Welcome to Pitch to Me podcast, a show about the subjective
past, present and potential future of flesh and blood
design. Today's episode will be about
part the mist veil and its impact on flesh and blood.
You can find us across all socials such as Blue Sky and
Instagram at Pitch to Me podcast.
I'm Joel and I'm fuzzy. No.
My name. Is Clark.
So did you guys see this new Iris spoiler?
So we're not gonna do a second day.
I might keep that one, but let's keep that one.
Let's do another one. Yeah.
I'm Joel. I'm Clark.
And I'm fuzzy, so we got some new.
We're all with those spoilers. Yeah, we saw a new headpiece and
arms piece that are going to be in the IRA Armory deck and
actually really fucking hyped for them.
The headpiece could like only be used by IRA because it fishes
out Whirling Miss Blossom which is an IRA specialization.
But as a Katsu gamer, that arms piece looks pretty sick.
Yeah, it does. Yeah, he'd be playing with names
recently, so I can imagine that he's gonna be all over that.
And God forbid there's anything else good in that Armory deck.
Yeah. Abuse.
I like it because it feels like they really designed it around
IRA. Yeah.
And then the moment that it had the rename thing, they were like
maybe. Katsu I totally like.
I guess we'll have to see. I do love that it's like
definitely an IRA design that Katsu can probably like do good
things with and that's really cool.
Yeah, no, I'm really excited about it.
As someone who did a lot of brewing with Ira to see if she
could make it in the Haunted meta, she could not.
I'm really excited by these new play lines opening up.
Obviously, we need to see a lot more of it.
I do expect us to see a lot more of it, actually, even before
this episode comes. I think the episode is going to
come out. We might already have a full
deck list. Absolutely, because LSS has some
other news dropping today. Not, not the day that we're
recording, the day this episode is coming out.
Oh, you scared me. On a blue sky, they changed
their banner to 712025 suspense and it's like, fuck, what does
that mean? But guess what?
This episode is releasing July 1st.
So. So we'll find out together.
Yes, we'll find out together. But hey, if it hasn't come out
yet, leave us a comment. Tell us what you think it's
going to be. I think it's going to be the new
set announcement. It could be, yeah.
Oh, that would be just. What do we think, Brick Wizard?
I don't think it's going to be a set announcement actually, OK.
What do you think it's going to be?
I think I'm on the camp that people I've seen are talking
about it being a new keyword or like rules text.
Because it's in the same font as like a rules text, it kind of
looks. Like it looks like for like the
guardian mastery. Set it could be the IRA deck,
maybe the IRA deck, probably more the IRA deck.
But I don't know if suspense it's just written in that font.
I have no idea what kind of a mechanic could be called
suspense, but. Joel see The thing is like now
when I think of suspense as a keyword and what classes might
use it, I immediately think of like shadow or assassin.
And I've been told by many of my haters AKA podcast hosts monarch
3 is not due till 2026. So I think it's like assassin
with Bru who? The fuck told you that?
Because they're right. Hey, assassin brute sounds
interesting. I mean, assassin necromancer
brute in the Savage Land sounds kind of that would be kind of
gas. I'm not kind of gas.
I won't cap anyway. I could also do with like a
whole year without an assassin. Me too, me too, but that's
'cause I'm a hater, not cuz of any logistical precedent.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, let's start talking about
today's episode. Today's episode inspiration is
that Enigma LLD and new LLD and we, there was so much going on
in the world of flesh and blood when they hit Living Legend, we
didn't really have the time to do our traditional debrief
episode. We try to always take an
episode, look at a hero, their journey, what a reprinted
version of them may look like. We love recording those episodes
to kind of talk about the history of the hero once they
leave. Classic constructed.
You guys don't though? You guys don't watch those
videos? The one with Aurora, Aurora
Aurora did very very well. That's just cuz we had a based.
Guest like it has nothing to do with the episode itself.
But so we wanna try to do something a little bit different
because all of Miss Vale has now LLD.
We're gonna spin the entire episode talking about Miss Vale.
It has some really unique designs.
It was a really era defining set.
I would say absolutely. 2024 definitely feels almost defined
by the power level of Missed Veil.
Totally. And the beginning of 2025 too.
So like this a whole year just defined by this one set.
Yeah, we do wanna ask you, audience, what is your favorite
aspect of Mist Veil and why should that come back when we
return to Mysteria or why should it not come back?
We'll want to hear those thoughts too.
It's a very varied and nuanced set and topic, and everyone has
different opinions, so we want to hear about them.
Yeah, definitely. With all that being said, let's
go over our three pitches. In our first red pitch, Fuzzy is
going to go over a lot of the mechanics that were introduced
in Mist Veil. I'm going to go through the
three heroes and the different things that they're doing there.
I'm going to be taking our second pitch, yellow pitch, and
talk about why was Miss Veil so strong specifically.
Everyone talks about its power, but like why though?
Let's let's dig into the why. And then in Blue Pitch, Joel is
going to lead us through the future of Part the Miss Veil and
what Mystic might look like in the future, sort of drawing on
the lessons that we have learned as a community and as pretend
designers and what that might look like for LSS as they take
it into the next step. You guys excited?
I'm excited. I'm excited.
I was born excited. All I'm going to take it away
with red pitch, then I'm going to be talking about the three
different heroes and the Mystic talent a little bit and just
what new mechanics we saw and how the design of the game was
furthered when the set came out. So to get us in the spirit of my
pitch here, every time a new hero is printed, it's an LSS
chance to reevaluate what it means to be a member of that
class and or talent combination. And it's a chance for us to
learn more about what LSS intends for the future of that
class. So let's start with talking
about Enigma. Enigma has advanced illusionist
design by making a board state hero that is much easier to
interact with than other board state heroes in the past.
Now a granted Second Prism did this a little bit too because
all of Second Prisms allies have ward on them.
But she also still played a good amount of Spectra auras and she
had these figments that couldn't be interacted with at all until
they flip. Enigma specializes in ward auras
that will go away the second enigma would take damage.
They also protect her so it makes it harder for her to take
damage. So if she has multiple ward
auras set up, she can use some of those existing ones to
protect the ones she has. And she is incentivized to play
very defensively. So she can protect these ward
auras on the field. And they become very above rate
weapons and give her repeating value the longer they stay out.
I kind of remember liking this shift when all of, like, think
of this going back to spoiler season, right?
You saw that, like, Enigma was going to be all about these Ward
auras. I remember being excited because
I wasn't going to have to face off against any Spectra.
Yeah. I think you could probably go
back to our part the miss fail spoiler episode and find
multiple moments of us being like they finally fixed the
illusionist class like that was our click bait.
And like, looking back, I'm not sure how fixed the Illusionist
is. Enigma is still kind of like a
big pain in the ass to play against.
I think the idea of letting her defend her board state is
something that was distinctly different from the other
illusionist and something that a lot of people missed when they
first read how she was going to be working as a hero.
Yeah, because you can't really defend Spectra auras once they
get attacked, the illusionist doesn't have a say in it.
If your allies get attacked, you don't get to defend or use
defense reactions. But with the ward auras, because
you're attacking the hero, suddenly there's a lot more
agency to the illusionist player.
Another thing I like about a lot of the Mystic illusionist cards
is that they get better when you have no auras on the board.
Think like spectral manifestations.
Yeah, it will always give you a spectral shield, but it will
come in with plus one counters if you didn't have any.
Auras before which you really needed to make it worth the cost
that you were putting into the card.
Exactly, 2GO again to make one Spectral Shield is not that
good, but those plus one counters make it a really nice
card to play, especially when you have like Reality Refractor
or whatever, or as you're running like the core design for
Mystic Illusionist seems to imply that there's a give and
take on your board. I want you to clear my auras so
that I can reset and play my auras when I have no auras on
the board. That way they're stronger.
I want you to kind of deal damage to me.
I almost want you to do exactly as much damage as I have Ward on
the board. But it encourages the
illusionist player, specifically Enigma, to get this value out of
blocking damage with Ward instead of just like leaving
your auras on the board. You know, I feel like the most
well known Mystic Lucianist card is the Manifestations of Maragi.
Manifestations of Maragi. That card is so overtuned and it
doesn't quite fit this this design, right?
There's no incentive for Enigma to get rid of her board before
she plays Manifestations of Maragi other than the fact that
like, if she has a full grip it'll be a lot easier for her to
stick it and land it and push like command and conquer on the
same turn as she drops the manifestations.
Yeah, it's honestly really, really hard to play
Manifestations in the most ideal game state, aside from the fact
that Transverse the Universe just gets you the free chi that
you needed to play it. That's why true.
But in terms of like if you're thinking starting from nothing,
I need to play a blue, then I need to transcend, then I need
to use that the play manifestations and then get
another resource to swing manifestations.
It's honestly pretty difficult. And adding on to that give and
take aspect, the cheek cards that you kind of have to play to
play any of these Mystic heroes, they don't block, which makes it
a lot harder for me to defend my auras on the field.
There's a little bit more of that expectation that I'm going
to be taking damage when I have to run non block cards.
And a lot of her auras that she had to play are instant non
blocks. Yeah, yeah, making it even
harder to protect the board. And if you play them
defensively, oh, it's just bad value.
Going alphabetically, I want to move on to new new pushed
assassin design by actually returning to a few ideas that
were already established in assassins like Arachne and
Missouri. Like, and I'm talking about
contract Arachne, right? Like at the time we hadn't seen
the Haunted yet, but we still saw this repeated pattern of
three different things. I'm going to talk about deck
damage, attack reactions, and disruption all seem pretty core
to the assassin class, even before we saw new but new added
on to each of these different design aspects.
All of the stealth cards that were printed, maybe not all of
them don't Fact Check me yet. That wasn't the literal all, but
most of them. Most of new stealth cards
banished off the top of your deck.
So you can either like use a card to block or you can take
damage and lose a card off the top of your deck.
It puts the value proposition actually pretty below rate.
If you're going to disrespect the attacks that are coming at
you, you really want to be getting cards to new, but then
you're going to like potentially be banishing cards that might be
gaining her life anyway. It's puts you in a tricky
position and it's a very grindy long term plan that Assassin has
again had the design cemented in the past and is being added onto
with cards like these. Yeah, it definitely blended the
card pools of Arachne and Zuri mechanically, where Azuri
stealth cards dealt with giving out those disease tokens and
with other secondary effects. And then Arachne had the
contract cards that dealt the deck damage and gave you an
award, a reward when they got banished.
Now they are taking the stealth, the zero for three baseline and
the and the stealth keyword. And then they take that deck
damage idea from the Iraqi and the reward when you banish
something. Yeah, and put them together.
They put them both onto these cards.
So I think they took the best part of each of the two
mechanical ideas expressed in Dynasty and Outsiders and
combine them in Misfail. I think that was a big home run.
They think what really pushed it over the edge was not only do
these stealth cards banished from the top and they get
bonuses based off what they banished, similar to contract
cards. So there's, you know, Arachne
coded, but News hero ability also banished action cards when
the combat chain closed, which triggered a lot of these stealth
cards as well. Could you imagine if Huntsman
had that ability? Oh, they'd be insane.
They'd have silver stacked up to the fucking ceiling.
So you just trigger your equipment over and over and new
got it for free. A lot of them were like draw a
card and gain a life and you had an excess amount of go again in
that class. So it's like, I think they did a
really good job, like Clark said, about marrying the two
design philosophies in the 1st 2 Assassins and then just broke it
beyond recognition with that hero ability because that was
what Iraq was supposed to be, was that you're damned if you
do, damned if you don't, and now you have the best attack
reactions to push anything over the edge.
And Speaking of attack reactions, we saw a return to
that idea as it being a core assassin identity.
We had cards that literally said hey I am shitty until you play
one attack reaction then my damage can't be prevented.
Or you play 2 attack reactions and I'll be able to banish 2
cards off the top of the opponent's deck and get
additional power from my own ability.
Double Trouble is still so far. I love that card so double
trouble is sick. I love that card also because
the on hit isn't crazy. Debilitating Bonds of agony
still triggers me. Yeah, that card is pretty nuts,
but double? Trouble.
That's just a limited. Bomb baby.
Yeah, yeah. And I love that focus of our
cards are shitty until you're playing attack reactions above
them. It's like this kind of tempo
based. Like Assassin is kind of
aggressive because you need to have attacks to play and attack
reactions to play, and maybe even pitch cards to fuel your
attack reactions. Which was being demanded by the
venomous bite and hiss designs which required a blue to be in
the pitch zone to get the 4th value, justifying the 1 cost.
Yeah, yeah. So you'd require at least three
card hands. And so I had this like mid range
slash aggressive bite to it. Even though Assassin's kind of
like a control deck, it has a late game plan.
Even though it's rewarding you for keeping cards in hand.
It's kind of a weird middle ground that Assassin lives in.
They also cemented Assassin as the disruptive class by giving
it by literally I think by giving them one card, Bonds of
Agony. Oh my God yeah that card is
disgusting. I think flesh and blood needs to
have strong disruptive effects. You know, like crippling crush
used to be like one of the biggest things you could do to
ruin a player's turn. Or spinal Crush, like Guardian
kind of has that place in the meta, right?
Like it's important that some classes have better disruption
than others. Absolutely.
Because like at generic, what's the most disruptive effect we
have? I think it's just command and
conquer. Command and conquer is it's a
big deal because it's a lot of value, but it's not that big of
a deal because it can only stop you from having a 5 card hand.
It can't even stop you from having a four card hand, right?
There's some other like specific hate cards, but I just think
Bonds of Agony does have that important place in the meta of
being able to completely shut down disrespective decks, you
know, aggressive decks. And I also kind of like that
Bons of Acne is hard to do multiple times per turn or per
game. Sorry.
It's really easy to do once, right?
You have like the fucking shoes that are like 2 attack reactions
in one and it gives go again. Yeah, yeah, it's really easy to
play the first Bons of Agony out.
And if you're playing against an aggressive deck, aggressive
decks don't want you to even have the opportunity to play
like multiple Bonds of Agony. So I kind of recognize it as
like an important thing in the meta that stops aggressive
decks. It's just so fucking annoying
because you're taking out my good cards in my deck.
Like you're forcing me to block with cards like Blood Rush
Fellow or like Whelming Gust Wave, Surging Strike, because I
don't want you to fucking search out those cards out of my deck
and then forbid me from playing them in the future.
The problem? With giving them access to bonds
is like most of the aggressive decks will run like a lots of
redundant copies of the same card so it doesn't really hurt
them the same way that it hurts mid range decks where they look
to pivot around these tempo plays by maneuvering around one
specific card in the arsenal. Or maybe they just save up for
like like you said, a blood rush bellow or like a really big
spinal crush and then bonds of acne will just RIP out those 3
copies that you need to like make impactful plays.
Especially if you're a hero that hasn't had a lot of really
impactful support lately. Like those are the only cards
you have access to to claw back in a game, and now they're gone
for basically one turn of either a misplay or they just had it
and you didn't. The I do want to mention one
other thing about new and that's a completely new type of effect
that we had not seen in flesh and blood until new debuted it,
and that's playing opponents cards.
I mean, technically we saw like infiltrate like isn't a mechanic
that existed, but new decided that in order to embody that
flavor of this Mystic assassin slash prostitute that gets into
your head and kind of like works your mind from the inside out.
She they wanted to give her the ability to play opponents cards
usually like in the very late game, right?
They want it to be a late game reward and they wanted to
restrict it in a way where it's not super crazy.
I think that's what they were going for when they said he can
only play Blues. Yeah, I don't know what the fuck
we were cooking with that one, to be completely fair.
I I can tell you probably what went through the LSS, which is,
God, this is a really cool fucking fun ability and it
creates some really interesting matchups where some decks don't
run Blues And so she just never has a hero ability, but then
like it causes guardians to fucking suck and like she's
allowed to have good matchups. No, that wasn't going through
their head. They wouldn't have printed her
if it if it was, honestly. I think it does have a new type
of deck building tension that we haven't seen before.
And I don't know that could be very frustrating for a lot of
players. Like when you're making your
sideboard plan, you need to think of, OK, I need extra Blues
in case I go up against wizard or in case I go up against ice
heroes. I need to have defense reactions
in case I go up against warrior or in case I go up against
assassin And new kind of put in a whole nother axis, which is
like I need to be able to take out Blues or put in shittier
Blues in order to make my matchup better somehow by
running worse cards. And there are some really
important Blues that you just can't play against her
sometimes. And it's I think it's an
interesting challenge that the players ultimately seem to have
hated. Yeah.
Lastly, I want to talk about Zen.
Of course, I can't get through parts of this deal without
talking about all three of our favorite Mystic heroes.
Zen returned to the Crouching Tiger archetype, which is
something that we saw played a little bit with in Dynasty.
Crouching Tigers are also a sub archetype of combo.
So not only is Zen like the second combo centric ninja that
we've seen, he's the first one that specifically focused on the
Crouching Tiger combo cards, which is a very flexible type of
combo. You know, think Katsu is playing
surging Strike into Whelming Gust Wave.
Yeah, these really. Narrow into Lord of Wind like
it's a very linear pattern, which admittedly has gotten less
linear over the years, but not as dynamic as Crouching Tigers,
where you can do Crouching Tiger into combo card into another
Crouching Tiger into another crouching.
Like Chase the Tail wants you to play Crouching Tiger into Chase
the Tail into Crouching Tiger, and then you can usually line
that up into something else. It felt like the closest thing
to a real martial art where you have different forms of, you
know, the the same fighting style versus like the original.
Welcome to Wraith and Arcane, right?
Or, excuse me, welcome to Wraith and Crucible of War combo lines
where it's like head jab, leg tap and surging strike and all
of them are kind of shitty but Crouch and Tiger felt complete
for once. And I also love how as a Mystic
Ninja, he advanced the idea of crouching tigers by allowing
tigers to be created directly into hand.
Technically there were two cards that created Crouching Tigers in
hand before, but Mystic Ninja is able to do it much easier, which
allows other synergies. You know, with cards like
Enlightened Strike. Or gore belching.
Gore Belching doesn't interact with hand though Art of War, but
it lets you put them in deck. They have to go in hand before
they go into deck. Art of War What a party pooper
over here. We can't have Art of War in our
Crouching Tiger hand synergy deck.
Clark That's that's too. That's not allowed anymore.
We don't talk about Art of War with our Crouching Tigers.
Fine, sorry for bringing it. Up.
That's so 2024, Clark. Very unbecoming of you,
honestly. I won't talk about Zen too much
more because we have done a whole episode on Zen in the
past, but he is my favorite miss fail hero so and I think Joel's
too. Oh yeah.
So if you want to hear more of our thoughts on Zen, you can go
back and we'll probably put a link to our Zen episode in the
Doobly Doo. I think that's about all I
wanted to say about the mechanics of part the miss fail
and how they advance the design of the game.
I think we're going to move on to yellow pitch where Clark's
going to talk about the strength of part the miss fail and how
why strong question mark. Yeah, so people are constantly
whenever they talk about part the miss fail, they go, man,
part the miss fail was so strong.
And then I think was it why? Why is it so strong?
And yeah, we can look at certain things like manifestations of
Mira Gai and traverse the universe and see clear moments
where numbers were just higher than they needed to be or could
have been. You know, why is levels of
enlightenment attacking for three?
They could have attacked for two.
Thoughts of acne could have been 0.
Yeah, great, great example. But when I look at the when I
look at the card list of part the Miss Vale, I see a bevy of
cards that were never being run. A lot of the Ms. just don't get
run in decks. A lot of the legendaries are
fairly underwhelming. And so for me, I wanted to dive
in a little bit more as to why do I think Miss Vale was so
powerful and why did it give that sense of power outside of
just explicitly? Numbers were big.
And one thing I noted is that the decks aren't full of Miss
Veil cards, meaning Enigma, Zen, and new lists only really ran
about 20 to 30 Miss Veil cards in their decks, and most of them
were Blues. It wasn't the Reds or even like
the occasional yellow majestic. It was mostly Blues.
And that's because I think Miss Veil did something really,
really interesting with the Mystic talent.
This is something we didn't get to talk about in red pitch, so
I'm probably gonna throw the mic to you Fuzzy to talk about this
at some point. But Mystic.
So a lot of the basic Mystic cards are based on this idea
that they are blue rated cards that become Reds.
When you meet some condition, you spend a lot of time talking
about bonds of agony. Yes, that is a blue 0 for one
attack. But if you play your 3
reactions, it becomes a gains plus three.
That's a 0 for four. That's a red.
Why the fuck is a blue coming attacking for a red level of
value? That's crazy.
I think that's a weird example because I think the plus 3 is
meant to be a reward for playing three attack reactions more so
than a reward for playing a blue.
But we do see that design a lot in the comments.
Like the water drop, the droplet cycle.
It's a 0 for two like a normal blue, but if you've already
played a blue, it's a 0 for four.
That's red value. Oh.
Yeah, and like Transcending asked you to play Blues and
transcending and getting chi, I mean that is the core of all of
these decks. So they are constantly asking
the Mystic decks to play Blues. And The thing is that Blues that
can convert into red value is really fucking good.
And because it subverts this basic balancing act of the game,
the whole idea is that Reds generate bad value because they
don't let you play higher costed things and get a lot of value
that way. And Blues, well, they give you
lots of resources, but they don't deal a lot of damage.
That's the whole point of the rainbow system.
It's why we have the different pitches.
It's so that we can. It forces deck builders to say I
don't just get to run the 80 cards with the biggest number on
them. I need to find some balance in
my deck. I totally agree, I think they
might have gotten a little bit overboard on like Blues that
actually give you good value. I think it would be pretty much
fine if like at least the first bluway player return is an
honest to God blue that's giving me like my one point to value,
you know, maybe a second point if I spend an action point to
play it, which I'm not going to because I wanna play other Blues
on my turn in order to do my Mystic stuff, right?
It's just when you double transcend it really breaks
because when you play a transcend card and it flips back
into a resource, that's kind of like drawing a card.
Or you could say it's like I've never actually played a card in
the 1st place. Like my 4 card hand is still a
four card hand. But you just got the free value
from playing whatever that Transcend was.
Exactly. Yeah.
This leads to an enhanced consistency for the Miss Veiled
Heroes and for Mystic decks, because so much more power is
embedded in the Blues. They can run more Blues.
And even when those Blues have bad value because of all the
value that you're getting because you're playing Blues, it
all evens out to if you know. So let me put this another way.
When I play a guardian hero and I draw 4 Blues in a turn, I get
to block 3 and throw a. That's pretty fucking good.
That's still only 11 value in a turn.
When Zen draws 4 Blues in a hand, I get my ass blasted with
20 plus points of damage. What?
What the fuck? Now I do want to make a point
here that this was actually fan fucking tastic for limited.
Oh dude. Like having Blues that could
actually do shit was so good for limited and it let mediocre
decks feel way more powerful, way stronger.
I mean fuzzy made it. What was the AGE You made it to
like top 8 and then you just drafted like nothing but blue
block threes. That was like fuzzies fucking
bombing this. It wasn't even in the top eight.
It was the first. It was the second pod of the
day. So it was like still in Swiss
and I was really happy with my deck.
But the commentators were like, I think Fuzzy thinks this is a
mediocre deck. This is looking like OK, I mean,
we have some combo cards, whatever.
I mean I remember in the third pack like pretty late you were
just like oh blue block 3 and the commentators are like that's
like the 14th 3 fuzzies grab. You have like 1 transcend card.
This deck is garbage. They clearly didn't watch his
kale episode or the Heavy Hitters RTN winner.
Yeah, Blue Block 3 is just fucking crazy, man.
It's important to note that I3 owed that pod and I beat the Zen
player that was directly to my right that was taking all the
Reds. Oh my God.
So it worked for me really well. And like, I think that's kind of
fucking cool. Like I think it was a great
thing. I also think it was great.
How you could draft all these like blue Mystic cards and you'd
still have these great tempo plays off of these 3 blue hands.
It made late games more interesting by actually being
able to provide some real damage and power.
I just think it did a lot of really, really good things.
So I really appreciated that element of Mystic design.
Part that Mystical Limited is a good limited format.
It's a fantastic limited format, but in terms of classic
instructor I think it just made decks way too consistent and had
too much power in their Blues. I kind of feel the same way
about Dromae, because you have a hero that is rewarded for
playing a single color, namely Reds, and you have the downside,
quote UN quote, of needing to pitch Reds.
But then it's mitigated by cards like Flame Scale Furnace, right?
Or even like Tome of Imperial Flame.
Yeah, Tome of Imperial Flame. Or just pitching them in
general. She gets an ash every time she
does so, yeah. Yeah, so it's never really that
punishing. Plus the best decks are able to
always convert their Blues into good value or just kind of
ignore having to deal with Blues in the 1st place either because
they just went so quickly that the few Blues that they see are
primarily just there to like. With Aurora it was Swing sword,
make an embodiment of lightning, right?
With Phi it was Swing Ember Blade.
It was like, I don't need that many Blues.
I just can convert fuck tons of Reds and then I need to get
occasional value from a blue in hand.
Yeah. And then I do think at this
point I want to note that the set was pushed.
The numbers are just bigger. I think Manifestations of Mira
Gai could have gotten an additional plus one counter
instead of doubling it. I think you know, I think Chase
the Tail could have given the next tiger +2 instead of +3.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. It was the first ever.
It was the first Ninja one for Seven that was ever printed.
I also want to. Point out that a lot of their
designs were able to abuse previously printed cards for me
this is thinking about well actually primarily what I'm
thinking about here is illusionist and enigma.
I think Enigma really abused old Illusionist cards that never
really made their way into other decks like Miraging Metamorph
and Phantasmiclasm because she just kind of got to
circumnavigate at the action point problem of Illusionist.
Yeah, she never really had to worry about Go again because she
either played the big attack and resolved in instant speed aura
or resolved in resolved something with plus one counters
on it so that she could attack with it and then played the
Phantasmic Lasm we're Miraging Metamor.
She was always able to convert hands very, very aggressively.
And so I don't know if I love that.
I think that was probably an awkward part design that felt
very Fab 1.5 rather than Fab 2.0.
Yeah, they did make this promise after Dromy LL that illusions
wasn't gonna be that way. And then it just was.
It just looked a little different.
Yeah. And to bring it into the modern
day, I will say Gravy Bones at the moment has to work pretty
hard for his extra action points.
Like Limpet is there, but Limpet is so powerful because Limpet
says attack with go again on it and everyone's going, whoa,
gotta kill that one as soon as possible.
And it still costs resources. Yeah.
So like, definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Everyone's in agreement with me here.
No one disagrees with me here. And if you do, get in the
comments. Or just stop being wrong
question mark. OK, last thing we're probably
going to get you in this pitch here is I want to talk about Qi
and transcending. They're so cool.
That's. So fucking cool.
Fuzzy. Do you want to gush about the?
McCann Love. Yeah, Fuzzy.
Take it away, tell us why Qi is so fucking.
Do you remember when they fucking spoiled Chi but we had
no idea what the fuck it did because all they did would just
show us a picture of like 3 swirling blue resources and
we're like what do you think this does?
And everyone was like, I think it does, XI think does why?
I still think I had cool ideas for what.
She could be. But ultimately it's these cards
that transform into a resource gem, not like literally a gem,
right? Like they're not literally gems,
they transform into non block resource cards, but it's kind of
OK because those resource cards are like bolstered.
They allow you to use your hero ability and as you're the game
goes on, you're going to literally fatigue faster.
You're going to reach a fatigue state sooner than other heroes
because your deck, your mind has literally transformed into
Mystic energy. I love the design of Qi.
And Fuzzy, I'm so happy that in there you mentioned that they're
like gems, but they're not gems because here's my hot take for
the episode. They are gems.
They're fables. Every single transcend card is a
fable because the first time you play it you get a blue pitch and
a fuck ton of extra. Value.
Is that a hot take? I feel like it's a hot.
I don't feel like people talk about you like that.
Only the fables. The fable.
No like I feel like these have absurdly high-powered.
I think this is each individual chi as an individual card is
more powerful than riches of Trophodoni.
I agree with that. But that's intentional, right?
Like fables are meant to be as powerful.
Well, one no. Yes, but also no.
Like that is one of the rarest most expensive cards in the
game. I think it's intended to have a
high power level and a high impact if you're able to make it
work. And like I think these cards are
way above it in power level because not only do you get
whatever the effect of the Transcend card is typically
evaluated somewhere between 1:00 and 2:00 value at instant speed
on a blue card, but also you can get benefits from transcending
from playing the blue. Now that blue card that you
played goes to a red rate, so you can add that value to the
fact that you played the transcend card.
Admittedly, sometimes not always.
I understand why people wouldn't consider that fair.
But then you also get the blue pitch and pitching Chi can also
give other cards big additional value, like the mask of
recurring nightmares or manifestations of mirror Guy.
Like a single transcend turn playing that transcend card can
generate once again, red levels of value.
And that is wildly powerful in a way that I'm not sure that I'm
super comfortable with staying in the game.
I guess the question is, is like maybe cheap pay offs need to get
a little bit weaker and we need to let those non blocks in your
deck be legitimate downsides because it never felt like a
downside. Yeah, yes.
There were rare instances where I was playing against the new
and the new had a really strong early turn where they
transcended like 2 times and they were like ha ha ha, I'm so
powerful and then I go cool, and then they draw 2 Qi in their
hand and I throw 20 damage at them and I win the game.
Like that has happened to me before but I think it is not
nearly as rare as people or as common as perhaps the designers
thought it would be. I don't think it ended up being
a downside, especially when they printed cosmic awakening as like
Oh my God this perfect anti fatigue tool peak.
I think it's so interesting how you mentioned that like if we
ever return to part the missed fail, this shadow of design is
kind of hanging over it as a solution that like LSS is going
to have to solve one day, right? If they want to print any other
Mystic hero, they need to either like ban all of these transcend
cards because they are kind of fundamentally some very strong,
or like nerf the effects that you get from the Chi, which in
itself would also be kind of a feels bad right?
Yeah, I mean, that would mean banning Master recurring
nightmares, banning banning manifestations of Mirror Guy.
Well, imagine if you made a new class in combination with Mystic
that didn't have any of those cards and maybe we banned
Trevors because Trevors is like one of those ones to help
sidestep it, right? You would still kind of need a
hero ability, slash Mystic cards that just aren't as much of A
payoff as you'd want, you know? Like the payoff would have to be
not that good, the hero ability would have to be mediocre, and
the the whole power fantasy is that our hero ability is extra
strong because we have to go through an extra hoop to get to
it, right? Yeah, but it's not a hard hoop.
Yeah, that's the problem. I'm really interested to see
what LSS does in the future with the Mystic talent, which I think
leads into our blue. Pitch at the blue pitch.
Joel. Oh me, yeah.
Yeah. So for Blue Pitch, I'm going to
talk about Miss Fail as it exists or could exist in the
future. And instead of like coming up
with specific mechanics, I want to talk about each aspect of
Miss Fail and what should change to have this part of this set
come back. Like my Co hosts have mentioned,
there's a lot of moving pieces to Miss Fail that make it really
powerful. And any number of things could
be, any number of levers could be pulled to see which of these
mechanics come back in the new iteration of Missed Fail.
And the first one I want to talk about is the unassuming power of
Blues. Clark already talked about this
to great extent so I'm not going to boil over it too much, but
making heroes care about Blues is very dangerous.
And I want to take a look at Gravy Bones because I think he
is actually a success story from their scaling back of how they
deal with not only action point management with board states,
but also how they use Blues as a way to make control decks
stronger. That's true.
He literally is a blue matters hero and he doesn't even have to
play the Blues right? He doesn't even need.
Not necessarily, but a lot of the times you do play the Blues
to get them into. Graveyard.
That is the easiest way to get them into graveyard, but they're
not strictly rewarding him for playing Blues.
Everyone runs them, everyone has Blues that hit the graveyard,
you know? I'm also going to insulate us
for the future. We've had gravy bones for like 2
weeks at the time of recording. Let's see what happens three
months from now. Because he could be, he's also
the one hero that's like actually put up results from
this set. So like maybe?
Cinder's finally good because he came out.
There's no way that he's doing anything with her around.
That's my, that's my take. Sure.
While the Missville heroes were around, one class that struggled
a lot was Arcane Heroes, specifically when Vista I got
his power spike of cards. Even Zen, after losing so many
of or so much of his powerful kit, was able to keep up with
him on like a 5050 ratio because he was able to use his chest
piece reliably and just make Zen say tokens then basically fog
all the arcane damage. Enigma would basically eat up
any wizard because she has Ward in addition to lots of AB from
past illusionist equipment suites.
Yeah, Blue Matters decks are insulated against Arcane,
they're insulated against Ice. And then if they're still able
to put out really, really good value in early, sorry, they had
their game plan available in the late game because they didn't
lose all their Reds in the first cycle.
Like there's a lot of just general benefits in Flesh and
Blood that come from having blue as a part of your game plan.
The concept of what I'm going to call an outlet versus an engine
in your hero power. I look at the most recent set
High Seas with Gravy and Marlin and Puffin and how they
transformed gold to not make it the payoff but use it as an
engine. Like Gravy.
Bones is using his hero ability and gold to filter his hand,
discarding the non blocks and also getting more resources into
your hands. And Marlon obviously is creating
these arrows that synergize with the rest of her deck and her
weapon. And then Puffin is also looking
to crank multiple times, creating converting gold into
cogs and drawing cards off of larger hands.
But none of these are things that say I'm going to win the
game or have a massive tempo swing if I activate my hero
ability. This wasn't the case with Zen, I
don't think. Or any of the Misfield heroes,
right? I really like this distinction
between outlet and engine. I feel like Zen putting a
crouching tag in your hand is engine because the crouching
tiger doesn't do anything. You have to run cards in your
deck to make it crouching tiger good.
You have to like be able to combo off of it, but being able
to actually grab the combo cards with the hero ability means that
you can just run combo cards. But what you're actually doing
on your turn is really focused on making Transcend happen.
You transcend in order to feel your hero ability, and then your
hero ability kind of takes over and gives you the combo cards,
gives you the wind conditions really to overpower your
opponent. Yeah, I guess I kind of want to.
It made a lot of sense when you first said it, Joel, but I kind
of want to lean on what is the difference between an engine and
an outlet when often times they are doing the same thing of
paying off by having the thing. Yeah.
Well, you faced it earlier. Sorry.
Cutting you off, Joel, for your own words, but.
I mean, sometimes you hear it two different ways from two
different people. Like if your hero ability is
winning the game, that's different than if your hero
ability is helping your cards do what they are supposed to do.
Like when Gravy Bones loots, he's not actually playing
allies, he's getting allies ready to be played.
It's a little different, right? Right.
And I think Zen's. So we want to move chi from
being the outlet to the engine. Yes.
I think one of the biggest issues with Zen's design is that
everything was baked into his hero ability and the cards I
cared about being paid for with Chi like Schwum, the mascot of
our podcast, it was extremely bad.
Shifting Wind to the Mystic. Beast, Yeah.
Shifting, Yeah. Thank you.
The Mask of recurring nightmares is kind of like it's a control
tool, so it's hard to say that it's a wind condition, but it
feels like an outlet more than an engine.
You know, I can just fuel into my mask and I don't have to
worry about what my other things do.
Like that's always on board. It's always an option for me.
And by activating it I am getting closer to my wind
condition. What about Enigma then, with
Manifestations of Mirror Guy? Because in this instance, that
card feels miserable to play. Yeah, Gee, yeah, absolutely.
And I'm glad you brought up both those examples, because I.
I think they're both, you know, part of the problem.
Massacre Recurring Nightmare is very strong because when you
didn't have a hero power, you had Massacre Recurring
Nightmares. And that means that meant no
matter what, you always had an outlet for your chi and ripping
a car from your opponent's hand has it.
It's really hard to calculate that value.
The baseline is 3, of course, but when you're a deck that also
disrupts from hand, that's just too much.
Yeah, we did a whole episode about that.
We sure did. And with Enigma using
mismanifestation of Moraga, we've said it multiple times
just this episode that card is widely overtuned.
Yeah. But it was the mechanic that
you're more looking for chi to lean on.
You're looking for Chi to augment the other cards, the
other strategies. You want transcending to be a
big tempo play, something that you need to.
Hold onto a lot of cards to be able to pull off exactly.
So to kind of pull it all together, I think Chi is a very
interesting mechanic, but to be reeled in truly, I don't think
any of it can start in the equipment zone.
So a lot of stuff needs to get banned.
Goodbye Transcend. Goodbye Traverse.
Goodbye traverse. Goodbye mask.
The art's so fucking. You can have the mat.
I bought, I bought, I bought the cold foil extended.
Me too buddy, me too. It's set in my binder right now.
I think all that needs to be banned and I think the dev team
needs to take a really hard look at the cards that are being
played from the Chi. That way you're keeping four or
five card hands to really have the same tempo swings that you
did with OG part the Mis fail and they're flavorful.
They're not just like overtuned back breaking cards.
The last thing I wanted to gloss over is obviously with each of
these heroes leaving the format, we need to think about who's
coming back to replace these heroes, whether it's in the same
combination or future heroes. For this example, I'm only going
to do possible replacements and what happens or what I think
should happen for each class in order to improve upon the
design, rather than just, you know, making the second prism or
whatever. I'm.
So excited. And because of the lack of lore
implications, it's kind of hard to insert who I think should
replace each of these heroes. Like I don't have any names in
mind. Mystic IRA.
Yeah, I was thinking about IRA as well.
But the first thing that comes to mind for a Zen replacement is
obviously Benji. They they did talk about it, I
think briefly that Benji was supposed to be the first Mystic
Ninja, but with the way that his design space existed at that
time, it was like your cards that are two or lower base power
are unblockable with cards from hand and then they were.
Probably going to try to like make the crouching tigers
unblockable or play on that unblockable right by 1000 cuts
kind of design. Right, which sounds it's like.
Hey, let him cook more. Maybe all this extra time let
him cook. More that that's exactly what I
was thinking too because that as a baseline does not sound fun to
play against. But I think they did an
excellent job converting to size ability which is also another
Crucible of war blitz only hero to CCI.
Think they can do a similar thing with Benji.
I don't know if it's going to be with crouching tigers though.
What do you guys think based on what you know about Benji I?
Think missing ninja is defined by the crouching tigers going to
hand. I think they got to keep in that
design space. I think a big pivot off would be
awkward, but it's not like they haven't done that with other
classes and talents. Yeah.
I mean, Lightning got a complete revamp of being instant based,
you know? Yeah, yeah.
That's true, I feel like it'd be pretty fair if it was like pitch
a cheek cuz it cut like pay 3 Mystic resources.
All your crouching tigers are unblockable this turn with cards
from hand and then they can put a crouching tiger in your hand.
He can try to like buff them. I don't know.
I feel like it's way too easy to buff a crouching tiger though.
You have to have cards for it. If you're spending an entire
card just for evasion, no tutor, just evasion, I think that can
be pretty balanced. But then I nimble ISM and then I
come in for three unblockable. That's a 2 card 3.
That's yeah, you. Scared of A2?
You scared of a 2? But what Fuzzies pitching is
also in line with what I was suggesting is that she needs to
have a good engine, but the output needs to require more
cards. Like if I'm playing nimbleism
and pitching a cheat to make my cards unblockable, that's two
cards and I haven't even, you know, use any combo cards.
Maybe if he had a passive that said something along the lines
of like when a crouching tiger hits your combo cards game plus
one. So you both have to find a way
of like buffing the crouching tiger and then playing something
that after the crouching tiger one of the combo cards.
That seems interesting to me. I don't know.
Assuming I don't know. I mean.
It can see me rolling my eyes just a little bit.
What I. What I what I want to look at is
probably the most balanced piece of equipment that came out of
part of the Misfield, which was Meridian pathway, which said
when you pitch a cheat, you may have this card game Ward 3.
So Meridian Pathway is a passive that you always have access to,
which I think could actually be expanded to like the Mystic
ninja and assassin classes because it's still probably a
powerful effect, especially if it has something to do with you
can't block crouching tigers or you buff your combo cards in
some way and it's destroyed after use.
Another aspect about Mystic Ninja that I really liked was
the defense that you had. I've heard a lot of complaints
when Zen was like the top dog, how he had too much armor when
he was like the offensive top dog.
But when he was toned down on his offensive, he had a lot of
defensive tools that players had to lean in and it made him like
basically the perfect mid range ninja, no offense to IRA
players. And so if he were to come back,
that's also something else I'd like to see because we know what
Transcend can do when you are good at offense.
We don't need to see that anymore.
I think the defense on an offensive class could be an
interesting spin. I mean it, it's also pretty
flavorful one, right? The monk who finds inner peace
is not going to use that inner peace to bash your head in.
He's going to use that inner peace to protect.
Himself Exactly. Yeah, I think it's a really cool
sunset of the of the design. Moving on to Enigma, we already
talked about how she can basically use all of her action
points at her will. And I think we've already
commented on Enigma's cost curve.
And so if the next Mystic Illusions were to come back, I
think it should. Or a much higher cost curve.
Sure, they got the Blues. They can afford it.
Exactly, like why didn't they just have manifestation in
Baraga? I'd be the baseline where it's
threes, fours and fives to pay for your big boards and then
just not give them go again. Like just have them be really
big. This would also really reward
the enigma for letting the opponent clear their ward a
little bit more rather than fighting to hold on to it.
When you have a lot of small amounts of ward, you can control
breakpoints a lot more comfortably, right?
When you have bigger sources of ward and you're like well I
could full block and then take one and lose my ward 6 so I
guess I won't block that much. Right.
Just block 6 with my ward. I mean, yes, but at the end of
the day. You had to pay for it.
It's still fair, yeah. But what if that 044 with go
again comes in and like is coming in for one over now
you're maybe losing a little bit of that value and like the
opponent got one up on you and maybe that's OK.
I think that rewards good control players.
I don't think that powerful mechanic should be easy to use
like that. They said Enigma was going to be
the hardest to use because you're managing all these
smaller break points with your ward and your bigger wards, but
it just didn't line up that way. So if an equal were to come
back, I think I'd like to see bigger cost curves, less
reaction, less reaction points. Yeah, thank you.
Yeah, the. Instance wasn't as much of A
downside as I think they thought it was.
Yeah, they need to temper a lot more with their supposed
downsides on some of these. Classes, I think they think non
blocks are like really, really hard because when everything
blocks three, that's really, really powerful, but when
they're incense, you can also just kind of do whatever the
fuck you want with. Them.
Yeah, like that's the best card in the game, Yeah.
I mean, throwing a weakest link and ripping A transcend card,
Good counter play. Yeah, I I was appreciative about
that. Everything else but.
Yeah next I want to move on to new, which I think a lot of
people want to see change if it were to ever come back because
of how it polarized the guardian match up and how it just
basically feasted on every mid range deck that existed.
You need to ban the mask, you know, not because I hated the
card, I do, but I think going along with the tenant that these
car, these heroes need transcend engines, not outlets.
This is like probably one of the most powerful outputs or yeah,
one of the most powerful outlets that you have access to as a
Mystic assassin. You want to?
I think would be interesting. What do you think would be
interesting? Getting cards of the same names
into the banish zone and then being able to do something off
of that. Yeah.
Like if you get 3 let's this is going to sound crazy.
Let's say you can get like 3 crippling crushes into banish.
You can flip two of them face down to play the third one.
That seems balanced to me. Maybe not for free but like
really being like if bonds can hit and I can get 3 cards of the
same name. Or like I can punish decks that
run a bunch of multiples of the exact same card and just having
to work a little bit harder to get those cards into banish.
Yeah, and that does the IT provides that entirely new deck
building tension that I kind of liked about new, where now
instead of thinking, hey, I have to be careful what Blues I run,
now you have to think, I have to be careful what place sets I.
Run. It doesn't tackle something as
fundamental right as Blues. Although I would say running
play sets of things is really fundamental.
Sure, but it doesn't come in until the late late game and in
my mind you would still have to pitch to play.
You don't get to fucking play a crippling crush for free, sure
just because you got 3IN. Damage yeah and also I the
playing for free was with this design in mind you also have the
agency to block with one and then if you banish the other
two, the new player still needs to banish the third to get the
effect which. Does reward her specialization?
I mean specialization. But the Mystic assassin
transcend card right? Wants to banish cards out of
graveyard. So like giving a fucking reason
for that to be a powerful effect is still good.
I can see LSS printing in effect like that, yeah.
Yeah cuz then it just requires them to keep more cards and use
their chi instead of just like pitching 1 and you have access
to every blue in their deck. That doesn't make sense.
And any amount of them. Too right, you can play all of
the Blues. No, like this is once you get to
take one card, it can be a red, but like, yeah.
And I still love that idea. Like we're going into the new
matchup, I'm going to have to flip through my deck and see if
there's any cards I need to take out.
And the answer would be like, I take out one levels of
enlightenment, you know? That could be so interesting.
Yeah. Just take, I'm going to take out
my Blood a Blood Rush Fellow and put in some random yellow 6
because I think it's more important to restrict the
ability for her to. I mean, actually Blood Rush
Fellow is a horrible card for her to play, but the idea is
there. Yeah.
One swing big, Yeah.
Yeah. I think also one of the biggest
gripes about people or that people had about new design is
that she had the best assassin attack reactions in the game.
Hiss and Venice fight don't say Mystic or blue or anything like
that. They just say or stealth or
contract. Yeah, they they could use it on
any, any attack. And well, Fang strike was
playable on any attack, the other one had to be played on an
assassin attack action card, but it was not keyword or Mystic or
Mystic. Yeah that is also true.
Actually. That was crazy.
Why the fuck are they playing on Mystic attacks?
Yeah, but you see what I mean? Like there's no other stealth
cards that exist in the Untalented or Shadow Assassins
that are unrestrictive like that.
Like they can't react onto the contracts the same way that they
can do on the self cars that they've released with.
And if this assassin talent combo type comes back, I don't
think they can have anything like that ever again.
Or maybe a ban because that lack of deck building tension Just
let them be the best assassin. Similar to how like Starville or
Oldham just dwarfed the other guardians at the time because
there's no reason for you to be playing them.
They don't have any value proposition greater than being
able to react on any assassin attack action.
Yeah. Why do the best contract attacks
get to go to 8? Because you had a venomous bite
in hand, right. And, and OG Arachne can get it
to maybe seven. Yeah, on a good day.
But yeah, that's that's sort of my two cents around the three
heroes, what I think should happen if they were to come
back. So to summarize, it's Zen.
Let's see a little bit more defense and not just the free
tutor. Definitely do more of an engine.
Idea, yeah, there an enigma I would say.
Needs much higher cost curve, much bigger wards and a lot less
action points. Which could be interesting.
Make her like a guardian Y illusionist right?
Big heavy hits, big heavy word amounts.
Yay. And then with new IT is
depolarizer hero ability. Make it a little bit more
general, but then that opens up a lot more design space for her
to feel a little bit more fair. Yeah, exactly.
You you put it beautifully. But with that being said, I
think I'm done with my pitch. I think we should go to our
Arsenal zone now. The.
Arsenal zone. I love the the Arsenal Zone.
The Arsenal Zone's a part of our podcast where we're talking
about cards that we love, cards that we hate, cards that we love
to hate, or cards that just kind of are there in our chaff pile,
and you're organizing the boxes that you pulled.
Like, oh man, you're calling me out?
Months ago and you're just like wait, I love this card those.
We also like to shout out a card from a Patreon subscriber to get
our Patreon subscribers into the show, and today we have randomly
selected Whippy. Whippy.
Thank you Whippy the. Hottest meme creator in all the
flesh and blood. Yeah, if you haven't seen their
channel already, go check it out.
They've also been a long time fan of ours, a die hard drip
type fan. We're a big fan of Whippy over
here and he's been consistently, you know, submitting these cards
for us to talk about on the Arsenal Zone and for today he's
talking about Olympia and what we have this to say about
Olympia. Well, hold on, can we what?
What's who's Olympia? And Olympia says the first time
that any of your attacks would win a wager, create a gold
token. And he had this to say about
Olympia. Literally all I've been thinking
about is Olympia since the interview with Brian Go stating
that him and Betsy were meant to be limited only and they
expanded them into adult heroes because quote UN quote.
Why not? It makes so much more sense for
them to exist the way they are where they both care about the
wager mechanic but it has like 0 support outside of limited and
specs. I've been theory crafting
Olympia decks all this week, but every time I put something
together I'm just like there's another warrior I could be
playing right now who would make this package work and actually
has a payoff. Without further support, this
hero is literally in a position of why the hell do you even
exist. Quote if you need a specific
card, not a hero. Up the Ante is a hell of a card
and the only thing that keeps me coming back to Olympia Deck
building. And that's a great show.
I think it was a very shocking comment to be made and I'm sure
Brian Go regrets it as soon as he said it because you know,
flesh and ball. I am sure the people online are
over. Dramatizing his casual nature of
how he said it, Yeah. Yeah.
I doubt he was like and yeah, fuck it, people will be fans of
this hero and we don't care about those people.
That's sort of how it sounded like in the interview, but
definitely not what he meant. I agree.
I agree 100%. I think a lot of people are
justifiably upset because we've been asking for a long time for
support for these heroes, but now that you have the closure
that this hero was never intended to be CC playable, I
don't think it should be. Like, it should all just make
sense. It shouldn't make you like, you
know, go at Brian go or the LSS team with pitchforks and and
torches or whatever. I don't know, they printed a
expansion slot card for Olympia soon after Heavy hitters, the
one where it lets you like equip stuff from your inventory.
So these heroes are somewhere in their minds, you know, and
hearts. So I don't think it's super out
of the question for us to see some support for these heroes in
the future. I think we're going to have to
wait for Wager to come back for these heroes to see another
resurgence. And if they update Wager or try
to make it more interesting in some other way, if they just
don't return to Wager ever, then yeah, I think these heroes are
going to wallow in infamy. For sure.
So thank you so much Whoopi for the suggestion.
We don't often get straight up here suggestions, but they're
always interesting to talk about, especially when they're
when they have relevant discussions around them.
And if you didn't hear your card shouted out, don't worry, keep
submitting. We do keep a Bank of everything
you've submitted up until now, and we'll get to it at some
point. Yeah, I'm going to jump in here
and start our section of the Arsenal zone and I want to talk
about solid ground. Solid Ground is not a card that
is out yet, but it is a pretty interesting card.
Solid Ground is continuing a trend of design that I've
noticed. I was thinking about this while
looking through the Miss Veil cards where it is a blue 3 cost
5 block defense reaction. Now all of the cards so far that
have followed this pattern have needed some payoff to get that
kind of ability. So for Solid Ground, it costs
one less to play for each seismic surge you control.
The other one is Territorial Domain, which only blocks for
two, but gets +3 if you've made a Crouching Tiger.
That can Love that card dude. Yeah, and then there's also a
Mystic one that if you pitch a Chi to play it, you get to draw
a card. Unravel.
Aggression. Unravel aggression, Yeah.
So all of these are essentially one card 5 blocks provided you
do some other hoop. I think it's an interesting
design space. I think solid ground is the most
playable one by far. Absolutely.
And we to spend a lot of time talking today about blue matters
and how interesting that is and how consistent they can make a
deck. What if they make Guardian
really strong with good Blues? Finally maybe?
I'd love to see it. They're the first class to make
it sexy to care about Blues. First class to care about Blues.
So I would love to see it, baby. I'd love to see, and I think
Solid Ground is the most playable version of this set of
design, so yeah. It's pretty cool.
Joel, what about you? What card do you have for us?
So the card on my mind this evening is levels of
enlightenment. It's one of my favorite Mystic
cards and I think it represents so much of part the MIS fail.
I like the modality of it and I'll explain the card to you
before I continue. Levels of enlightenment is a
blue three block 1 cost three base power that says when this
attacks, choose one for each blue card you've pitched this
turn and you pick one of three, which is or one of three draw a
card. This gets +2 or this gets go
again. And I loved the playing with the
instances and your hero ability being able to get multiple cards
in the pitch zone before this card resolves.
I loved the high row potential of having three Blues when
you're playing with Zen, like with your sacred art.
I love that this card as a baseline is like A2 card 7.
The fact that it also comes in extended art is pretty cool too.
I loved top decking levels of enlightenment off of the levels
of enlightenment. And you just roll it back, baby.
Yeah. And it was such a unique.
Oh, my God. And this is the car that helped
me win my my RTN most recently because I was able to.
Well, I won't get into the line, but I use this card to basically
lock a win against a very hard matchup.
And yeah, it's just a car that's near and near to my.
Heart the OG high tide, get 2 Blues for strong effect.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. This this card should have been
two power but you know what y'all can have your fun.
Yeah, I'm excited to play this card again sometime soon.
Yeah, Yeah, that's my card. Fuzzy, you got a card.
My card for today is Whelming gust way because they printed
they spoiled some ninja cards lately like I said in turn 0.
The card that they spoiled today is called O'Connor Scar Wraps
and it's kind of like breaking scales.
Breaking scales was already this nice common that Katsu players
were playing because it gave one of your combo cards plus one at
one point during the game. So until I use my breaking
scales, you have to respect every whelming gust wave that I
play because that on hit draw card is a little bit harder to
block if I can just give it plus one whenever I want to.
What's whelming gust wave? Whelming gust wave is a 0 cost 3
block that comes in red yellow, blue with three two and one
power respectively and it says combo.
If Surging Strike was the last attack this combat chain
Whelming Gust Wave gains plus one go again and and if this
hits draw card. Wait, that's like levels of
enlightenment. It it's one under rate and it
goes to like one over rate and on hit.
Draw it becomes snatch. Go again.
Oh, that's true. Favorite card Snatch 2.
And it's a three block baby. Oh my God, even.
Better than Snatch 2? So Whelming Gust Wave is like
one of the like best cards that Katsu's had for the longest
time. O'Connor's Scar Wraps is so good
with Whelming Gust Wave that it gives us like a reason why we
might want to ditch the Kodachi's and start running.
Edge of Bottom baby Spanish Edge of Bottom to give Whelming Gust
Wave plus one multiple times per game.
Hello. Shit.
So yeah, I'm going to be really annoying at armories now.
Or, as Clark claims, continue to be annoying armories.
Yeah, you play fucking Katsu. Yeah, for those.
I run into your ass and I'm like, oh God, I have to block.
You got to over block by two because I got the O'Connor scar
wraps and the ancestral empowerment.
I already had to play around your fucking 3 pumps back during
fucking having a heavy meta. So I've actually have a copy of
Wilming Gustrape that I brought to sign and give to each of you
hosts. And I I brought the red 1, you
know. The good one.
One for you and one for you. Thank you, Fuzzy.
So go ahead and drop in the comments and let us know your
thoughts on part the missed fail and what you liked about it.
And what you'd like to see, and it's immediately going to get
outdated because Alsace is going to reveal whatever the fuck
suspenses and everyone's going to want to know our opinions on
it. It's like, why are they talking
about Miss Veil? Yeah, don't worry, we will get
to it a week late. I swear it's a new set.
All right, well, be sure to join a Discord for the spoiler season
coming up, because we're the only place where you can get
spoilers. And be sure to join the Patreon
if you want to hear your cards shouted out, or maybe play in
the next round of Crucible games.
Yeah, Speaking of Crucible, I have a really cool format for
July, so. And it's July 1st.
It's July 1st now, so go ahead and hop onto the discord or go
to our socials and you should see some information about it.
Hell yeah. Well, with that being said,
guys, bye. Bye.
Pitch It to Me podcast is hosted by Fuzzy Dope, Clark Moore and
Joel Racinos, Executive producer talent Stradley, logistics
coordinator John Farkas, music by Dylan Holtz, logo by on V
sound mixing, Christopher Moore and last but not least, you.
Thank you for listening. Please give us a follow on your
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