The Fresh Recruits
UsageIn ElementOne of Water's weaknesses lies in heavy CC decks which can pick off its smaller, more versatile creatures before they are able to affect the board. Playing
Squids,
Mind Flayers and
Chrysaoras can lead to a slight tempo loss if they are played and immediately dealt with. Even with
Shard of Patience, decks with high amounts of CC cards can cripple your creatures before they get a chance to grow out of CC range. Using this card would not be a perfect, all powerful solution, because it would require you to take up slots in your deck with potentially useless 'Tech' cards, and it doesn't even guarantee stopping your opponent's CC cards, it simply decreases the chance your opponent can deal with your threats in the same turn as building their own board presence.
Off ElementPotentially, these could be included in Grabbows, but due to not completely shutting down your opponent's CC, in most situations (except, ironically, against things like squids and wardens) silence would be more effective. However, since including
Silence forces you to drop
Lightning from your Grabbow, some players might enjoy 'Teching In' this card as a way to safely evolve your
Graboids earlier in the game. This could be a decent addition to any deck which relies on creatures surviving their first turn on the field, such as
Animated Titans,
Shard of Focus or
Lycanthrope.
BalanceThis card has a similar effect to
Silence, in that it restricts the opponent's following turn. It is less versatile, warranting a slightly lower cost in the unupgraded form, however overall its effectiveness is similar due to it affecting creature abilities in addition to spells. You could argue that the fact it actually makes some spells such as
Fire Storm and
Antimatter cheaper could excuse a cheaper cost, we must also consider the fact that with
Shard of Patience, in element, the extra cost could be the difference between a strong 'Tech' card, and an overpowered block to a weakness of an already strong card.
We should also make note that this would remove
Nymph's Tears from the meta. This destroys an incredibly good and versatile 'Stallbreak' card, so the increase of value of another 'Stallbreak' card is felt less keenly.
Remember, it does not STOP creature targeting spells and abilities, it simple reduces their effectiveness, at the cost of both a card slot and quanta.
War MetaAgainst elements such as Fire (
Rage Potion), Aether (
Lightning) and Darkness (
Drainbolt Deck), 'Teching In' a few of these could mean the difference between Water's
Arctic Squids surviving to be effective in the game or not.
It would not be a fullproof mechanism, because the extra bulk in your deck to include these cards would mean losing consistency, which could mean your opponent has enough quanta to play their CC cards anyway, but it could allow you to play two squids at once and only have one of them CCed rather than two.
Unfortunately, losing
Nymphs Tears and
Nymph Queen would have a negative effect on the versatility of Water's decks. These cards allow one of our fastest rushes in Mono Nymph Rush, while simultaneously giving us access to
Air Nymphs for shield bypass,
Gravity Nymphs for a strong (albeit unreliable) Nymphcord denial deck, and depriving us of 'Nymph Splash' in many of our 'Domin' decks for a potential stall-break element. The question of losing our
Nymph Tears is harder to answer than many other elements because of our Alchemy card's versatility. However, the blow would be lessened by strengthening one of our strongest other deck archetypes, as
Scalding/Boiling Water does.
Bonus: ExampleScalding Scarabs
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Boiling WaterThis is a simple example of where
Scalding or
Boiling Water could be 'Teched' into a deck to improve its reliability against a wider variety of opponents. This is essentially a rushy stall-break deck with domination components. That might sound impossible, but the splitting effect of
Deja Vu with the cheap
Scarabs make this a fairly fast deck, and the
Shards of Readiness used on
Scarabs allow you to control your opponent's strongest creatures. Finally,
Shard of Patience allows you to break many popular stalls.
Against some opponents, you won't find yourself needing to use
Boiling Water, but against others, saving your quanta to dump
Shard of Patience, all your creatures, and a
Boiling Water would in many cases allow your
Deja Vu the chance to survive the turn they need to split into two, and double your opponent's problems. Similarly, it could let your
Scarabs have an extra turn to grow into a threat to your opponent's board.
Interestingly, this could actually cause Water a problem against Time in War, because it would harm our chances of getting our squids out in time to deal with this type of deck.
Nymph Corner
BalanceThese need to be within CC range, so that for the opponent to want to stop the effect of higher cost CC, they must prioritize killing these first, so higher than 4 hp would be too string. However, because of the niche nature of the ability, they need to have fairly strong damage to cost value to see usage, similar to how
Death Nymphs have strong stats but a relatively weak ability (in most decks). With regards to the ability itself, having too high a cost would be counter productive, as the ability's purpose is to affect your opponent's quanta usage so you can gain a tempo advantage, so using too much quanta yourself would negate that effect.
