fire and in your supplementary Element, if present, alike. 

The card’s primary weakness is that it’s 7 CP. 7 CP is a lot and if you commit that much early in the game, your better hope that your Phoenix play and existing board are going to get you there because you don’t really have a lot of options coming up without waiting a couple of turns. In the mid-late game, the amount of options your opponent can have to reduce the effectiveness (or potentially negate) Phoenix increases and removing an on-curve 8000 Forward is not as impactful. Additionally, Phoenix is only as powerful as the removal it can facilitate; if Phoenix can buy back its CP cost from the opponent’s resource pool (in terms of exchanged CP payed) then it’s fantastic, but if the 8000 burn or the CIP of the 3 drop you bring back doesn’t sweeten the deal the card doesn’t really do anything.

The Emperor – 3/5

When The Emperor enters the field, you may pay (1). If you do so, your opponent discards 1 card from his/her hand.

When your opponent draws a card outside of his/her Draw Phase, choose 1 Forward opponent controls. Dull it and Freeze it.

This card got shit on a lot on social media, but I don’t think it’s quite as bad as it’s getting a wrap for. The option to Overload and force a discard is nice, bringing him down to a net 4 CP 7000. So the question we should ask ourselves is “Would I play a net 4 CP 7000 with this effect?” The answer is probably no, at least not in an undefined meta like the ones we walk into at the launch of every new set. But I would not be surprised if we saw The Emperor sliding his way into decks designed to counter an existing meta that is either reliant on draw or runs a lot of incidental draw that makes it difficult to play against. Only time can tell if he will be potent, but he’s not my go-to pick, more like a nice option that I feel good about having in the long term. 
But let me tell you, in the long term I feel really good about having this card. To me this kind of solidifies the idea that we will never see Final Fantasy TCG devolve into a 'draw pass' game, and that the tempo, board-centric approach that really separates this game from Magic is here to stay. 

Orphan – 4/5

When Orphan enters the field, choose up to 2 Forward opponent controls. Dull them. If you control 5 or more Ice Characters, Freeze them also.

When Orphan attacks, choose 1 Forward opponent controls. Freeze it.

One of the only Legends we didn’t see until the first pre-releases revealed the full spoiler list, Orphan is a heavyweight. Orphan is essentially 9000 Power CIP Shiva, which is really, really strong. 2 CP will often be bought back immediately by opening up a path to swing with Genesis, and can be thought of a net 6 CP 9000 provided you can do so. In Mono Ice and other heavy-Ice variants (Wind/Ice primarily) Orphan will often also freeze the two dull targets, but it doesn’t really change the timing you aim to play this card. The auto ability was probably not necessary to make this card see play as a 1-of, but definitely sweetens the deal and makes you happy to slot 2 or potentially even 3 of this in your Ice variant.

It’s not all upside though. 6 CP is a pretty huge cost and the amount of hate going into high-CP costed Forwards has been increasing, meaning that in you otherwise 3 and 4 cost Forward-prevalent decks you will be including targets for removal like the new Diablos, Alexander, and others. Moreso than just increasing your susceptibility to off-brand removal, 6 CP cards can be pretty clunky in the early game and cutting them early game can make it harder to make progressive pushes. Still, the amount of firepower Orphan packs more than makes up for such a slim downside.

Diabolos – 4.5/5

Select up to 2 of the 4 following actions.

"Choose 1 Forward of cost 5 or more. Break it."

"Choose 1 Forward of cost 4 or less. Until the end of the turn, its power becomes 1000."

"Activate all the Forwards you control."

"Activate all the Backups you control."

A summon that encourages Backup efficiency, that can work both offensively and defensively, and that has flexible CP efficiency… yeah, this is a pretty good one. The amount of good targets for the 5 Cost+ Break has increased dramatically over the last few sets, especially in Opus 5 itself. Reactivating your Backups immediately means you can play this on 3 or 5 efficiently on your turn, or if you have something to fill out the Backups on your opponents turn as well. The set to 1000 makes it easier to use your Cactuars and small power removal like Dancer and Cactuar, perhaps allowing us to make use of this kind of ping-removal in decks outside of Lightning/Wind. It can even be used to just ruin Ice’s day by letting you reactivate Forwards and clear something as well. This card is basically the only reason I have second thoughts about how I’m going to slot Orphan and just slam Ice for the first month of meta.
There is a lot of nuance to how this card can be played and is probably the single most exciting card of the format; but I think it’s also very important to think about how this card is going to fit in the upcoming meta and, frankly, we just don’t know that right now. I want to say that this card will be a staple 3-of because it seems insanely strong in thought experiments and in a vacuum, but one card doesn’t really make an archetype. So, if the archetype fails to stand on its own its possible not even a crazy strong card like this could fix it.

Y’shtola – 3/5

Y'shtola doesn't receive any damage from Summons or abilities.

Put Y'shtola into the Break Zone: Choose 1 Summon or auto-ability. Cancel its effect.

On first glance Y’shtola looks like the card we’ve been waiting for; something with innate resistance, that can protect your board from Auto Abilities (something only Snakebite could do previously) on a relatively light, 7000 Power body. And I think she does just that, and nothing more. When I first saw her I thought that maybe she had the potential to be as potent as Ranger had been in the previous set rotation, but it didn’t take me long after first seeing the entire setlist to realize that this wasn’t conceivably going to be the case. Even against the deck you would expect her to be most potent against, Mono Lightning, she can be broken with Edea and 7000 Power, capped at 8000 with Maria isn’t really that difficult to work around. Earth/Wind may be able to use her to a degree, but they can’t stack Maria and use Carbuncle or other effects in conjunction with a single power boost to recycle, making the numbers on this card just a little too awkward.

I think Y’shtola still has the potential to be an awesome card, but I’m not quite as sold on her as I was when she was first spoiled. She’s weak to a lot of the power boosts coming into the game (particularly Wol) and she can still be chosen and broken by Mateus, the new boogeyman Summon of the format. I don’t expect her to see no play, but I would expect her play to dwindle as the format progresses in favor of midrange strategies (such as Ice/Earth, Ice/Fire, or Earth/X, perhaps) she isn’t as effective at countering.  

Cecil – 3/5

EX BURST When Cecil enters the field, choose 1 dull Forward opponent controls. If its cost is equal to or less than the damage you have received, break it.

Dark (S): Choose 1 Forward. Cecil deals you 1 point of damage. If the cost of the Forward is equal to or less than the damage you have received, break it.

I have truly mixed feelings about this card, and I think up until today I have been looking at it with rose-tinted glasses. Cecil is really only as good as his CIP, and so his value is only ever going to be as good as long as two things are true: one, you are even or losing on damage and two, you can dull your target. When you can fulfill these two conditions reliably in your deck I think that Cecil has the potential to be an absolute monster, and when you can’t he is just a waste of a slot and a premium removal target. As such, his playability in the long-term competitive scene might more or less be limited to Earth/Ice or Earth/Lightning, since these are the only two elements who have reliable access to dulling and pair well with the other Legend of the set, Wol, in addition to existing dull-reliant abilities such as Masked Woman.

In terms of nuance, Cecil really opens up a new type of pressure related to a strategy that we have already seen up until this point: intentionally sacrificing damage for long-term board advantage. We’ve seen a lot of this in almost every metagame. In Opus 3 and 4 Mono Water often gave up the first 2-3 points of damage relatively uncontested to try and give themselves breathing room to set 3+ backups, in an attempt to put efficient Shantotto pressure on (when present) or just try to play efficiently as possible with Mira + Tonberry, Lenna, or Gau plays (in Opus 3 this was more like Steiner/Zidane). Cecil gives us a way to capitalize on this damage that we took and forces the opponent to decide whether or not boosting the amount of targets (both in terms of dull Forwards and damage) for our Cecil to efficiently cause a boardswing and give us some leverage with a 9000 body and midgame CP efficiency. If the opponent doesn’t swing than, well, we got to play our Backups mostly uncontested. The tech can be described as a win-win through this lens, and really makes me excited to play with this card over the set. Still, I’m not totally sold just yet and I think we will have to see a deck built around dulling and breaking dull Forwards already existing for him to really see the play he deserves.

Wol – 4/5

At the beginning of your Attack Phase, select up to 2 of the 4 following actions.

"Choose 1 Forward. It gains Brave until the end of the turn."

"Choose 1 Forward. It gains +2000 power until the end of the turn."

"Choose 1 dull Forward. Deal it 3000 damage."

"All Forwards cannot be chosen by Summons' EX Bursts or Characters' EX Bursts this turn."

While I was spending so much time fawning over Cecil I didn’t really give Wol as much thought as he deserved as the other Earth Legend. Wol is a fantastic offensive swiss-army knife. Need 2k? He got that. Need Brave? He got that. Scared of EX? He got that. Need to ping something to finish it off with Celes/Terra/Cid Raines? He got that. Wol is fantastic because his Auto Ability doesn’t need to wait a full turn, you get it the turn you bring him out no matter how he got there. He allows your mediocre-power Forwards like Locke and Genesis swing at +2k with no fear of EX to try and proc their on-hits. If you need the maximum number of blockers Brave lets you apply pressure, which is absolutely huge. All-in-all he is just a great Forward and can often buy back 2 CP of value on the turn you play him as long as you are playing the right type of deck, and even when he doesn’t buy back that CP he can often force removal from your opponent that isn’t getting soaked up into your other value-oriented Forwards.

Because most of his value is wringed out the most efficiently while you are attacking, I predict we’ll be seeing a lot of Wol in decks that can make the most use of his ability to swing… The one that immediately comes to mind is, as you might have guessed, Ice/Earth. That being said, I think that Fire/Earth, Wind/Earth, and Lightning/Earth all have the potential to benefit from his abilities as he is a solid addition to any deck running below an 8000 base power line that can really prevent an opposing Forward wall from stopping your attacks.

Zemus – 4/5

"(X)(Dull): Choose 1 Lightning Forward in your Break Zone. If its cost is X, play it onto the field. You can only use this ability during your Main Phase."

You must kill Zemus the turn that he comes out. This is Zemus’ primary strength as a card. Zemus essentially discounts every Forward he reanimates by 2 CP on top of letting you toolbox your graveyard when playing Forwards. This is the type of effect we’ve never seen in the game before, but I don’t think this card is quite as impressive as many folks have let on. Let us not forget that if you do kill him he was a 6 CP sink that did almost nothing. A lot of his weaknesses can be fought by giving him haste, either with Red Mage, Goblin, Belias, Sage, or Chocobo and immediately using his effect to discount the Haste. I think that hasting him with Sage is potentially very real, as the CP will essentially buy back the cost of the Sage and often assure that you will be able to use his effect the next turn to continue buying back your CP. I know it has probably become a cliché at this point, but I honestly do think that a lot of Zemus’ playability is going to come down to how prevalent removal is in the meta and how much of it can be used to nuke him into oblivion. The less there is, the more I am inclined to jam 2 of them and try to milk as much value out of reanimated Al-Cids as physically possible.

Ramza – 5/5

The cost required to play Ramza onto the field is reduced by 1 for each Forward you control (it cannot become 0).

For each Forward other than Ramza you control, Ramza gains +1000 power.

If Ramza has 10000 power or more, Ramza gains Haste and "When Ramza attacks, choose 1 Forward of cost 3 or less opponent controls. Break it."

The first card ever printed that makes me want to play Knights, Ramza is kind of nuts. He is discounted to curve after merely 2 Forwards out (Al-Cid combo, Shelke combo, Steiner/Zidane), and encourages a lot of the low-value board spam decks like Mono Lightning are already so good at. After 3 Forwards are vomited onto the field he comes in as a whopping net 5 CP 9000, and with either Ovelia or Lulu he has his Haste and Break-on-Attack effect, which is also simply fantastic. His downsides are mainly that he stays dull to Vayne and enables otherwise conditional 5 CP+ removal that is going to become popular this set (looking at you Diabolos). There is not much else to analyze with this card; he is quite simply very, very good and if you have your reservations I recommend trying him out in Mono Lightning, Scions (Earth/Lightning), or Knights and getting back to me on your experiences. I don’t think he is game-breaking or anything, but I expect him to see pretty consistent play as long as any of the archetypes I mentioned or others have a spot in the metagame.

Porom – 3/5

EX BURST When Porom enters the field, look at the top 3 cards of your deck. Add 1 card among them to your hand and return the other cards to the bottom of your deck in any order.

(1)(Dull): Choose 1 action ability. Cancel its effect.

Porom is a nice luxury to have. A net 4 CP 5000 Power that sticks around to help keep the opponent down after floating her CP in. If she gets removed, fine, she was more or less an empty card anyway; if she sticks around, maybe your opponent has an annoying time swinging without using their Selphie or some other Action ability. The real icing on the cake with Porom is that she has EX Burst, and can be cheated in off of her 1 CP self, so even if you don’t have better Lenna targets (maybe you don’t play Monsters for Relm) you can keep your Lenna engine up while not giving up too much in the way of slots to babysit Porom’s engine.

I think Porom’s probably come to sit as a staple in Mono Water decks as a 2 of for a little while, but I also wouldn’t be very surprised to see her played at any number of copies. She’s a very flexible fit for the deck and can help a lot of your awkward midgame hands after you’ve stemmed the bleeding against aggressive openings or help you tutor for your key cards for any matchup you have the breathing room to play her normally in. She’s just an all-around solid card, and I don’t think she’s really going to be breaking the meta, but she’ll still be a consideration for most decks since the consistency she offers is unique and reliable.

Cloud of Darkness – 2.5/5

When Cloud of Darkness enters the field, choose 1 Forward opponent controls. It loses 2000 power for each Forward you control until the end of the turn.

When Cloud of Darkness attacks, choose 1 Forward opponent controls. It loses 1000 power for each Forward you control until the end of the turn.

The other Water Legend of the set, Cloud of Darkness is really really okay. Realistically, if you are playing Mono Water in the mid game she should basically kill a decently sized Forward with her CIP almost every time, which is pretty good. The problem is that slotting her is difficult in Monster builds, where it’s easiest to build a big board and combo power reduction, as well as the fact that even if you do slot her she’s not going to do as much of the reducing. Maybe I’m just dumb, but I’m not realistically seeing a card in the Summon build or in the Monster build that I really wanna cut for her. I will, of course, test her with decks oriented around going wide more quickly (maybe we can bring back Famed Mimic Gogo. I like Famed Mimic Gogo) and she will be able to find her place, but as it stands I’m not really impressed. She’s obviously not horrible though, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see decks playing 1 or 2 of her pop up over the next few months.

edit: I thought I would expand a little bit more on this card given the amount of community feedback I received upon initially rating this card as a 2. Part of the reasoning lies with the initial rating system I had prepared, and I honestly feel that this is a card with decent potential, but that said potential is highly dependent on the metagame and it is difficult to justify her deckslots and overall strength as a result. What really let me decide to push this card up to a 2.5 is that she essentially can fill the shoes of Raubahn in Opus 4, letting you have a CIP ability that can clear problem cards, namely The Emperor, that would otherwise prevent you from playing the game in Monsters. 
I'd also like to be specific saying that while my rating of her revolves mostly around her potential use in Mono Water, I don't think this is an unfair or unjustified position to take when evaluating the card despite the fact that she has no innate color limitations. The fact of the matter is that, outside of Water and possibly Wind, almost every other color has better answers than Cloud of Darkness for dealing with the kind of threats Cloud of Darkness is equipped to fight. 

                                                                                                                                                                           

Vaan – 2/5

When Vaan attacks, select up to 2 of the 5 following actions.

"Draw 1 card."

"Choose 1 Forward. Activate it."

"Choose 1 Forward. Dull it."

"Choose 1 Forward. It gains +2000 power until the end of the turn."

"Choose 1 Forward. It cannot block this turn."

r/FinalFantasyTCG blew up when this card was revealed, and there has been a lot of controversy surrounding it. Whole camps of people seemed to sprout up saying this card was overpowered and was going to be a staple in every list; that it would be the chase Legend of the set and be a meta defining card. That’s all really over the top. If you get his effect to go off once he replaces 2 of his CP (making him net 5 CP, which) and presumably did something else for you as the second effect, which makes him an OK card in terms of efficiency, not great. Depending on how much he did with his second effect the gamestate might have changed more, but there are plenty of other cards that usually could fulfill his attacking (dull/no block) purpose. He really starts becoming an efficiency engine when you can swing the second time, and is where his use really shines. The problem is getting there. It’s hard when so much of the meta we expect to see in the next month revolves around the plentiful amount of available removal. Leviathan, new Leviathan, Diabolos, Alexander, Ahriman, Phoenix, Bahamut, Celes+X ping removal, Terra with S can all remove this thing in one shot, and the game becomes much tougher when you lose all of that net CP.

Vaan isn’t ass, but he requires a lot of building around to be the powerhouse you want him to be, and even then you really want him to get another swing to be coming out ahead. If you just drop this card and pass the turn, he’s gonna get removed and you’re gonna lose the game, because you just sank net 7 CP into a card that did nothing and possibly advanced your opponent’s boardstate. Because of that, he really needs extensive care to ensure that he gets his effect to go off, whether this is in the form of protection or in the form of Haste. Personally, I think the best way to go about this is as a 1-of in aggressive Fire variants (seems good in Shelke) where you have access to cards like Goblin, Belias, and Sage reliably and you already want to play them. Even then, I’m reluctant to include him as is, since Orphan seems like a more reliable version of the ‘finisher’ card role.

Eald’narche – 2/5

If Eald'narche leaves the field, return Eald'narche to your hand instead.

Paradise (S): Take 1 more turn after this one. At the end of that turn, you lose the game.

A 10000 Power Forward that returns to your hand whenever anything spooky would happen to it. A fine card I think, other than that I’m pretty sure returning to your hand is just pretty bad most of the time. I have mixed emotions because the idea of a card being more or less immortal is pretty cool. I just think that if Eald’narche gets frozen (or Vayne stunned) then your net 8 CP sink was even worse than the Vaan. Paradise is pretty attractive, but I found it difficult in any builds to slot more than 2 without risking some pretty severe bricks. The set seems to want you to run Eald’narch in tandem with Kam’lanaut and Star Sibyl, which kind of tunnels the kind of deckbuilding into an Earth/Wind defensive build, which doesn’t really play well with the S. Maybe I’m overreading it, but I feel like this card was designed to do cool extra turn stuff and didn’t really have a plan beyond that. Regardless, I think the card is a massive risk in competitive builds unless Ice is clean out of the meta, and I don’t expect it to see a whole lot of play over the course of the set.

Final Thoughts on the Opus 4 Meta

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything, and I figured I’d get in a quick write-up during the downtime before the set gets spoiled and I can do a Legend review (and start brewing with Opus 5).

Let’s start with a quick rundown of some of the archetypes that saw play with the introduction of the new set, in (roughly) the order they came into the meta. I am not specifically talking about any region, but, as always, I mostly consume meta reports from Japan, and that is definitely reflected in the order of the list below. 

Mono Water Monsters

Ice/Lightning

Wind/Water Chocobos (Standard Units)

Mono Fire

Water/Earth Monsters

Ice/Fire Shelke

Ice/Wind

Mono Water IX

Water/Lightning (and Chocobo variants)

Earth/Wind (and Golbez variant, thanks Cid)

Ice/Fire VI

Mono Lightning

Mono Ice

Water/Lightning Fusoya

Tricolor Monsters

All of the decks I’ve just listed are competitively viable archetypes, and have been clearly demonstrated to be able to win at the highest level of play multiple times to great success by both well-known and unknown players alike. A healthy metagame, no? Plenty of room for innovation, tons of viable archetypes. However, I hold great confidence in saying that there are 3 or 4 archetypes here that vastly outclass the rest. Why is that?

The meta we’ve seen since the launch of the Opus 3 starter decks during the end of Opus 2 has largely been more or less the same. A water-based archetype (Wind/Water, Mono Water, in Opus 4 Water/Earth and Mono Water Monsters), a Lightning-based archetype (Mono Lightning, Ice/Lightning), and an Ice-based archetype (Ice/Lightning, Ice/Fire) have consistently remained in a position where their existence largely defines the meta we play in. None of the other archetypes I listed up there have the same level of warping effect on the core meta as Mono Water, Mono Lightning, and Ice/Fire. Archetypes can be aimed to beat 1 or 2 of these decks, but almost no archetype in the game can be built to have favorable matchups against all 3 of these at the same time. You can always build a deck that beats 2/3 and try to read the field for a specific tournament, and that is why we see so many different archetypes topping.

This is why we see a lot of high level players tend to “come home” to one of these archetypes when deciding what deck to take to an event. They could take their sick Earth/Wind deck they’ve been building for the previous month, but their Ice/Fire matchup can be pretty tough if they can’t answer an early Celes + Locke push or a Genesis + Sage play since they spend almost all of their tech slots dealing with the Lightning and Water matchups. This is just an example of course, you could certainly tech your Earth/Wind to deal with Ice very well (Wind has a lot of these tools!) but then maybe your Lightning matchup suffers from not dealing with Hildibrand well, or you can’t put on enough pressure to avoid the Cagnazzo inevitability Mono Water presents. These kinds of problems tend to loop around and around when deckbuilding with the decks that are not part of the “Top 3”, so to speak.

What I really want to say with all of this blabbering is that Mono Lightning, Mono Water, and Ice/Fire (or Mono Ice) have a gatekeeping effect on what can be viable for a long tournament setting in which every win is important. Make of this what you will. I’m sure some competitive players think this is great; if they can get a solid read on the likely archetypes in their area they can tech for it appropriately with the third deck and get some advantageous wins where their opponent’s deck is lacking. Personally, I find it kind of frustrating because, despite all of the cool new cards that have come out, the game I’m playing doesn’t really feel different, and the fundamental interaction we’ve had feels more or less the same.  

“But, eureka, what about Tricolor Monsters? That deck instantly climbed to Tier 1 status and it can totally wreck Mono Water and Mono Lightning!” I know, I know, that deck was a pretty surprising bit of fresh air the first time I got absolutely wrecked by it, and then proceeded to wreck every top tier archetype I knew with it. But the trick gets old, just like every new archetype we see have success. Tricolor Monsters is a good deck, but it isn’t going to be gatekeeping new archetypes from entering the game the way the top tier is; and realistically, the Ice matchup is not favorable at best and can be ridiculously one-sided if you miss early EX Bursts or can’t draw a 3^rd Backup at worst.

This pretty much concludes my thoughts on archetype evolution over the set, so I wanna talk a little more about specific engines that we saw enter and/or leave the meta over the set, what their purpose was, and why we can probably expect to see some of them again in the future. 

Chocobos

The Chocobo engine, which normally consists of Izana, Fat Chocobo, Haste Chocobo, and sometimes 6k give Haste Chocobo, can be really great tools against Water and Lightning, but they tend to roll pretty high and pretty low. In a best case scenario, you get the Izana out early and can start pumping out the pain with consecutive attacks your opponent has no hope to block because of Nono + Fat Chocobo combo or just them not having blockers. If you can’t draw Fat Chocobo or Izana quickly, on the other hand, your engine is absolutely horrible and would almost always be better as another set of cards. Additionally, the engine is pretty expensive for the power line it generates, and so if one part of it can be answered efficiently (Cid Randell to prevent Hasted swings, Zalera that clears a board of your weenies) the whole thing was pretty much meaningless. I expect we’ll see this engine continue to see play to keep the meta honest. 

The Earth Package

Normally this means 3x Shantotto, 3x Raubahn (Forward), and your choice pick of Earth card(s) including but not limited to Atomos, Hecatoncheir (both), Magic Pot, Opus 3 Rydia, and Masked Woman. Basically, we get to play a mono deck while having sufficient outs for The Emperor and an extra board clear. Water and Lightning have both seen some play like this, though Water to a much greater extent. The Earth Package as it exists now tends to cover weaknesses to a lot of universal threats, like early board floods (VI, Chocobos, Golbez), The Emperor, and Elemental booster Backups. I think this engine is going to be one of the first to go away, namely because I have a hunch that Shantotto will decrease in playability heavily in the upcoming set.

Hildibrand and Nashu

Lightning’s new Swiss-army knife. While he doesn’t seem so on the surface, Hildibrand is actually incredibly versatile. He can be a difficult-to-deal-with blocker, a potent attacker, and most importantly, he dodges a lot of the popular removal available right now. He came into play namely because of the popularity of Shantotto and Yuna-H/Chaos Walker combo, which Lightning’s blockers could have a lot of trouble with before his utilization.

Ranger and Arc

Arc has become the new hottest inclusion in a lot of decks dipping into Wind, but most specifically Wind/Water and Wind/Earth archetypes. Alongside him, Ranger has been one of the most-included 3-drops in the game, and without a doubt inside the Wind element. And it’s easy to see why; the card provides a lot of wide-spread protection from a lot of available threats in the meta, since they’re all attached to auto-abilities right now. I do think that Ranger will dip off in popularity compared to the other cards I’ve mentioned, however, since both Forwards with inherent resistance and the use of Summons will be rising in the upcoming set.

Yuna-H and Chaos, Walker of the Wheel

Not exactly a new combo, we’ve seen this since Opus 3 with Garnet + multicolor Summons, and throughout the set in Wind/Water Chocobos, Standard Units, and now Tricolor Monsters. I won’t waste my breath talking about it too much, but the fact that both of these cards are EX really tops of it off, and as long as Yuna-H’s auto effect can keep up with CP efficiency and her Field Ability is relevant in the meta, we’ll see her around, and Chaos Walker too a result.