by James Hata, UFS Developer

This week I decided that it would be best to show you guys another big facet of Set 12 that I find really fun: utility cards! By utility cards, I mean cards that serve purposes outside of your basic kill condition. They are disruptive and annoying for your opponent, or they help by giving you more options for your strategies. The two cards I want to highlight today are Pommel Smash and Eagle Talon.

Pommel Smash is a great disruptive card that is not big on damage. Instead, the utility is found in the enhance abilities on the card. Forcing your opponent to commit 2 cards is something that cannot be overlooked, especially when you get to choose one of them. The best part about the abilities on this card are that they aren’t conditional. There is no requirement to meet, and if they’re cancelled, you still don’t really lose resources (like foundations, momentum, etc). Overall, this card is great way to disrupt your opponent before you go in for the kill.

Click on the image to the left for a larger version of Pommel Smash.

Eagle Talon is another attack with an different kind of utility. Instead of directly disrupting your opponent’s game, this attack is just very versatile. The attack is useful whenever you play it, whether at the beginning of an attack string or after your low weapon attack (because you want to pull off this combo). The printed enhance makes your opponent wary about trying to play effects like damage reduction to disrupt you, and the combo enhance allows for the attack to grow significantly to a beefy amount of damage. Solid stats combined with solid abilities with no real “cost” make this attack a great all-around attack.

Click on the image to the right for a larger version of Eagle Talon.

I hope you enjoyed the spoilers and are looking forward to the pre-releases going on this week. I am confident that you will enjoy this set as much as I enjoyed creating it!

See you in the arena!