There’s just a few days to go until Monsters of Norso is officially released, and today I’ve got 2 exclusive SPOILERS to share with you.

Without further ado, the spoilers:

Ladorna, the Hydra is a 4Δ achrom creature with a very strong -3 resolve. In fact, we’ve only ever had 3 characters in the game with a 3 drain/steal Achroma effect, and they have all cost 6Δ (Tenebris, Kocora Bri, and Pearl). This makes this a very effective drain engine for an aggressive achrom palette.

Its ability could get out of hand if you’re able to trigger it multiple times in a turn. If you could give this character RAGE, it could attack and erase a 3Δ and 4Δ character in a turn. It is also almost impossible for the opponent to erase by attacking it with multiple smaller characters.

Where this character has the potential to really shine is in a palette with the cards spoiled yesterday: Aries or Sigrun. If you can trigger Hydra up to 8Δ, 16Δ, or even 32Δ Shards, it’s game over, as you can just REBOUND it for the win.

On an aside, it’s fun to see lore-based mechanics seen in Magic: The Gathering mirrored in Achroma (though we’re only seeing a doubling of health, not attack as well).

One thing I’ve noticed about The Hydra (and The Minotaur) is that they’re creatures. This means that they can be paired with an underplayed card from Rise of the Realm Runners, Tufter’s Companionship. This Action essentially means you can play a creature for 1Δ, or you actually net shards if you already have 1 or more on your Canvas. If all the Monsters of Norso are also creatures, this could be a very strong card.

And while I’m on the subject of Tufter, who is sitting on Leif’s shoulder in Antinomy93’s article, it occured to me that cards that deploy other cards for free would be very handy indeed with new Leif, as you’d get two deploy triggers from him. Some examples are:

Perhaps a Leif/Monsters crossover, meaning that I can play Leif, followed by The Minotaur, Tufter’s Companionship, and The Hydra, and finish on 1 more Shard than I started.

The next spoiler is a chroma card, and is absolutely beautiful:

Lake of Reflection is a solid rare with a +3 resolve for 4Δ. It also shows that GUARD can be applied to charaters, objects, and locations. Giving all your cards GUARD, including Lake of Reflection itself, makes your Canvas very resilient indeed. Locations are already hard to remove. Having to remove them twice is especially tough.

Giving this to objects is interesting. A character with an object that attacks a character will simply break the GUARD on the object. It could then attack another character, and potentially erase the object but only break the GUARD on the character, leaving the character to fight another day.

Additionally, this is precisely the sort of ACTION ability you might be able to replay with REBOUND. On the basis that each keyword is likely to only appear in its own precon palette, this is unlikely to affect precon games, but wil certainly come up in constructed play.

I am loving these spoilers. It’s looking like the power level for Norso has crept up, and hopefully this means the realm will finally be able to compete with the other three in constructed play.

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