Rise of the Ruler : A Gorgeous Terror
Welcome back to “Rise of the Ruler”! This time we’ll keep you company with a glorious ride into the spoilers for about two months with three weekly episodes! There are a lot of summer releases and we want you to miss out anything in this period full of news, so we increased our efforts to best assist you !
Let’s start with Vingolf: 5 Rulers and a lot of new resonators for a fixed set that will surely have a great impact, let’s proceed without further ado and let's get to the heart of today’s topic: Vlad Tepes, the Ruler who's dominating the Darkness attribute in this expansion:
We can immediately notice some minor peculiarities of this set: for example Rulers and J-Rulers have the same name, a really rare characteristic in the past, they also have really similar artwork on both sides of the card, and it seems that the J-Ruler is some sort of upgrade, graphically speaking, of the Ruler. We’ll find the same feature again in Resonators and their Alternate version. This feature probably derives from the collaboration with the Engage Knights game for the design aspect of the game.
The Ruler side shows an interesting ability: at the cost of two generic Wills we can deal 200 damage to an opponent, gaining just as many life points. This is not an ability that requires us to exhaust our Ruler, so we’ll be able to activate it several times in each turn without losing the chance to call a stone and which makes it really useful in a lot of situations.
After doing Judgement, paying one Darkness and two generic wills will grant us access to the J-Ruler side of Vlad that brings with her really nice statistics and both the possibility to remove a resonator from the opponent field and, at the same time, gain some life points. Despite being his historical counterpart, Vlad doesn't lose the vampiric nature of the literary Dracula at all! Furthermore paying a Darkness and two generic wills and banishing a resonator will make our Vlad Imperishable till the end of the turn, which can make the difference in the outcome of a match .
Continuing on our hypothetical “curve” we find the crazy monk: Rasputin!
He's classic first turn Resonator with the ability of allowing us to pay life points for getting him back to hand if he goes to the graveyard from our field. That is a really synergetic ability with the activate ability of our J-Ruler which never put us in card disadvantage or leaves us without any blockers.
Once we're done with Rasputin, we're up to meet the little Faust and Mephistopheles
At the risible cost of two Darkness Will she will gain, but just once every turn, a great bonus, making her a serious threat right from the early turns. Surely we’ll see her around both in darkness decks and Little Red decklist… the possibility of summoning on the field a 1400/1400 will surely entice a lot of players.
Let’s continue our journey and meet the wise King Solomon
He's a Resonator with perfect average stats for her cost, she gains +200/+200 if our life points are equal or under 2000.. Needless to say, she’s the ideal companion for our Rasputin or for other old friends like Ebony Devil and she also works very well with spells like Whisper from the Abyss.
We’re almost at the end of today's episode but we can't say goodbye yet, not before having you meet Nobunaga Oda.
With 1000/1000 she is surely one of the aces of the Darkness attribute on this set, moreover she gives a malus to all the Resonator that do not belong to this attribute, which makes her a really interesting support for our strategy.
Talking about Nobunaga's ability of destroying a Resonator of cost 2 or less when she’s put into a field, We'd like you to watch out for the exact wording of the text : as you can see this card doesn't have the Enter ability and not a single card in Vingolf set will have it. This matter will heavily impact on the game because, if ENTER abilities only activate when a card is played from hand, with Vingolf cards these abilities that usually trigger with the entrance of the Resonator on the field, will ALWAYS trigger, in every way those cards makes their appearance on field, which makes cards such as Dream of Juliet or Genesis Creation a lot more interesting and, furthermore, will make Abdul’s ability utterly useless!
After this important clarification we can wrap it up, that's all for today folks!
See ya next time!
