Having finally finished finals for this semester and having a whole two days to relax, I figured that now was a great time to polish off a few changes that I had been meaning to make to some customs and maybe post the next batch. It's the perfect break!
VISHANIA
First up, I had noticed a typo in
Vishania's card that had been bugging me for a good while. Her
Shakti ka Charan was supposed to be +2 attack to mirror her other OM-reliant boosts, not the +3 attack that escaped my eye on the posted card.
Her Card Text was correct, but who reads that?
Based on early reports of games with Vishania that I've heard from others, I also decreased the cost by 10 points. She was already very difficult to leverage well, and the loss of +1 attack to her OM3 is a definite nerf compared to how she was behaving before. I'm hesitant to decrease her cost too much, though, given that she can still be really powerful in the endgame.
I also took this chance to update the
Triple Attack wording to be a bit more intuitive. I was leaning on the established "may attack X additional time(s)" from Double Attack beforehand, but after further review I think that it makes more sense to buck that trend here. There's already precedent the other way with stuff like Major Q10 and Gräbermund from C3V's Public Playtesting forum, so I think going with the more intuitive form is probably better overall.
MOKUMOKUREN
Mokumokuren was also a bit overdue for some changes. First of all, although
Disguise Revealed was great thematically, it was pretty problematic in practice. Given that you would only ever take Mokumokuren in Talingul armies where he bonds or in Yokai armies where revealed Order Markers can be moved, he simply never had a revealed Order Marker on his card and was always invisible. I also didn't like how it strayed from the core Yokai gameplay conceit of needing a revealed OM to get some very powerful effect--not only is the Yokai faction complex and benefitted by maintaining a consistent central mechanic, but this also results in more interesting decisions for where to leave OMs with Seimei, which I love.
His
"Lesser" Shapeshift that made him better at shapeshifting than the other Yokai without Seimei involved never really sat well with me thematically, especially given that the source Mokumokuren legend is a relatively weak spirit that merely hints at the possession of something worse. Still,
@
Captain Stupendous
has been relentless in convincing me to keep the Talingul synergy and not make Mokumokuren undraftable without Seimei, so I figured that an 8-space range limit on the switching both clearly emphasized that Mokumokuren is
weaker than Kincho the Tanuki, and it nerfs Mokumokuren in exclusively-Talingul builds. Both seem like desirable effects to me.
Note that while Seimei is alive, Mokumokuren could still move via Shapeshift rather than via Lesser Shapeshift, so this change really only impacts Construct builds. Combined with the nerf to his invisibility, Mokumokuren now should better fit the Yokai mold of being "weird but interesting in X Army, but weirder and potentially better when Seimei is involved."
NURE ONNA
Nure Onna only got a minor change this time around. After her stint in the Pre-SoV Workshop, a few people mentioned that the defense penalty from
Paralyzing Trap doesn't come across well enough without knowing the reason why it's happening (there's a lot of interesting lore about demonic boulder babies involved). Most people probably envision it as being something more normal like her coiling around a figure or poisoning them somehow, which I was trying to keep open a bit anyway with the vague name and inability to come up with a concise power name for what the power actually does.
Given that the Yokai are weird enough and already unfamiliar to most Western audiences, I figured that making a small thematic concession for a 20-point filler figure isn't too bad. Just imagine that Jotun and Bramcephys can't see the boulder baby or something.
