Welcome back Ashes players! We are here again with another exciting installment of card previews from the upcoming Spirits of Memoria expansion deck! This deck features Sembali Grimtongue, Phoenixborn of Memoria. If you missed her preview, check it out here! This deck uses a combination of divine and illusion magic to ascend Sembali's allies to new heights, while banishing the likes of magical conjurations that stand in their way. Let's take a look at the next piece of Sembali's suite of removal.

CHAINED CREATIONS

This is one heavy hitting ready spell! Chained Creations has a hefty cost of both main and side actions, as well as an illusion and divine class die. For such a steep price, one would expect a pretty substantial payoff. Luckily, Chained Creations can fill an essential role for Sembali and her controlling playstyle. By simply using an ally recursion effect (such as the ceremonial dice power) while this spell is in play, you can discard Chained Creations to remove a target conjuration from the game. With Sembali's ability and unique spell already applying plenty of pressure to enemy conjurations, Chained Creations will be sitting on the spellboard, ready to remove a threat at a moments notice. You may be lucky enough to even be able to remove the last copy of a type of conjuration, rendering the opponent's summon spell worthless for the remainder of the game! This effect won't happen just once though; this spell has respark! Chained Creations' flexible respark cost of 1 basic or 1 discard allows you to forfeit whichever resource you need less. Illusion magic historically can have a surplus of dice, while divine magic is exploring the effects of returning allies to your hand. And speaking of ally recursion…

SHEPHERD OF LOST SOULS

The Shepherd of Lost Souls fills a very important role for many different strategies. The Spirit Guide ability allows you to return an ally from your discard pile to you hand when you put this ally into play. This can trigger Chained Creations, allow you to reliably get other strong allies back to your hand, or simply add more resources to your hand for discarding purposes like Coal's Slash ability or even just meditating. This unit does have a main and side action cost, meaning you will have to plan ahead to assure you'll have a divine class die ready in advance. All in all, this simple, but effective, unit is sure to be a staple of divine and ally-centered decks for long into the future. It is certainly one of my favorite units to use in Ashes and I hope you find her to be just as useful!

SUMMON SPECTRAL ASSASSIN

Our last preview to today is a very quirky one! Summon Spectral Assassin is a conjuration summon effect on an action spell, as well as being only a side action to play! To summon this tricky little character, you'll have to return an ally to your hand in addition to the costs to play the spell. While this might normally be a drawback, it can be incredibly potent to trigger Sembali's ability or Chained Creations off of a side action, allowing you to surprise your opponent with a remove effect, a unit summon, and still be free to attack that turn! I also love the ability that this spell has to clear up your battlefield when bogged down by Regress or exhausted allies, giving you the option to play them again. If that wasn't enough, you also get to draw 1 card when casting this spell, which could be exactly what a stable of Squall Stallions need before charging into battle!

As for the Spectral Assassin conjuration, we have a fragile but deadly offensive unit. Being a side action summon, the Spectral Assassin is best used to sneakily pop into play when your opponent is out of blockers to make sure you get through to the enemy Phoenixborn with that 2 attack value and the Spy 1 ability! Spy 1 allows you to draw 1 card if this unit deals damage to a Phoenixborn by attacking, so make sure to look for your windows of opportunity to turn the tides of battle with this very dynamic unit!

As always, thanks for checking out today's previews! I hope you've been enjoying seeing these decks come to life over the past couple of weeks, and are looking forward to seeing what we have in store for next week. Be sure to check back in on Tuesday, when we investigate the vampiric powers of the Demons of Darmas…

Until next time!

-Nick Conley