Well here we are with more Summoner Wars previews. Gosh, how I’d missed this game giving me easy blogging content. We’ll be looking at the new, improved, remodeled and ready for action Breakers 2.0. Tacullu is back and has never looked better. Because she’s a girl now. And has boobs. Everyone loves boobs. 

But seriously, I couldn’t be happier with the visual redesign of the breakers. I didn’t hate the original Summoner Wars envisioning of this weird, catsuit clad psychic lady faction but it was disappointing that these people were, ostensibly, the representation for an Eastern civilization and they had none of the flair. I wouldn’t mind seeing some recycling of that old design (updated of course) and, you know, we have Cloaks sitting there on the horizon. Considering the Cloaks originally were just dirty Benders, here’s a great opportunity to just shift those visual directions a little.

Anyway, I still don’t like the style even if I’m over the moon with the direction. I’ll take my wins where I can get them. But we’ll save art comments for the units themselves. Let’s take a look at what we’re getting. We’ll try things a little differently and begin with the factions commons this time. 

New Benders look like they pull a lot of inspiration from the Benders second summoner Shiva. And that couldn’t make me any more happier. First original Tacullu was a nightmare. Sure, he was a top deck but his gameplay was so awful. I’m usually one for “control” style decks in card games. But Tacullu epitomized the stalemate strategies that bogged old Summoner Wars down. He punished opponents for crossing into his side of the board and, thus, opponents were better of sitting and waiting for him to come to them. Except, there was no reason for him to go to them (in most cases) so you just had two players staring at each other and playing chicken.

It was awful. 

Original Tacullu was somewhat fixed with the Owl Gryphon even if, to this day, I think the champion is hot garbage. Shiva, however, took the idea of control and made it less oppressive on the enemy. Instead of outright stealing units, Shiva pushed and pulled them, making it hard for the enemy to get where they needed to be. 

And for our first new Summoner Wars Bender unit we have the Wind Mage. The Wind Mage will bring back memories of the Controller. And, it some ways, it’s not as good. Telekinetic Blast obviously has greater application, triggering move abilities and targeting summoners alike, but Push has an advantage over it. You can Push without requiring an attack, so no more weird hitting your own gates or units to get that one card you really need it to be. 

But there’s more to the Wind Mage that makes it stand out. I mean, first it has 3 health which makes it infinitely more survivable than the Controller. And with an equal strength to the old attack value too. All at the cost of 1 magic. That’s insane for stats but we’ll have to see other faction reveals before we can determine just how favourable this shakes out for the Wind Mage in the end. 

Now, it could just be the limited matchup in the demo, but I find while the Wind Mage is good, I generally don’t rely on them too much. I want to keep one or two around or in reserve for getting some tricky pushes so my other units can get into position but overall they aren’t a priority summon for me. 

That said, they partner extraordinarily well with the Deceiver.

I cannot say how complete a re-imagining this unit is from original Summoner Wars. So I won’t bother. The new Deceiver was so successful at deception that we had no idea it was really a Guild Dwarf Defender in disguise. 

Original Summoner Wars Benders were a faction known for being paper thin but hitting hard from a range. With a 4 health common at 1 magic, I don’t think this categorization is true anymore. Between that and Stupefy, Deceivers are very, very hardy. Turning special results into lower damage while the attacker is beside a Deceiver is an interesting way of pumping a unit’s defence. It gives any ranged attacker’s target the equivalent of the old Toughness ability. It also brings melee attacks down to a 4/6 probability of hitting. And the Engage ability means that their 1 strength attack is negligible. 

You’re not really throwing dice with this unit. You’re putting Deceivers out as walls and forcing your enemy to smash their faces against them. They’ll want to throw their high strength units on the Deceiver as they’ll be more effective in bringing them down quickly. Thus, those precious attacks are directed away from your more fragile core pieces. And they can’t simply walk around because they take a damage each time they move past a Deceiver. And then you’ve got the Wind Mages that can force a unit away from the Deceiver for some automatic damage too. I think they’re fantastic but I’m not sure if that conclusion is biased from just how effective they are against the Cave Goblins in particular. 

I feel like this was a weird matchup for the demo as I feel like the Benders have an advantage over Sneeks almost solely due to the Deceivers. 

Course, as I think about them some more, I’m not certain the probabilities of Stupefy are accurate. Whatever, this is a quick look, I’m not going to sit and do math for it. I suspect it might be even better than my initial impression though. 

Next up is the Mind Witch and wow has she gotten better. A boost to strength from the original version seems to be uncommon. Plus, she got a magic discount! And her ability got even better! 

Ok, the Mind Witch has lost the ability to mimic enemy champions and summoners. However, being able to target your own commons makes her far more reliable. Old witch was really matchup dependent but now you can ensure there are plenty of good targets for her to copy through your common choices. She can be an additional Deceiver, giving you four more (albeit much weaker versions) of those lovely tanks. She can be a surprise Wind Mage, getting your units that extra space you need to close out a game. And she can take anything good your opponent has kicking around the table. That she mimics after the summon phase really means there’s not a lot of options your opponent has to stop you. 

Her inverted stats compared to the Wind Mage comes out more favourably too. There’s no getting around strength is better than health and I’m not sure what the breakpoint in health values are in this game yet to know if 3 health is on the line of usefulness or not. 

And so far, the Benders are incredibly affordable on their common list. 

Their last unit is their one expensive unit. Coming in at 2 magic is the Wind Archer. Two health is pretty fragile in this game but 4 strength is fantastic. That all of the Bender’s commons are ranged makes them a little less reliable in their attacks but this woman is almost like an improved Cloak Sniper from original Summoner Wars. Swift is great, making it hard to hide from her. And Far Shot, an ability I’ve long considered terrible, works much better in part thanks to Swift. Your opponent is going to really struggle to keep away from that 4 strength and, if they’re melee, it might be hard to punish the Archer thanks to her range. 

She’s wonderful for trading enormously well with champions and commons alike. With that said, I’m less inclined to summon her if I draw her in the early game. Generally, I want to be building up my magic pile and the cheaper Bender commons are serviceable at the start. However by mid-game, she’s hard to pass on and in the late game she shines when your opponent is left with very few options to deal with her. 

And has anyone else noticed how odd she holds her bow? No? Just me?

Overall, I’m blown away by how good the new Benders are. We’ve broken the Plaid Hat curse (where every faction released with at least one bad unit) as each of these units, at the very least, play different roles in improving the effectiveness of each other. My standouts are the Deceiver and Wind Archer for their plain effectiveness but I’m not disappointed to draw either Mind Witches or Wind Mages. 

And looking at their symbols I’m starting to get a better grasp of these subfaction categories. Clearly wind is a faction, so any unit that will bear wind in its name will have that symbol. The eye is likely to be representative of Benders or perhaps Tacullu in particular as it looks suspiciously like the third eye on her mask and deals with more psychic-like capabilities. It’s interesting but we’ll have to wait for more releases to get confirmation on these suspicions.