Welcome to the first single card discussion! Today through tomorrow we have Lantern Fox up for discussion.
The Songhai fox has always made a big splash in the meta and has been a key card for them through all its iterations.
How does everyone feel about it? What does it work well with? Have a good way to counter or protect it?
Lets discuss all things Lantern Fox!
is this related to the daily challengue of today? XD
is a neat card if you know when, where to strike to gain more posibilites from the phoenix fire. In early could be pretty usefull cause some races doesn’t count with a low cost removal.
Card is absurdly good. Explaining why isn’t even necessary as everyone here got destroyed by it at least once. But that’s fine because every faction needs some staple broken cards to define them and give them competitive edge. Sure, zenrui shits on it but whatever.
I really like this fox, it generates you advantage and has decent health. It sets up lethals and can take out big threats. It naturally synergies with the burn part of songhai and serves as a good control card. All in all it’s a good card
I am quite concerned when in combo with the new expansion cards,but hey,who isn’t getting more synergies anyway?
However,i would like to see it being 2/3 as it can still produce 2 phoenix fires and get one-shotted by a not-so-medium-sized-minion that is going to die from the phoenix fire produced.
It is a part of club of minions (Reaper, Amara, Taygete,Iron Cliff Guardian,Vorpal Reaver,etc) you don’t want to trade in to it and your better off using/saving removal for it. You can’t let give two Phoenix fire to the Songhai or else your almost always dead in a rain Phoenix fire at some point.
It is prime success in how you nerf card it went from twin celerity minions to its current form still something useful.
Weak against cards that DESTROY, TRANSFORM or DISPEL. If you are having trouble against Songhai include or add more of these to your deck:
Neutral :
Dispels- (Ephemeral Shroud, Lightbender),
Zenrui the Blightspawned, Repulsor Beast(Situational, only stalls), Primus Fist(Buff up a minion so that they only draw 1 Phoenix Fire)
Lyonar: Martyrdom, Decimate
Songhai: Onyx Bear Seal(situational, might want to keep for larger threats)
Vetruvian: Siphon Energy, Entropic Decay
Abyssian: Nightsorrow Assasin, Ritual Banishing
Magmar: Natural Selection, Eggmorph(Situational)
Vanar: Chromatic Cold, Aspect of the Fox, Bonechill Barrier/Gravity Wells(Situational, only stalls but prevents draw as the Lantern Fox receives no damage)
All classes have Artifacts that can buff them up to 4 ATK(Some situational) which can limit Lantern Fox to a single Phoenix Fire Generation.
To me, the card is a win-more situation type of card. I generally drop it whenever I already have a board presence. By itself, this card doesn’t generate enough value for me, I find that running L’Kian over it is a lot better. (Dispel, enemy can’t overdraw me)
Zen’Rui stealing this thing is a nightmare for me, and a godplay for them. Sometimes it’s won them the game outright just because of the tempo play.
I love how vanar has at least twice as many options when it comes to single target removal, it’s not such a big problem if you know how to work around it with vanar.
Anyway, fox is always a must have in shongai, it’s one of it’s best cards and i think almost anyone can see why, phoenix fire is a really good card to have in your action bar and fox will almost always give you at least one.
The card is one of the Songhai’s best card-draw mechanics, as just giving one phoenix fire allows the card to generate value. I like the card design (although I currently don’t have one), and I feel that with the upcoming expansion, it will play a bigger part to generate value with phoenix fires (ex: the new 1 mana legendary artifact to deal 4 damage with it, or by using other cards to improve spell damage). It has it’s weaknesses (Zenrui, dispell, removal that doesn’t deal damage to it), but it is still a good staple in most Songhai decks.
This card in general is the poster child for great design.
Songhai focuses on Spells and Spell damage more than any other class in the game to ensure its win condition and Lantern Fox enables itself to allow you to further that goal by supplementing your hand size, which can rapidly decrease early on, with minion removal or face damage.
It’s cost is low and allows it to make a presence early in the game. The stats are where Fox shines as balanced. By itself, Fox in the early game can do 4 damage across minions and general. Generally 2 slaps and it does, leaving you with 1-2 Phoenix Fires. (depending on hand size)
At 2 attack, Fox can be dealt without triggering its effect via Zen Rui or the Abyssian card "Destroy a 2 atk or less minion nearby. (Name slipped my mind)
Fox is also vulnerable to Dispel and thus making it a 2/4 body. Removal in the forms of Martyrdom clears it away with the Songhai getting no Fires.
This is where Fox shines. He has a phenominal ability, great stats for his cost, and because of it forces your opponent to either use removal that can be saved for larger late game threats such as Four Winds Magi, or accept their fate and take extra damage in the long run from it’s Fire spawning.
There’s never a bad moment to drop a Lantern Fox and how it plays out depends on your opponent’s reaction to it. Of course you can have Inner Focus to get instant value but I don’t see that happening as often as it used to before 1 draw was implemented.
That’s my thoughts on the card.
I personally dislike every cards that are a no brainer auto inclusion in any given faction and unfortunately lantern fox definitely belongs to that category .
Of course this card has been in the game since such a long time that people learned to play around it.
Nonetheless this card is still way above the average power level and I would love to see those kind of cards get nerfed someday.(even tho it is not probably going to happen) It is ok to have imbalance within a card game , some cards will always be better than others within a certain context , I just think that auto-inclusion cards should be avoided as much as possible for the sack of diversity and interesting deck building.
This is one of the two auto-include epics for the Songhai faction (the other being Onyx Bear Seal), and for good reason:
-it generates additional burn/removal, unless answered by a non-damage removal such as Natural Selection or Zen’rui. This allows you to use your regular Phoenix Fires more liberally as removal, as you effectively run ~6 of them.
-The recycling mechanic allows it to be card draw.
-Its attack value is below the threshold of inner focus, allowing early tempo swings via inner focus+phoenix fire.
-Songhai, as a faction, leans towards spell based decks with high spell synergy. Lantern Fox is a minion that supports that.
I think one of the problems with Duelyst right now is lack of faction cards. In Magic, you could really build thematic decks because there is just so much to choose from. Counterspell is a strong spell but not all blue decks use it. Balance is kickass but not all white decks have it. It’s the same with Lantern Fox. It gets auto-included because there just aren’t that many good creatures to choose from.
Agreed hopefully denizen fix that , but I wish monthly card could also bring faction cards and not only neutrals.
in the actual state I agree with you, but the game is still very young and we get neutral cards every month, which means 13 class cards in Shim’zar! Juicy!
I don’t think, however that Lantern fox’s place is going to change, it’s an incredibly solid minion with a very good body and an insane card advantage mechanic inserted to it, if you mannage to get 2 to 3 phoenix fires on it it basically means that depending on what he traded you made a 1/ 3~4 trade.
And that’s insane.
I actually wait for the time when more win conditions evolve; where there’s a faction that wants to run out of hand, one that enchants the actual board in fantastic ways, maybe place creatures in a specific formation for something to happen, those kinds of things.
When that time happens, IF, then we won’t have to blindly auto-include ANYTHING anymore.
Strong card for 3 mana, like Revenant is for 7 mana and Ironcliffe for 5. But in this case, you’re able to get value from the fox earlier than the other two mentioned before.