Shadow Era Spoilers #18: Golden Dawn

It's a new morning and a new spoiler. Priests get a new ally this time, and I get a clever new segway to the card that I'm going to waste at the start instead of now. Whoops.

Dark Prophecies 70/150: Knight of the Golden Dawn
Spoiled by Kyle on 1/8/2013
Source

Plain and simple: Even in an attachment deck, is this better than Raven or ASW?

The thing with attachment strategies is that it makes you vulnerable. You put all your eggs in one basket, you get burned. There's a lot of setup and cards spent for attachments to work, then one Mind Control later you've got nothing.

The ONLY, and I mean ONLY good attachments that stay on allies will be ones that either protect the ally from removal or recycle themselves to hand when destroyed. There's no advantage to spending a bunch of cards to make a huge threat when you could just spend one on an Aeon and call it a day. Plain and simple. Attachments need to natively counteract their own card disadvantage in order to be playable.

The healing clause is cute, I suppose, but as a seasoned Zhanna player I can safely say you'll rarely heal allies. Not enough to validate this card, anyways. Most of the time, allies tend to get shot down in one turn. Zhanna's opponents will be aware of the heal, and so just won't allow the chance to do so. Most Zhanna decks tend to also spend their energy on Wizent's Staff, which would limit the amount usable for heals.

I also want to point out that just like Divine Connection, this card works with non-permanent attachments. Extra Sharp is now three damage for two resources, Holy Shield becomes offensive, etc. It's not that good, but a cool trick.

The last thing to point out is that even if attachment strategies WORK, attachments function to create, simply put, a large ally. The entire concept behind the strategy is that the size of the base ally is completely irrelevant. And once you get three or more attachments on something, that +1 attack from Golden Dawn is overkill. I'd much rather play Armored Sandworm - a card that has natural protection, even without bearing anything.

There comes a point when you've already won, so stop worrying about you winning and worry instead about giving the opponent less ways to stop you. This card is that point.

Rating: 2/10. I like the interaction with cards like Extra Sharp. However, the first effect is irrelevant and the second is simply overkill. Attachment decks would rather allies with survivability; the attachments themselves should provide the firepower. If you want a natively offensive ally, you shouldn't be playing an attachment deck. People will undoubtedly want to play this card, but that's because there's a casual market that loves overkill and doesn't care about losing nine games if they get a 15 attack ally in the tenth.