Today, Achroma released their Achroma 2.0 Rules update on their discord. For those who missed it, click the logo below for a link to the pdf:

I thought I’d go over some of the changes to the rules, and what impact these may have on some decks and specific cards.

The first significant rules change is the introduction of a Mulligan. From the new rules:
“If you do not like your first hand of 5 cards you may shuffle them back into your Palette and draw 5 new cards. Your second draw of 5 cards is final and must be used as your opening hand.”

This is a rule that casual players have played occassionally since the early days of Achroma, and it’s interesting to see it being made official (for a video from 2022 on the topic, check this out). This will certainly add greater consistency to many decks, especially those that require or lean on specific combos to be most effective, such as one of my favourites, Ray’s Rube Goldberg Machine.

Next up, a much anticipated Trade limit:
“There is a 6 Shard overall TRADE limit for how many total Shards you may receive from Trading in your Start and End steps combined. Any cards with abilities allowing you to TRADE additional times in your turn or gain extra Shards for trading do not count toward this TRADE limit.”

After toying with banning double trading in Spirata, this is a welcome change to rein in trade heavy chroma decks, not least of all Rayders. As an increasingly large number of 4+ shard uncommon/common cards are released, more and more decks that jam in 20 or more of these cards would have been able to win by leaning heavily on double trading. This rules change caps the double trade at a very Achroma-friendly 6 shard maximum value, meaning that Rayders, which likes to trade for 10-11 shards in a single turn, is essentially living with a once per turn trade limit, while achrom decks running cheaper cards still have the option for double trading in a pinch.

This change will of course hurt Norso Traders too, though not terribly much. They still get to gain shards from extra trades due to other card abilities. It’s only the Start/End trades which are capped.

You now have to fully resolve ACTION effects on cards you play, and fully resolve Action cards (if possible):
“ACTION effects on cards are mandatory unless it is stated that ‘you may’ resolve the effect.”
“When deploying an Action card, you must resolve as much of its ability as possible, even if this has a negative impact on the player who deployed it.”

It had been previously ruled that if you played Carmella Traitorious when you’re the only player with a Location or Object, you could choose not to resolve her ACTION. But no longer. Similarly, you better not play Blizzari Plains unless your opponent has a location out, or you’re going to end up freezing it, or another location you control.

This “do as much as possible” ruling also applies to Action cards. You used to be able to play Magus Elite Investigation to claim a location without restraining a character, if for example you were the only player with characters on the canvas. You could play Release the Fireflies to give a card PROTECTION without having to drain a card of shards; worth doing if you were the only player with cards out. Overall, this is a relatively minor but very welcome change, as it gives clarity and consistency to Actions in general. It also has no effect on cards like Breath of Fire which say and/or, giving the option to erase one or the other or location or character.

Shield Wall has been completely changed. It used to affect a character’s strength, but now it makes it harder to attack characters with shield wall:
“When an opponent’s Character declares an attack on a Character on your canvas, your Character gets X additional Shard Value until the end of your turn. This effect only triggers once per turn, per character. SHIELD WALL can stack if you have more than one card with SHIELD WALL on your canvas.”

This will make your characters much more resilient to attack, which makes more thematic sense, and is a welcome change.

Deploying cards for free:
“You may Deploy up to three cards during your turn, this does not include cards Deployed for free due to other card abilities.”

It was a bit of a grey area whether if you played a card due to a card effect but it wasn’t for “free” whether it counted towards your 3 card limit. Now the one card in the game that plays another card but not for free, Parasitic Fusion, just got a small nerf, as deploying it uses up two of your slots.

Self-referential erasure effects:
“Some cards have gameplay abilities which grant bonuses when cards are Erased from specified Canvases. These abilities do not count for the card with the ability itself as the card is Erased before the ability can activate.”

Poor Norso Totem is not such good value any more. It used to be it could be erased and you’d get 6 shards back, but no longer. Similarly, The Unruly was much more playable when you knew that if he was erased you’d at least be able to steal 1.

Heroic actions:
“If a second copy of a Heroic card is Deployed onto a Canvas while the original copy is still on the Canvas, the original copy is Erased before any game abilities are triggered on the second copy.”

Originally you resolved Actions before checking the heroic rule. However, having to resolve them after erasing the heroic card has two significant impacts. The more obvious one is Chroma Storehouse. Having to erase the other copy before getting the +2 gain makes this card a bit weaker. However, since it was one of the most powerful chroma cards in the game, that only seems fair.

The more subtle impact of this change is that it reopens the door on the Phisto/Cintimani infinite combo. I wrote about this back in July of last year. Now, if you have Phisto on the canvas, a Cintimani Stone in your hand, and another player has Cintimani Stone in their dregs, you auto-win:
Play Cintimani Stone and use its ACTION to play the opponent’s Stone from their dregs,
Your Stone is immediately erased, triggering Phisto for +5,
You then resolve the new Cintimani Stone ACTION to play the original Stone again, erasing the new Stone, triggering Phisto for +5,
Rinse and repeat.
It’s not a massive problem in canvas mode, as to pull it off you have to play Phisto as your legendary. But it could be worth slotting Phisto in to your heroes deck on the off-chance.

And finally, the End Game:
“If at any point in the game you run out of cards to draw from your Palette, you may either TRADE or skip the Start step.”

This means that if you get Hissano‘d into a mill defeat, you can limp on a little longer. However it doesn’t say anything about the End step so I assume you still have to Trade in the end step.

Another minor change is that there is now a list of two-word card types which are considered one card type. However, this currently only affects menagerie, and has no effect on existing effects since:
“Any cards that interact with a specific Character Type also interact with two word types as long as the targeted type is within it. An example is that cards which interact with Pixies still interact with Mechanical Pixies as it has Pixie in the overall type.”

The two-word character types from Spirata are Forest Spirit, Mechanical Pixie, and Mechanical Creature. This means if you want mengarie to be active, characters with these types are less helpful than they were before.

Impacts on the meta
The strongest decks in Achroma are almost certainly Rayders and Draco Locations aka Staycation. Control heavy Occultists and Norso Traders are also top tier.

When playing Rayders, in the majority of matchups opening with Ray or Firetender massively increased the odds of victory. Previously the odds of drawing one of those cards was 43%. Now, thanks to the Mulligan, it’s 68%. In previous testing, eliminating the double trade hampered Rayders a bit, but I think on balance these changes actually favour the deck.

However, this is not in a vacuum. Every deck now has the same benefit. In the Rayders matchup, Staycation can Mulligan for character control and steal to put the brakes on their opponent. Control decks, especially those with Hex Clunker, now can look forward to much more consistency from their opening draws.

It’ll be interesting to see how things shake out at the next event, but I think I’d still put my money on Rayders.

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