Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Shadow Era Spoilers #9 - Lythite Coating

Today's spoil is pretty cool for a couple reasons. Playable? Not for the moment, but it's a very trollish card in meltdown at the least.

Dark Prophecies 34 - Lythite Coating
Spoiled by Kyle on 12/19/2012
Source


My first thought is how this card can be used with 'utility' armors such as Wrath of the Forest or Black Garb, but alas, being a warrior card, it can't. These interactions are still possible in Meltdown, however.

It can extend the life of a King's Pride, but in my eyes, how is that better than just playing another King's Pride when the first runs out or gets blown up? If you're already playing four prides, sure, but at that point do you really need this card?

No, the real trick with this card is Mocking Armor.

While admittedly low on durability, it can still be attacked down by weapon-based heroes. However, until then, you can basically run out whatever you want for allies without much fear. These cards have pretty deadly potential.

What I would look out for is a Zoey Silversmith that targets armor. If that happens, what you have is the potential for a very powerful lockdown combo. My kingdom for a Jericho.

Before closing, one more interaction I'd like to note is a meltdown one. Lythite Coating can be played on Crescendo, increasing the odds of getting it off. Especially if Moonstalker is your hero, this could prove as an extremely powerful trick.

Rating: 6/10. Lythite Coating is a card essentially designed for Meltdown, and there it will shine. However, for constructed, it's lacking something to really get the full effect. While it's decent for shadow warriors that don't otherwise have access to protector, I feel like both sides would be much better off just playing The King's Pride instead. To make the lock strong, there needs to be another way to ramp up Mocking Armor's durability, preferably in ally form. While I don't intend to forget this card any time soon for future potential, right now, with what we've seen so far, it's just not good enough for inclusion.

Until next time,

MistahBoweh.

1 comment:

  1. zzzzzz. imo you're being way too generous here, this is more worthy of a 2 than a 6 outside of perhaps some meltdown corner cases. I seriously hope they're not spoiling the good cards from the expansion first. The conditions for this card to be useful are so narrow as to make it unplayable. You need to have:

    1) An armour in play. This either menas you ran it out the previous turn, and your opponent didn't have or didn't use item destruction, or you don't mind adding 3 to the cost of your armour.
    2) Your opponent has item destruction (but didn't the previous turn if you played this the turn after deploying your armour).
    3) There's no other good targets for your opponent to use their item destructio non.
    4) Your opponent can't just kill your armour by attacking it. Or they have acid jet.

    And for all of that, you get the benefit of [b]maybe[/b] blanking one card in your opponent's hand (their item destruction). That type of effect is usually worth about half a card (think about the value of a pithing needle in MTG, which is only valid to use as a sideboard card vs something you just can't beat).

    Yes, there might be something in the new set which is an "awesome" combo (mocking armour + this + zoe silversmith for armour... yay?), but if so then it's going to be a 3-card combo and 3-card combos invariably aren't good enough to get played unless they just win the game. Especially because this card does literally nothing without one of the other combo pieces (the armour) and probably won't do very much without the third.

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