Reevaluating Early Elestrals

Coming from a background in other card games, I’m used to the average card having potentially multiple effects. Whether it’s different activated abilities like in Yu-Gi-Oh! or Magic: the Gathering, or effects that do more than one thing like in Pokemon; cards are versatile and can fill multiple roles in different decks. Importantly, cards in these games are rarely “dead” as a result of missing some specific piece. They may not do anything meaningful to progress a gamestate, they may not generate maximum value, but in a competitive deck of any card game that I can think of, all cards are playable as long as players have the necessary resource requirement. 

In Yu-Gi-Oh!, as long as the player hasn’t used their normal summon, a level 4 or lower is never dead. In Pokemon, as long as they haven’t filled their bench, they can put a basic on it. In Magic: the Gathering, as long as they have the lands to pay a card’s cost, they can cast it. Some cards have conditional requirements, where if X card is on the field, or if X card is in their Graveyard or Discard Pile, the player gets an additional effect. Where I’m going with this may be obvious to some in regards to the game of Elestrals, but let me set the scene.

A couple weeks ago, the Elestrals team put out a call for new set testers. As a part of the application process, they asked for applicants to propose a redesign for a Daybreak card. They posed the questions of if you could take any card and change it however you want, what would you do and why? 

Immediately, what came to my mind was the stadium-based invoke runes released in Frostfall, Race to the Top, Rise from the Depths and Stoke the Forge. These cards are ones that I desperately want to be good, but consistently are early cuts from a deck when I build in these elements. Now, Race to the Top saw quite a bit of competitive play, so you may contest my statement that I don’t find this card to be “good.” It’s even on the Tartaurus list limited to one copy per deck! But the day before that limit was announced, on December 1st, 2024, MBT found his way undefeated into the last swiss round of a premiere tournament and ended top 4, losing the entire day only to the player who would go on to win the entire event, Jessica Robinson. He did it with a Thunder deck that wasn’t playing a single copy of Race to the Top in his list. In fact, he wasn’t even playing Jolten or Mt. Olympus.

Race to the Top is... Bad?

In the deck profile posted to the Caster’s Corner YouTube channel, he starts the profile acknowledging the absence of Race to the Top and calls it a bad card. Trishula, who helped MBT tweak the deck in advance of the event, goes as far as saying, “I’ll do the [BeanSoldier] thing. … Race to the Top bad card [sic]. ... It’s a bad card, don’t play it.” A little later in the video, MBT succinctly addresses this, and my perspective on the stadium-based invoke runes as a whole when he says:

 “The concept is that Race to the Top is like, a good card in so far as it’s removal. But it sucks unless you have Mt. Olympus, and Mt. Olympus is terrible. … You just have to draw them both and you’re playing, like Jolten and all these guys that enable cards that you don’t want to see except in two-card combos. And there’s actually other, better hard removal spells, if you want to be playing two-card combos.”

This gets at the heart of why I find these cards to be so bad. The stadium runes aren’t necessarily bad cards themselves, but they don’t generate as much advantage as many other cards, and advantage is what wins games. Jolten searching Mt. Olympus is a solid play since under Mt. Olympus Jolten is a 5 attacker, but comparatively, Elechik searching Zeus represents a 7 attacker that you can repeatedly use. Because Race to the Top requires a two-card combo, it’s necessary to build around it and include Jolten, but ultimately you don’t really want to see Mt. Olympus unless you have exactly Race to the top in your hand already. You never want to draw a Mt. Olympus, but you don’t mind drawing a Zeus, even if it’s not ideal. The fundamental issue with these stadium reliant invokes is they make you play cards that are not as good as other cards you could be playing, and because of Elestrals decks being restricted to exactly 40 cards, this means you’re specifically removing slots in a deck that could go to better cards.

MBT points that out in this video as well, his point of “other, better hard removal spells” that are two-card combos likely is referring to the combination of Zeus and Cryoblast, which individually are incredibly powerful and useful in many instances, but together have the capacity to destroy and 5 defense elestral. This is stronger and more flexible than Race to the Top, because while it’s still a two-card combo, both Cryoblast and Zeus can provide great value independently, as opposed to Race to the Top being functionally a card with no text when there isn’t a Mt. Olympus on field. The final thing that this comparison actually misses, is that really Race to the Top is a 3 card combo, because in many cases it necessitates that you control an elestral with a high defense stat, or that your opponent has taken such a tempo advantage over you that they have two elestrals on their side of the field. Both of which are cases that you do not want to be in.

Hopefully in this dissection of Race to the Top you can see why I consider these stadium-based invoke runes to be bad, and it only gets worse for Rise from the Depths and Stoke the Forge. Stoke the Forge is marginally better, as with the release of Rummacoal in Daybreak, Fire has an in element searcher for both Volcanic Forge and Stoke the Forge, which helps to bridge the 2 card combo gap, but again this requires you to play an otherwise middling elestral, with Rummacoal being only a 4/3 under Volcanic Forge. Rise from the Depths is not so lucky, as it has no searcher, and there is no stadium searcher in element for Water (at least until the release of Champion of Poseidon - Glauby in Firestorm). Ultimately, both of these cards, Stoke the Forge and Rise from the Depths exist as worse versions or clunkier versions of existing cards as well. Stoke the Forge, if you do not draw it naturally with Volcanic Forge, takes as much time to set up as just normal casting a Smoltuga, while getting the same search with a worse statted elestral. Rise from the Depths is a cheaper costed version of Rise from the Ashes, but only by 1 spirit as to make Rise from the Depths able to be activated, you have to spend 1 spirit on Atlantis. While that spirit does stay around on field, functionally you’re spending 1 less spirit for much lower flexibility on targets for special casting from the underworld. In many cases, Rise from the Depths ends up just being a way to get to a 2-cost elestral, and in that case Tadpuff is a one-card way to do the same thing at the same cost. Obviously I’m skimming over the potential to Rise from the Depths a high value card like Sluggle or Dratagua to refund your cost, but if you need to specifically bring those cards back for your card to be “good,” you’ve now increased your two-card combo to a three-card combo, while again, Rise from the Ashes serves a much more versatile one-card way to do this at the cost of only 1 spirit more.

So hopefully now you can see why, when asked “what card would you change and why,” my answer was “every stadium-based invoke rune because they’re bad.” But why does it matter? Why go through the effort to argue about cards released almost a year ago now? Well, I would like to now, after an incredibly long preamble to justify this exercise, introduce a hopefully recurring series of blogs from me about the creation of two custom sets “Coldsnap” and “Novaburst.” The goal of these custom sets is to take two sets that I think are criminally undertuned and see what it would take to bring these sets more up to snuff. A common joke throughout both Frostfall and Daybreak was how none of the cards from those sets save two or three actually saw competitive play, and even then 95% of all cards played were from Base Set. So I want to go through and see what it would take to make more of these cards playable and maybe make some strategies that never saw the light of day get the support they need to stretch their legs a little bit.

Reworking the Invokes

So we’re starting off this endeavor with the stadium-based invoke runes: Race to the Top, Rise from the Depths, and Stoke the Forge.

Race to the Top: 1-Cost Thunder Invoke Rune

Enchant T from your Underworld to an Elestral on your field. Then if Mt. Olympus is Enchanted you can Expend T in order to target 2 Elestrals and destroy the Elestral with the least O.

The idea with all of the changes to these invokes is we want these cards to be activateable even if the stadium isn’t on field, so a 1 cost to enchant 1 thunder seems reasonable. If anything, the recent announcement of Solar Charged in Firestorm confirms that the team has thought of this sort of design already, but with how Solar Charged is designed maybe I will have to revisit Firestorm some time in the future to give it a rework. That’s besides the point though, a 1 cost to enchant 1 is unlikely to be ridiculously overtuned, and I think the ability to raise an elestrals defense by +1 under Mt. Olympus for the destruction effect is cute.

The clear application of this is to re-enchant an Astrabbit and get another trigger off of it which is absolutely stellar, but it also motivates a risky gameplan that saw a lot of play in the Elestriad season 2 from many Thunder casters. In that season multiple players would cast an Astrabbit and then cast Circle the Sky using the Thunder spirit under the Astrabbit, then nexusing a Thunder spirit from something like a Zeus to draw a card and then trigger Astrabbit. This is a tricky little play that is incredibly spirit efficient as you don’t end up with an Astrabbit with extra spirits under it, but it loses very hard to Gorgon’s Gaze as the Astrabbit wouldn’t be able to receive the nexus (or the enchantment in the case of the reworked Race to the Top) and thus would be sent to the Underworld at the resolution of the chain. This effect is likely to be very strong, and paired with the destruction effect it’s even stronger, which is why the Expend T was added to the effect to bring it back to being non-spirit neutral in cost. It may be more balanced to make this an Expend TT, but that would be up to actually playtesting this card to determine if that is truly necessary. I think with the above written effect, Race to the Top would see much much more play

Rise from the Depths: 1-Cost Water Invoke Rune

Target a 1 Spirit W Elestral in your Underworld and add it to your hand. Then if Atlantis is Enchanted you can Special Cast a 1 Spirit W Elestral from your hand.

There is incredibly little Underworld recursion in the game of Elestrals, in fact the only recursion that I can think of which adds from underworld to hand are Khione, Ashrabbit, and Boultuga. Eventually, I think all elements should have some way to add elestrals back to their hand, and so I think making Rise from the Depths a way to recur elestrals is a neat thing to add for the element. Being able to then special cast a Water elestral from hand then allows Rise from the Depths to still have the same functionality as before, by special casting a 1 spirit Water elestral that was in your Underworld, but also gives it flexibility to special cast a different one in your hand. This is still great for 2-drop quick ascension strategies for getting into cards like Lochagon or Capregal, but it also enables Water to have a potential for a more swarm based strategy with something like adding a Smoltuga back to hand, special casting a Galaxea, and then normal casting that Smoltuga and searching for a 1 spirit Fire elestral. This swarm aspect of Water would likely not be as prevalent after the release of Daybreak, but I think that there could have been a very interesting metagame for Frostfall where we saw Water swarm do some interesting things as a 5s variant. Because this adds back to hand and special casts any 1 spirit Water elestral, this also means you can do some silly 3-drop quick ascensions like add back Tadpuff, special any other 1 spirit Water elestral, special cast Tadpuff, ascend into a 3-drop with 2 water in its cost like Chronodile. I don’t think this change to Rise from the Depths instantly makes this a ridiculously broken card, in fact it’s definitely still a league below Race to the Top, but I think this makes Rise from the Depths much more versatile and worth a consideration in more decks. It certainly would be worth more of a consideration if there was a 4/2 1-cost Water elestral that searched an Atlantis though.

Stoke the Forge: 1-Cost Fire Invoke Rune

Target an Elestral, it gains +1j/+1o until your next turn. Then if Volcanic Forge is Enchanted Search your deck for a 1 Spirit F Elestral and add it to your hand.

A major thing that fire lacks compared to most other elements is generally good stated elestrals. While it has one of the strongest stated normal casts in the game in the form of Necruff, that is the only elestral in the fire deck that easily reaches the 5 statline. With this new base effect of Stoke the Forge, we can make Kindleo a 5 under stadium or a 6 if we’ve used the nexus effect, Necruff becomes a 6 without stadium, and if you have this in hand with a Rummacoal you can get the search and also a 5 statted Rummacoal. The “until your next turn” is also a very critical aspect of this effect, as making it only a good beater for your turn would make this card only good as an offensive card, but now it can be both offensive and defensive. My initial inclination was to make this card search as the base effect, but that directly invalidates Smoltuga and that clearly isn’t the intention of this combination, although I don’t think it would be ridiculously overtuned if it did search at base.

Elestrals is a wonderful game that wears its heart on its sleeve when it comes to the inspirations it draws on from other games, but clearly I think that something they’ve tunnel-visioned on is the idea of cool two-card combos. Even with the recent reveals of Firestorm cards, a set that I think massively accelerates the game and finally makes the classic “5’s” strategy phase out a little, we see cards that heavily rely on these two card combos to function. I don’t see a major issue with two-card combos overall, but when cards are fully un-activateable without the second card, that’s where I have an issue. I think the new Zeus support in Firestorm will be very helpful for thunder and its identity, but Zeus’ Call will potentially be a card that sees little to no play as a result of being a do-nothing card potentially. I’m hopeful that in future sets we will see the team move away from this type of design, and move to opening up card design for more cards to interact with each other. I think Hibearnation is a great step in that direction and I hope to see more cards exactly like that, a good card with a reasonable restriction. I may revisit Zeus’ Call in a future discussion, but something as simple as making it activateable if a Champion of Zeus is on field would instantly make it much more playable.

Speaking of future discussions, what cards do you think need some tuning up from these sets? I certainly have my eye on some of the 2 and 3 drop elestrals and their lines as cards looking to be improved in some way. Hopefully this has been an interesting thought experiment to read, and I look forward to doing some more in the future!