Closing the Mistveil - podcast episode cover

Closing the Mistveil

Jul 01, 20251 hr 9 min
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Episode description

Now that Nuu has rotated out of CC, all of the Part the Mistveil heroes have officially left the format. Let's take a minute to reflect on MST, it's design, and what the future may hold!Our episode on Zen's LL'ing: https://youtu.be/uq_d0IqFNM0

Bwipy's channel: https://youtube.com/@bwipy?si=8s1EnpIHzV0-zGaADiscord Link: ⁠https://discord.gg/HR4pJpcdZ8Patreon Link: https://patreon.com/PitchItToMe?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=creatorshare_fan&utm_content=join_linkYou can follow us at the following socials:Bluesky: @pitchittomepodcast.bsky.socialInstagram: @pitchittomepodcastYoutube: @PitchItToMePodcastTimestamps:00:00 Introduction00:29 Turn Zero06:16 Red Pitch (Fuzzy): The Mechanics of MST22:50 Yellow Pitch (Clark): How/Why was MST so strong?38:46 Blue Pitch (Joel): The future of Mystic58:17 Arsenal Zone (ft. Bwipy)1:08:36 CreditsCredits:Host #2 -- Fuzzy DelpHost #2 -- Joel RecinosHost #2 -- Clark MooreExecutive Producer -- Talon StradleyMusic -- Dillon HulseLogo -- Han ViMix -- Christopher MooreAudio Editor -- Joel RecinosVideo Editor -- Fuzzy DelpThank you to Legend Story Studios for allowing the use of their card art through their Content Creator policies and for making the game of Flesh and Blood.#fleshandbloodtcg #tradingcards #gamedesign #podcast #legendstorystudios #fabtcg #pitm #pitchittome #MST #PartTheMistveil

Transcript

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. 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 favorite social media platform at Pitch It to Me Podcast.

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