Thanks Red! Very happy you're re-doing this list. Generally agree with everything, with a few comments: -- Focus the Land's Anguish gives more than just the damage rate, it's also a control card. Pulling 3-5 blight from adjacent lands can do work in the late game on a busy board. I might have it in upper D for that reason, but I do hate the single element. -- Vengeance has always been F tier garbage in my mind, but I guess the floor of 3 fear is an interesting point. Are you still testing the exploratory version? -- Fire and Flood floor is definitely low floor as you say, but hitting one or both of the thresholds gives you a chance to solve 2 lands against non-England matchups. I think that might be just enough for lower C tier. -- Eruption comments are totally fair, but you didn't mention Volcano at all. I build Volcano top-track major heavy, and I think it absolutely destroys everything except England 6 (haven't tried HME yet, NI only arrived recently, but I think it will shine there too). This card is extremely easy for top-track Volcano to cast and threshold, winning you the game on the spot in almost against instance (including England 6). I know you play Volcano bottom track, but i strongly urge you to give top track a go. I play it very similar to you - t1 G2 top/bottom, then G3 all the way to the bank. But instead of pushing to 3 plays, stop at 2 and run down top track. You use majors to solve your problems, you mini-explode every turn, and you take advantage of the card-gain innate. You have so much energy and see so many cards that there are very few problems you can't solve. Top 5 spirit in the game for me, and I think it's got the best matchups across the board (Stone and Green are both weak against at least 1 - Volcano isn't quite as weak vs England). Looking forward to the rest of the videos, particularly seeing where you place Exaltation. Card is absolutely cracked.
Good video! While I don't disagree with anything here, the wins that are based on these weak majors feels even better. Base Manifest feels awesome if someone plays Lightning to make it quick, turning a ravaging land with insufficient defense to just solve itself. Niche situation, but I used it three times in my first England 6 win and felt great about it. Volcanic eruption (threshold) has closed the most epic game I've played.
Seeing Focus the land anguish in the row with cards from garbage bin really hurt. This is my favorite major, both thematically and for it's effect. I often play with inexperienced players, and it can solve the whole board in terms of blight "removal". Fear generation is insane, usually going up to 8 fear (hello Paralizing fright). In terms of elements, I often find myself in a situation where I can fuel my innates / other majors with half of my hand while in the next turn it is not possible, and Focus fits nicely here thanks to it's easy-to-meet threshold. Also, Focus goes hand in hand with Dire metamorphosis and other blight-generating minors. I guess seasoned players don't allow blight as much on the island (or control it's generation better), so the gather effect is much weaker (I only ventured as far as levels 6-8 on adversaries). Or it's due to your preferred defensive playstyle, leaving less Blight on board by defending and removing it. You proposed damage buff for Focus which scales of blight on board, and I never felt like I was short on damage for this card.
Some of your D-tier majors are situationally useful. 1. Focus the Land's Anguish is actually surprisingly decent on Stone, as Stone has tonnes of blight around anyway, and moving all the blight to a single land makes it much easier to pay for future blights. You can then reliably get 5+ blight in a land, so if you threshold it (and you only need a single extra sun if you play Stubborn Solidity, which isn't a bad card), you can get 5 fear, 10+ damage, and blight consolidation. Maybe B-C tier for that spirit (though highly situational) 2. Manifest Incarnation is actually really hilarious under the following situations: a. Finder dumping a land with 20 buildings b. Thresholded Instruments of Their Own Ruin to trigger a second ravage (because why not?) c. Infinite Vitality or Trees and Stones for the defense to actually clear this massive land I just played a game on Keeper where I picked up Manifest Incarnation through Unlock the Gates, and played it on a 6 building England 6 land with 3 Dahan, where I had 3 defense from Canny Defense, and added a strife from Inflame the Fires of Life. That was 16 fear from the card, 4 more fear from destroying two cities (one was damaged from Keeper right innate), and removed another city and town. Even if I hadn't picked it up for free from Unlock the Gates, being able to clear 3 cities and a town against England plus 16 fear isn't a bad tradeoff for 6 energy. But I agree, this is very situational 3. Cleansing Floods: for the spirits that it can work on, it's great. Snake loves it. Downpour laughs at the targeting restriction and never has problem thresholding it. It's on-element for River, despite not normally taking majors. It's great for Ocean on board D, because it can actually then target every land on its board minus the inland jungle (oddly specific) 4. Accelerated Rot is ok on Keeper if Jungles and Wetlands are a serious problem, as it allows Keeper to then neglect half the board. Starlight could play it too, because if you grab waters and plants, you can use the waters to remove S/M blights, and use Accelerated Rot to remove J/W blights, allowing for you to remove blights anywhere. This combination also gives you access to free extra cards every turn, though a 3/3/2 threshold on Starlight isn't great unless you grab a tri-element card.
I think the biggest thing that shows up in this analysis is you heavily, heavily focus on the un-thresholded power of the major rather than including the threshold. That's one of the big things you may want to discuss more in the next video, because you make throwaway comments like "this would be good if it hits its threshold, BOTTOM OF D TIER" and those are kind of contradictory statements. For example, Fire and Flood being one of those percieved "decent" powers is because when people often look at powers, they (perhaps mistakenly) look at it from the context of being able to hit its thresholds. They might say, for example, that 3/3 on F&F for example isn't too hard to hit if you have a spirit providing 1 or 2 fire/water, because then you would need 3 card plays and not too restrictive elements to hit Of course, your counter point is "there are better powers that don't need that much effort", and you'd be right, but I think some more discussion of that would be helpful. One interesting video you may want to do is the distribution of elements in the minor deck - for example, why is Moon/Fire the worst element combo?
1. it is not a card for everyone 2. the spirits that like them may not be using majors, or cant afford them consistently 3. and a lot of this even with thresholds are just okay 4. very expensive cards
The reason why players think Fire and Flood is a good card is because it's a "Timmy card" It does a lot of damage and people like destroying things. It's just not reasonable for the price you pay. If you look at the spirits that have 1 fire or 1 water on tracks, you'll notice that few of them want to pick this card up. Like the card is "fine" on them, but tends to get overshadowed by cards higher up on the tier list.
Even if you hit the threshold on Fire and Flood, it's...not bad, but you're really hoping 16 damage can clear two lands for the investment that goes into it. It really struggles vs England and can struggle vs Habsburg. Compare to something like Jungle Hungers, which is less than half the cost, and can easily output 8 damage with no threshold, while being decent into all matchups.
I love pillar on Volcano, easy threshold, extra range. And energy isnt an issue for volcano. Combo with an eruption innate to clear any lands it didnt hit or failed to clear
As a Sharp Fangs enthusiast, I will admit to taking Savage Transformation fairly often. I think it's probably a C or B-tier card with that spirit, if for nothing more than stacking beast tokens.
Manifest is a minimum of 9 fear (I guess 8, but 1 presence a town+city=9 fear) so even without set up or threshold the 10 fear you said is about guaranteed.
Wounded wild is a great card imo, it can easily stack with itself and push fear hard if you can threshold it consistently, great for tearing down a dump land. Manifest never struck me as a weak card either, and land thrashes is great for making a comeback if you can threshold or the land is really bad. It's especially good for ocean, who often can't deal with inland lands early and can threshold easily
The problem with Wounded Wilds is it's basically 4 damage for 4 energy that must target a blighted land. This is pretty bad value for the cost. I'd argue that the card isn't even good on Fangs!
Hello Red. Concerning *Manifest Incarnation*, if you play it with Finder, will that trigger the *Responsibilities to the Dead* after ravage takes place and there is a destruction happening? Also, *Volcanic Eruption* is a huge help for finder for late game of course if you draw really bad. Lastly, *The land thrashes in furious pain* was once in the past for me at least a game winning draw, because I was playing with Wildfire and suddenly all that blight was just a minefield. But, I get what you mean. They are all very situational.
Okay, so I've just started learning this game and I'm glad I was right about Transform into Darkness! That card just looked sooooo bad. I remember reading it and being like "this would be underwhelming if it didn't remove my presence." Real "what were they thinking" card. The cost of removing two presence should like at a minimum do 20 damage (which is something a different major does).
I saw land thrashes and I thought “wow it’s only D? I crushed with it last week.” Then I remembered I was stone with an ally burning plague and volcano (and a green but they don’t matter for this) so probably the optimal time. For stone and plague it was cracked
I am confused about the wounded wilds: if you are adding 2 badlands before damage you should at least do 3+1+1=5 dmg (you gather 2 animal and you are targeting a land with 1 blight), what am i missing?
I knew Savage Transformation would be low on the list but that's fine, I love the card even if it's not really the best. I am biased because the theme of the card is very much to my interests.
With the higher end of d tier, i think many of those actually are really good cards, but only if they allign with your spirit's available elements, so they arent good general drafts, but good for the right spirits
Yeah I think a lot of d tier is "if it's thresholded, it's good, otherwise it's garbage." A lot of the cards have very tough to hit thresholds though, which holds them back even further.
For Cards like accelerating rot, i'd find it already more appealing if the target restriction would be put into the range/cast Btw: Will the rebalancing of Powers be part of the dahan expansion?
Wounded Wilds feels like it got a bit of a bump with NI adding fire+plant spirits that dump tokens like Behemoth and Transforming Wildfire. Darkness gives a bit of a bump to Moon+Animal cards because you want moon and animal and sometime Darkness can go for majors. Not enough that I think it gets them out of D tier, but more times that I can see the niche cases coming up. For the F's, completely agree. They aren't just not worth the energy or the pick, they aren't worth the play slot. If they cost 0 and were in my hand I'd still almost never play them.
@@RedReVenge007 Haven't played enough Behemoth to know, for Transforming Wildfire, if the game toes to turn 7+ I often take a major and play it once. Wounded Wilds was pretty good then. Which, now that I wrote that out, sounds like top of D tier.
Do you tend to do full/mostly bottom track builds? I feel like your insistence that the powerful majors (volcanic eruption, fire and flood) cost too much to see play just isn't true in my experience
Grant Hatred works with Breath of Darkness at least. And savage transformation is great with it also. I like how this spirit makes som bad cards better.
Both the F cards should just be removed from the game, I would gladly pick a defense 5 minor than those lols Though I will also add Mist to F, it feels bad to draft 95% of the time.
I find that mists can be good with the spirit with the same name ;) It is a shame that Mist has so little energy income that it would never draft mayor powers
"This card doesn't have text" is some next level insult.
Thanks Red! Very happy you're re-doing this list.
Generally agree with everything, with a few comments:
-- Focus the Land's Anguish gives more than just the damage rate, it's also a control card. Pulling 3-5 blight from adjacent lands can do work in the late game on a busy board. I might have it in upper D for that reason, but I do hate the single element.
-- Vengeance has always been F tier garbage in my mind, but I guess the floor of 3 fear is an interesting point. Are you still testing the exploratory version?
-- Fire and Flood floor is definitely low floor as you say, but hitting one or both of the thresholds gives you a chance to solve 2 lands against non-England matchups. I think that might be just enough for lower C tier.
-- Eruption comments are totally fair, but you didn't mention Volcano at all. I build Volcano top-track major heavy, and I think it absolutely destroys everything except England 6 (haven't tried HME yet, NI only arrived recently, but I think it will shine there too). This card is extremely easy for top-track Volcano to cast and threshold, winning you the game on the spot in almost against instance (including England 6). I know you play Volcano bottom track, but i strongly urge you to give top track a go. I play it very similar to you - t1 G2 top/bottom, then G3 all the way to the bank. But instead of pushing to 3 plays, stop at 2 and run down top track. You use majors to solve your problems, you mini-explode every turn, and you take advantage of the card-gain innate. You have so much energy and see so many cards that there are very few problems you can't solve. Top 5 spirit in the game for me, and I think it's got the best matchups across the board (Stone and Green are both weak against at least 1 - Volcano isn't quite as weak vs England).
Looking forward to the rest of the videos, particularly seeing where you place Exaltation. Card is absolutely cracked.
Good video!
While I don't disagree with anything here, the wins that are based on these weak majors feels even better.
Base Manifest feels awesome if someone plays Lightning to make it quick, turning a ravaging land with insufficient defense to just solve itself. Niche situation, but I used it three times in my first England 6 win and felt great about it.
Volcanic eruption (threshold) has closed the most epic game I've played.
Seeing Focus the land anguish in the row with cards from garbage bin really hurt. This is my favorite major, both thematically and for it's effect. I often play with inexperienced players, and it can solve the whole board in terms of blight "removal". Fear generation is insane, usually going up to 8 fear (hello Paralizing fright). In terms of elements, I often find myself in a situation where I can fuel my innates / other majors with half of my hand while in the next turn it is not possible, and Focus fits nicely here thanks to it's easy-to-meet threshold. Also, Focus goes hand in hand with Dire metamorphosis and other blight-generating minors.
I guess seasoned players don't allow blight as much on the island (or control it's generation better), so the gather effect is much weaker (I only ventured as far as levels 6-8 on adversaries). Or it's due to your preferred defensive playstyle, leaving less Blight on board by defending and removing it. You proposed damage buff for Focus which scales of blight on board, and I never felt like I was short on damage for this card.
Some of your D-tier majors are situationally useful.
1. Focus the Land's Anguish is actually surprisingly decent on Stone, as Stone has tonnes of blight around anyway, and moving all the blight to a single land makes it much easier to pay for future blights. You can then reliably get 5+ blight in a land, so if you threshold it (and you only need a single extra sun if you play Stubborn Solidity, which isn't a bad card), you can get 5 fear, 10+ damage, and blight consolidation. Maybe B-C tier for that spirit (though highly situational)
2. Manifest Incarnation is actually really hilarious under the following situations:
a. Finder dumping a land with 20 buildings
b. Thresholded Instruments of Their Own Ruin to trigger a second ravage (because why not?)
c. Infinite Vitality or Trees and Stones for the defense to actually clear this massive land
I just played a game on Keeper where I picked up Manifest Incarnation through Unlock the Gates, and played it on a 6 building England 6 land with 3 Dahan, where I had 3 defense from Canny Defense, and added a strife from Inflame the Fires of Life. That was 16 fear from the card, 4 more fear from destroying two cities (one was damaged from Keeper right innate), and removed another city and town. Even if I hadn't picked it up for free from Unlock the Gates, being able to clear 3 cities and a town against England plus 16 fear isn't a bad tradeoff for 6 energy. But I agree, this is very situational
3. Cleansing Floods: for the spirits that it can work on, it's great. Snake loves it. Downpour laughs at the targeting restriction and never has problem thresholding it. It's on-element for River, despite not normally taking majors. It's great for Ocean on board D, because it can actually then target every land on its board minus the inland jungle (oddly specific)
4. Accelerated Rot is ok on Keeper if Jungles and Wetlands are a serious problem, as it allows Keeper to then neglect half the board. Starlight could play it too, because if you grab waters and plants, you can use the waters to remove S/M blights, and use Accelerated Rot to remove J/W blights, allowing for you to remove blights anywhere. This combination also gives you access to free extra cards every turn, though a 3/3/2 threshold on Starlight isn't great unless you grab a tri-element card.
I think the biggest thing that shows up in this analysis is you heavily, heavily focus on the un-thresholded power of the major rather than including the threshold. That's one of the big things you may want to discuss more in the next video, because you make throwaway comments like "this would be good if it hits its threshold, BOTTOM OF D TIER" and those are kind of contradictory statements.
For example, Fire and Flood being one of those percieved "decent" powers is because when people often look at powers, they (perhaps mistakenly) look at it from the context of being able to hit its thresholds. They might say, for example, that 3/3 on F&F for example isn't too hard to hit if you have a spirit providing 1 or 2 fire/water, because then you would need 3 card plays and not too restrictive elements to hit
Of course, your counter point is "there are better powers that don't need that much effort", and you'd be right, but I think some more discussion of that would be helpful. One interesting video you may want to do is the distribution of elements in the minor deck - for example, why is Moon/Fire the worst element combo?
1. it is not a card for everyone
2. the spirits that like them may not be using majors, or cant afford them consistently
3. and a lot of this even with thresholds are just okay
4. very expensive cards
The reason why players think Fire and Flood is a good card is because it's a "Timmy card" It does a lot of damage and people like destroying things.
It's just not reasonable for the price you pay.
If you look at the spirits that have 1 fire or 1 water on tracks, you'll notice that few of them want to pick this card up. Like the card is "fine" on them, but tends to get overshadowed by cards higher up on the tier list.
Even if you hit the threshold on Fire and Flood, it's...not bad, but you're really hoping 16 damage can clear two lands for the investment that goes into it. It really struggles vs England and can struggle vs Habsburg. Compare to something like Jungle Hungers, which is less than half the cost, and can easily output 8 damage with no threshold, while being decent into all matchups.
I love pillar on Volcano, easy threshold, extra range. And energy isnt an issue for volcano. Combo with an eruption innate to clear any lands it didnt hit or failed to clear
As a Sharp Fangs enthusiast, I will admit to taking Savage Transformation fairly often. I think it's probably a C or B-tier card with that spirit, if for nothing more than stacking beast tokens.
Manifest is a minimum of 9 fear (I guess 8, but 1 presence a town+city=9 fear) so even without set up or threshold the 10 fear you said is about guaranteed.
Wounded wild is a great card imo, it can easily stack with itself and push fear hard if you can threshold it consistently, great for tearing down a dump land. Manifest never struck me as a weak card either, and land thrashes is great for making a comeback if you can threshold or the land is really bad. It's especially good for ocean, who often can't deal with inland lands early and can threshold easily
I agree. It is such an amanzing card for wounded waters bleeding.
The problem with Wounded Wilds is it's basically 4 damage for 4 energy that must target a blighted land. This is pretty bad value for the cost. I'd argue that the card isn't even good on Fangs!
Hello Red. Concerning *Manifest Incarnation*, if you play it with Finder, will that trigger the *Responsibilities to the Dead* after ravage takes place and there is a destruction happening?
Also, *Volcanic Eruption* is a huge help for finder for late game of course if you draw really bad. Lastly, *The land thrashes in furious pain* was once in the past for me at least a game winning draw, because I was playing with Wildfire and suddenly all that blight was just a minefield. But, I get what you mean. They are all very situational.
Okay, so I've just started learning this game and I'm glad I was right about Transform into Darkness! That card just looked sooooo bad. I remember reading it and being like "this would be underwhelming if it didn't remove my presence." Real "what were they thinking" card. The cost of removing two presence should like at a minimum do 20 damage (which is something a different major does).
Congrats on finding spirit island. Message me if you have any questions.
Welcome to the journey
Manifest Incarnation can be a game-wining card for Starlight.
I saw land thrashes and I thought “wow it’s only D? I crushed with it last week.” Then I remembered I was stone with an ally burning plague and volcano (and a green but they don’t matter for this) so probably the optimal time. For stone and plague it was cracked
Do you have somewhere or maybe on discord a list of exploratory/proposed versions of majors?
This doesn't exist at this time!
@@RedReVenge007
Is there a way to get the exploratory versions of these cards as objects I can export into TTS? I'd like to try the proposed "fixes.
I am confused about the wounded wilds: if you are adding 2 badlands before damage you should at least do 3+1+1=5 dmg (you gather 2 animal and you are targeting a land with 1 blight), what am i missing?
I knew Savage Transformation would be low on the list but that's fine, I love the card even if it's not really the best.
I am biased because the theme of the card is very much to my interests.
With the higher end of d tier, i think many of those actually are really good cards, but only if they allign with your spirit's available elements, so they arent good general drafts, but good for the right spirits
I've had multiple high level players put together the list. This was the general consensus.
Yeah I think a lot of d tier is "if it's thresholded, it's good, otherwise it's garbage."
A lot of the cards have very tough to hit thresholds though, which holds them back even further.
Mist of oblivion is my favorite shroud major
For Cards like accelerating rot, i'd find it already more appealing if the target restriction would be put into the range/cast
Btw: Will the rebalancing of Powers be part of the dahan expansion?
@@PhilPhossosArtadeus unfortunately no. They said 5 years out from the Dahan expansion.
@RedReVenge007 that's a lot of time. Ha. Thanks =)
Wounded Wilds feels like it got a bit of a bump with NI adding fire+plant spirits that dump tokens like Behemoth and Transforming Wildfire. Darkness gives a bit of a bump to Moon+Animal cards because you want moon and animal and sometime Darkness can go for majors. Not enough that I think it gets them out of D tier, but more times that I can see the niche cases coming up.
For the F's, completely agree. They aren't just not worth the energy or the pick, they aren't worth the play slot. If they cost 0 and were in my hand I'd still almost never play them.
Unfortunately, I don't think Wounded Wilds is very good, even on these spirits! Wildfire doesn't want majors and this isn't the major Behemoth wants.
@@RedReVenge007 Haven't played enough Behemoth to know, for Transforming Wildfire, if the game toes to turn 7+ I often take a major and play it once. Wounded Wilds was pretty good then. Which, now that I wrote that out, sounds like top of D tier.
Where would you rank Exploratory Vengeance of the Dead?
A tier
Do you tend to do full/mostly bottom track builds? I feel like your insistence that the powerful majors (volcanic eruption, fire and flood) cost too much to see play just isn't true in my experience
Typically plays is a stronger approach for many Spirits.
Grant Hatred works with Breath of Darkness at least.
And savage transformation is great with it also.
I like how this spirit makes som bad cards better.
Breath of darkness is so energy-tight that Grant Hatred could be 3 energy and I’d still pass, unfortunately
i would happily play any of my minors and uniques than that weak card.
Seems problematic how much major cards are bad or just meh most of the time. Feels bad a much larger portion of the time to go for majors than minors.
Both the F cards should just be removed from the game, I would gladly pick a defense 5 minor than those lols
Though I will also add Mist to F, it feels bad to draft 95% of the time.
Mists has counter play to Russia and France which is why it's in D tier.
I find that mists can be good with the spirit with the same name ;)
It is a shame that Mist has so little energy income that it would never draft mayor powers