Greetings all you Class Zero Cadets, and welcome to Lv.1 Onion Knight: The Final Fantasy TCG blog that swapped out its Onion helm for a carved pumpkin head.
Happy Halloween everyone! Much like the Great Pumpkin of yore, I rise from the pumpkin patch of obscurity to deliver spoilers to all the good TCG players. But this time around... you may just wish you got a rock instead.
I'm not about to sit here and pretend that every time I've gotten a spoiler, it's always been a winner. There have been quite a few cards I've revealed over the past few years that weren't game breaking, but I've always tried to keep a positive spin on things. I've tried to find interesting or niche combos that - even if they weren't the most practical - could be a cool way to use different cards, because that's what I find fun. But this time around, I quite literally have nothing to say about this card. So let's rip the band-aid off and reveal my community spoiler for Journey of Discovery: Ace
Of course he does have a secondary effect too. For one CP and putting Ace into the Break Zone, you can ping something for 5000 damage. Hmm... why does this seem sorta familiar though?
Oh right, because it's almost exactly the same as another card revealed for this set, Fire Elemental. Ace just does the higher damage amount up front, and the smaller amount when you put it into the Break Zone. I'd argue this makes Ace way more usable than Fire Elemental considering their high costs. But it's just extremely funny that in this set, they essentially printed the same card twice, just put that thang down, flipped it, and reversed it.
What's even more frustrating is that he's not even a good Cadet card, a deck that *still* has't managed to find its footing even with such heavy support two sets ago. It looks like that might be corrected in Journey of Discovery, with cards like Nine finally at least acknowledging that Cadets are a three-element deck. If I'm being generous, I can suggest that you run this Ace as Special fodder for other Ace cards, but even then, there are WAY better candidates for that you'd actually want to play. The 2 cost Backup Ace at least gives you the option of paying less for a lower amount of damage, or paying more to deal with a bigger target - and that card came out seventeen sets ago!
Perhaps it's fitting for Halloween, but reviewing this card has sent me into a time warp. This kind of card design really sends me back to when I first started blogging about this game in 2017: The ye' olden times when Fire cards were way too expensive for what they did, or had humongous drawback in an attempt to "balance" them. Given that, I really struggled to think of any cards that Ace would combo well with. But let it never be said that I back down from a challenge! After browsing through 27 sets of cards, I finally managed to find a group of cards that Ace feels like he belongs with.
Wanna play the OG version of Lenna/Primal Leviathan, but really slow and bad? Then Opus I Auron is the perfect card to combo with Ace! It's actually a kind of funny that given all of the ways to free play expensive cards in more recent sets, a card from the first set in the game is still the only way you can play any Fire Backup without restrictions. You'd obviously want to play the most expensive Backup you could with Auron to offset his huge cost, and before Ace, There were only six Fire Backups over the cost 5 of in the game. But now with Ace, now there's seven! Isn't that something?
Tired of having to dull Ace to use his secondary ping effect, leaving you unable to generate CP with him before putting him into the Break Zone? There just has to be a better way! But what would you say if I told you that, for the cost of dulling two other Backups, you could activate Ace again to get that sweet sweet 5k ping? Well then Chocobo Chick is the card for you!
Oh you thought I was going to forget about this card? Hell no. We're bringing back Dark Lord if it's the last thing I do. Think of all the things you can do with that extra 3K ping. And it's every turn? For Free? Are you kidding me?? You can totally kill 8K's by combining it with Ace's 5K ping!
If you had any guts you would actually do this. You could run Dark Lord with Clive with a bunch of Eikons then RFG the top 10 cards of your deck so he's got a bunch of Eikon abilities he can use instantly. But you won't do it, will you? Yeah, that's what I thought. Coward.
So if you haven't picked up what I'm laying down by now, the joke is that these are all extremely bad, old Fire cards as a way of saying that Ace is not very good. Neo Bahamut here doesn't combo particularly well with Ace either. However, I wanted to remind people this card existed, since you actually can't find it when searching for it on the official FFTCG card browser. That's right: Neo Bahamut was so bad, Square Enix wants you to forget it ever existed. But those of us Fire players who were around since the beginning will never forget.
Long story short, use Ace in sealed if you really need spot removal. That's about it.
In any case, with it being the tail end of spoiler season, it won't be too long until the full set list is revealed. Maybe through some miracle, there will be a card that makes Ace amazing, but I wouldn't count on it. I'm still holding my breath that the Chebukki siblings will get more actual XI support.
Until next time - Keep on Grinding,
0 comments:
Post a Comment