More Damage or Secured Damage?

With the recent Rental Girlfriend reveals for the upcoming set, this got me thinking about perhaps another shift in another direction for the game. Traditionally, Weiss Schwarz has powercreeped its own cards by constantly adding additional damage instances onto cards. Cards became overloaded with multiple opportunities to kill, even with a single finisher.

In a recent reveal by Bushiroad, they shared the upcoming design of 3/2 Chizuru shown here. Chizuru has a lot to unpack. To begin with, Chizuru’s first ability is itself a double boon that helps with her own damaging ability. She can be changed into through another card, and when she enters the stage from hand, you can sacrifice another character on your stage to heal the bottom card of your clock to your stock.

This is extremely relevant considering that Chizuru’s finisher costs a whopping two stock on swing which effectively becomes a single cost in practice if you perform her healing ability. Chizuru’s finishing ability becomes essentially a guaranteed way to inflict damage on your opponent with her “up to three times a turn” clause. Essentially, if your opponent cancels Chizuru’s damage, they take two damage, and if they cancel that damage, they take it again, up to a total of three times. Theoretically speaking, Chizuru can effectively burn out four climaxes in total off of a single swing from your opponent’s deck.

Speaking of which, I spoke about Chizuru’s changer from before. Chizuru’s changer may look innocuous at first, but it hardly anything of the sort. It is easier to talk about the second ability before the first one. Chizuru’s changer here lets you readily morph itself into 3/2 Chizuru by sacrificing itself and discarding a card, spawning 3/2 Chizuru from waiting room without any stock costs. This is already really good considering 3/2 Chizuru’s combo costs, but this is an even bigger boon since, through this ability, you can effectively make 3/2 Chizuru into 3/0 Chizuru.

Now, the changer itself costs a stock, but don’t let that fool you. This card is much more egregious than it appears. Presuming you get its first ability off, Chizuru floats away to memory to return the following turn during your next draw phase. The 2/1 changer can loop itself until you are ready to proceed with your finishing turn, reducing the need to commit other hand to board and thus saving resources for its changing ability. In that sense, theoretically speaking, your 3/2 Chizuru will always be a 3/0 Chizuru under the right circumstances and generate you additional stock on play, presuming you have enough hand.

In other words, this combo, while it looks very complicated and expensive, is actually very efficient at what it does, and presents a rather potentially degenerate game pattern in terms of finishing ability. In practice, this may or may not be as easily achievable due to a number of factors including game variance and opposing interaction, but the theory still stands. Furthermore, the combo itself is incredibly weak to money counters unless there is an attack trigger modification that provides its own damage instance.

In all fairness, this play pattern has been much more common as of late with some of the newer sets. Whether its appeal is catching on is another story. For all the cards above, just like Chizuru, they all look to accomplish and finish your opponent by securing damage. If your opponent cancels, you just reverberate another damage instance until your opponent finally takes some amount of damage. 3/2 Miki on the right is a little bit more nuanced, but effectively, she does the same thing. She does have an upside, but it is based on another card that grants her another ability to resolve cancel-based damage instances. Either way, the focus and point of these finishers is clear. They are here to make sure that your opponent takes damage.

Theory and practice are two different things, and while the popularity of such finishers may be divided, my personal worry is this play-pattern, especially with Chizuru likely to get even more support, may create this game where a single cancel can become so intuitively punishing that a single finisher will eventually be able to burn out all your remaining cancels in the same attack, leading to your opponent in empty deck states where they’ll have no choice but to eat all the remaining damage in their climaxless deck. But that is only a concern, and time will tell if my theory is proven correct or not.

Speaking of which, thanks to the timings of the abilities on both Chizuru and Miki (both Ruby and Kaju’s triggers are on-attack; thus, rendering backups moot), backups do actually act as a potential way to give defending players some amount of protection. Money counters, like Achilles on the right, are very effective against Chizuru and Miki as it nullifies all damage, making their abilities moot. Refresh counters, like Takina, can work both ways, refilling your deck with all its climaxes ideally and potentially helping you take the damage so you can ignore the cancel punishment. At worst, you still cancel, but you will be given a fresh deck of climaxes so you can potentially live through the entire swing turn.

We’ll have to just keep our eyes out and see what Bushiroad prints next.