5. Rare Review, cant but must

Electrodynamics3-9/10Upgrade priority: highCogito, Tempest Storm & Hedgehog will love this one. There are plenty of multi-foe combats, more so during the dreadful Stage 2 - probably the toughest part of the game for Defect. And basically doubling or tripling every Lightning Orb channeled will make your life just so much easier there. So this is a rather necessary crutch. Even for the Tempest Storm - this doesn't look like much of a combo card but better lightning efficiency means less Energy needs to be gained to combo out. I also think that it's vital to upgrade this - one extra lightning may not sound as much but all these archetypes are tempo-oriented so you want to pack your plays with as much bang as possible. Not to mention that, as I've previously said, lightning is not that easy to channel out en-masse. All other archetypes mostly don't care about this one as they don't care about lightning. Maybe in Snecko but that depends on your overall deck composition.Fission2/10Upgrade priority: highWhile it can theoretically upgrade your orbs greatly when used with Consume, practically it's infinitely slow and clunky. It's pointless in the turns when you don't have any Orbs so you need a timely draw of this thing and then, once it's done, you need to rebuild your defense/offense from the scratch. Which may take another turn. And you also want to be drawing your Consume after Fission, not before it. Imagine drawing both Consume & this thing on turn 1. What an atrocious hand that would be. Now, "infinitely slow" is definitely an overstatement but it just takes so much time that most archetypes will win the combat already. It's yet another "slow n' steady" finisher only this one is especially slow and unwieldy. Hence the rating.Hyperbeam8-10/10Upgrade priority: highTheoretically, Focus is almost everything for many Defect builds and losing it in droves is a really, really bad plan. Practically, this thing will finish many encounters on its own, especially when dualcast from either Echo Form or Necronomicon. And while necro is a precious rarity, Echo Form is much easier to come by. And then you have archetypes like 0-face, Chain of Plasma and Snecko which mostly don't care about the orbs. So you're dealing all the wanton destruciton you'd like to do (and you'd like to do lots) at no real cost.Machine Learning6-9/10Upgrade priority: lowIf consistency is a problem then how about we just draw more cards to fix it? Nice plan and it works decent in practice but, tbh, not as great as you'd think. The early game tempo is so crucial for this class that spending even 1 extra mana on this may bring out bitter results. Maybe that's a bias of mine and it's not that bad but, when playing with this card, I've often found myself losing more life than I'd want to because of one missed play. That's why I initially ranked this as 7 and then trimmed that down to 6. To a certain degree, it's like a Skim but slower and it pays off in parts. And often it's the bursty Skim+ into Turbo+ that you really need, not this gradual advantage. Doesn't make the card to be bad but it mostly shines in storm decks – there the bigger hand allows for the easier combo assembly.Meteor Strike1-10/10Upgrade priority: lowYeah, that's polar. This is the God Emperor of the Snecko deck and there it plays exceptionally well, doing some cheap and serious damage and almost guaranteeing that you'll play the entirety of those seven cards on the next turn. It's just too profitable there to ignore. You may also consider this in the Storm deck as a method of energy conservation – Turbo out one of these and you'll have 3 more Energy on the next turn and the potential to Dualcast four more out. Value. It'll work in Chain of Plasma, obviously, as there you will have enough energy to cast it easily. But that's it. Everywhere else it's just too expensive, it gives so much mana that you may no be able to use it all and even from under the Mummified Hand it may not be all that great. Generally, heavy power decks with the Mummified Hand have their Energy problems solved already so where would you put all that spare energy? So it's a very cool card under the certain rare conditions and it's awful under all other ones.Multi-Cast8-10/10Upgrade priority: highEven outside of the Storm, Multi-Cast is a top-notch card because it allows to essentially splash for the storm. One time, I was nearing the third level with an 0-face deck and I absolutely loathed my chances as that deck wasn't that great and the boss was the Time Keeper. How else could that be? But I've already had Darkness and, through the course of the level, I was luckily offered this little thing. I agreed and who could've known – while it would've been impossible for me to beat the snail in an “honest” fashion, the very basic Turbo+ & reasonable Dark orb & Multi-Cast kicked his butt all right. It's just too easy to incorporate such a play into pretty much any deck and then squeeze out two or three hundreds of damage from it. It can also play nicely with Plasma orbs (mostly from the Nuclear Battery), Plasma Orb from under 4 Energy will result in having 10 Energy once again (that's with the Multi-Cast+). Not too shabby if you have something to use that energy properly. Maybe a Hologram+ into another Multi-Cast, this time for Dark orb? Smth like that. It's a very flexible card and it's hard to play in such a way where it will not be at least partially great.Rainbow2/10Upgrade priority: lowThat's just awful. Three basic orbs (if we consider Plasma to be a special one) for two mana is just lame. And no deck really wants to have them evenly mixed, they just don't work that way. In many decks, I wouldn't even play it if it was one mana. And it's also bad early on because it exhausts and doesn't work in prolonged combat. What's wrong with this card? Pretty much everything.Reboot9-10/10Upgrade priority: highSecond chances are priceless and even if this thing gives you nothing but a mulligan at the start of the combat that still might be the difference between victory and defeat. Virtually skipping the first turn is just too painful for this class. In 0-face and Storm archetypes, it plays even better. In 0-face everything is so cheap and Energy can be so plentiful that it's essentially like taking another turn. Last time I've heard, Time Walks are imba. In Storm, that just gives you a second chance of assembling your combo. You might even be going all-in, using all your mana sources then Rebooting for your out. Or for Conserve Battery to keep your energy into the next turn so you can win then. It's also rather good in Chain of Plasma – you can have ridiculous mana bursts there and how about drawing fresh seven cards to profit from them? This thing is too good.Seek10/10Upgrade priority: highThe only time you don't pick Seek is when your actual out is the competing choice. Like Multi-Cast in the Storm or All for One in the 0-face. In all other cases, you slam this baby. This just gives you the perfect hands and that's exactly what this class needs. That's true for any class, ofc, but here that is prized as highly as possible. It's even better in the Storm decks, at times producing an insta-win, but pretty much any archetype can use the ability to fetch all best and most needed cards in their decks at will.Thunder Strike1-6/10Upgrade priority: highIt suffers from being tied to what basically is the weakest orb type. The card itself is technically great but the support isn't really there. You're just not channeling that much Lightning orbs unless you go for the very vulnerable non-combo Tempest. And if you're not summoning your lightning heavily, the damage output grows really, really slowly. And probably doesn't overcome that of a lowly Barrage. Yeah, at 10+ stacks it gets rather great, but that's mostly achievable in Chillin' and, as we've learned, everything wins in Chillin'.