So, this weekend has been both PAX Prime and DragonCon, and Cryptozoic were on panels at both conventions, and quite a few new cards have been revealed as a result. Today I’m going to take a look at a few of them!

Couple of things first, though! You may or may not have noticed it’s been over a week since the last update – unfortunately my connection crapped out on me again as part of the repair process from the last time (I know, right). It’s fixed now though, and with a little luck will stay that way from now on. Secondly, the images of most of the new cards are taken from fairly low resolution slides, so the quality isn’t so great. I’m going to include them anyway along with text summaries, but just bare in mind that we don’t have better quality images of these cards yet. If some show up in the near future, I’ll go back through and update them. Update: Nice high-res versions of the cards were released, so I’ve gone and added them!

First up, the Battle Beetle, a 6ATT/4DEF Wild troop with a Major Socket, Crush and the ability to gain a turn of Flight for 3 Resources. I really like this card a lot – I’m a sucker for most of the socketed cards we’ve seen so far, and this one’s no exception. Honestly, it’s so good I actually expect it to be nerfed before launch as a card with these stats and any one of those abilities could easily have the same cost – for 6 resources, a major socket, Crush and the option for Flight this card is an absolute bargain. Stick either of the Major Blood gems in this thing and you could easily be well on your way to winning the game.

The art here is pretty nice too. It’s a little hard to make out, but on the back of the beetle itself seems to be 2 Mantis-looking people – a new race we haven’t seen yet? Seems like there’s plenty of races on Entrath that they aren’t going to run out of ideas for cards any time soon!

Incantation of Fear is a pretty interesting card to me, because the first deck I’m hoping to build is a Mill deck, and while this card doesn’t have a Mill effect itself, it fights nicely into those kinds of decks. Every time a card enters an opponents graveyard, the Incantation of Fear gets a counter added to it – get to 5 counters and it transforms into that horrible thing on the right there. 5 cards in a graveyard isn’t really a lot in most cases, but in a Mill deck you could do that in a couple of turns pretty easily.

The Nightmare, the monster that the Incantation transforms into, is a powerful troop indeed. Much like the Battle Beetle, it’s a 6ATT/4DEF, which would be well worth it by itself considering you’re only paying 2 resources and then doing things you’d be doing anyway, but it also has a very handy effect. At the start of each of your turns, you can look at the cards on top of each opponents deck, and then chose whether or not you want to bury those cards. It can be a pretty tricky ability to use well – it requires you to understand the current state of the game and make some reasonable predictions as to what the opponent has in their hand, but you can potentially deny your opponent the cards they need to successfully carry out their strategy, whatever that may be. Well worth the price of admission, if you ask me!

I’m a big fan of the High Tomb Lord for similar reasons as the above cards – he fits nicely into my planned Mill deck. Though he is 0ATT/0DEF by default, he gets +1ATT/+1DEF for each card in every graveyard. Now, by turn 6 it’s pretty likely you’ll have a few cards in your own graveyard, but if you’re running a Mill deck then your opponents graveyard is going to be full of cards – this guy can easily become a massive threat to your opponent.

Obviously this guy has a few weaknesses – being susceptible to normal card removal like Murder for one – being a 20/20 isn’t going to help you if your opponent drops a Murder. It also has a small issue in that he will become weaker if the opponent manages to get cards out of his graveyard. If you’re running a Mill deck then this probably won’t be much of a problem, but if you aren’t and your opponents strategy involves some kind of graveyard cycling, this guy might end up a lot weaker than you were expecting.

Those are the cards I wanted to talk about specifically, but quite a few others have been revealed this weekend – you can check out the full set of slides courtesy of Colin over a Hex Vault. There are quite a few interesting bits in the slides, including a look at the standard art for Extinction and Princess Victoria (the art we’ve previously seen is the Alternate Art kickstarter rewards) along with a few other updated pieces of art for cards we’ve previously seen. On top of that, hacky over on the official forums posted some decent quality photos of some cards from PAX, and there’s also the regular Friday card reveals on the official Hex website, including our first proper look at a non-basic resource, the Shards of Fate!

That’s all for today! Check back next time, when I reveal how to make a pair of wings out of wax and feathers that will literally carry you to the sun!