The enemy can’t play spells or weapons until your next turn.

When developing Eternal, Dire Wolf Digital has generally shied away from game design that promotes limiting the options of the opponent. Your opponent will not have the ability to respond to you playing anything that only affects your side of the board – this rule lets players enjoy playing their cards.

This is seen in their card design philosophy as well. The discard spells and counterspells are all specified to certain classes of cards, and/ or have multi-faction influence requirements to prevent ubiquity. The only card that limits opponent’s mana, Curse of Taxation, is too inefficient to be playable. (Go look it up).

Recently, however, we have seen a break from this trend.

DWD is pushing the power level of hate cards by designing hate cards that are still playable/reasonably efficient if the hate target is not present in the opponent’s deck. Hooru Pacifier still has an unbelievable set of abilities even if your opponent does not play a single weapon. In Cold Blood is an acceptable removal spell even if your opponent does not play Justice units.

And now we have Svetya.

The summon ability of Svetya is very strong. Most cards that can destroy units are either spells or weapons – playing Svetya means, most of the time, that your units are guaranteed to stay on the board for one additional turn. Against non-fast spells, that means two waves of attacks when you would normally get one.

Even if, in actuality, Svetya’s effect did not make any difference, playing a 4/4 for 4 with a mana-sink ability at 8 is a reasonable outcome. That’s what pushes hate cards into ubiquity – when their worst case scenario is still reasonable.

Flavour concerns aside, the release of Svetya in the same faction as Hooru Pacifier creates redundancy to the locking out of the opponent’s ability to interact with your board. It would almost seem like DWD is trying to push a faction to be strong against low-minion removal pile decks. It would seem, like in the case of In Cold Blood, that there was a metagame problem they were trying to correct…

To all players who frequent the Constructed Ranked queues, it should be clear why Svetya was created. The existence of a large number of removal-pile style decks that played the above cards became a fairly toxic presence that stifled the metagame. By no means were they always the best decks in the metagame – but they limited the types of units that opponents could play. The units either had to be low-to-the-ground cheap efficient units like Oni Ronin, or efficient two-for-ones like Heart of the Vault. Having Hooru be a metagame gatekeeper for decks like Icaria Blue becoming too popular was a design risk that DWD has decided to take.

Of course, the limiting ceiling of Svetya’s strength comes from the fact that the ability is proactive. You cannot simply wait for the Harsh Rule to come, and respond with Stand Together – with Svetya, the player must predict the likelihood of a spell or weapon based on reads, and make an in-game decision that can affect the impact that Svetya has on the game. Having another skill-testing card in Eternal is never a bad thing, and Svetya brings that to the table.

I am excited to see Svetya in the manner of decks that the online community has already pointed out. Given the summon ability gains tempo, Svetya plays best in tempo decks that are looking to push damage quickly. The current TJP Midrange, as well as Hooru Fliers, are good landing spots for Svetya. These decks will now probably be heavily favoured against all manner of Icaria-based Harsh Rule decks, seeing as how most of their units are immune to Hailstorm and Vanquish, and now also have Svetya and Hooru Pacifier to muck things up. Expect much from TJP Midrange going forward.

My one fear for Svetya? Hooru’s ability to destroy removal-based control decks means those decks are under-represented, leading us back to the midrange soup that has controlled the Eternal metagame for many months. We have only recently freed ourselves from Sandstorm Titan, Svetya, please don’t chain us back up?

The ability also has relevance against other spell-based combo decks like Haunting Scream and Moment of Creation, so that may have an undesired impact on the metagame.

Nearing the end of the Dusk Road’s lifespan, we all got a great toy to fiddle around. Let’s hope Svetya brings us to greener pastures rather than dragging us back into soupier board-stalls.