Category: Releases

Release: Le-Koro & The Map of Mata Nui

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This month’s release is a double feature: On the one hand, we have Le-Koro, the final village to receive its overhaul with a dedicated strategy – all detail on this can be found in the Theme Guide. On the other, we have one additional card that boosts the consistency of all the Koro-focused decks I’ve been putting together for the past few months: The Island of Mata Nui. With all six villages and the island itself now accounted for, I have also written an overall Theme Guide for this archetype of Field Spells, so just check there to see how exactly all of this works.

In the “Updated” section, there’s just one change to the Kanohi Kaukau that I may have mentioned before. Rather than protecting from Spell/Trap effects, it now protects from all non-targeting effects instead.

v3.14.3

Great Kanohi Kaukau

Equip Spell

If another “Kanohi” card is equipped to the equipped monster, destroy this card. If the equipped monster is a “Toa” or “Makuta” monster, it is unaffected by other Spell/Trap effects. If this card is sent to the GY: You can banish 1 monster from your GY; add 1 “Toa Mata Gali” from your Deck to your hand. You can only use this effect of “Great Kanohi Kaukau” once per turn.

Bionicle: Coming of the Toa (v3.14.3)
v3.17.4

Great Kanohi Kaukau

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 is unaffected by your opponent’s card effects, unless they target it. If this card is sent to the GY: You can banish 1 monster from your GY; add 1 “Toa Mata Gali” from your Deck to your hand. You can only use this effect of “Great Kanohi Kaukau” once per turn.

Bionicle: Coming of the Toa (v3.21.6)

This was done in conjunction with the Le-Koro release changing the Miru from something that avoids monster effects to something that avoids targeting effects – now they complement each other just as before, and their respective original ideas (protection from environmental conditions vs avoiding stuff by floating out of range) are, in my opinion, represented better than ever.

Finally, it has occured to me that design notes should probably be more separated from theme guides than they have been so far, so for the first time ever I’ll just do them right here in the release post as a quick list.

  • This month I had to split the time allotted to this project between more things than usual (Le-Koro, updating the other Koro strategies with Mata Nui, an additional video, and building the card viewer plugin for the site). Therefore I wasn’t able to do quite as much experimenting and fine-tuning as I would have otherwise, and in particular Matau’s delayed floating might see some changes in the future. There’s some usability concerns with the current version (like having no explicit indication of what the target is in EDOPro), and I’m not sure if it wouldn’t be better to have the bonus in case you’re behind on field presence be something like reducing the stats of the opponent’s monsters to lessen the hurdle of a comeback rather than just giving you an extra card.
  • The Mahiki unfortunately had to lose one of its effects from the old version (making the created Token the only available attack target) to keep the text length within reasonable bounds. Maybe I’ll add it back in as a separate card, but I can’t imagine it being very useful.
  • Lewa is the second Toa Mata after Kopaka to receive a stat change, in this case from 2500 ATK/1400 DEF to 2200 ATK/1900 DEF. This way, the team is spread over the whole ATK range from 2000 to 2500 without any duplicates, and I think it makes sense for the one with the removal effect to have comparatively low utility as a beatstick. I also briefly considered making him 2300 ATK and putting the 2200 on Gali instead, but being able to easily run over Gameciel seemed more valuable to the Ga-Koro strategy.

And with all that said, see you in the next release! Maybe it’s finally time for the Toa Mata to get their Extra Deck back.

Release: Unbreakable Ko-Koro

Back to our regularly scheduled trip around the island of Mata Nui, we now arrive in the snowy realm of Ko-Wahi and enter the Village of Ice. However, unlike the previous updates of this sort, this is a BYE release rather than a BCOT release, which means all the Rahi and Bohrok cards are in the package as well! (I didn’t change them since the previous version, but they’re there)

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As for what I did change with this version, well first of all you can just check the overview right above. For more detailed information and design notes on the new Ko-Koro cards, I refer you to the Theme Guide, and the other update I’ll go over briefly right here.

C.C. Matoran Maku got the change I talked about a few months ago, with her handtrap effect to make a monster unaffected by effects for the duration of a Chain getting moved to the field so it aligns better with observed Warrior design conventions. In exchange, it’s a bit easier to get her on the field now, since she can be Special Summoned from the hand as well if your opponent activates an effect in the wrong column.

That concludes the summary for this release, thanks for reading! If you have anything to say about these updates, simply leave a comment below.

Just one village left now …

Release: BCOR and BBTS – The EDOPro Update

The first three expansions I made as part of this project (Coming of the Toa, Challenge of the Rahi, and Beware the Swarm) were developed for YGOPro Percy, which means the old releases have some compatibility issues with the current EDOPro. For BCOT, I’m currently in the process of resolving this by doing a complete overhaul that also fixes the glaring design flaws in there, and fixing the rest was kind of put off until after that. But then, I figured some basic compatibility updates couldn’t take that long, and here we are: The first complete release of the Bionicle YGOPro Expansion for EDOPro!

Download here

Since overarching lore connections already resulted in some dependencies between different expansions “packs”, I’ve been meaning for a while to move from the single-pack release mode to one where all of them are treated as an unified whole, so this is a very good step in the right direction. On that note, it’s worth pointing out that this is essentially only a new release mode, not a new version – only scripts were updated and no card designs were changed from the latest v3.15.5, so that number remains in effect for all the cards found here.

In the future, all updates will come as this kind of full package, even if all cards changed are from one single expansion pack. This will simplify future cross-expansion updates, such as redesigning the Rahi archetype which has members in both BCOR and BBTS, as it allows smoothly doing those whenever I feel like it without needing to touch the rest of the respective expansions.

Anyway, for a quick look at the updated scripts and some of the cards that are now available for play, look no further than the video below.

As you can see, there’s a lot to try out, so if you haven’t already, I recommend you click the download link near the start of the post and have some fun! As always, feedback is greatly appreciated.

Release: Carvers of Po-Koro

As previously announced, here’s Po-Koro, freshly reworked!

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For a detailed introduction to the new cards, best check out the Theme Guide all about them. There, you can also find a sample decklist and Best of Test demo video, so really no reason to repeat any of that stuff here.

Aside from that, the one update of the release is C.C. Matoran Taipu, whose non-OPT ATK boosting effect was adjusted so it can only be used on monsters with less than 2000 ATK. While stats barely matter, the ability to make arbitrary monsters arbitrarily big if you can just repeatedly send this one card from field to GY seemed a bit abusable, so now it’s more limited to its intended purpose. But you can still cheat by using multiple in the same chain 😉

And finally, just one more thing:

A card I did not update, but identified as possibly needing changes, is C.C. Matoran Maku. What I noticed is that the Warrior type does not really have any hand traps with significant effects outside battle, which might be a legitimate Konami design rule due to how searchable Warriors are. Maku’s ability to protect a target from pretty much any one effect stands out as uncharacteristically useful in this light, so I might need to get rid of that ability.

However, I already have the whole lore mapping for making cards unaffected worked out and don’t really want to move away from the idea. So my solution would be to let Maku continue doing that, but from the field rather than the hand, and expanding her self-summoning effect to also work from the hand. That way, you can’t respond quite as immediately and the utility is a lot lower, but the basic concept stays intact.

I have not done anything to implement this yet because it would affect Ga-Koro as a whole enough to make at least a partial rerun of the test circuit necessary, but once I find a good time for that I might just try and see how this change works out. In the meantime, if anyone has a different opinion on this issue, I’d be very happy to hear it – not sure yet if the way I’ve interpreted things is actually the correct one.

Release: Dumbed Down Edition

Introducing version … i.1.4??? … of the Bionicle YGOPro Expansion! I’m not sure how I feel about this being the first ever official release post on the new website, but well, here we go.

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Release summary

For this version, we take a little break from the grand tales of adventure taking place on the island of Mata Nui, told in the ancient days of 2001, and instead focus on the more recent reimagining of the story released in 2015. The original Bionicle was famously filled to the brim with fancy names and deepest lore, but for this short-lived G2 Lego decided all of that was way too complicated for a franchise aimed at kids, so they did their best to simplify the new version. In the words of fans less happy with this decision, they dumbed it down. And in a convenient coincidence, much the same words have been used to describe a certain new duel format Konami introduced for Yu-Gi-Oh a short while ago, which is why it seemed natural to combine the two. That’s right, fellas: It’s time to rush rush go rush.

The stars of the G2 story are the six Toa, though they were mainly marketed under the name “Master” in keeping with the simplification efforts. As archetypes are not (yet) a thing in Rush Duels, there’s no problem with using this term for the card names as well, but not having archetypes also raises the question of how our heroes’ effects can be made to work together like a proper team. My solution was to use Level 6 Warriors as a pseudo-archetype, since Rush Duels only have a few of those right now. With that as a general theme, the individual effects are then simply based off each Toa’s characteristics as described in bios and seen in the story.

Tahu is the leader, so he has the ability to boost everyone’s ATK. And he’s described as being both lucky and forgetful, so the whole thing is based on a gambling condition where forgetting what’s in your Deck can get you in trouble. Gali can be “as fierce as the raging ocean”, and since I figure battle Traps aren’t going to do much against the raging ocean, she’s able to block those. Onua doesn’t say much, but what he says is usually important – so his effect has the most difficult condition paired with a really powerful and versatile payoff. The condition itself involves controlling 2 or more Toa (more accurately, Level 6 Warriors) to go with Onua being the big unity advocate of the team. Pohatu is the fearless vanguard who leads the way into danger, but on the other hand he is afraid of doesn’t like the dark. These two traits mesh together surprisingly well into an effect that powers him up with piercing and an ATK boost to eradicate face-down (“dark”) cards. An unintended consequence is that he is the only Toa whose effect does not explicitly interact with other Level 6 Warriors, but that actually fits how he was portrayed as kind of a loner in G2 specifically. Kopaka didn’t slip, he just changed to Defense to recycle a monster from the GY. Due to infinite Normal Summons and global soft OPT, you can make an infinite loop if you use this on another Kopaka, but since it’s one with no net change it didn’t seem worth preventing with an extra clause. Lewa carelessly rushes into battle at the expense of his teammates, but in doing so finds solutions others would overlook. I imagine being able to simply attack directly while ignoring any strong monsters on the field is a decent solution to some situations the others might have trouble dealing with.

This is probably the right point to briefly mention two interesting aspects of Rush Duel card design that immediately stood out when implementing these six. One is the significantly lower stat threshold for each monster level – Tahu here at 1800 is seriously the highest a non-Legend Level 6 Effect Monster can go at this point. Tahu specifically had his ATK chosen so his own 700 boost would bring him to the 2500 ATK I gave his G1 counterpart, but the rest just ended up with general semi-appropriate values. The other thing is that Rush Duel cards are strictly limited to having a single effect, which almost automatically makes things stay very simple. Self-synergy as a concept is barely applicable here.

Anyway, on to the Spell and Trap.

First is Okoto as the Field Spell for the Toa (Level 6 Warriors). Rush Duel Field Spells pretty much just grant continuous buffs, so that’s what this one does too. Just a plain old stat boost that ramps up as you gather more of the team.

And finally, Skull Spider Ambush is kind of a standalone thing exploring a little design space niche I found interesting. Rush Duels do not (yet) have any handtraps, they have no Main Phase 2, and you draw to 5 cards every single turn. Therefore, discarding a card during the Battle Phase is actually mostly beneficial, but you also generally want to get everything out of your hand before battling so you draw more. So an extremely powerful battle Trap that the opponent can negate with a discard could be really good, or really useless. Which one do you think it is?

And that’s it for this release. I tried to keep the power level in line with the currently existing Rush Duel stuff, but I feel like it still ended up a bit ahead of the curve. Definitely had a lot of fun playing around with this alternate format for once, though. Hope you enjoyed it too, happy April Fools’ Day, and we’ll be back to Mata Nui for the next update (probably Po-Koro).