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.
Great Kanohi Kaukau
Equip SpellIf 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.
Great Kanohi Kaukau
Equip SpellIf 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.
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.