I’ve written about this almost a year ago, but I’m coming across another emerging trend as of recent. Rather than talking about the generalities of defensive design, today’s focus will be on discussing the implementation of new anti-damage cards, cards that are primarily designed to prevent certain allocations of damage.
While versions of this anti-damage effect has existed within the past, these profiles were rather few and sparse in-between. However, as of the time of this writing, some versions of these cards have become more prevalent in the game and seem to usher a potential direction for the game. With the majority of finishing abilities being mainly【自】effect based, having this type of effect on board can heavily deny the extra damage provided by many of these finishers. Keep in mind that this type of anti-damage does not affect re-standers or anything that puts cards to clock (that doesn’t constitute as damage). It also only affects effects that occur during battle step (meaning, for instance, on-climax play, start-of-attack step, and encore-step abilities will still proc).
Traditionally, the problem with many of these anti-damage cards is the fact that they seem rather slow or cumbersome. Take the case of Guam on the left. This card, while neat, is only really useful in the case where you are able to deploy her early enough and when you can’t reliably finish your opponent. Ideally, after her turn, your opponent would hit level three and be unable to reliably get rid of Guam, transforming their attacks all into vanilla swings. But that is based on a hypothetical and ideal scenario. The more important part is that Guam, by herself, lacks any offensive ability, and in a game which is aggressively pushed towards piling damage, Guam is more of a tech card that needs to be full-boarded in front for a semblance of function.
Kotone does fix this as her finisher provides both a finishing ability and that of additional defensive power. However, most notably, Kotone comes at a very high cost with her finishing ability. You need to pay for the full cost and can’t simply skip out on the finisher just to get the anti-damage proc. Additionally, just like Guam, she is also particularly weak to anything that can out the board, be that a bouncer or a level-down profile for example. However, in both cases, to get rid of either cards above, at least your opponent will have to commit some kind of resource, hopefully diminishing their finishing power overall.
However, in the case of some of the new versions of this type of effect, we’ve been seeing some significant changes, mainly in the costs of these cards. While Guam is essentially a vanilla with the anti-damage ability and Kotone is a powerful finisher with overbearing costs, the newer versions of these cards have reduced the costs to more manageable levels.
While not inherently as powerful as Kotone whom is able to provide a damage instance and both that of anti-damage and negative soul deduction, these finisher cards still provide a decent finishing ability. Sure, while they do have some amount of building requirements, I do think that’s still pretty fair for this type of effect, and, on top of that, you should be building towards certain endgame cards anyways. This type of design is still slowly rolling out into the game, but I’m sure we’ll see more of these profiles as the game progresses further.
I’m generally a fan of these types of designs because they help to mitigate or reduce the overall power of newer finishers with the extended amounts of extra damage instances. Even though the damage prevented is only for specific types of damage, it still offers some amount of defensive capabilities, giving the defending player more of a chance to survive their opponent’s opposing attack rather than just praying on the magical cancels from the top of their deck. Furthermore, hitting level three early doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily be in a do-or-die situation as, with these finishers, you can perform a weaker finishing ability while having a chance to play around or survive for one last turn. Once again, these cards aren’t invincible by any means, and you can play around them with the associated tech and decisions, making them fair by my books.
I also want to share about the beautiful card above with Nier. I think Nier embodies what I think the current design for this type of profile should be. Talking about her anti-damage ability primarily, Nier’s ability gives a modular option between healing or dealing additional damage. Because of the modular choice, Nier gives the option to reset your clock if you are pushed to three early or clean up the game with her large burst attack. I think these types of cards must have some type of healing ability, especially if deployed early to give you a chance to survive a turn cycle at level three which Nier does especially well since she can heal up to two cards from your clock.
I think, all-in-all, this is a great design type going forward and does help give an alternative path in the late game compared to the all-in final blast turn that has been a set standard in the game for a long while. I find this is fair and feels better comparatively to the older neg-soul decks where players were effectively locked if the other player could loop said combo. Remember that these cards only stop that auto damage during battle, so there are plenty of ways to get around this, especially if you have off-finishers that have alternative attacks. You are still capable of dying to vanilla swings, especially if you have bad compression.
These cards also give back additional power to backups such as those above which shine when it comes to defending against vanilla damage. Furthermore, from a gameplay perspective, these cards heavily incentivize players to build around these cards by having answers which makes the game far more engaging and interactive. This type of design is still rather young, but we’ll just have to see how it develops going forward.