4Game

Played 10 matches with a rain deck and I am LOVING the new cards! 8 Casual matches and 2 ranked (rank 3) matches later the deck went 9-1. Here's some analysis on why the new cards are exactly what the rain archetype needed.

Before the new cards, Fucusya and Fulmar were the only two units with a deploy effect that added rain to the board (apart from Avallac'h) and they were far too expensive to play on a whim. This meant all of your other cheap rain generating units had to survive a turn before you could spawn rain which brought the tempo of rain decks down. Another obvious issue with rain decks was that they could only collect extra points from rain through Messenger of the Sea (MotS) and Rioghan. The necessity of managing and protecting these key cards while establishing the board of rain generating cards slowly but surely pushed the archetype out of the meta. Add to this the occasional unfortunate top decking and you have a recipe for a miserable experience. There's a reason why GN turned out to be the only semi-viable rain deck because it single handedly solved the deck's low tempo and draw dependent issues.

The new cards, to my and hopefully other's delight, elevate the rain archetype beyond the dependence of GN and solve many of the issues discussed above. Here's a rundown of the new cards and what they bring to the table.

Kraken (13P): A powerful, and honestly quite busted, unit that can move enemy units to its rows while spawning storm instantly. This card alone brings the storm weather effect back into the game. Storm also allow the new Kelpie card, MotS and Melusine Cultist to generate frightening amount of points in one turn.

Kelpie (9P): Another on deploy rain card with a deck building restriction. This, played correctly, is MotS on steroids. It spawns rain and essentially makes all of your beast cards in play into a MotS as long as they are not boosted. The brilliance of this is that you spread out your points instead of having all your points in one basket, i.e., MotS.

Anglerfish (5P): A deck thinning card that also functions as a tempo play. The requirement of its summoning effect is easily achieved and having 6 points come out of your deck while you play another card is strong and reliable. If it gets sent back to your deck, no worries, they go to the bottom of your deck so they can also work as carryover on top of their deck trimming effect. The hidden MVP of the expansion cards.

Sea Serpent (5P): Previously, you needed cards on the board to reap the rewards of spawning rain. Not anymore with these scary sea noodles. Their deploy ability accumulates value over the round as long as there is rain or storm on the enemy side. That's right, the rain or storm doesn't even need to damage the opponent cards. As long as the weather effect triggers, the deploy value goes up by 1 and by the end of the round it plays well above its provision, perhaps too much. Additionally, it synergizes well with Kraken as Kraken will always be left at 3 power if not boosted or damaged. So ideally you want Sea Serpent to kill and call back the Kraken to your side of the board for a huge point swing.

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The new cards each in their own right, solve the many issues that riddled rain decks. Spawning weather effects has never been easier and in one instance it even comes with a built in movement mechanic. Points are now distributed amongst units instead of on one or two units. Consistency is achieved and pointslam options are now available through cards like Sea Serpent and the reworked Corrupted Flaminica. This is a phenomenal addition and buff to a long underperforming archetype and I cannot praise the genius design of these cards enough. Well done to the devs for their hardwork and I'm sorry I was harsh on your patchnotes.

For those of you who read this essay, here's the deck if you're curious. Deck sharing doesn't seem to be working right now so please excuse my screenshot.