A Threefold Dose of Reheated Foolery

Triple Baka, if you will.

It’s April 1st, the day of the year where I talk myself into investing time into silly side projects that don’t go anywhere serious. In the past, this has brought forth some ideas that could honestly be pretty cool if pursued further, so this time I thought why not follow up on some of the greatest hits?

#1: Skull Army in Rush Duels

Once upon a time in 2021, an April Fools’ post had the honor of becoming the first ever so-called release post on this website, featuring the Toa of G2 adapted as Rush Duel cards. This left hanging a question that was often asked in early 2015 as well – where are the villains to face our heroes?

Oh look, here they are.

Enter the Skull Army led by Kulta the Skull Grinder, bringing along some new mechanics like Rituals and Contact Fusion that were added into Rush Duels over the past five years.

Download here (also includes the previous Rush release)

(This is a non-repository release in the old style, so you’ll have to copy the files into your game folder as per the included README)

Long story short, the core concept of these is beatdown with Zombie monsters whose gimmick is covering a bunch of different Attributes. Their boss Kulta is a Ritual Monster (those go in the Extra Deck in Rush Duels!) whose effect simply calls the others back out of the Graveyard, in addition to adjusting battle positions – but not of DARK monsters, because he himself is on Makuta’s metaphorical payroll. Fun Fact: This guy is also somehow the only FIRE Zombie in Rush Duels as of right now. Basher is an EARTH monster who simply deals piercing damage while you have a higher-Level Zombie around, making him ideal to revive with Kulta. Slicer is a WIND Zombie (an actually pretty well supported category) who can multi-attack at a hefty discard cost, but he can also offset that by adding back either the resident high-ATK Level 4 Normal Monster Skorpio (Beware its stinger tail!) or Kulta’s Ritual Spell Skull Raid. At Level 3 (this also has synergy with existing Zombie support), there’s the WATER Warrior, who makes use of your variety of Attributes to make the opponent’s field smaller. And finally, the Contact Fusion Skull Chimera combines Warrior, Basher, and Slicer to obtain … a big ATK stat and protection. The usefulness of this relative to how likely you are to make it mirrors how it never showed up in the story either.

From my brief gameplay experience, these slot pretty well into existing Zombie Ritual decks like Defiant Soul. One part of the design where I may have gone overboard is Kulta just being able to bring a guy back every turn, another more unexpected one is Warrior’s stat reduction and how it can stack if you manage to recycle him since it’s an (implicit) soft once per turn. But that’s just an initial, very vibes-based observation based on the few rounds of testing I managed to fit in.

#2: Toa Mata in Virtues

Virtues. A card game devised in 2024 to cause great damage to the human spirit without a single benefit hypothetically salvage my design work in case Konami comes after my ass with a C&D for making custom Yugioh cards. While the initial draft was quite comprehensive in all the mechanics I wanted to include, many details were still left open as they would require deeper consideration and/or testing than the allotted time could fit back then.

So the obvious thing to do when going back to it was to explore those, and for that I picked the classic Toa Mata as a case study. Behold their glorious forms:

As a quick recap to what there’s to see on Virtues cards: The white frame color on all of these indicates they’re Beings, the active entities akin to monsters, creatures, minions, and so on. The “DUTY 4” in the top right corner is their Duty Cost, the number of cards in your Duty Area you have to turn in order to play (formally, “Assemble”) them. The line below that holds a list of groups, as well as an element, which are classifications used by card effects. Then below the image, the text box contains effects – nicely numbered and structured, but written in full sentences so that reading the card explains the card. Finally, the little box at the bottom contains Attack and Defense values, indicating how much damage a Being can deal and take, respectively.

There are some slight visual improvements here compared to the sample cards from two years ago – the Element moved to the right side so there isn’t an awkward gap on non-elemental cards, the image now takes the whole width of the card, the font size in the text box increased slightly, and the stats at the bottom are centered and labeled with their proper names for clarity.

The new versions of the Toa Mata you see above in this style were made while trying to find answers to all the open questions from last time. Let’s go over them by category.

Duty Costs

The general outline of the “Duty” resource system is that you place cards from your hand in a special Duty Area and then rotate them to pay the costs of other cards. At the start of the next turn, those cards recover so you can pay with them again, establishing a ramp that makes more expensive cards available the longer the game goes. Sounds simple enough, but there were several crucial details I was still pretty fuzzy on.

How many cards can you place in your Duty Area per turn? Part of me wanted this to be unlimited, so the level to which you trade card advantage for speed can be up to the individual, but it’s easy to foresee a scenario where simply dumping almost your whole hand into Duty right at the start and then getting to play powerful bosses every turn would be difficult to beat for more conservative strategies. My current, still rather experimental idea, to solve this would be: At the start of your turn, you get to place as many cards as you want from your hand in the Duty Area. However, the number of used Duty that recovers each turn is capped at how many cards the opponent has in their Duty Area. So if both players want to have a big chungus slugfest, they’re free to do that, but if one of them wants to take it slower, that approach automatically forces the game into a more manageable pace. Maybe this works as intended, maybe it has horrible unforeseen consequences, maybe it’s too complicated to keep track of – whatever the case, there’s always the fallback of just hard capping Duty/turn to 1, much like any card game with a resource system does.

Should there be a soft deck building restriction associated with resources? A standard example would be the mana colors in magic, and I did originally have one in mind where you can only play cards that share at least one group or element with something in your Duty Area, but quickly dropped it because it didn’t seem to work the way it should. Thinking back, however, the main reason was that non-elemental cards – which includes most generic things – have a hard time finding matches, so that should be fixable by just limiting the rule to cards that have an element. Feels a bit arbitrary, but worth trying I’d say. If it’s no good, that just means element/group cohesion has to be achieved on the level of effects, like the Toa Mata already do with their passive cost reduction effects (adapted from their YGO incarnations’ Tribute-from-hand clauses).

Turn Structure

As briefly touched on, there’s a specific step at the start of the turn where you set up the Duty Area, but actually I have more generally de- and revised the structure of a whole turn.

  1. Start Phase: The following things happen in order.
    1. The turn player draws 1 card.
    2. The turn player puts as many Idle cards in their Duty Area as possible On Duty, but no more than the number of cards in their opponent’s Duty Area.
    3. The turn player can place any number of cards from their hand On Duty.
    4. All Ready cards in the turn player’s Unity Area return to the Destiny Area.
    5. Anything that should happen at the start of the turn according to effects.
    6. Proceed to the Main Phase.
  2. Main Phase: The turn player can perform any of these actions.
    • Assemble a card from the hand by paying its Duty Cost.
    • Assemble a card from the Unity Deck by moving the materials from the Destiny Area to the Unity Area.
    • Assemble a card from the hand or Deck by sending its listed Destiny Material from the Destiny Area to the Grave.
    • Equip an equippable Item in the Destiny Area to a Being.
    • Use applicable [ Active ] or [ Quick ] effects of their cards.
    • Declare an attack with a Being in the Destiny Area.
    • Proceed to the End Phase.
  3. End Phase: The following things happen in order.
    1. Anything that should happen at the end of the turn according to effects.
    2. All damage is removed from Beings and Items.
    3. The turn player discards until their hand size is 6 or less.

“But wait”, the astute reader may note. “Where do Trigger effects go?”

Everywhere. Trigger effects go everywhere. Essentially, any time an action is performed as described above, it causes a State Check (name pending) in which the following happens:

  • If a player’s Life is 0, they lose the game (this ends both the game and the State Check).
  • If a Being or Item in the Destiny Area has 0 Defense after factoring in all modifiers and damage, it is destroyed.
  • If multiple equips are in conflict, all but the most recently equipped one are destroyed.
  • Any modifications due to [ Passive ] effects are refreshed according to the latest state of the game.
  • If anything whatsoever changed during this State Check, perform another State Check.

And once that is done, both players get to declare any [ Trigger ] effects that met their condition at any point since the previous opportunity to do so – we have no such thing as missing the timing here, because why does any game even have that. As already decided in the earlier draft, multiple simultaneous effects activated here form a Chain, with the turn player’s coming first and the order being otherwise freely decided by the activating player.

And after that, Chain Building starts. The players alternately get a chance to append an applicable [ Quick ] or [ Chain ]* effect to the Chain, then once they both have nothing more to add, it all resolves backwards in one unstoppable sequence.

Oh yeah, and every time an effect is chained or resolves, there’s another State Check (this one not followed by Triggers). Or maybe not, we could also move that to only the end of resolution so a card/player can die mid-Chain and still be saved by a recovery effect that resolves immediately afterwards … another case of two viable options that would need to be tested for their exact implications.

I know this might be a bit late to realize this, but man, how is there a whole fucking minigame every time anyone does anything? CCGs are hell.

*Examples for [ Chain ] effects among the Toa are Gali, who responds to effects in general with targeted negation, and Lewa, who responds specifically to Actions (broadly the Virtues equivalent of Spells/Traps) with a bounce that can be either removal or a way to dodge something dangerous. The latter is a big change in trigger condition relative to the YGO Lewa design, because I suspect Le-Koro’s playstyle of spamming Special Summons would be hard to keep intact in a game driven by a resource system.

Battle

Since some form of battling between cards tends to be a central mechanic in these games, there’s a good argument to be made that you can’t reasonably start designing anything before you’ve settled on how the system for that works. As I am a deeply unreasonable person, this did not stop me from leaving a bunch of questions open about exactly this topic the last time we were here. Let’s do something about that.

The general outline of how battles should work was at least already established: Beings have Attack and Defense, Items have only Defense. A Being can attack another Being or an Item, any Being in that battle inflicts damage equal to its Attack to the other combatant’s Defense, and if anyone’s Defense hits 0 the card in question is destroyed.

Now when it comes to damage, how persistent should it be? My initial thought was “completely”, making Defense act as a little per-card health bar with all the cool narrative implications that holds. But keeping track of that seems a bit annoying as hell in a physical game – hence why it’s usually found in digital-first games like Hearthstone and Shadowverse. While I have no idea in what format Virtues is meant to be played, if it is ever meant to be played at all, it’s probably good not to close off options with fundamental design elements, so I settled on resetting accumulated damage at the end of each turn, which should keep the book-keeping from escalating too much. Another option would have been to make Defense simply represent how much attack you need to hit a target with in a single battle to beat it, but then making your little guys team up would only be possible if we had an MtG-type n:m battle system with multiple attackers and blockers going at it simultaneously, and I’m personally not very fond of how that plays.

Also regarding the management of damage, one important insight I had while brainstorming card effects is that “damage” and “Defense modifiers” should be two distinct concepts. That is, imagine damage not as a direct change to the Defense stat, but a separately tracked value per card that is used in the computation of the current Defense (= Base Defense +/- modifiers – damage). That allows the end-of-turn recovery to work smoothly even if there are lingering modifiers, lets card effects (e.g. Gali) say things such as “recover X damage”, and gives non-damage Defense reductions a role equivalent to reducing maximum HP, since by the formula you can’t heal past (Base Defense +/- modifiers) through merely removing damage. Incidentally, as can be seen on Tahu and Pohatu in our examples, damage can also be dealt by effects, in which case it simply adds to that same counter with nothing special to consider.

Okay, that’s how we do damage to cards, what about the players? Ostensibly, and largely for lack of better ideas, the way to win the game is to reduce someone’s Life to 0, so there needs to be some way to deal damage in that direction. The simplest case is attacking into an empty field, in which case you do a direct attack that makes your opponent lose Life equal to your Being’s Attack – having this is probably essential to properly incentivize playing Beings and Items to defend yourself. But should there also be player damage when two cards battle? My current leaning yes, specifically by having the excess damage from “overkilling” a target pass on to the player (so if you hit 4 Defense with 6 Attack, that’s 2 damage to the player). Alternatively, it could be a fixed amount of damage equal to the destroyed card’s cost value, to reward taking down bigger targets, but I’m not sure how that would work with Unity cards that don’t have a numeric cost. Anyway, both sound worth trying and testing in the event of further development.

To give all the numbers some grounding, we should probably establish a specific Life total, and for this I’ve decided on 36, a nice round number in base 6. Accordingly, I’ve scaled the stats of Beings so that the average Toa has around 6 Attack and the combined attacks of a standard team are approximately lethal. Comparing this to the numbers from Yugioh, it’s like if Toa were in the 1000-1500 ATK range, which is substantially smaller than my 2000+ ATK designs, so it’s probably a good thing the mechanics include plenty of damage being dealt from non-direct attacks. Or we might have to give up on some of the base 6 beauty, another question for practical testing.

There’s also the question of summoning sickness, i.e., should Beings be able to attack the same turn they hit the field? Many games don’t allow this, but my approach would be to make it legal and just keep the restriction in reserve as a balancing measure depending on how things work in practice. If we did have it, I’d probably also introduce a concept of position in the Destiny Area, where Beings that can’t attack are simply indicated by being turned sideways.

So, in summary, the battles work like this:

  1. During a player’s Main Phase, they can declare an attack with any of their Beings in the Destiny Area against an opponent’s Being or Item in the Destiny Area, or directly against the opponent if there are no other targets. The two entities involved are now formally considered combatants, one the attacker and the other the defender.
  2. At this timing, a State Check occurs, and this is also where any triggers that want something to “attack” or “battle” would fire.
  3. Any combatant with an Attack stat (= Beings) inflicts that much damage to the other. In the case of cards, that means increasing the accumulated damage that is subtracted from their Defense, and in the case of players it’s simply subtracted from their Life.
  4. At this timing, another State Check occurs, and triggers that revolve around damage being dealt fire (note that, due to the preceding State Check, any lethally damaged combatants will already be destroyed at this point!).
  5. The battle ends, and the statuses of combatants, attacker, and defender are lost.

What’s not mentioned here is the “overkill” damage dealt to players, because I’m thinking about having that be an inherent part of Defense-based destruction, so it would also happen when something is (more than) lethally damaged outside of battle by effects. Alternatively it would simply be an extra thing to take care of in Step 3 above.

Notably, while there is some manner of “damage step”, I’m not currently planning on imposing any restrictions on what can be activated during that part of the game. That means in particular that both Onua and Kopaka can apply their triggers if something is destroyed as a result of battle – may or may not have balancing implications.

What remains open

Given that time was fairly limited, I didn’t quite manage to get to everything I wanted to tackle for this revisit of Virtues. There’s a whole spreadsheet of card designs that I couldn’t finish to the point of having an image to post, and in the back of my mind I’ve also been strongly reconsidering a slight redesign of the field (moving the Duty Area to the bottom edge and the Unity Area to the left edge above the Unity Deck). Meanwhile on the card text side, I’ve been wondering if it might be good to introduce a separate quick effect marker that can be applied to [ Active ] and [ Action ] effects, so there are fewer fully distinct categories to keep track off.

I guess those will have to wait for round 3 and/or the intellectual property apocalypse.

#3: Bohrok in DE/JP/MA

In 2023, the “Polyglot Edition” delievered translations of the basic Ga-Koro cards (because those include the Kanohi Rau, obviously) into every language in which I consider myself capable of assembling a card text: German, Japanese, and the Matoric conlang crafted from Bionicle terminology by word wizard outofgloom.

For our second time on this rodeo, the Bohrok seemed like a good candidate – overall nice, simple, and uniform, but featuring some structural components that weren’t touched on by the last round of translations.

For the sake of completeness, I’ve supplied download links for each translation, but the advancement of technology has rendered them kind of impractical: If you have the expansion installed via repository, as is the recommended method nowadays, the English cards provided that way will simply override the translations without leaving any trace. The only way to see them is to turn off the repository or use a whole separate install of EDOPro.

German

Tahnok

Bohrok Tahnok

Flip Effect MonsterLevel 4 | FIRE Machine | ATK 1600 / DEF 1700

FLIPP: Beschwöre 1 “Bohrok”-Monster der Stufe 4 von deinem Deck als Spezialbeschwörung in die verdeckte Verteidigungsposition, außer “Bohrok Tahnok”.
(Schnelleffekt): Du kannst diese Karte ins Deck mischen, und dann 1 offenes Monster wählen, das dein Gegner kontrolliert; zerstöre jenes gewählte Ziel.

Bionicle: Beware the Swarm (v3.15.5)
Gahlok
Nuhvok
Pahrak
Korahk
Lehvak
Beware

Download

There’s not too much to say here, the process was the exact same as for the previous batch. One new thing I learned, or at least consciously noticed for the first time, is that German PSCT translates the “then” in “, then target” as “und dann”, while usually it’s only “dann”. Fascinating.

Japanese

Tahnok
Gahlok
Nuhvok
Pahrak
Korahk
Lehvak
Beware

群れに注意

Spell

このカード名のカードは１ターンに１枚しか発動できない ①：デッキから「ボロック」カード１枚を手札に加える。それがモンスターだった場合、自分の墓地からそのモンスターのレベル以外のレベルを持つ「ボロック」モンスター１体を手札に加える事ができる。その後、手札を１枚選んでデッキに戻す。

Bionicle: Beware the Swarm (v3.15.5)

Download

Business as usual over here as well, just stitching together appropriate phrases from the card database. And of course the beautifully elegant OCG format with its numbered effects; observe how it makes visible that Pahrak is actually the only Bohrok with 3 effects, technically.

I did face a slight bit of frustration with these when Magic Set Editor decided the already translated bottom halves of Gahlok and Nuhvok were garbage data that needed to be deleted with no backup, and another when it turned out my 2023 jury-rigging of ygopic to generate Japanese card images was based on an older version of the program and no longer compatible. Luckily there was time to resolve those problems since I ran into them a whole two days before the deadline.

Also something funny about the spelling of the names – I took the individual Bohrok’s names from Lego’s official building instructions download site for Japan, but for the Pahrak specifically it’s actually inconsistent because they spell its Kal version with a soft バ, as in “Bahrak”. I assume that’s a typo, though the odd spelling of Kohrak as “Koowakku” actually is consistent. The word “Bohrok” itself wasn’t so easy to find a primary source for, I ended up just basing it on what’s written on fan sites, same for “群れ” being the correct terminology for this particular swarm.

Matoric

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Last but certainly not least, the translation that requires the most brain juice on account of not having any established concept of PSCT. I figured this wouldn’t be too difficult this time since I could just reference my notes from Ga-Koro … but it turns out those are nowhere to be found, so I had to re-engineer it based on the luckily extensive explanations in the 2023 post instead. See, the public walls of text DO serve a purpose!

The usual disclaimer: This ostensibly “Matoric” translation is technically its own dialect, in which I deliberately retain PSCT layout and punctuation and also make a bunch of more or less educated guesses on vocabulary and more involved grammatical constructions.

Alright, on to those pellets.

Bohrok Tahnok

Flip Effect MonsterLevel 4 | FIRE Machine | ATK 1600 / DEF 1700

ROHAI: At sapuru’u a ka iru-hau a manas bahtu 4 “Bohrok” 1 (“Bohrok Tahnok” va) za fe-idoya.
(Kah-Akiro): O’o uka paro’o-sapo za sapuru ko kelika ya, ihu-manas ya-rupu borau-za 1 aro ya ka vo; oto’u-aro za ikhya.

Bionicle: Beware the Swarm (v3.15.5)

One shared component between all Bohrok is the type line, which contains two new words to translate: “Machine”, which thankfully has an official dictionary entry as akka, and “Flip”, which is … surprisingly tricky.

In essence, the word refers to both a specific motion and the more general idea of something having opposing sides, all things which tend to be handled with affixal markers in the available language references. So isolating a standalone word for the concept itself needs a bit of spitballing, which in this case brought me to rohai, a combination of the marker -ro for “in front” and -hai for “behind”, aiming to express something like “back of front”. The reason I choose -ro to be abused as a prefix is because it’s also homonymous with ro simply meaning “item”, so you can have an alternate reading of “back of an item”, which still points in the right direction. Another important factor is that this is a nice, crisp combination that rolls off the tongue well, much like the original “Flip”.

With that figured out, we also have the first word of the shared Flip Effect covered, so that only leaves the rest. “Special Summon […] from your Deck” is a familiar structure with an easy enough translation:

At sapuru’u a […] za fe-idoya

With sapuru’u being “your Deck”, fe-idoya being the imperative (it’s mandatory!) of an “unusual being-calling” or “Special Summon”, and at_a the marker for “originating” from. Now we just need to fill in the rest:

  • 1 Level 4 “Bohrok” monster – a simple chain of adjective-ish words, translated individually and flipped around for suffix modification: manas bahtu 4 “Bohrok” 1.
  • in face-down Defense Position – we previously had ka hau a, “oriented towards defense”, to indicated that a Special Summon goes into Defense Position, so to further make that face-down or “downward”, just add another modifier and make ka iru-hau a.
  • except “Bohrok Tahnok” – here it makes sense for readability to apply a slight restructuring previously used on Gali, and put a (“Bohrok Tahnok” va) right after the description of what you summon. That’s “other than Bohrok Tahnok” – not to be confused with the lesser Bohrok Tahnok or Bohrok Tahnok Va, of course.

And so, we arrive at a general translation of the Flip Effect that’s ready to use on all six of these Bohrok:

ROHAI: At sapuru’u a ka iru-hau a manas bahtu 4 “Bohrok” 1 (“Bohrok …” va) za fe-ido ya.

Neat. Now on to the Tahnok’s unique removal effect. Its most special trait is that it’s a Quick Effect, or kah-akiro, and it lets you target (aro ya) 1 face-up monster (ihu-manas) that your opponent controls (ya-rupu borau-za) and destroy (ikhya, as an imperative) that target (oto’u-aro). All familiar, or at least easy enough to derive from what we’ve seen before. Except there’s also the cost, “shuffle this card into the Deck” – how do you translate “shuffle”?

In a way it’s another of those card game terms like “card” and “deck”, but I think in this case we’re better served with a more general term expressing something like “to randomize”. Which is still not directly in the dictionary, just “randomness” as one meaning of rahi … but I’d rather not have the name of one of the largest archetypes double as game terminology. Luckily, there’s also an entry kelika, for “branching futures” or simply “chaos”, so if we use that as a verb and apply an appropriate direction marker, we get sapuru ko kelika ya, “chaos-ify forward into the Deck”, or simply “shuffle into the Deck”. Voilà!

Bohrok Gahlok

Flip Effect MonsterLevel 4 | WATER Machine | ATK 1700 / DEF 1600

ROHAI: At sapuru’u a ka iru-hau a manas bahtu 4 “Bohrok” 1 (“Bohrok Gahlok” va) za fe-idoya.
On agiro u takaro: Uka akiro ai-aka ve sapo rupu ai-bakuala hu ai-atu u za lutu ya vo. E’e agiro yanu-paro’o-akiro za lutu ai-End Phase po ai, paro’o-ihu-sapo za sapuru ko kelikya ke.
●Manas: Sapo ya-rupu borau-za 1 aroya; oto’u-aro za ikhya.
●Doka: Paro’o-agiro ai-oko po ihu-manas ya-rupu borau-za 1 ai-akiro za rya.
●Ilhura: End Phase ko at rupu ai-arnoro a rahi-sapo 1 za khya.

Bionicle: Beware the Swarm (v4.5.6)

The Gahlok, much like every Bohrok going forward, has the same Flip Effect that we can now immediately skip over to get to the other part. In this case, it’s a modular effect, so there’s a lot to translate.

The first hurdle is the disambiguation itself, which tells you to activate (lutu ya) a certain effect (akiro). The way I figured makes most sense to describe what decides that effect is with a complex modifier on the word “effect”, specifically one derived from the sentence ve sapo rupu ai-bakuala hu ai-atu u akiro ta ai (lit. “the effect extends from the type of the card on top of the opponent’s GY”, with the “extends from” marker ve_u being flexed into a metaphorical sense of “follows from”). That means the (here explicitly marked) subject akiro ta gets pulled forward and swapped for the placeholder aka, the equative sentence predicate ai attaches to it as a prefix, and the whole thing goes right after the akiro we seek to modify. And thus, “you can activate the effect that extends from the type of card on top of the opponent’s GY”. Close enough.

Before we get to the actual effects you can choose from, a slightly different self-shuffling cost that only applies in the End Phase of the turn sneaks its way in. We’ve covered the “shuffle” part, but translating “the turn you activated this effect” is another headache. I ended up fuzzing it a bit into “the turn related to this effect having been activated”, which should be agiro yanu-paro’o-akiro za lutu. A rare use of the past tense nu in these, here becoming a prefix together with the ya designating the verb. Also, in keeping with previous translations, the macro structure of the clause is slightly reworded from “During” to “If it is the End Phase […]”, by wrapping the whole thing in the sentence-level conditional e’e_ke.

Finally, the modes for Manas/Doka/Ilhura (Monster/Spell/Trap) are luckily quite simple. The first is just another targeted destruction (though now with an imperative aroya), the second combines the known mechanics of negation and “until the end of this turn” (paro’o-agoiro ai-oko po, lit. “during the future of this turn”), and the third banishes from a place “until” or “forward to” the End Phase (End Phase ko). A literal random card is involved here, so it’s hard to argue against following the dictionary and writing rahi-sapo in this case. Just don’t go banishing “Rahi” cards with this!

Bohrok Nuhvok

Flip Effect MonsterLevel 4 | EARTH Machine | ATK 1500 / DEF 1800

ROHAI: At sapuru’u a ka iru-hau a manas bahtu 4 “Bohrok” 1 (“Bohrok Nuhvok” va) za fe-idoya.
On agiro u takaro: Uka sapo doka/ilhura nuala po 1 aro ya vo; oto’u-aro za ikhya, e apaia ka Standby Phase’u kova a vala’ai o doka ilhura na za iro ya voru ke. E’e agiro yanu-paro’o-akiro za lutu ai-End Phase po ai, paro’o-ihu-sapo za sapuru ko kelikya ke.

Bionicle: Beware the Swarm (v3.15.5)

Three Bohrok in, we can now recycle both the Flip Effect and the delayed shuffling clause, leaving only a targeted removal effect. With a second half that’s a bit more difficult.

For the connective “and if you do”, we have a nice phrasing e apaia […] ke, meaning “if successful, […]”. Then, we need to block a “Spell & Trap Zone” until “your next Standby Phase”. The former becomes vala’ai o doka ilhura na, combining the established game terms with a basic o_na conjunction instead of the foreign “&”. The latter is Standby Phase’u kova, “your imminent Standby Phase” – there isn’t a literal “next” (except one meaning of the location marker ko, but I believe that needs another reference point relative to which something is the next element), so this seems to convey the meaning best. This is also another occurrence of the notoriously annoying “until”, now transformed to the direction marker ka_a. With iro (“work, “perform function”) as the verb, we achieve a literal meaning of “toward your imminent Standby Phase, its Spell & Trap Zone cannot function”.

Bohrok Pahrak

Flip Effect MonsterLevel 4 | EARTH Machine | ATK 1900 / DEF 1400

ROHAI: At sapuru’u a ka iru-hau a manas bahtu 4 “Bohrok” 1 (“Bohrok Pahrak” va) za fe-idoya.
E’e paro’o-sapo ta barra ya, ka Damage Step ai-fahi a ve rupu ai-akiro e iza u aro ikhi sa ya voru ke. E’e o’o Battle Phase ai-fahi po ai paro’o-sapo ta barra ya nu na: Uka sapo ya-rupu borau-za 1 aro ya vo ke; oto’u-aro za ikhya. E’e agiro yanu-paro’o-akiro za lutu ai-End Phase po ai, paro’o-ihu-sapo za sapuru ko kelikya ke.

Bionicle: Beware the Swarm (v3.15.5)🎉

The Pahrak is again a bit special in that it has a continuous protection effect to supplement its battle-based removal. This is a conditional where the left side is simply “this card battles” (paro’o-sapo ta barra ya) and the right side makes some creative use of location markers: “toward the end of the Damage Step” (ka Damage Step ai-fahi a), “extending from the opponent’s effects” (ve rupu ai-akiro e), it cannot “be targeted or destroyed” (u aro ikhi sa ya).

Then the removal immediately makes use of ai-fahi for “end of” again, nested in the interesting configuration of a conditional whose left side is a conjunction (e’e o’o A B na C ke) – “if it is the end of the Battle Phase and this card battled”. And then it’s just another targeted destruction.

Bohrok Kohrak

Flip Effect MonsterLevel 4 | WATER Machine | ATK 1800 / DEF 1500

ROHAI: At sapuru’u a ka iru-hau a manas bahtu 4 “Bohrok” 1 (“Bohrok Kohrak” va) za fe-idoya.
E’e paro’o-agiro po paro’o-sapo ta vua ya nu ta cu: O’o uka paro’o-sapo za sapuru ko kelika ya, ihu-sapo ya-rupu borau-za 1 aro ya ka vo ke; oto’u-aro za khya.

Bionicle: Beware the Swarm (v3.15.5)

Okay, I promise it gets simpler from here on. The only real novelty is the condition “If this card did not declare an attack this turn”, which introduces vua, the proper word for “attack”, and attaches a bunch of suffixes to give us vua ya nu ta cu, “did not begin to attack”.

Bohrok Lehvak

Flip Effect MonsterLevel 4 | WIND Machine | ATK 1400 / DEF 1900

ROHAI: At sapuru’u a ka iru-hau a manas bahtu 4 “Bohrok” 1 (“Bohrok Lehvak” va) za fe-idoya.
E’e Main Phase 1’u po ai: Uka paro’o-sapo za sapuru ko kelika ya vo ke; sapo nuala po 1 za ikhya.

Bionicle: Beware the Swarm (v3.15.5)

And the last one has barely anything new to cover, with an activation condition of “If it is during your Main Phase 1”, a standard shuffle cost, and a non-targeting destruction of a card on the field.

Actually there’s one more, because I really wanted to translate the name:

Vah Rhapaya

Spell

At sapuru’u a arnoro’u ko sapo “Bohrok” 1 za ivoya. E’e o apaia iza manas ai na, o’o at bakuala’u a arnoro’u ko uka manas “Bohrok” 1 ya-aka ku-bahtu za ima te oto’u-manas za ivo ya, at arnoro’u a sapuru ko sapo 1 za kelika ya ka vo ke. On agiro u uka “Vah Rhapaya” za lutu 1 ko ya voru.

Bionicle: Beware the Swarm (v3.15.5)

“Vah Rhapaya”, AKA “Beware the Swarm”. Standard search spell, but its little bonus clause that would be used to grab matching pairs of Bohrok and Bohrok Va involves some heavier nesting of structural markers.

  • E’e A, B ke = “If A, then B”
  • A = o apaia iza manas ai na = “success, and it is a monster” (so on the left side of the conditional, it’s essentially “if you do, and it is a monster”)
  • B = o’o C, D ka vo = “possibility of (C, then D, in sequence)”; the order of ka and vo is relevant here to indicate your options are either doing “C then D” or nothing at all.
  • C = at bakuala’u a arnoro’u ko uka manas “Bohrok” 1 ya-aka ku-bahtu za ima te oto’u manas za ivo ya = “you move 1 “Bohrok” monster that has a different Level relative to that monster from your GY to your hand” … luckily Nokama from last time already had a (admittedly kind of convoluted) wording figured out for the “different from” restriction
  • D = at arnoro’u a sapuru ko sapo 1 za kelika ya = “shuffle 1 card from your hand into the Deck”

Now you know, and always remember: vah rhapaya!

Overall Conclusion

If there’s one thing to take away from all this, it might just be that when you don’t hear anything from me for a while, it’s probably because I’m doing something very stupid and can no longer be stopped or reasoned with.

Speaking of which, where did I put that Rahi Overlord rulebook…

Bohrok Invasion: A Dungeon Duel Monsters Campaign

Today, I bring a special “release” of something I’ve been tinkering with on the side for a good while now. Using selected custom cards from this expansion, Bohrok Invasion offers a 2-player experience of the conflict between the Toa Mata and the Bohrok, reaching all the way to Nuva and Kal.

Powering all this on a technical level is, of course, Dungeon Duel Monsters, the popular Yu-Gi-Oh! roguelike platform developed by Mika. Check their homepage for more information, how to download the actual program, and a link to the Discord server where you’ll find many user-made campaigns including this one!

Now, it’s an open secret that I like to ramble about the thought process and all the various considerations during development when presenting something new, so let’s get straight to that.

Campaign Storyboard

The basic idea I set out to implement went like this: One player chooses to play as the Toa, the other as the Bohrok. They each go through three areas to collect cards and build their decks, first with the core of each archetype, then adding sub-engines and optional boss monsters, and finally upgrading to the Nuva and Kal. At the end of each area, they meet for a duel, summing up to a best-of-three match that decides the winner of the run. All this is, of course, accompanied by a brief retelling of the relevant lore to give it some flavor.

One interesting feature of DDM is the ability to choose between different paths as you advance through the “dungeon”, so I wanted to use that to make various build options of the decks available. In the end, this came out to the following:

  • Toa Area 1: Kanohi-centric, Kaita-centric, or paired with a package of Insect Rahi (they have a good Attribute spread).
  • Bohrok Area 1: L4 Bohrok-centric (+ generic Xyzs), Krana-centric (including Swarm Servants), or Va-centric (+ generic Synchros).
  • Toa Area 2: Add a Boxor package or an Exo-Toa package.
  • Bohrok Area 2: Add a Bahrag package or a Bohrok Kaita package.
  • Toa Area 3: Upgrade to Toa Nuva.
  • Bohrok Area 3: Upgrade to Bohrok-Kal.

So the paths spread out in the beginning, then narrow down in the subsequent stages, which I figured would give better replay value since you get the most possibility to switch things up for a new run right at the start. Each player has 3×2 = 6 ways to go through the campaign without even factoring in card choices and deckbuilding, so there’s something to be had from doing it more than once.

This attempt at variety of course led to greater difficulty with the part I quickly found to be the hardest of all …

Balancing

The Fundamental Problem

Generally, what I do in this project is make custom archetypes for offline use against the various AIs included in EDOPro, with a focus on interesting lore-based designs that function well in that environment. While that sometimes implies specific interactions between cards from two of those archetypes, they are not actually designed, tested, or balanced to play against each other in any way. (I believe the only time I did go in that direction so far was when I briefly played with AI scripting during the Percy days.)

So, when you build a competent Toa Mata deck and a competent Bohrok deck, there is no reason to assume these in-universe opponents would be evenly matched on the dueling field. Worse yet, there is no guarantee they would interact with each other in a way that is even fun.

Let me illustrate this with one of the earliest standout examples I noticed: You know how all the Bohrok have a mandatory Flip Effect to Special Summon another one from the Deck face-down?

Bohrok Lehvak

Flip Effect MonsterLevel 4 | WIND Machine | ATK 1400 / DEF 1900

FLIP: Special Summon 1 Level 4 “Bohrok” monster from your Deck in face-down Defense Position, except “Bohrok Lehvak”.
During your Main Phase 1: You can shuffle this card into the Deck; destroy 1 card on the field.

Bionicle: Beware the Swarm (v3.15.5)

You know how there’s a Kanohi that gives the power to attack every monster your opponent controls, including any new ones that show up during the Battle Phase?

Great Kanohi Kakama

Equip Spell

If another “Kanohi” card becomes equipped to the equipped monster, destroy this card. If the equipped monster is a “Toa” or “Makuta” monster, it can attack all monsters your opponent controls, once each. If this card is sent to the GY: You can banish 1 monster from your GY; add 1 “Toa Mata Pohatu” from your Deck to your hand. You can only use this effect of “Great Kanohi Kakama” once per turn.

Bionicle: Coming of the Toa (v3.21.6)

Yeah, so when the latter meets the former, not only is the Bohrok deck suddenly out of monsters, resolving the whole thing is also torture for everyone involved since every single Bohrok needs to separately come out of the Deck, get flipped face-up, die, and repeat. On a manual simulator, because that’s what DDM uses.

To summarize the issue briefly, the Toa have access to certain cards that completely shit on the Bohrok’s Flip-based strategy with very little in the way of interactive counterplay. Conversely, if they fail to have those cards, there’s really very little they can do against the threatening board of one (1) face-down Bohrok other than attack into it and get snowballed to death by the thus awakened swarm.

Both of these are extremely frustrating patterns of gameplay that need to be counteracted if anyone is to actually enjoy this campaign, so several measures were taken to that end.

Card Pool

The most unintrusive tool available is the specific lineup of cards that is actually given to players. On the one hand, it can be used to mitigate a general power imbalance by giving better pull ratios and generic tools to the weaker side, and on the other it can be used to hand out – or withhold – cards that enable particular interactions.

What isn’t actually on the table here is simply leaving out the Kakama or Lewa (who can easily bounce face-down Bohrok to keep the engine from starting indefinitely), since that would leave things incomplete and the Toa do need their outs to stand a chance. Instead, I decided to add some helpful generic options so the games don’t center on randomly drawing those few natively available interactions as much, while in turn providing the Bohrok with means to recover from the counters to their basic strategy or even prevent them.

For the Toa, this means choice Tribute fodder in the form of Lhii (whose hand effect can shut down a single Bohrok), Nixie (who can dump a Kanohi for a search if Tributed early), and Green Ninja (who can force a Bohrok Flip Effect to trigger in the Main Phase right into that Lewa you just Tribute Summoned; also Ninjago crossover). They also get boss monsters like the Kuma-Nui on the Rahi path or Gauntlet Launcher on the Kaita path that serve as effective removal in exchange for some resource investment. And thanks to how beautifully the Levels add up, they can use Revolution Synchron into Power Tool Braver Dragon to throw a bunch of Kanohi in the GY all at once. Fun!

Kuma-Nui, Rat Rahi

Synchro Effect MonsterLevel 8 | EARTH Beast | ATK 3000 / DEF 2500

1 “Rahi” Tuner + 1+ non-Tuner monsters
Gains 300 ATK for each other “Rahi” card you control. If this card battles an opponent’s monster, at the start of the Damage Step: You can activate this effect; change that opponent’s monster to Attack Position, also negate its effects until the end of this turn.

Bionicle: Challenge of the Rahi (v4.7.3)

The Bohrok, meanwhile, don’t need as much help to put up a fight against the Toa, since their core engine comes with great consistency and removal tools that still hold up perfectly fine in this format. What they lack are good counters to killer plays like the Kakama outlined above, access to disruption that doesn’t rely on resolving a Flip effect first, and a way to beat big monsters while maintaining board presence early on. The one thing I found to address the first point is Tindangle Angel, which brings back a Bohrok and then conveniently ends the Battle Phase so it can’t get run over again. For the second, Red Wyvern and Hot Rod GT19 provide options that feel appropriate for the power level (okay, I’ll admit the latter is more here because it’s really funny). These also help with point three, as do Silent Honor ARK and Crazy Box (no wait, that one’s for the lulz too).

Finally, area 2 lets each player pick one of three generic power cards, which were also selected specifically to cover these known weaknesses should you happen to draw them – from Nobleman of Crossout for the Toa to Daruma Karma Cannon for the Bohrok.

Design Tweaks

Since there was a limit to what I could give the Bohrok in generic cards without making them feel absolutely unbeatable when things went in their favor, I next made targeted adjustments to effects that were responsible for the annoying Kakama thing in particular. Most significantly, the mandatory Flip Effects were turned optional, letting you cut the assault short whenever you wish, but also the Krana Ca’s battle protection was upgraded to work once for each monster and not just the very first one attacked. This change will probably make it into the main expansion by the next version, because there’s honestly no reason to have the card be as restricted as it is. I actually assumed I was misreading it for a good while before I re-checked what the script was doing!

Boons

As the final and greatest measure, I ended up including a pair of wholly new cards making use of one of DDM’s special features: the so-called Boons, Spells and Traps that can be activated directly from the Extra Deck when their activation conditions are met. Think of them as kind of like Duel Links Skills, at least that’s approximately the application in this case.

For the Toa, the problem to fix was how much you had to rely on random chance to even see the particular Kanohi or Toa you would need to crack a given board. So their Spell Boon, Heroes Assembled, takes the form of a simple searcher flavored by utilizing the mentions of specific Toa Mata on the six Great Kanohi. One thing I wanted to make really sure of is that you don’t always default to using this, but just when really needed – so on top of requiring you to have fewer monsters, it’s also a -1 in card advantage (though you can make it neutral by triggering a discarded Kanohi’s search effect, as is expected). Technically you only get one copy of the Boon, but if so inclined I know a guy who can recover it …

Since with this it’s basically guaranteed the Bohrok setup will be contested by something, they have the Trap Boon Queen’s Gambit at their disposal for equally reliable access to counterplay. Whenever your opponent’s effect removes your Bohrok from the field, and you now have fewer monsters (to keep it from being used for squashing a comeback from the losing player), you get to respond with a search or your own removal effect – and if you Tribute a monster as well, you can either do both of these things, or do one of them and return the Boon to the Extra Deck to use it again later. I got a bit cute with the mechanics on this one, so yes, you can also activate it just to put it back. Do what thou wilt.

Combined, these Boons establish a more solid framework for the interplay between the two decks: The Bohrok player will attempt their setup, and the Toa player will find an out to it. The Bohrok player will neutralize that particular threat, forcing the Toa player to try a different angle. This keeps both players moving with an active role in the game, unlike the otherwise possible scenarios of “Toa fail to out face-down Bohrok and get stomped” or “Bohrok have no response to getting outed and get stomped”.

Conclusion

So, to summarize my main takeaway from this experiment … boy is balancing these decks against each other hard. No wonder I usually don’t do it. But being able to observe how they fare in that kind of environment is some interesting data, and might inspire some improvements in future updates that I would otherwise not have thought of.

And of course, having the whole thing set up as a campaign with different choices and little lore sequences scattered throughout is just a whole load of fun in its own right. As a first attempt, this one was meant to be unambitious in concept (even if it still ended up taking a lot of work), but I already have a far more unhinged followup in mind for when BMOL is finished …

Hope you guys like MNOG2 🙂

Card of the Day 2026-01-02

You’ve got to be shitting me.

The second RANDOMLY SELECTED card of the day 2026 is none other than Ka, the airborne counterpart to the previous day’s Pewku . I can’t even pin this on some unknown technical quirk of my implementation that causes consecutive days to land on consecutive cards (which shouldn’t happen, supposedly CRC32C is pretty convincingly random), because it picked the movie-style artwork that has an entirely different ID.

If this repeats and tomorrow is, I don’t know, Washed and Chilled , I may as well exit the simulation. But while I’m still here, there are actually some interesting details to note about this one that weren’t covered on release.

Ka, Avohkii-Bearing Rahi

Link Effect MonsterLink-2 [↙ ↘] | WIND Winged Beast | ATK 1900

2 monsters with different Attributes
If this card is Special Summoned: You can reveal 1 “Great Kanohi Avohkii” or 1 Beast or Winged Beast “Rahi” monster in your hand, then activate 1 of these effects;
● Draw 1 card. ● Destroy up to 2 cards on the field, including a card you control.
If this Link Summoned card is destroyed by battle or card effect: You can target up to 2 Level 4 “Avohkii” monsters with different names in your GY; Special Summon them. You can only use each effect of “Ka, Avohkii-Bearing Rahi” once per turn.

Bionicle: Mask of Light (v5.1.2)

First, the materials – 2 monsters with different Attributes. This is, surprisingly, not a combination that has ever been printed, unlike different Types or different names. I landed on it specifically because the Avohkii deck has a fairly wide Attribute spread (Jaller FIRE, Takua LIGHT, Pewku EARTH, Graalok WIND), while the Rahi decks that are also meant to get use out of this card usually put out some combination of EARTH, WIND, and occasional other Attributes.

Second, the effect on Summon. The idea of what it does remained consistent throughout development, but other than that it actually has quite a history. Once upon a time, in the earliest draft stage, it was two trigger effects – one on Summon that revealed the Avohkii or a Rahi to draw, and one on reveal of an Avohkii in hand that destroyed cards. Due to text length concerns and some uncertainty of whether or not searching an Avohkii and revealing it for confirmation would trigger that second condition, they were merged into something modular, with the benefit of Rahi now also getting to wield it as removal. For a while later on, the combined effect was still written to trigger again if your opponent Summons a monster, so you could also end on it as a piece of disruption. This was scrapped because it already provided enough value as a combo/toolbox piece, and you can get disruption out of it regardless if you’re clever about Special Summoning it with other effects .

Finally, the floating effect that is exclusive to the Avohkii deck, representing the crash in Ko-Wahi after which Jaller and Takua continue on foot. I briefly had plans to let you only bring back both of them if your opponent had a monster on field, and otherwise you’d have to pick one and shuffle the other back into the Deck – as a nod to their parting soon after. But that too was scrapped due to length, plus the fairly specific targets and needing to be properly Link Summoned are probably restrictions enough to justify the full refund on materials here.

So yeah, now you know all there is to know. Maybe a future card block overhaul will include a space to include trivia notes like these with each card when viewing them on the site, that might be fun to have.

Card of the Day 2026-01-01

Let it be known that the first card of the day in 2026 was, by pure hash function happenstance, the poster child of the latest release: Pewku, the true hero of the Avohkii party. Perhaps this is a sign of good fortune in upcoming activities with the new expansion?

Granted, these MOL cards do have twice the chance of getting picked because they’re doubled up with alt arts … another reason to fix that technical limitation eventually.

Now this would be a good opportunity to drop some interesting design notes or point out details about the card, but I kind of already did all of that in the release post, so what’s there left to say? I guess I could mention how the stats come from taking Takua’s 1500/1500 and adding the Ussal’s 1000 to DEF only (our girl isn’t exactly an attack crab, after all).

Also: Set 8595 Takua & Pewku has the greatest action feature ever made, in my objective opinion.

Pewku, Avohkii-Bearing Rahi

Xyz Effect MonsterRank 4 | EARTH Beast | ATK 1500 / DEF 2500

2 Level 4 monsters
You can detach 1 material from this card; Set 1 Spell/Trap from your Deck that mentions “Great Kanohi Avohkii”, except an Equip Spell, also you cannot Special Summon from the Extra Deck for the rest of this turn, except monsters that mention “Great Kanohi Avohkii”. If a Level 4 “Avohkii” monster(s) is Special Summoned to your field, while this card is in the GY (except during the Damage Step): You can target 1 of them; Special Summon this card, and if you do, attach that monster to it as material. You can only use each effect of “Pewku, Avohkii-Bearing Rahi” once per turn.

Bionicle: Mask of Light (v5.1.2)

The 2026 Roadmap

Just because your Chronicler is “busy” and your Turaga slightly homeless (wait what) isn’t an excuse not to submit that annual report!

Was a bit short on time for this one, so slightly different format, but still the same old review and preview. The main plans for 2025 went smoothly and we are now well into adapting Mask of Light, and finishing up BPEV meant Best of Test and Theme Guides managed to make their return. Still hoping I’ll get to spread those out a bit more for this expansion.

Next year, we have:

  • April 2026: “Birth of the Rahkshi”, the first wave of Rahkshi support to upgrade the already existing Kraata into something more formidable.
  • August 2026: We’re taking a brief break. Officially it’s vacation time, but depending on the general state of things I would like to tackle some overdue maintenance like letting the card viewer on here handle alt arts correctly.
  • December 2026: “Play Well!”, AKA the -Koro update, AKA the one with the Kolhii stuff. I have devised a recipe to utilize the fresh new inter-village competition going on in the background of the story as support for all of the elemental strategies from BCOT, and here we’ll start cooking in MNGO2 order with Ga-Koro and their first two opponents, Onu-Koro and Ko-Koro.

Only two releases instead of three, but still a lot of neat stuff to look forward to.

Summer break might also be a time to get back on those side quests which were largely neglected this year, the open ones being:

  • Dungeon Duel Monsters: There is now a prototype “Bohrok Invasion” campaign (come check it out on Discord!), but it still has some adjustments to be made that I haven’t gotten around too. Will hopefully happen a bit sooner than summer.
  • Support for YGO Omega: This one has been for the list since forever and I still haven’t touched it, but my aim with it has gradually shifted to making a more generic multi-client scripting adapter – a library of uniform Lua functions that translates calls from scripts to the proper commands for each client, making it possible to write cards once and have them work everywhere. That way we’d also have something like MDPro3 covered at the same time. Maybe in summer.
  • mse2cdb Windows build: Surely one of these days those clever ey aye thingies will be able to just give me a working CMake file for this shit so I don’t have to sit down and deal with it. Also maybe in summer.
  • Figure out Master Duel modding: The state of the art on this still seems to be the same as two years ago – one guy somehow managed it at some point and never told anybody how. Probably not happening this summer either, but maybe a working adapter for MDPro3 will be “close enough”.

Overall, I’m very curious how everything is going to look by the end of next year, and very much hope you’ll be there to check it out as well.

Happy new year!

Release: Search for the Seventh Toa

Across the land and in the skies, guided by the light.

Install via EDOPro Configuration

Sample Decks

This batch introduces the core of the “Avohkii” archetype, beyond just their barest engine that was included in the earlier preview. Though to be accurate, most of the cards here are actually unrelated by name and connected only through the fact that they mention “Great Kanohi Avohkii” (a card that still does not exist). I promise this makes total sense and there’s a perfectly logical reason behind it, read on to find out.

New Cards

Regular Art

Pewku, Avohkii-Bearing Rahi

Xyz Effect MonsterRank 4 | EARTH Beast | ATK 1500 / DEF 2500

2 Level 4 monsters
You can detach 1 material from this card; Set 1 Spell/Trap from your Deck that mentions “Great Kanohi Avohkii”, except an Equip Spell, also you cannot Special Summon from the Extra Deck for the rest of this turn, except monsters that mention “Great Kanohi Avohkii”. If a Level 4 “Avohkii” monster(s) is Special Summoned to your field, while this card is in the GY (except during the Damage Step): You can target 1 of them; Special Summon this card, and if you do, attach that monster to it as material. You can only use each effect of “Pewku, Avohkii-Bearing Rahi” once per turn.

Bionicle: Mask of Light (v5.1.2)
Movie Style Art

First on the list is Takua’s trusty companion Ussal crab, Pewku. Who does, in fact, have “Avohkii” in the name – because she’s a proper member of the party searching for the Toa of Light, carrying our heroes all over the island wherever the mask may lead them. This is also reflected in the first effect letting you fetch the many Spells and Traps that represent events along the journey, which could act as a gateway into the whole Avohkii package since this is a generic Rank 4. The missing ingredient for that is a target that actually works as a starter, but there might just be one planned, so this search already comes with an Extra Deck lock just to make sure Ryzeal doesn’t actually become the most optimal way to play Avohkii. A lot of time was spent debating myself on whether or not that is really needed, but in the end it stuck mostly because the combo lines you can do to dance around this lock ended up being kind of neat.

One possible enabler for said lines is Pewku’s own second effect, which brings her back from the GY by jumping on top of a Jaller or Takua you just put on the field – so you can get a nearly free Pewku with material after you’ve already done other things, and also easily get yourself even more backrow on the following turns.

Regular Art

Ka, Avohkii-Bearing Rahi

Link Effect MonsterLink-2 [↙ ↘] | WIND Winged Beast | ATK 1900

2 monsters with different Attributes
If this card is Special Summoned: You can reveal 1 “Great Kanohi Avohkii” or 1 Beast or Winged Beast “Rahi” monster in your hand, then activate 1 of these effects;
● Draw 1 card. ● Destroy up to 2 cards on the field, including a card you control.
If this Link Summoned card is destroyed by battle or card effect: You can target up to 2 Level 4 “Avohkii” monsters with different names in your GY; Special Summon them. You can only use each effect of “Ka, Avohkii-Bearing Rahi” once per turn.

Bionicle: Mask of Light (v5.1.2)
Movie Style Ar

Our next, more short-term, party member is the Gukko bird Ka, who is in the movie for exactly 57 seconds to air-fly the guys out of Le-Wahi and then crash in Ko-Wahi. Which isn’t a lot, but does help the Avohkii make meaningful progress towards its destination, so we award it the rank of an actual archetype member. The other archetype it belongs to (as does Pewku) are the Rahi, and since the bird actually does hang out in the jungle with the rest of the wild beasts, its first effect works by revealing either the Avohkii or a (correctly Typed) Rahi monster – either to draw a card (flying high) or to destroy up to 2 cards including one of yours (crashing down).

Rahi, being a Pendulum archetype, of course appreciate having a generic Link-2 with down-pointing arrows that gets them a draw or non-targeting removal, but the full power of this card shines in the Avohkii deck, where its second effect lets it float straight back into Jaller and Takua, making it basically free. In fact, this effect will even let you trigger Pewku in the GY to get that back as well – I think you can see how the interesting combo lines come together here.

Perhaps worth pointing out about that second bullet point: The way it’s worded means you are perfectly allowed to destroy just 1 card on your own field, including Ka itself, so if all else fails you always have that option to trigger the floating effect.

Regular Art

Graalok, Ash Bear Rahi

Effect MonsterLevel 7 | WIND Beast | ATK 2600 / DEF 1800

During the Main Phase, if this card is in your hand or GY (Quick Effect): You can either Tribute 1 Beast or Winged Beast “Rahi” Pendulum Monster from your hand or field, or reveal 1 “Great Kanohi Avohkii” in your hand, then target 1 face-up card on the field; destroy it, and if you do, Special Summon this card to its controller’s field, but if you Special Summoned it from your GY, place it on the bottom of the Deck when it leaves the field. You can only use this effect of “Graalok, Ash Bear Rahi” once per turn. At the end of the Damage Step, if this card battled: Return it to the hand.

Bionicle: Mask of Light (v5.1.2)
Movie Style Art

Thankfully we also have other options, such as Graalok, the Ash Bear that almost mauls Jaller’s and Takua’s masks off on their way through the jungle. This is clearly not party member behavior, but is something that happens to them, making this monster a non-“Avohkii” card that nevertheless mentions “Great Kanohi Avohkii”, searchable by both Jaller and the Sealed Avohkii . By the way, if that “regular art” doesn’t look familiar, that’s because I (digitally) built it to have some non-movie representation of an Ash Bear. Might try to improve the look in future updates if I get my hands on the parts.

What it does is mostly one long effect, but with multiple options and applications. You can activate it from your hand or GY during any Main Phase, so it’s one of them shiny new-fangled turn 0 plays if you can meet the condition of either revealing the Avohkii in your hand or tributing a (properly Typed) Rahi from your hand or field (the latter is more expensive because it’s much easier to draw into in a Rahi deck, and tributing a Rahi from hand so it goes to the GY can actually lead into further plays). That lets you target a face-up card on either field, destroy it, and Special Summon Graalok to that same field. Some examples of how this can be used:

  • Your opponent activates a Continuous Spell on turn 1, you reveal an Avohkii to blow it up and give them Graalok instead, disrupting what they actually wanted to do.
  • Your opponent flips a floodgate, you get rid of it by chaining Graalok so you’re free to play the game.
  • You activate a Normal Spell during your Main Phase, then immediately target it with Graalok to get a free 2600 ATK monster on top of what you were already doing.
  • Mid-Avohkii combo, you use Graalok to blow up Ka, triggering the floating effect and handing you a board of not just two, but even three monsters.

And so on. Additional limitations to keep in mind are that using Graalok from the GY will make it go back to the Deck once it leaves the field, so you can’t keep doing it over and over, and that battling with it makes it return to the hand (or Deck, if that condition is applying).

This card is one case where the ATK/DEF values were actually somewhat carefully considered. 2600 ATK is just big enough to clear the “protagonist stat” of 2500 and matches Lewa Nuva (who comes to the rescue in the movie), while exactly 1800 DEF allows you to attack a Defense Position Graalok on your opponent’s field with Jaller to trigger the bounce and get it back to your hand (also much like what happens in the movie). Incidentally, these numbers on a Level 7 Beast are baboon stats, which is … not the right animal, but we are defending the forest here, so it works if you squint.

A Seventh Star

Continuous Spell

When this card is activated: You can target 1 “Avohkii” card in your GY or banishment; add it to your hand. Each time a monster(s) that mentions “Great Kanohi Avohkii” is Normal or Special Summoned, place counters on this card equal to how many of the following apply to at least 1 of those monsters.
●Warrior ●LIGHT ●Level 7 or higher ●cannot be Normal Summoned/Set
During the End Phase: You can send this card with 7 or more counters to the GY; draw until you have 7 total cards in your hand and field. You can only activate 1 “A Seventh Star” per turn.

Bionicle: Mask of Light (v5.1.2)

Anyway, on to the Spell/Trap lineup, so Pewku actually has some targets. First, here’s A Seventh Star, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, ASS. This Continuous Spell celestially foretells the coming of the Seventh Toa, first by adding a proper “Avohkii” card back to your hand on activation to either restart or extend your combo, and then by gathering counters as you go through various Avohkii-related monsters. The number of counters gained for each monster (or group of monsters) depends on how close it is to being a Level 7 or higher LIGHT Warrior that cannot be Normal Summoned or Set. What an odd assortment of conditions. I wonder who that’s for.

Anyway, the ultimate payoff for this is that if you get to 7 counters (which is consistently possible through the currently available combo lines), you get to draw to 7 in the End Phase – counting cards on the field as well, so it’s usually not as huge as it may sound. A pure Avohkii combo from a 5-card hand will draw 1-2, and if mixed with other engines that generate advantage, you can very well find yourself in the first-world problem position of ending on too many cards to draw at all. Where this card truly shines is if you have to trade advantage to counter an opponent’s disruption while performing your combo, or if you manage to stick it in a low-resource grind game. In situations like that, I’ve seen it draw up to 4 in testing, which puts you in a position from which it’s pretty hard to lose.

Yes, this card is searchable by Seventh Ascension. It’s probably not the most useful target in the Decks where that is played.

Light of the Mask

Trap

Target 1 face-up card your opponent controls; for the rest of this turn, your opponent cannot activate cards, or the effects of cards, with the same original name as that target, also you can reveal 1 “Great Kanohi Avohkii” in your hand, and if you do, send that opponent’s card to the GY. If this card is in your GY: You can target 1 “Avohkii” card in your GY; shuffle both it and this card into the Deck. You can only use each effect of “Light of the Mask” once per turn.

Bionicle: Mask of Light (v5.1.2)

Our first Trap is Light of the Mask, which lets you shine a guiding light on an opponent’s card to indicate they won’t be using that, or anything with its name, this turn. Oh wait, you shook the Avohkii too hard while revealing it in your hand and it shot out a fricken lazor that sent the target straight to the GY as well. Oops. Well, maybe it can still make use of some kind of GY effect … except it can’t, because it’s locked! Ha!

So basically, this is disruption in the form of floating-proof targeted removal if you have an Avohkii to reveal in hand, and if you draw it without a way into a proper setup (or generically, in any deck) it can still stop some select things your opponent may do, if they require putting a card on the field before activating its effect. In the GY, this card can also recycle itself and another “Avohkii” card (that is, the monsters except Graalok, or the Equip Spell), which keeps your resources in rotation, ensures you always have something to set with a revived Pewku, and can potentially dodge something like Called by the Grave since it’s inherently a Quick Effect due to being on a Trap Card.

Washed and Chilled

Trap

(This card is always treated as a “Nuva” card.)
If you control a face-up monster: Banish all face-up monsters on the field until the End Phase, then you can discard 1 WATER monster or reveal 1 “Great Kanohi Avohkii” in your hand, and if you do, Special Summon 1 of your banished monsters. You can only activate 1 “Washed and Chilled” per turn.

Bionicle: Mask of Light (v5.1.2)

Finally, Washed and Chilled provides a second option for the backrow. It works in a similar way to Light of the Mask, with a generic effect that can be upgraded by revealing the Avohkii during resolution, but aims for a potentially much higher impact by just banishing all face-up monsters on the field at once, for a limited time. The counterbalance to this massive disruption is that it only works if you yourself have face-up monsters to banish, but getting to the bonus part of the effect does at least let you summon 1 of them back right away – which can itself be an advantage by e.g. triggering Ka again. The main idea here is that firing this at a reasonable time will ensure you live to your next turn, where you can then strike back with the strong recovery features of the Avohkii cards.

Two curious points I haven’t touched on: It’s always treated as a “Nuva” card, and you can also get the bonus by discarding a WATER monster. Both of those reflect the fact that this card is based on an attack (and “cool” one-liner) by Kopaka Nuva , so you can integrate it into a Toa Nuva deck as well. It has especially high synergy with Kopaka, because summoning him back to an otherwise empty field will let him use his effect to banish, even a second time on the same turn due to being a soft OPT. I was specifically considering making use of this in the “Kopaka’s Bad Day” deck, but didn’t actually try it since there are more motivating ideas than playing a round of floodgate turbo.

Updated

Matoran Jaller, Avohkii Herald

Effect MonsterLevel 4 | FIRE Warrior | ATK 1800 / DEF 1200

You can Special Summon this card (from your hand) by revealing “Great Kanohi Avohkii” in your hand. You can only Special Summon “Matoran Jaller, Avohkii Herald” once per turn this way. If this card is Normal or Special Summoned: You can add 1 card that mentions “Great Kanohi Avohkii” from your Deck to your hand, except “Matoran Jaller, Avohkii Herald” or an Equip Spell. You can only use this effect of “Matoran Jaller, Avohkii Herald” once per turn.

Bionicle: Mask of Light (v5.1.2)

Just a small one within the archetype: Jaller now Special Summons himself from the hand as a procedure, i.e., without an activated effect. This was the result of various considerations, including balancing out the value provided by starting with Jaller vs starting with Takua, and opening up the theoretical possibility of a combo line that never triggers the K9 cards. The only reason I hadn’t previously done it was because an activated Summon effect can share its HOPT clause with the other effect, saving words, but whatever, Jaller still had enough room left. Truly the text box is a canvas waiting to be filled with legalese.

Strategy & Deck Options

Seeing how this release doesn’t just add some cards, but actually makes Avohkii properly functional as its own archetype, I should probably elaborate a bit on how it’s played. I mentioned above how the deck can consistently obtain a fully stacked ASS to draw some cards in the End Phase, so here’s a DB replay showing how that works (in a scenario where you have only the bare minimum resources for a nearly-1-card combo). It also demonstrates how that might not be the best thing to go for since you might just end up drawing 0 of your many handtraps, so in practice I prefer using more or less the same combo to search for a Trap and just going the ASS route as a bonus if I happen to have it.

In any case, you can tell these basic lines do not set up much of a board, only some points of disruption with Graalok, maybe a Trap, and whatever else you happen to have in your hand. But their strength lies in being very consistent and resilient in getting to some kind of play, and their ability to rebuild and recover very easily thanks to the Sealed Avohkii that stays in your hand. Combined with a good helping of generic power cards and handtraps, it’s actually pretty effective, and the best part is you get to play out all those Mask of Light scenes as seen here:

Alternatively, you could go off script a little and introduce a character who didn’t originally appear in the movie. A handsome individual who, given his LIGHT Attribute and Level of 6 could very well pass for the legendary Toa of Light, were he not so damn Fiendish. One who, while robbed of his most generic enabler, remains available through the Rank 4 plays that the Avohkii cards can so easily do.

That’s right, baby, the Masksmith is back.

By the power of Evilswarm Exciton Knight, the original Fiendsmith build of this deck still lives, and the best part is it’s now capable of pivoting into Fiendsmith AND back again! The trick to this is making Sequence and keeping it on the field after you Fusion Summon, acquiring a second (non-LIGHT!) monster via either ASS or Graalok, and linking the two into Ka. That Ka then explodes (or draws before being exploded by Graalok, if available) and gets back Jaller and Takua, letting you finish the combo on Pewku for your Trap of choice, long after making all the generic plays that the lock would prevent. It’s pretty effective, possibly the optimal form of Avohkii at this stage.

Other builds to consider include:

  • The previously covered Ryzeal-based 4vohkii – it didn’t get a huge buff here since the lock on Pewku makes it hard to use that particular Rank 4 as part of the strategy, but Jaller now being able to search Light of the Mask does give us an extra bit of disruption if we draw the Avohkii cards, and actually makes the recovery aspect work properly even without Gearbreed involved. Theoretically having Ka in the Extra Deck could give you a stealth route into Rank 4 access in some obscure situations, but it’s probably not worth the slot if we’re being honest.
  • Beast/Winged Beast Rahi with Graalok and Ka. Being more optimized for the Avohkii side, they don’t exactly represent a huge shift in how the Rahi deck is played, but they do provide both turn 0 plays and some interesting lines you can do without ever Synchro Summoning, which is nice to have I guess. Only tested this a little bit so far, though.
  • Kopaka’s Bad Day with Washed and Chilled. I may try this at some point when I feel like it – of course, if you feel like it, feel free to do it ahead of me and report results! Maybe it would even make sense to put the card into a regular Toa Nuva deck …

So much for that. Look forward to the next release, where the quest meets some opposition …

Deck Idea: Bohrok + Enneacraft

But this time, the idea isn’t mine: YouTube commenter @EditKingNumber5 astutely observed that there might be some synergy between Bohrok and the newly released Enneacraft archetype, both being Machine-Type Flip Monsters that Special Summon in face-down Defense Position.

So once I had an opportunity to slot in a little side task, I looked into that and cooked up an Enneacraft variant using the Bohrok as basically a self-recycling and self-replacing removal package.

https://www.duelingbook.com/deck?id=19104335

The design of Enneacraft itself is such that it’s very hard to make a lot of room for other things in the deck, so I ended up including just the three Bohrok that instantly shuffle themselves back for their effects, at one copy each – there isn’t much benefit to be gained from keeping bodies on the field since we’re basically always locked out of face-up Special Summons. To ensure somewhat consistent access, triple Beware the Swarm is a must, while Bohrok Invasion is a more optional tech that gives us a way to get the engine back online if a Bohrok lands in the GY. Another one I considered for a bit was Bohrok Counterattack just as a general negation backrow, but the fact that it needs a Krana somewhere and is dead as soon as you flip an Enneacraft makes it impractical.

Due to the aforementioned lock, the Extra Deck also consists entirely of things that we could theoretically make in some scenario but probably won’t, including the special spice of Nuhvok-Kal and Kohrak-Kal to broaden our removal options if two Bohrok ever stick around at the same time. Don’t count on it.

A quick test match against the AI proved reasonably successful:

The Bohrok cards actually came up more consistently than I would have expected, probably due to the Enneacraft searches thinning the deck a lot, making it that much more likely to find one of our 6 hits. Of course, if you weren’t playing Bohrok that would instead apply to generic power cards, so who knows if this really is a worthwhile way to build the deck. In any case, it activates the plastic crack neurons, and that’s all we’re here for anyway.

Deck Idea: 4vohkii

What’s FIRE, LIGHT, and has 4 stars? That’s right, Ryzeal. And also Jaller and Takua from the new Avohkii archetype. How curious. You could make a deck out of this.

https://www.duelingbook.com/deck?id=18820788

On a more technical Level, the appeal of this combination is in the fact that by using either Takua or the Sealed Avohkii as a starting point, you can make a Rank 4 Xyz without spending your Normal Summon or getting locked into anything. That makes it good for baiting out interactions before you limit your further options, and if undisrupted has potential to go into interesting lines that might be difficult otherwise. As a big bonus, the archetype gimmick of the Sealed Avohkii being back in the hand at the end of the combo also guarantees follow-up, provided you still have search targets in your Deck. See for yourself how it works here:

As with everything, there are of course tradeoffs. While 6 of the 7 (how topical a number) extra cards included get you to the combo as desired, Jaller by himself only does it if you spend your Normal Summon, which gets in the way of the Ryzeal half of the deck. Going first, the Sealed Avohkii will also only work if you can put a monster on the field without it already, so with certain hands the play:brick ratio will feel more like 3:4 than 6:1. The numbers get even less optimal if you play multiple copies of Jaller to enable the Avohkii’s follow-up functionality, though if you’re based like me, you can get around this by instead playing Gearbreed to recycle him for a draw (never mind that Gearbreed is also kind of a brick, it gets away with this due to being based, as previously established). Finally, the lack of restrictions on the whole thing comes at the cost of card economy: Searching with the Sealed Avohkii will force you to lose one of the other cards in your hand (because if you use it to add Jaller, you certainly do not want to discard either of the 2), and if you start with Takua before having any other Avohkii cards ready, he’ll also cost you a card to Special Summon. Can feel pretty bad in a deck like Ryzeal, where your hand tends to be stacked with useful engine cards and handtraps, but well, first-world problem if I’ve ever seen one.

So, all things considered, is Avohkii Ryzeal going to be the next big thing for Rank 4 enthusiasts once I break into the Konami servers and install my expansions into the official card pool? Eh, probably not. The ability to get a “free” Rank 4 without so much as an Xyz lock is certainly enticing, but so far the most special thing I was able to do with it is make Utopic Draco Future as part of the endboard, which is also possible with existing engines like Sharks and takes just enough steps to lose to Nibiru. Assuming there’s nothing else crazy I completely missed, the slight awkwardness of ratios and the discards would probably make this a package that’s just worth considering rather than anything life-changing.

Another perhaps more realistically relevant thing I was trying to test here: Is it a balancing issue to let Takua be Special Summoned unconditionally at a slight cost, thus making the entire setup fairly splashable? The results so far say no, but of course the payoff isn’t yet complete without Jaller having anything to search other than a second Takua. At the very least, I feel confident in saying that the engine’s ability to Special Summon two Level 4 monsters in and of itself is not broken, we’ll see how it looks in general after the next update.

By the way, if it were to turn out we can’t get away with Avohkii plays being quite so free, my go-to solution would be to simply change Takua to “If you control a card(s) that mentions “Great Kanohi Avohkii”, you can Special Summon this card from your hand”. That leaves the Equip Spell, which is slightly conditional by nature, as the only thing that can get you started without the Normal Summon. A convenient side benefit of this change would be that the effect would no longer activate in the hand, making it possible to play around the K9 cards if needed. Come to think of it, Jaller’s SS effect could also perfectly well be a non-activated summoning condition, provided I spend some extra words on the HOPT clause.

Hmmm. Food for thought, for sure.

Release: BMOL First Drafts

The time has come once more: New expansion, new archetypes, and a new chapter of lore to adapt. Grab your popcorn buckets, because we’re going to the movies with Mask of Light! And Mata Nui Online Game II, that’s here too.

Install via EDOPro Configuration

Sample Decks

While Protodermic Evolution consisted mostly of upgrades for Toa and Bohrok, this set builds up some new strategies from the ground up, but will also add a fresh coat of polish to the six -Koro strategies that have been neglected for these last few years. Here’s the details.

New Archetypes/Cards

Avohkii

The Avohkii archetype is the one that tells the story of the movie from the perspective of its protagonists: The two humble Matoran who discover the Mask of Light and embark on a quest to find the seventh Toa destined to wield it. Its basic idea is a simple, consistent setup engine that gets you the Main Characters on the field and the Kanohi Avohkii itself to the hand, as well as access to a variety of searchable cards representing events, characters, and concepts from the movie.

Regular Art

Matoran Jaller, Avohkii Herald

Effect MonsterLevel 4 | FIRE Warrior | ATK 1800 / DEF 1200

You can reveal 1 “Great Kanohi Avohkii” in your hand; Special Summon this card from your hand. If this card is Normal or Special Summoned: You can add 1 card that mentions “Great Kanohi Avohkii” from your Deck to your hand, except “Matoran Jaller, Avohkii Herald” or an Equip Spell. You can only use each effect of “Matoran Jaller, Avohkii Herald” once per turn.

Bionicle: Mask of Light (v5.0.2)
Movie Style Art

The first of these we look at in detail is Jaller, leader of the party and the Avohkii’s chosen herald – or so it seems. Befitting his role, he gets to enter the field for free if you have the shiny mask to show off in your hand, and searches most of the cards related to it on summon. The notable omission from this are Equip Spells, because as we know, it is not Jaller’s role to find the mask itself.

Regular Art

Matoran Takua, Avohkii Chronicler

Effect MonsterLevel 4 | LIGHT Warrior | ATK 1500 / DEF 1500

You can reveal 1 other card in your hand; Special Summon this card from your hand, then send the revealed card to the GY unless you control 2 or more cards that mention “Great Kanohi Avohkii”. During your Main Phase: You can equip 1 “Avohkii” Equip Spell from your hand, Deck, or GY to 1 “Avohkii” monster you control. You can only use each effect of “Matoran Takua, Avohkii Chronicler” once per turn.

Bionicle: Mask of Light (v5.0.2)
Movie Style Art

That honor goes to Takua, tagging along to chronicle the historic events unfolding as a result of his serendipitous discovery (even if he’d rather have nothing to do with it). This is the guy who gets you the Equip Spells missing from Jaller’s portfolio, and as a funny little reference to his attempt to dodge responsibility, he can even equip them to another “Avohkii” monster you control – convenient side effect is not always losing to Ghost Ogre. He also has a way to be Special Summoned from the hand by revealing a card, but since his time to shine is precisely when you don’t have the Avohkii yet, any card whatsoever will do; in exchange, you’ll be losing that card if you do this without having prior Avohkii setup.

Basically, what this somewhat convoluted sequence tries to achieve is letting Takua work both as a search off a Normal Summoned Jaller, in which case you’ll get to bring him out at no cost, or as a separate starter who does not take up the Normal Summon, but will make you lose an additional card from the hand. More importantly, going through this effect step by step matches up with the way he talks while hopping across lava in the movie, which I found very funny and was perhaps 70% of the reason I ended up going this way. Mechanically speaking, it really might be better to make the Special Summon only if you control an “Avohkii” card and require the Normal Summon otherwise, so it might still change to that once I get tired of the joke in a later version.

Regular Art

Avohkii, Sealed Mask of Light

Equip Spell

This card’s name becomes “Great Kanohi Avohkii” while in your hand. While this card is equipped to a monster: You can return this card to the hand; add 1 “Great Kanohi Avohkii” or 1 monster that mentions it from your Deck to your hand, and if you do, send 1 card from your hand to the GY. You can only use this effect of “Avohkii, Sealed Mask of Light” once per turn.

Bionicle: Mask of Light (v5.0.2)
Movie Style Art

Finally, all this talk about using Takua as a starter only makes sense with the context of the one and only Equip Spell he can get at this point in time: Avohkii, Sealed Mask of Light. Or Sealed Avohkii for short.

Revealing the Avohkii in hand is meant to become a recurring element in this theme, so this one takes on that specific name while it is in your hand. That means double the cards you can draw to unlock all those benefits, and at the current preliminary stage it is in fact the only thing you can reveal to satisfy the Special Summon requirement on Jaller. Truly unsealing the Avohkii will take some more time, despite it already being referenced all over the place.

This card is also crucial to the engine’s functioning because, after equipping it, you can return it to your hand to search any Avohkii-related monster, though you’ll have to give up a card in exchange so the advantage math works out right. That bridges Takua to Jaller, or lets you get to either of them if any equip target is present on the field. The fact that it bounces for cost is especially powerful, as that immediately gives you a Kanohi Avohkii to reveal and sets up follow-up for the next turn in the form of another search. It is, however, vulnerable for the small window between equipping it and activating the effect, where a savvy opponent may just chain MST and take that valuable resource away.

The slightly odd search pool of specifically the actual, currently non-existent Avohkii and the monsters (but only the monsters) that mention it came about through the following reasoning: Obviously you need the monsters so the combos work, as explained above. But if you could also search Spells and Traps, you could just play a package of Sealed Avohkii and some convenient backrow cards, many of which are planned to use the hand reveal gimmick and therefore may very well be able to wield their full power in such a scenario. That didn’t seem proper, so those searches have been locked behind Jaller instead, forcing you to play a fuller Avohkii party if you want access to their cards. Finally, searching the real Avohkii itself represents the “unsealing” (for maximum lore accuracy, you should send the Sealed Avohkii to the GY when resolving this effect) – originally it was planned to have this search happen when the Sealed Avohkii is destroyed, but having an effect that only searches a currently non-existent card seemed a bit too weird after all. We’ll see where we end up with that in the long run.

https://www.duelingbook.com/deck?id=18397294

Thusly equipped with three combo pieces that can all get us to the desired setup, we build a first simple deck to make use of it. And where does this repeatable engine that puts two monsters on the field lead us? Into a LIGHT Fiend for Fiendsmith combos, of course.

Other points of note are Rank 4 access through the main combo, the possibility of Chaos Angel with Takua + Engraver, and two neat little packages that further enhance consistency by getting Takua directly from the Deck. One consists of Gen, Ken, and Triple Tactics Thrust to search Naming Day and upgrade the Level 3 LIGHT Warrior you Summoned into the Level 4 LIGHT Warrior you need. The other is Taipu and Prima Light (a card so fresh off the presses I had to use a custom on DB), letting you trade a free EARTH Warrior for a LIGHT Warrior. In a grind game, Gearbreed also shows its worth as a fun tech card, since it lets you recycle Jaller to get value off the Sealed Avohkii in your hand truly forever.

Here’s where I would normally put a sample video, but in this case it’s more a showcase of how the basic combo aligns with what we see in the movie. Worth a watch anyway (he said, unbiasedly).

As you probably noticed above, this is also the first time in this project I’m using alternative artworks – one version coming from the usual set/comic/game sources, and another directly using movie screencaps. Not everyone is a fan of the highly stylized character designs Miramax used (personally I think they’re okay, but easily at their worst in this first movie), so now you get to play whichever you prefer. However, the stone seal on the Avohkii was only ever depicted in movie form, so for that one I had to put my rather limited art skills to work for the first time since Lhii .

Artwork for Sealed Avohkii in full size

Currently the Card Viewer just shows these alt arts as separate cards, as they are in the database. If life stops being so damn busy at some point, I’ll hopefully get a nicer way to include them done.

Future updates for the Avohkii theme will add a variety of searchable Spells and Traps based on scenes from the movie, and a small set of Extra Deck monsters across different summoning types that help you build up advantage while always cycling back into Jaller and Takua. Over the course of a duel, you should (at least theoretically) be able to recreate their journey step by step, from discovering the Mask of Light all the way to finding the seventh Toa.

Kraata

Far away from the light, strange beings crawl through the shadows. They are the Makuta’s own substance, the source of the infected masks that have placed the island’s Rahi under his control, and wielders of many dreadful powers. Introducing the second theme of the set: The Kraata, tiny 0/0 DARK Fiend critters that swarm the field and spread devastation to your opponent’s monsters through the physical contact of battle.

… Yes, I am aware about half of that description overlaps with Yubel, but I swear this concept was in my drafts long before that deck got the modern support wave that made it functional. And taking a closer look at the cards will reveal some major points of distinction in the specifics.

Explosive Kraata Xi

Effect MonsterLevel 1 | DARK Fiend | ATK 0 / DEF 0

If this card is Normal or Special Summoned: You can add 1 “Kraata” monster from your Deck to your hand, except “Explosive Kraata Xi”. You can only use this effect of “Explosive Kraata Xi” once per turn. Cannot be destroyed by battle. At the end of the Damage Step, if this card battled an opponent’s monster with ATK less than or equal to this card’s Level x 600: You can destroy that monster, then destroy all cards your opponent controls in its adjacent Monster Zones or Spell & Trap Zones, also increase this card’s Level by 1.

Bionicle: Mask of Light (v5.0.2)

The best point to start is probably the Kraata Xi, the one that simply searches another monster from its archetype when summoned. That’s already the first obvious difference from Yubel, the fact that these aren’t high-Level bosses, but small combo pieces that try to gather in great numbers. Accordingly, their battle protection does not go as far as keeping battle damage away from your LP, and the offensive effects that represent their unique powers only work on enemies up to a certain ATK stat, determined by the Kraata’s own current Level (or “stage”, as it would correctly be called in lore terms). That means they’re more a bonus rather than your primary win condition, usually.

The Xi’s power is Fragmentation – making stuff explode. When it successfully does so to a monster, the splash damage also catches the surrounding cards, so you can do some real field clearing with this if you’re up against careless use of zones. A successful use of its power raises a Kraata Xi’s Level by 1, and thus the ATK threshold for its next target by 600.

Erosive Kraata Ul

Effect MonsterLevel 1 | DARK Fiend | ATK 0 / DEF 0

If you control no face-up monsters, except DARK Fiend monsters: You can Special Summon this card from your hand, then you can add 1 “Kraata” Spell/Trap from your Deck to your hand, also you cannot Special Summon Effect Monsters for the rest of this turn, except DARK Fiend monsters. You can only use this effect of “Erosive Kraata Ul” once per turn. Cannot be destroyed by battle. Monsters your opponent controls lose ATK/DEF equal to this card’s Level x 600.

Bionicle: Mask of Light (v5.0.2)

To make those thresholds a bit more attainable, you may want to pair your attacker with the support of a Kraata Ul, using its Disintegration ability to passively wear away at the stats of your opponent’s monsters. Here we actually see an anti-synergy with Yubel, which wants the opponent’s monsters as big as possible for the purpose of damage reflection.

This one also contributes to the swarming aspect by being able to Special Summon itself as long as your field is exclusively DARK Fiends (or empty), and on top of that it acts as a Spell/Trap searcher when you do that. Since this is rather powerful, it comes with a lock into the aforementioned Type/Attribute combination, though curiously only for Effect Monsters. I will not elaborate on this beyond pointing out that Energized Protodermis Destiny needs to make a LIGHT Aqua Token so it can Fusion Summon.

Kraata Stasis Breach

Field Spell

Each time you activate a “Kraata” monster effect, increase the Level of all “Kraata” monsters you control by 1 immediately after it resolves. You can only use each of the following effects of “Kraata Stasis Breach” once per turn. If a DARK Fiend monster(s) is Normal or Special Summoned to your field (except during the Damage Step): You can add 1 “Kraata” monster from your Deck or GY to your hand, with a different name from the cards you control. If this card is sent to the GY: You can target 1 “Kraata” monster in your GY or banishment; Special Summon it in Attack Position.

Bionicle: Mask of Light (v5.0.2)

The previous card kind of left two questions hanging, namely “what Kraata Spells/Traps” and “how does this gain Levels”. Both are answered by the Field Spell, which is a Spell (duh) and advances all your Kraata by 1 each time one of their effects resolves. That means putting a few of them on the field while this is up can actually get you to a point where the battle effects are a reasonable threat to an established board.

Like any Field Spell you want to be run at 3 copies should do, it also enhances consistency, in this case by translating any DARK Fiend you Summon into a Kraata in your hand. In testing, this turned out to give pretty insane value over time because a lot of DARK Fiend stuff can also Summon on the opponent’s turn, and in light of future plans I’m almost considering making it add only from the Deck and also requiring a name different from the ones in your GY. But with only 2 Kraata in existence right now, I didn’t want to impose that restriction just yet.

And finally, as a Makuta-related Spell/Trap, it does something in the GY, namely reborn a Kraata when sent there. This is kind of a flavor effect to represent the actual “Breach” that happens in the Kraata Cave moments after the card image. Hence why it summons in Attack Position, that Kraata is ready to strike.

By the way, in case the monsters had you wondering if there were really images so directly focusing on the Kraata using their powers, there actually weren’t. In fact, there was basically no usable promotional art of any specific Kraata type, forcing me to break out the literal drawing board for the second and third time in this single release. The shit I put up with, seriously.

Artwork for Kraata Xi in full size
Artwork for Kraata Ul in full size

Looking forward to doing this at least four more times for this archetype, oh joy. Hell, might as well go for the other 36 Kraata types that totally needed to exist while I’m already at it.

https://www.duelingbook.com/deck?id=18397603

In spite of all the differences explained above, you do actually play these with Yubel and the related usual suspects for now. It’s just the most effective combo shell that falls in line with the DARK Fiend lock, other than sometimes not being able to use the red dog. The recent TCG exclusive Fiend Fusion support is also pretty good here, letting you bridge from the more generic combos into Kraata via Aerial Eater.

In fact, the plan for future versions, other than adding the remaining Kraata, calls for Rahkshi in the form of Fusion Monsters, so that’s a very promising direction. Those will also act as proper boss monsters that can deal with stuff too high on the ATK ladder for squishy little Kraata, so I expect the awkward inclusion of Yubel specifically may go away as we approach completion.

See below for some test footage with this deck.

The Final Chronicle

Finally (haha), this set includes a second Matoran-based engine, hailing from Mata Nui Online Game II: The Final Chronicle. Rather than a standalone thing, this is something you can add to any of the established Koro decks, along with other new cards to enhance those strategies.

Matoran Chronicler Hahli

Effect MonsterLevel 4 | WATER Warrior | ATK 1400 / DEF 1400

Gains 300 ATK for each “The Principle” card with a different name in your GY and/or banishment. You can only use each of the following effects of “Matoran Chronicler Hahli” once per turn. If this card is in you hand (Quick Effect): You can target 1 Warrior monster you control, except “Matoran Chronicler Hahli”; return it to the hand/Extra Deck, and if you do, Special Summon this card. If this card is Normal or Special Summoned: You can add 1 “The Principle” card from your Deck to your hand.

Bionicle: Mask of Light (v5.0.2)

The core of it all is Hahli, a Ga-Matoran surprisingly chosen to represent her village in the Kolhii championship. This task has her journeying across Mata Nui, learning the Principles of each village that form the foundation of their Kolhii Skills. Therefore: She searches those Principles and grows stronger the more of them you apply. For smooth integration in the different decks, all it takes to summon her is bouncing a Warrior you control, which doubles as a way to dodge stuff and triples as a reference to her spontaneously replacing Kotu on the team. Poor Kotu, they don’t let her have shit.

The Principle Of Purity

Quick-Play Spell

Target 1 “Matoran”, “Toa”, or “Turaga” monster you control and 1 face-up card your opponent controls; negate their effects until the end of this turn, then, if all monsters in your GY are the same Attribute (min. 1), you can destroy that opponent’s card. At the end of the Damage Step, if your Warrior monster attacked: You can banish this card from your GY; it can make a second attack in a row. You can only use each effect of “The Principle of Purity” once per turn.

Bionicle: Mask of Light (v5.0.2)

And now for the Principles, starting from the first one you encounter in the game: Purity. As I certainly mentioned in some article way back when, the effects of the six Koro Field Spells were actually modeled on these in, uh, principle, so the basic idea for their direct representation in cards is to have them kind of loosely be one-shot versions of whatever the Field Spells do. In the case of Ga-Koro , its focus is protecting your plays from interference as long as you keep your GY “pure”, so the associated Principle of Purity similarly offers negation to protect your plays and adds removal if you happen to have a pure GY.

Other than the fundamental mechanical differences between a static Field Spell and a dynamic Quick-Play Spell, the Principle version adds a requirement of having a Matoran/Toa/Turaga to negate along with the target card, and indeed all of them will be restricted to working with those archetypes. You’ll have to play the villagers if you want to make use of their culture. Meanwhile, there isn’t any explicit Attribute synergy here (as that would make it hard to use Hahli with other villages), but Ga-Matoran do still align especially well with this Principle due to the Quick Effects they tend to have being able to slip past the negation before it applies.

A secondary thing each of these six cards will offer is a GY effect that grants some benefit to Warrior monsters. This is the Kolhii skill derived from the Principle, and for Purity that means Speed, simply allowing an extra attack.

https://www.duelingbook.com/deck?id=18397567

For testing, I integrated the new cards into a Ga-Koro deck that aims to set up the dream team of Nokama and Chengying. Icejade Ran Aegirine helps us do the latter somewhat consistently, while the former can generally be cobbled together from Ga-Matoran. Ice Doll is also convenient for several reasons, one being that it’s an extra body, another that it gets you a card in hand for Nokama’s discard, and another that its Mirror is a somewhat useful Spell/Trap that Nixie can send to the GY if you miss with her effect.

Here, big Hahli (not to be confused with small Level 2 Hahli ) serves her intended purpose of just sneaking into a Ga-Matoran setup whenever you happen to draw her, getting you a copy of Purity to further counter anything that may still threaten your board. The End Phase effect of Nokama can also get her back to the hand, so you can actually repeat that move as often as the Principles in your deck allow (so twice in this case – seems to be enough).

And once again, a testing video. I would like to draw your attention to the faithfully recreated MNOG2 loading screens and UI popups, those were pretty fun to do.

That concludes the preview, thanks for coming. The next update will consist of the first dedicated wave of support to the Avohkii deck, hope to see you again then!

Designer’s Quip: Second Step in the Combo

At the time of this writing, the core archetypes of the new Mask of Light set are currently being worked out and getting their first few cards made. Usually, a good place to start doing this is at the start, or rather the starter – the first step in the combo that kicks off everything else. The design for this part is pretty straightforward, it’s simply a card that gets you to your other cards that do the stuff you’re trying to do. But what I’ve found recently is that things get a lot more fuzzy once you advance to the second step – the first card that you get to that then further enables the stuff you’re trying to do. Intuitively, this is something that extends your combo, so it’s easy to assume we can just apply the widely used term “extender” and be done, but as I’ll go on to elaborate, not every second step in a combo necessarily has the properties people tend to associate with extenders.

Let’s begin by defining more specifically what I mean when using these words. My understanding may differ slightly from that of any given reader or even the general community, especially as the use of terminology has evolved and continues to evolve with the game, so we won’t get anywhere without cleary setting out what things mean for the purpose of this writeup.

  • The combo is the sequence of plays leading towards a certain game state a deck was built to achieve. Some decks have a single linear combo, some have many different paths leading to the same goal, others have multiple paths and goals, and again others just use their combo to accumulate resources and use them for a control style of gameplay. Any such sequence falls under the umbrella of “combo” here, not just the ones found in big spreadsheet decks. For the purpose of our examples, we’ll specifically consider a combo that leads to a field of two monsters A and B, potentially with some further advantage like B searching a Spell/Trap or whatever.
  • A starter is a card which, if present in your opening hand, holds the potential to access the combo, with no prior setup required on your field, GY, or banishment. Starters that also work if nothing else is in your hand are 1-card starters, while those that need resources from the hand but aren’t picky are 1.x-card starters (where x is arbitrarily chosen based on how hard it is to satisfy the requirement). A card that only works as a starter if (n-1) other specific cards are present in your hand is a n-card starter, and I suppose it’s also valid for a starter to require setup on your opponent’s side (we could call this a conditional starter).
  • An extender is a card that allows you to execute some portion of the combo, if and only if certain conditions are fulfilled in your field, GY, and/or banishment (in rare cases, other values like LP may be involved as well). Aside from being crucial to follow up your starter and actually make it into a combo, having an extender in your opening hand also allows you to extend and continue playing if your starter is stopped; this is the specific property I would argue is inherent to extenders, but not always to a “second step”.
  • The second step in the combo is specifically the thing you do immediately after your starter resolves. What exactly it is depends on the form of the combo, in many cases it can also act as an extender, but its one and only defining property is, as the name suggests, the point at which it comes up in the combo.

Now for some different design approaches.

Design 1: The Taketomborg

The most classic extender-style second step, a monster that is added to the hand by the starter and can Special Summon itself from there if you control a monster from some category (e.g. archetype) that also includes the starter. So if everything resolves, you get to the goal of the combo with only the investment required by your starter, and if the starter is stopped, having the extender already in hand allows you to keep going and end up in the same place, just with 1 less extra card.

However, if you draw a card of this type as your initial piece of engine, you won’t be able to fulfill that condition to Special Summon it, making it either a brick or a Normal Summonable alternative starter – generally for a line not quite as good as the main starter’s, because otherwise that one wouldn’t be the main starter.

Finally, it’s worth noting there are a few seemingly exchangable, but actually quite distinct ways to write a “Special Summon self from hand” effect on card B.

a) If you control "A", you can Special Summon this card (from your hand).

Technically not an effect, but a procedure – doesn’t activate, can’t be hit by effect negates, but is vulnerable to the rarer Summon negates. At this particular point in time, the fact that this type of Special Summon plays around K9 can also be considered a significant advantage.

b) If you control "A": You can Special Summon this card from your hand.

Activates in the hand, thus can be chained to and negated. Arguably a strictly weaker version of the above, but also easier to adjust for synergy with more specific archetype gimmicks (for example, you can make it a Quick Effect). I’m also fond of this one because it can be covered by a regular HOPT clause along with the on-field effects, rather than needing its own “can only Special Summon … once per turn this way”.

c) If you control "A": You can Special Summon this card from your hand, then you can [...].

Not so much a variant as it is an extension of the (b) approach. This is an effect that activates in the hand, and then, while it resolves, performs an additional action rather than leaving that to a separate on-Summon trigger. Put simply, in the case where the action consists of searching something, this plays around Imperm at the cost of losing harder to Ash Blossom. Bit of an all eggs in one basket tradeoff.

Within the Bionicle YGOPro Expansion, somewhat straightforward examples of this design are Tamaru (who also works from the GY with a discard cost) and Midak (who sends an EARTH monster instead of directly Summoning himself).

Design 2: The Faris

Where the major weakness of Design 1 was its inability to leverage the free Special Summon in situations without the conditions provided by at least attempting to use a regular starter first, this next one aims to also cover those cases … for a price, that is.

The essence of this approach is a Special Summon that does not rely on particular preconditions, but just asks you to invest resources from your initial pool of cards and/or LP. The titular example I’ve chosen is Vision HERO Faris, who can be Special Summoned from the hand with an activated effect discarding another “HERO” as cost, and then advances your game plan once he has hit the field. As a classic second step, you can use this after Normal Summoning Stratos and searching it, but there’s also the option to Special Summon it as the first step if you open it directly.

A more modern example is Diabellstar, who instead gets brought out with a non-activated summoning procedure and has a far more generic cost, but functions much the same in principle – you can extend with it when you’re already playing, or start your plays by investing a resource less critical than the prized Normal Summon.

All of this, however, is contingent on being able to pay the cost. If you have zero cards in hand and your draw for turn is Faris, you can only Normal Summon it (and not even that is possible with the Level 7 Diabellstar). Worse, if your draw is Stratos, searching Faris won’t do anything, even though this would be full combo under Design 1. We also should not overlook that, in terms of card economy, having to pay even a small cost is going to add up in the long run; the tradeoff for greater starter/extender versatility is, in this case, being a bit less efficient at each of those things.

In BYE, a curious example of this design exists in the form of Taipu , whose Special Summon is seemingly free, but actually comes at the “cost” of restricting your attacks for that turn. Can be a surprisingly big problem outside of turn 1.

Design 3: The Poplar

Now for a category that has recently gained popularity: The second steps that, somehow, manage to not be extenders. They achieve this by having their effects that bring them to the field trigger specifically when added to your hand (by a card effect, or by any means except drawing, or even by any means except the normal draw), which is just what the first step of the combo does.

The namesake of this design is, of course, Snake-Eyes Poplar, which summons itself as the second step of the combo if added by the starter Snake-Eye Ash. What’s notable about the titular Poplar is that it’s a very powerful card even in isolation, capable of acting as a starter itself by searching Original Sinful Spoils and providing additional setup or recovery when it hits the GY. So I suspect that this particular design was chosen to conserve the power budget, so to speak, making sure you’re not able to access all these benefits for free unless you manage to resolve the preceding combo steps that search Poplar – having it in your hand already won’t help you if your Ash gets Ash’d.

Of course, technically having a card with this design can still increase the number of traditional extenders in your deck, because it grants that role to e.g. any Spell that’s able to search it. It’s certainly no coincidence Poplar and Bonfire were released only months apart.

And I guess it bears mentioning that, even though it has become the name everyone associates with this kind of effect, Poplar didn’t actually invent it. Machina Unclaspare had the exact same clause years before, and R-Genex Oracle did it (in a more archetype-locked fashion) all the way back in 2010.

In BYE … we haven’t used this yet, the design work so far mostly happened before this fad started. But it may just pop up somehwere sooner or later, since it is a pretty neat trick for giving something the second step role without directly increasing the number of extenders.

Design 4: The Deep Sea Diva

I know what you’re thinking. “Deep Sea Diva? That one’s not a second step! It’s just a starter!” Which, yes, but the end result of using the starter is suspiciously similar to the two-step combos where A searches B and then B comes down to the field. By having the starter Summon directly from the deck, the second step has been rolled into the first.

So what’s the advantage of doing it like this? Well, it lets you include a much wider range of cards into that basic setup of two monsters on the field, not just the ones that provide their own way to make the jump from hand to field. Diva enables this for all low-level Sea Serpents, and even less generic incarnations like the modern powerhouse Ice Ryzeal give access to their whole archetype without needing to use up any additional effects.

And the downside? Mainly that it spends power budget like crazy, hence why both Diva and Ice only do their thing if you invest the Normal Summon into them. It also concentrates a lot more power in a single card, making it a much more enticing and valuable target for any disruption your opponent may have. To top it off, if you’re using this kind of effect to bring out cards that otherwise cannot Special Summon themselves, that very trait means they won’t work as extenders if you do get disrupted – though Ryzeal has solved this issue quite handily by still giving everything in the archetype some ability to self-Summon, Ice just lets you skip that step so you can use it to extend later.

The example for this in BYE is Takua , who mixes in a bit of a fancy excavation gimmick, but ultimately works out to a guaranteed Special Summon of any Chronicler’s Company member from the Deck if you invest your Normal Summon.

Closing Thoughts

All in all, which design should we use? It depends™. If you want your card B to also work as an extender if card A is stopped, then the free conditional Special Summon fits best. But if card B is useful to bring out all by itself as well, it may be worth adding a cost so you can do that without requiring a condition or using the Normal Summon. Finally, designs 3 and 4 act as more specific adjustments to the power budget of the individual cards, the options they give you in deck building, and how effectively your opponent can interact with the combo. Hard to make a general statement on those, but it’s certainly worth keeping them in mind as options.