Efficiency Changes and More

In this biweekly complaint post of powercreep changes, I’ve decided to talk a bit about the more subtle changes in powercreep that may not be the most obvious or most glaring. When people refer to cards, they often refer to cards that have very high impact in a competitive setting or are cards with effects that seem bonkers due to their sheer efficiency, modality, or sheer amount of power in both a numerical value and raw ability in game. This isn’t really focusing on that but more on just slight changes that have been seen moving from set to set and not necessarily on how powerful they are or game breaking.

To begin our conversation, I want to give a brief history of early plays as they are the first topic of today’s blog. Early plays have existed in the game for a very long while. The above are not the only existing early plays of their time. However, in the earlier days of Weiss, early plays were rather rare for the most part and had rather vanilla-like abilities. The condition to get them off was difficult to pull off to begin with like with these two requiring you to have five or less cards in deck. Mill was also not as abundant, especially controlled mill, leaving little leeway in player agency to get to the condition for both cards above. As a side note, we’ll be calling the above free-form early plays as they can be played without needing the assistance of another card which is an important distinction compared to our section below. Free-form early plays felt solely like a way to recover from impending refresh damage than providing consistent powerful threats in the mid-late game.

Most early plays came out through the use of either combos or some inherently high cost. While many were tied to the keyword CHANGE [チェンジ], I don’t think this was a universal rule. As with powercreep, and the dominance of the accused standby design, CHANGE was effectively (not written) phased out overtime. You can read more about CHANGE here if you are more interested in the keyword. Needless to say, early plays were rather in an odd spot. But powercreep sometime in the mid to late 2010s radically transformed what conditions for early plays were.

Sometime in the 2010s, free-form early plays had a revolutionized early play condition. Compared to needing very specific requirements, a universal general condition was having the player be out two or less climaxes. This coincided perfectly with the general timing of level two as players most commonly refreshed or were around their early level two game by their first refresh. As such, players would rarely have a large amount of climaxes in their waiting room, making them much easier to get on board. Another additional condition would emerge later with the full board requirement, essentially needing the player to have an almost full board, leaving the last slot for the early play.

Even combo early plays have been altered to seemingly include another form of utility rather than being a transforming requirement exclusively. They usually return some sort of value in addition to their own transform ability.

Furthermore, there have been an increase in bringing back another additional condition for free-form early plays with counter early plays. Essentially, as the moniker suggests, if your opponent has an early play or a level three on board, you can bring yours out in response, a fair one-to-one exchange.

In newer news, free-form early plays have received a strict powercreep upgrade on their own. The old two-or-less climax condition has been extended to both you and your opponent’s waiting rooms, giving you an additional check. It’s subtle, but this gives more opportunities to use the early plays.

On another note, past early plays, brainstormers and even finishers have had some design changes that can heavily impact gameplay in the most subtle ways. Brainstormers like Memcho and Crusch have had their check abilities give one more additional check but having a requirement of locking you into their specific climax lineup. I think that’s a good thing and a great design choice that gives benefit should you choose to build within that specific archetype. Nier isn’t the first to have this type of ability, but her design choices gives you the opportunity to be able to play her from waiting room, effectively giving you the option to hold and play other cards in the mid-late game without having to keep her in hand and spawning her as needed. She is restricted from spawning to board from her ability at level three, but this ability adds consistency to your game plan since you don’t have to worry that much about grabbing copies of her to hand at level two in preparation for level three. She does also come with a built-in demerit, requiring that you have an empty board slot for her to begin with. Technically, your opponent can play around this by just ensuring your front row lives, making you have to work harder to get her to hand somehow then. But that offers a fair trade since you get to keep your board and it lessens the soul damage from your opponent ideally.

As an ending note, we also have cards that mess with your stock zone more exemplified by Al above and also support utility cards that do more than provide a simple filter fix with Memcho. Personally, to me, it’s these small changes that are commonly understated in favour of the more flashy powerful finishers and strong utility profiles in terms of how they affect powercreep as a whole. They, along with the other two factors mentioned previously, ultimately combine together to push the game forward in terms of powercreep for better or for worse. And it’s these changes and additions that make it harder for older series and decks to compete when they struggle to match up to the same utility, resource gaining, or filter abilities that these cards provide that their old strategies cannot measure up to. However, for now, many of these abilities are rather new and unexplored, and given Bushiroad’s track record of not printing symmetrical cards in every set, they may pop-up as one time additions or only appear in specific series. We’ll just have to see.

I almost forgot, but before we end this post entirely. I also want to talk about this interesting change. Both cards above effectively have the ability to discard a climax on climax trigger to allow you to perform a heal. This is usually a more rare ability, but there’s significant changes to note here. While Nichika is a level assist, Denken is a far more common and heavily utilized profile as a brainstormer. Furthermore, Denken is costless while Nichika needs one base stock which is significant, especially in the early game when resources are low. While Nichika can be used in conjunction with any climax, this is often not really a point to bring up as the only two triggers that can add climaxes to your hand are gate and bar. A gate trigger isn’t very optimal since you still get stuck with the triggered gate in your stock, so the most effective use of Nichika is with bar climaxes. Denken has that bar restriction, but as hinted in the previous sentence, that’s not really much of a demerit. To add to this, Nichika only heals the top card of your clock and sends it to waiting room. Denken, on the other hand, lets you choose which character to place at the bottom of your deck, which gives you the opportunity to selectively control what is in and out of your clock. That being said, Denken doesn’t allow you to heal off events and climaxes which Nichika does (as long as they are on the top of your clock).

From a general perspective and use case scenario, Denken is far superior to Nichika by far. And this is where I mean to show how powercreep can really slide into the game without much notice. As the game continues to develop, costs become less restrictive, effects and ranges of abilities are far more dynamic, and more agency is given to the player. As a cost or downside, older cards just become unable to compete with the increased efficiency of these newer cards. Now, functionally, these two cards are different, but, given the general use case of one over the other, it can be very obvious to any experienced player how much one of them feels superior comparatively.