Minerva is a ‘melee support’ player, meaning that her abilities are generally focussed around increasing the efficiency and damage of melee attacks made by her team. However, having a more supportive role means that Minerva doesn’t have high melee damage herself. It also means she’s also one of the easier Falconers to take out. Together these mean that coaches using Minerva will need to consider her positioning carefully to ensure they get the most out of her without getting her easily taken out by the opposing team.

Minerva has a 2” melee zone, which is a fantastic thing to have, but she mainly uses this to enable her support abilities. For example, she has a momentous GB symbol on her first column which can trigger either of her two character plays (which we’ll come onto later). Minerva also has a momentous knockdown result on her second column which is incredible for setting up an enemy player for an easier take out later in the turn. However, Minerva doesn’t have any momentous damage until her third column, which at the fairly average TAC of 5 Minerva will struggle to access consistently. Even if Minerva is able to access her momentous damage, Minerva has a maximum influence cap of 3, meaning that she can only make 3 attacks in most situations. Defensively, Minerva doesn’t have a particularly potent counter attack, since her double push result doesn’t show up till her fourth column. Also, Minerva has slightly low defensive stats with DEF 4+ and no ARM.

Moving onto Minerva’s character plays, this is where things start getting interesting. Firstly, Minerva is the second Falconer to bring the Harrier character play. As we explained in our Mataagi blog last week, Harrier is a very important character play for the Falconers, since it’s their main method of increasing their damage output. Since opposing players can move into or out of a Harrier AOE once it has been positioned on the pitch, learning when and where to place Harrier AOEs will be an important aspect of learning to play with the Falconer’s Guild. Additionally, the fact that both Minerva and Mataagi have access to Harrier means that the Hunters have two different options for bringing Harrier to the pitch; they can even bring both players if they want to!

Minerva’s second character play is a brand new one, Eye Spy. Eye Spy is kind of like a ranged version of the Singled Out character play, any friendly player that attacks the Eye Spy’d player will gain +2 TAC for each attack. The big difference for Eye Spy is that, unlike Singled Out, Minerva can choose to pay its 2 Influence cost to use the character play from range rather than needing to trigger it from her playbook. The ranged nature of her character plays is especially useful for Minerva since she won’t often want to get involved in a melee brawl. Instead, she can choose to assist her team from a distance by using either Eye Spy or Harrier from range.

Owl-Out War