Last week, The Last Snow Dragons of Altari arrived at my front door, and I thought I’d go over the highlights, as I see it, of the set.

I’m going to start with what I think is the stand-out most powerful card in the set (in a vacuum), and that is Jali:

Jali is a Ailouros Rare, with 4Δ ±2 stats, but an unprecedented ability. When you play them (gender neutral pronoun from card), you look at an opponent’s hand and choose a card to discard. This means that not only will you know what’s coming, but you can hugely disrupt an opponent’s plans. Clearly this is much more powerful in a 2 player game, but even in multiplayer it could be quite handy. This is going in a lot of my decks. However, it must be said that the rares in this set are mostly incredible, so finding space is going to be tough.

Next up, FREEZE. This keyword has undergone 3 versions since it was first spoiled, the most recent one being shared over discord just today. Here’s the current clarification:

Frozen cards cannot GAIN / DRAIN / STEAL / PREVENT. This is different from the previous version in that the word “Resolve” has been removed, meaning it is both more simple and more powerful: a Frozen card cannot gain / drain / steal / prevent AT ALL. It doesn’t matter whether it’s during the resolve step, or during yours or anyone else’s turn. A card that is Frozen will not be able to get you any gain/drain/steal/prevent effects until it is unfrozen. This means that FREEZE now prevents cards like Slayscorch Pools, Asa, Apollo, The Veil Chaser, Orium Diamond, Hod, Trader’s Pass, and any card with a PREVENT ability.

There’s a ton of cards to support Freeze, and here are a few of my favourites:

Given there’s only 60 cards in the set, and this isn’t all of the cards that refer to Freeze, it is fair to say that Freeze, as a mechanic, is well supported. This is nice to see, and appropriately thematic for a set based around a frozen world.

Probably the most powerful Freeze card is Harusk, but there’s plenty of other cards that stand out. Tarni River for instance is another 2Δ ±1 location, but tagging on an aditional ability makes this extremely playable in most decks. Slayscorch Pools really encourages you to play many Freeze cards, and when combined with cards like Permafrost (+4 as it freezes twice), or Ice Cannon (Freeze every round for +2 each round), this means you can ramp your shards while simultaneously Freezing your opponent’s progress.

There’s so many other highlights from this set, but I thought I’d close with my first build using cards from The Last Snow Dragons of Altari. This deck features some other highlights from the set for me, such as Chromatic Voyager and Ice Falls:

This build is a cyan chroma build, using Chroma Storehouse and Ice Falls as big gain locations, Isaz for further cyan burst, and 7 FREEZE cards to slow down the opponent. It’s character light, but those that are present pack a punch. Even Jewna Hare with its cyan shard and FREEZE can make a big impact. Chromatic Voyager is heroic, but as I expect to have a cyan, yellow, red, and blue shard down at most times, it seemed worth it. There’s 7 cards with ±2 or above, and 4 with ±1, so this could sneak an achrom win, but it’s definitely designed for the chroma victory.

Soon, I’ll share an achrom deck using the huge array of new achrom tech that landed with this set.

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