The “Drop X” Profile feat. Kazuma

In Weiss, the ability to grab a specific card you want, especially in the early game is a valuable ability that usually comes at a cost. Sometimes you may also want or need that single card from your deck or waiting room to kickstart your combo or plays. Furthermore, you may need to discard extra cards in your hand to make way for future turns or rid yourself of extra climaxes. This is where the “drop x” profile comes in handy, helping ensure that you grab the card you need.

Coming in a variety of forms and occasionally having secondary abilities, the point of a drop x is to discard a card and filter for another card. The traditional more common profiles are that of the drop search represented by Karin on the left and the drop salvage represented by Sachi in the center. As hinted in their profile names, a drop search searches through the deck for a character while a drop salvage salvages a character from the waiting room.

In the early days of Weiss, drop profiles were especially valued due to the lack of early game filters and the inability to grab specific cards needed. Drop x profiles were commonly rares or higher in a set and valuable for adding consistency to a deck. They are considered essential profiles that are highly welcome in any deck for being such a powerful standard effect, found universally in almost every set. As with older versions of the profile, they usually lack additional secondary effects. None of the profiles are especially better than one another and their value is contingent on your deck state. Usually in the early game, depending on the size of your waiting room, drop searches are more valuable as you can fetch cards from a greater pool in your deck. As your waiting room fills up, drop salvages are better as their range is increased. Another great merit of drop searchers is their ability to allow you to glance in a sealed zone (the deck) and get information.

Another occasional variant that shows is the drop and check x, adding a card or character from among them as is the case of Saber Alter on the right. Check x is usually considered a more rare variant due to its ability to check a larger range of cards depending on conditions met.

A lesser known profile variant is known as the “Kazuma” profile by some players as a profile that checks exclusively the top three cards of your deck and adds any card to hand, including events and climaxes. Unlike the other variants, Kazuma is the most restrictive by far, and his value lies in the ability to forcibly grab cards that most effects are unable to, mainly events and climaxes. He is a bit of a gamble and works best if you have an idea of your deck state and what remains within there.

Overtime, as better filters have been printed, drop x effects have been seeing less of the limelight and become less important. A key factor to this is that most drop x effects carry a single stock cost that can be quite expensive in the early game. With the speed of the game in its modern state, decks want to ideally look for cheap costless filters. Riko, Rize, and similar profiles as such are considered more valuable as a result. However, one key advantage that drop x have going for them that other profiles may lack is that the majority of drop x abilities are primed when played from hand, giving you a much larger advantage compared to the timings of the other profiles. At their core, drop x cards are great and effective at what they do, so even in the current game, you won’t be surprised to still see players teching in a copy or two.