Decompression Finishers and Damage

Initially, I was going to title this post as “Icy Tail is a Poor Design”, but after thinking about it, it sounds more like click-bait and offers nothing to the actual discussion at hand. While it is true, I don’t think Icy Tail is a good design for the game (and I will offer more explanation later), the real problem lies partially in the way that Weiss functions as a game and its mechanics.

For those unfamiliar, Icy Tail is a coined finishing ability from the series of Saekano from the 3/2 Michiru Honda above. Icy Tail is a relatively simple effect. You mill your opponent’s bottom deck and then punish your opponent by dealing damage equal to your opponent equal to the number of climaxes that were milled. At first glance, you’d think that this ability is kind of random. Well, that’s exactly it. Icy Tail is random. It’s hard to really call “Icy Tail” effects as “good” finishers. We’re not here to argue about the quality and proficiency of these finishers at ending your opponent, but that question of the reliability of Icy Tail is exactly the key question that needs to be answered here. Icy Tail is random, and in most games, that’s a bad thing. You should be manipulating your odds and using consistency to perform guaranteed abilities. Leaving your finisher effect to the dice is generally quite awful.

However, that is only one of the two main problems I have with Icy Tail. On top of being unreliable and random, Icy Tail punishes your opponent and also decompresses their deck. The first effect is obvious. You are dealing damage for the climaxes they reveal from the bottom of their deck. It’s like a double whammy. While already dealing damage from their supposedly blank top deck with little to no climaxes, Icy Tail seemingly mocks your opponent by punishing them for bottom stacking.

The decompression, while not as effective in Saekano’s original iteration, is essentially milling your opponent’s deck for them, ridding them of potential cancels. Now, at the bottom of their deck, this isn’t necessarily an issue. If their deck was large to begin with, this decompression would never matter since those climaxes would never reach the top of the deck for cancelling anyways. But this is the key problem with Icy Tail effects in general. As they stack on each other, they mill more and more, and what would normally be at the bottom of the deck slowly moves upwards towards the center of the deck and above, making them actual cancel potentials.

As time has passed, Icy Tail “profiles” have increased in degeneracy through either one of two common changes. They would either be performed multiple times on a single finisher, or there would be a heavier punishment for climaxes revealed.

Before we even dive into the evolution of Icy Tail, I want to discuss the randomness of Icy Tail and why that’s a bad thing. To be fair, Icy Tail effects are usually cheap or essentially free to make up for the fact that your finisher’s finishing ability is random. That helps make them more palatable, but they don’t resolve the inherent issues of randomness. Randomness is not a good thing since it is the opposite of consistency. Players want to be in control of their game, and Icy Tail does the complete opposite. You have little to no ability to control what happens at the bottom of your opponent’s deck. Furthermore, Icy Tail doesn’t reward you for playing well or balancing your resources. No matter what you do, your finishing ability is essentially an even heavier coin-flip since your experience is determined based on your opponent’s deck, not your own. Arguably, I’d say that Icy Tail abilities are the bane of competition, and make a game like Weiss, a game that’s considered to be very random, even more so.

Icy Tails themselves aren’t exactly fun or fair either. Having your chances of victory be completely washed away by the randomness of an effect that isn’t even in your opponent’s control leaves a sour taste in players’ mouths. It’s like dying from a stray bullet from an NPC in a shooter game that isn’t affiliated with anyone. In competition, it completely invalidates strategy since there is nothing either side can really do to influence or change the odds of their win/loss chances. Icy Tail offers a double-edge sword to your opponent. They can either be compressed and more likely to die from climax reveals or be uncompressed and just die from natural damage. Where’s the player agency? Where’s the competitiveness?

Moving back to Pecorine from Princess Connect! and Himmel from Frieren, we are looking at the evolution of Icy Tail. I would argue that both of these cards encapsulate everything wrong with modern Icy Tails. So let’s remember the core tenets of original Icy Tail:

• Icy Tail is random by nature
• It mills a set amount and that is all
• Damage is a singular instance (to make up for its lack or low costs)

By the time of Pecorine’s release, Icy Tail has been much warped by powercreep and the metagame. Pecorine performs an Icy Tail check for two, which, while less impressive than four, is made up by the fact that you perform the check three times for a total of six cards. What does that mean? Each check performs its own separate damage instance. Pecorine essentially has up to three different damage instances on a single Icy Tail swing.

Himmel, while obeying the old standards of milling only a single set amount, raises the total damage dealt per climax revealed. While not exactly as likely to hit a climax as say, Pecorine, any climax hit has much more significant impact. Also, Himmel kind of cheats around the set amount since the Frieren he summons gives you a sneak peak to begin with.

Pecorine and Himmel are here to highlight changes in the philosophy for Icy Tail. While the idea of random revealing is kept, everything else is essentially forgone. Himmel, in particular, highlights one significant change for Icy Tail. No longer was Icy Tail considered a one-instance damage ability; Icy Tail dealt damage for each climax revealed rather than the total number of all climaxes. Overall, the total damage doesn’t change, but the fact that you deal so many instances for each checked allowed a single Icy Tail check to burn away several climaxes that would have otherwise given your opponent a chance.

As for the random element of Icy Tail, I’m here to argue that the general belief of Icy Tail being “random” is outdated. Yes, technically speaking, Icy Tail is still a random ability. However, the ways in which the Icy Tail effect is manipulated in modern day makes it quite consistent as a matter of fact. Part of the ways this is done is when the check itself is extended beyond the original four cards. Touya, for example, here checks six cards form your opponent’s bottom deck, dealing one for each climax hit. It may not seem like a lot, but checking six is a significant number, giving Icy Tail an additional 50% chance in the possibility of hitting. Aki is even more horrendous in his effect. Technically, he’s just performing a standard Icy Tail ability with dealing one per climax revealed, but the sneaky part in which he’s making Icy Tail more consistent is the fact that the 1/1 event that is paired with him gives you an additional four checks (one per event in memory) to up your odds of hitting. Aki is deceivingly an Icy Tail for four; he actually is a modular Icy Tail that can check up to total of eight.

And both Aki and Touya are sitting on the ban-list with some amount of restriction on them as of this post.

All-in-all, my point here was to discuss my thoughts on Icy Tail and that type of ability. I argue that Icy Tail abilities are not good for the game, especially in their current state. Your opponent should not be punished for their deck state, especially for their compression. I’d even argue that Icy Tails are regressive by design and make Weiss into a worse game. Instead of finding traditional tools or fighting through your opponent’s cancels or compression, Icy Tail dilutes and makes a mockery of the mechanics of Weiss. It makes the game even more random than it already is while removing skill and strategy, devolving the game into even more random coin-flipping. It’s like you are driving a car and then letting go of the wheel in the late game, hoping that luck will drive you to the finishing destination.

3/2 Temari here, introduced from the Gakum@s series, creates an interesting question. Temari is an Icy Tail profile, but unlike the aforementioned Icy Tail profiles, Temari will only ever deal one extra point of damage if your opponent reveals a climax through its Icy Tail combo. This is partially “balanced” by the fact that Temari’s mill check is based upon the number of cards you have in memory minus one. So, essentially, the more cards (specifically characters) that you have in memory, the more cards you mill. Temari is best considered as a ping one twice combo. However, there’s a bit of a nefarious side to Temari. Since Temari can mill so many cards, you are often able to push for additional points of damage through refresh damage. And in certain compressed situations, your opponent can even take up to multiple points in a single turn. I’m not sure how I feel about this design as a whole myself…