There’s just a few days to go until Monsters of Norso is officially released, and today I’m going to look at the new Keywords announced today, as well as 2 new spoilers that Realm Runner Studios released earlier. Before I get started though, I’d like to point you towards Antinomy93‘s spoilers from this morning. His excellent article can be found here.

Before I get on to the new keywords and what they mean, I have to define a new concept from the Rules reference, Shard Drain, which is, “The act of reducing a card’s Shards in its Hex through attacking, erasure, or ‘Draining Shards’ through abilities. Not to be confused with reducing a card’s Shard Value.”

Now, on with the keywords:

Guard:
This chroma faction keyword looks like a one-off PROTECTION from draining, attacks, and erasure, with a subtle difference: if you’re the one doing the draining/erasing, the GUARD will still protect you (once). This means that cards with GUARD will be protected from Impius Drake and Sorrono unlike cards with PROTECTION. However, cards with GUARD are still vulnerable to POISON.
We’ve already seen this ability on Queen Flora (see link), and it looks like it’ll give characters a bit more staying power in the game.

Vengeance:
Our achrom keyword. If one of your characters survives drain, you get to trigger this ability. This could be from attacks, opponent’s abilities, or even self-damage, from cards such as Lacringi Catapult. We’ve seen this on Astar, the Minotaur (see link), and if there’s plenty of cards to support this ability in the set, we could easily see this triggering multiple times in a turn, even the opponent’s turn.
It’s worth noting that you won’t get the VENGEANCE ability unless the character actually has their Shards reduced, so don’t go PROTECTing or GUARDing your characters with VENGEANCE.

Rebound:
This is our new neutral faction keyword. Returning a card to your hand to resolve an ability makes it a better version of SACRIFICE. In fact, much better, as you can go ahead and play the card again, or Trade it. This could be expensive (unless you’re rebounding a 1Δ card), but will be great with cards that carry an ACTION ability, as it means you can resolve the ACTION again. I can see this being especially strong if you can use it to play Cintimani Stone twice, especially if you get some other positive benefit from the ability. I’ll certainly be including some Stones/Forges in my Norso palettes if this proves to be a good keyword.

Now on to the spoilers, and on the subject of REBOUND, Realm Runner Studios’ spoilers showcase the power of this Keyword very well indeed:

These two could easily be the strongest legendaries ever in Achroma.

Aries is a Samr Troll with an unusual combination of colours. Cyan and achrom are our usual go-tos for the Samr, suggesting that yellow and green may be colours we’re going to more of in this set, at least in the neutral faction. ±2 for 6Δ is an acceptable ratio, but his ability is absolutely stunning. If you REBOUND a card, any card from your Canvas, you can DRAIN equal to that card’s Shard Value. Given it’s pretty easy to have a 5/4Δ card out turn 1, this character could easily represent a 6-7 Shard Drain (including his ±2 Achroma effect) on the opponent’s Shard Bank in a single turn. Sure, it’ll be expensive, but it means you can go in for the kill from much further out.

Sigrun is a Vitki Troll which costs a mere 4Δ for a +3 Achroma effect, but again the ability is unreal, and is like the mirror image of Aries, except maybe stronger as you can use it for control. REBOUND a card on any Canvas, and you Gain Shards equal to its Shard Value. So if the opponent has shelled out for their 6Δ legendary, you can bounce it for go +6. Even better if its carrying an object. Also, unlike Aries, Sigrun doesn’t specify another card, meaning she can target herself. This means you can REBOUND her every single turn to net +3 Shards, as of course you only ever are going to be using these abilities after you’ve resolved the REBOUND card.

Obviously these cards will be strong with any card with an ACTION, like Lacringi Catapult. However, the big target you want to use will of course be Cintimani Stone. Sigrun means that you can play Stone for 5Δ, play a card for free from your dregs, resolve the ±2 on the Stone, then REBOUND it back to your for +5 and repeat next turn. Perhaps more scary is what Aries can do with a Stone. If you get HAIM Shard Cache, Aries, and Cintimani Stone in your opening hand that’s a 15 Shard Drain. I mean, obviously we’re in Achroma dream land there, but still, woe betide any player who goes first and leaves themselves on fewer than 10 Shards, only to find their opponent has Aries and practically anything else in their hand.

It’ll be interesting to see if any other cards from this set carry a good ACTION ability to abuse these characters even more. Either way, I could see either character being a build-around. Thanks to the yellow and cyan shards, it might even be possible to pull them with a rune, but we’ll have to see the whole set to know if that’s worth the build restriction or not.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned, as I have a couple of exclusive spoilers for you tomorrow.

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