Originally, I felt Marine was quite fine for a card. I actually praised Marine for being quite a simple, powerful, efficient finisher. However, over the past few months, my opinion on the card has changed quite a bit. Given how Weiss works and the on-play ability of Marine, she provides decks with far too much value for such low opportunity costs.
Before we delve further into the topic, let’s breakdown what Marine is. Marine, with its namesake coming from Houshou Marine in Hololive, is a cheap finisher with a powerful on-play ability. When she comes into play, you may sacrifice another character, and if you do so, you may check the top three cards of your deck, add a card to hand, send a card to stock, and mill the other card.
This is a phenomenal effect as she lets you dig through your deck for extra copies of herself or even her finisher climax while also refunding a stock for her costs. Keep in mind that this is done on a single card as well. Additionally, her cost can be used as a boon on top of everything else. There are many cards in Weiss that would like to activate their effects when sent to waiting room, and Marine can be a way to enable that ability without costing additional resources such as playing over the card.
That being said, why is Marine so potentially problematic?
As of the point of this writing, there aren’t too many pure Marine clones. Ryo above is a carbon copy with slight trait differences, and increased damage output, but overall, she functions exactly the same. Weiss is a game where consistency and deck manipulation matters quite a lot. Compared to other card games where your deck mostly serves as a compendium or library to grab resource, the deck in Weiss serves a multitude of functions. And given the mechanics of Weiss Schwarz, where cards are constantly shifted between different zones and no two games are alike, consistency pieces are hard to come by and highly valued. However, every effect comes with some variance for the most part. Securing resources and filtering your hand are a multitude of functions that usually require several cards to accomplish.
Now meet Marine. This card does both while also providing a finishing ability on top of everything. In essence, I would argue Marine could be dubbed as the “perfect” finisher in the sense that she is exactly the ideal finisher every deck would like. She refunds part of her own cost, replaces herself in hand advantage, and also provides a finishing ability that is relatively cheap in comparison to most finishers.
There is a certain absurdity in terms of consistency when it comes to playing Marine. To give you an example, you can firmly field three Marines by starting off with a single copy in hand and just four stock. You can simply refill your hand and refund your stock enough to play all three finishers. This is absurd as the typical finishers will cost you a minimum of six stock to play on field while holding several copies in hand (outside of discounted effects). Marine is just too efficient of a finisher. She’s also quite effective as a cantrip card equivalent to 2/1 profiles that let you redraw, but compared to them, she allows you to dig a little deeper as well.
So the final question is does Marine warrant a ban or limitation of some sort? At this current point, Marine is as I’ve stated above. She’s a very good efficient finisher. She only deals one additional instance of damage, and she’s not exactly disrupting your opponent’s plays either. However, I would argue that she’s far too value-oriented, making her games overly consistent and giving her too much of an edge over other finishers. But that’s just my opinion. What do you think?