Spreadsheet: 0-Cost Cards
Category: Ambush Champions (A-Tier)
Internal Category Tier: D-Tier
Tier 6
I’m not terribly impressed by this usually weaker Dark Draft version of Dark Knight. Best reliable-case scenario in Dark Draft is you ambush this in, off-turn, when both golds are down to break an attacking wolf/zombie token and get a 0-cost 5-damage attacker that breaks to 3 damage effects. Meh, not as bad as my original draft made it out to seem. You can also ambush it in to block a champion out of desperation or trade with a demon token, but at only 5 offense, it won’t break basically any 1-cost champion that would attack. At the end of the day, still an ambush 0, so still fairly desirable overall.
The Evil AoE buff is most valuable for getting your tokens slightly bigger than your opponents’ to make trading a nightmare for them. So, if you have a bunch of Evil tokens, maybe, particularly Zombie Apocalypse or Wake the Dead. This wasn’t enough for me to put it into the tech category, but this does cause it to increase in value.
In constructed, however, I’m intrigued. I did bump The Risen‘s rating up to Tier 5 (from 7) in large part because of all of the Evil 0’s in Duels that work with it now (Eager Necromancer, From Beyond, Villify, and this [the worst of them]). This is a 2-card 18-potential damage combo that is an excellent punish if you already had Evil tokens in play and/or got Zombie Apocalypsed. The buff is tied to the champion though, so, unlike From Beyond, if they can can remove just this, that is a massive reduction in potential damage and trading ability. Further, the lack of inherent blitz drastically reduces its offensive potential since setting this up off-turn gives your opponent both two windows to interact with it before you can get an attack through and a gold to do so. We haven’t seen much Courageous Soul off-turn for comparison, although the jump from two health to three is a big deal.
Maybe it’s time for Dark Leader to rise in conjunction with Royal Escort. (It isn’t.)
Widget Ridge Kickstarter and Review
Widget Ridge expansion (and core game available) on Kickstarter right now until Sunday, November 22 2020 11:00 PM CST. I highly recommend the game, and I just finished a review on it: http://www.tomsepicgaming.com/widget-ridge-review/