Twisting Azure Inferno – Banned

This one wasn’t hard to see coming, but might be a surprise to some. Twisting Azure Inferno has been on a wild ride in the past 2 years. It’s given characters like Tokoyami and Midnight the edge in the early days to win the biggest events. It’s found a home in every format in Top Decks like Mimic, Younger Toguro, Shigi III, and Eraser Head. But lately, his response to boost damage has been far too easy to take advantage of with cards like Combined Firepower in the format. We’ll see if this calms down the Elder Toguro’s that have been able to play this mechanic the best. It sounds like the Design Team is learning the right lesson here, that the ceiling of cards can’t be this high for this free.

Risky Encounter – Banned

You can love it. You can hate it. But if you disagree, you’re probably just incorrect. Risky Encounter has only just popped on the scene and while I’m not a fan of banning cards that haven’t seen their 6-month anniversary, Risky is making too easy to end a game without using your decks strategy. If your character has the Death symbol anywhere on the card, then you’re probably suboptimal if at least 1 Risky isn’t Main Decked. The Design Team says this is to “…reduce the number of games ending on turn 2…”, which is a good point. I’d go a step further and say this is a low to no skill luck box card that shouldn’t have so many positives. In a late round of the ATL Regional, I Risky’d twice at the end of my string IN SMILING TITAN for game and it just felt dirty. The game was assured just because luckily milled both copies and my rival had nothing they could do after blocking 3 big attacks before the final hit.

Old:
– Enhance [Tenacious]: Your attack gets +X speed and +X damage. X equals your attack’s printed difficulty minus 4.

New:
– Enhance [Tenacious]: Your attack gets +X speed or +X damage. X equals your attack’s printed difficulty minus 4.

As a Smiling Titan enjoyer, this is a pretty big hit. Throwing 8 diff moves is already a pretty difficult strategy. You’re not typically throwing many attacks in a given turn. To reduce how hard those hit, or how many of them hit, it definitely going to bring Smiling back in line with the power level of a Tier 2 deck. Not a bad thing, but I think Smiling will just seem fair now. They say, “We believe this change helps provide more space for 7-handers in the format while still allowing Smiling to be effective in showing off its unique game plan.” While, that’s probably true, it’ll be really rough for Smiling to deal with the defensive decks that can guarantee 1 block a turn.

Old:
– Response: After you play a card, if it has no abilities, draw 1 card and you may add 1 card from your hand to your momentum.

New:
– Response: After you play an attack card, if it has no abilities, draw 1 card and you may add 1 card from your hand to your momentum.

With so many cards being printed as vanilla’s, this one seemed inevitable. The more cards get printed, the stronger Ryukyu gets. Put a restriction on her now so you don’t hamstring yourself later.