Plenty to cover in this one; let’s jump straight in.

AR Cards

Though I still would not recommend rolling for AR cards, all of the new ones this time around are immediately useful, which is a step up from previous ones. Apologies in advance for poor title translations!

Double Hero of the Holy Night!

Considering this is a farmable equip, we can consider it at level 100, which makes it a fair bit better. Guaranteed Guts when showing up is pretty good, and the extra stats and resistance to Blow damage is a nice bonus. Definitely worth farming this one up.

Watched by the Same Moon

Probably the weakest of the new cards in the gacha, Nullify Debuff on phase start is still a pretty good effect to have on hand, particularly for the things like the harder dungeon quests. It’s unfortunate how restrictive the equip conditions are on this one though.

Youth at Sunset

Increasing the equipped card’s CS multiplier by one is effectively moving it up a rarity level in terms of damage. in terms of percentage gains, lower-rarity cards will gain more from this, but it’s a pretty good effect to have on any card that can support it. The HP gain is great (you don’t have to work very hard to trigger it), particularly on Shot units, but it’s not a huge amount of recovery at level 1.

Summoners’ X’MAS

With a pretty broad list of units it can go on, and two strong effects, this is a pretty broadly powerful card – it’ll be pretty easy to find a use for this one, if you do manage to roll it (VShino, Snow, Tangaroa, etc.)

Gacha Units

With a pretty significant difference between his two rarities (from Light/Thrust to None/All), Tomte is a new addition to the standard gacha.

His 3★ form is a decent healing support, with 3 skills geared towards healing his team. He also brings some extra utility with him in the form of Remove Debuff, both on his LB3 and Charge Skill. Offensively, he’ll get a bit of a damage boost from Ardour, and he’ll be able to slow the enemy down a bit with CP reduction (though you have to miss to trigger this) and Remove Buff (which can be a very useful effect to have handy).

His 4★ completely ditches any pretence of being a unit you need to attack with, and goes full support. Maintaining the healing output from his 3★, he picks up a bit more offensive support in terms of Nourishment and Ardour for his team, as well as a bit more defensive utility (Adamantine to self, and Remove All Debuffs to allies, both on phase start).

One particular note about his 4★ is that it’s going to be very difficult to get his Charge Skill off – unlike most other None-type units we’ve seen, he has very few ways of boosting his own CP. If it’s an effect you particularly want (with his LB3, you won’t usually need it), consider running other units that can accelerate CP gain.

Using Tetsuya on a team is pretty straightforward: use his Magic range and Crit from his LB3 to sweep most of the weaker units off the board, then sit behind the front row and support them to do the heavy lifting for the rest of the phase.

His supporting kit covers all the bases you’d want it to, with a heal, offensive buff (Vigour) and defensive buff (Protection). For harder content, you might want to supplement him with another support (particularly since he has almost no self-sustain), but he’s a good starting point for a lot of teams.

What a strange unit design.

Kalki has a number of easily-triggered offensive and defensive buffs that all have a decent duration on them.

He also removes all of them at the start of turn, meaning he has to rely on triggering all his buffs every time he needs them. Every turn, he has a 90% chance to trigger Brawn, and when attacking, an 80% chance to trigger ATK Up, and a 60% chance to trigger Vigour. Let’s take a look at the chances of triggering these buffs, based on the number of enemies hit:

Number of Buffs 0 1 2 3 Number of Enemies Hit 1 0.8% 11.6% 44.4% 43.2% 2 0.1% 1.7% 24.9% 72.6% 3 0.0% 0.8% 15.7% 83.6%

If we assume that each buff has an equal damage multiplier of 2.3x (which is pretty accurate), his expected damage multiplier based on the number of units hit looks like this:

Number of Enemies Hit Expected Damage Multiplier 1 7.9x 2 10.2x 3 11.0x

This is the point where I remind you that Crit++ is a 6x boost.

On top of murdering everything, he’s also got a bit of team healing, and a decent defensive boost in Adamantine (though you’ll need to move him every time you want it), but do you really need these when everything on the enemy team is dead?

My friends list has featured a level 75 Sitri for about a year now – so, when I saw his event variant, I had a hunch I’d be seeing him around.

I log back in about half an hour after the event is released, and see this:

Godspeed, friend.

Spread Buffs has proven to be a relatively powerful effect, and here is no exception – running double Sitri (yours and a friend’s) is going to be able to clear quite a lot of content, particularly once one of their Charge Skills has been triggered – Blessing, Glint, Ardour, and Barrage are all great buffs to share around.

Once again, the limited 5★ units are absolutely bonkers – though it’s pretty entertaining to see what LW does with them, I do worry a little bit about how sustainable this direction is.

Much like his normal version, Takemaru is a very strong offensive support. Unlike his normal version, 1) he’s able to capitalise on his own support skills, and 2) he doesn’t need to be positioned early in your team lineup to get results.

Weakness and Ardour (as well as Crit from his Charge Skill, even at level 1) will both significantly boost your team’s (and Takemaru’s) damage output, while Skill Lock on demand can really reduce the difficulty of some quests (looking at you, dungeon quests!).

He’s got decent sustain in the form of a heal on phase start as well as Unction on attack, and gets Increased Movement pretty readily, which is great when he relies on movement abilities.

With the introduction of Spread Buffs, it was only really a matter of time before Copy Buffs followed, and what better character than Aegir (the original buff thief) to introduce it on.

Aegir does 3 things, each of which are strong in their own right:

Removes a whole bunch of status effects from himself (though he’s not immune to any of the really oppressive ones – Charm, Fear, Skill Lock). Applies Charm to enemies – either through attacking (30%) or them simply being in range at the start of turn (40%). He also pulls enemies towards him when he attacks, which helps get them in range for this. Steals buffs from enemies (slash range), and copies buffs from allies.

And here I thought Kalki’s expected damage was high.

Even with the wrong teambuilding, Aegir is a powerhouse. With the right teambuilding, he’s going to be absurd. I can’t wait to see what people do with him.

As seems to be the case with recent event gachas, it’s pretty easy to recommend this one, particularly if you like the look of the 4★ units. As always, good luck to those rolling!