All right so the reveal of GBT-13 has been out for a while now. With the announcement came a new rarity for every set, ZRs. Even before we got more details I’ll admit I was very concerned by the idea.

Bushiroad had recently made a rather good decision to alter their set ratios. They changed the set composition to have less commons and more high rarity cards, and boxes sizes were changed from 30 packs with 5 card per pack to 16 packs a box 7 cards a pack. This resulted in overall better pull rates and a larger supply of high rarity cards, which we can see with the current prices of GBT-11 cards. Nothing in Set 11 has really broken the 20 dollar mark I believe. Even Mujinlord, which was part of the big hyped up new thing is hovering around 16-18 bucks. There was one attempted buy out that pushed him to into the mid-20s but a fresh supply pushed him back down within 3 hours. Normally when this happens there’ll be like one asshole seller selling a card for some exorbitant price (so like 25 bucks vs 16-18) and then after a few days the major sellers will list him lower than the asshole price still higher than usual (so 21-23 using this example). Within other clans even a meta defining card like Ziegenburg is only around 11 dollars. The only card that really resembles older hype prices is Gancelot who is a GR run at multiple copies in a popular meta deck.

But Bushiroad being Bushiroad they can never do a good thing for very long without raising concerns soon after. So 2 sets into their new system, which has already shown improvements to the market, they have decided to introduce a new rarity. Cause that sounds like a wonderful idea after how shitty GRs were in the beginning (it took them until GBT-7 to realize “Hey maybe we should stop making GRs flip themselves or other expensive RRR/GRs”).

So what are these new ZRs?

According to this stream graphic, they are these super special awesome new strides that work within nations instead of specific clans. So this sounds like an awful idea for a couple reasons

Market Impact

The first, and obvious one is market impact. Within 2 sets of their new composition they are now increasing the amount of cards again and shoving in some unknown number of these ZR cards. I don’t want to incite panic since we still only have very basic information but early GRs are not very good evidence in their favor. And the thing with GRs were they were staple cards within one clan. Yes they may fit into several different decks of a clan, but it was still one clan. These are going to be fitting into a nation that means if I am playing Kagero, for example, I am not only competing with other Kagero players to get this card I also have to deal with Narukami, Tachikaze, Nubatama, and Murakumo players all trying to get this one ZR.

We’ve already seen how getting a a staple high rarity card can go for just one clan. In the past Nextage, Amnesty messiah, and Commander Thavas were all 80-100 dollars. Now those GRs were 4 of staples, which I doubt the ZRs will be so lets reel it back a bit. Of course we have the most recent example in Gancelot being 30 dollars. I recall Hellsky Fenrir and Steeped in Sin Scharhrot being 20 dollars on release (they’re lower right now). Radiant Sword Gurguit was also 20-30 dollars. And of course this is all within one clan (or one deck even for Gancelot).

So if ZRs end up being this huge staple mechanic (which they are bound to be since Bushiroad is trying to make money) imagine taking the 20-30 dollars a card and multiplying that by the amount of clans within a nation. And of course this doesn’t account for the viability of said clans either. Just using examples in this set let’s say you play Murakumo which isn’t too terribly expensive, and you have to share your ZR space with Kagero and Tachikaze who are both pretty expensive. So if this ZR ends up being really powerful and you absolutely need it to have an optimal deck you gotta shill out some insane Kagero price for it instead of your more reasonable Murakumo price. Unless there’s a dozen of these fuckers per case it’s hard to imagine these cards being less than 50 USD at least.

Clan Cohesion

The other major problem with this idea is that the nations don’t really have a whole lot of cohesion between their clans.

We’re gonna go nation by nation and kinda break down everything.

United Sanctuary

Royal Paladin – Superior call shit, stack power/multi attack

Shadow Paladin – Superior call shit, use that shit as fodder for your Vanguard to power up

Gold Paladin – Superior call from a select number off the top of your deck, stack power/multi attack, superior guarding

Oracle Think Tank – Deck Manipulation, draw a bunch of card

Genesis – Deck Manipulation, Soul Charge a lot, Soul Blaster to stack power/multi attack

Angel Feather – Damage zone manipulation and deck filtering, extra trigger checks with Rescue

United Sanctuary is probably one of the easier nations to deal with overall. Half of the clans are spin offs of each other and you can kinda fit together deck stacking and superior calling to generally imitate like 2/3 of the clans. Angel Feather will probably be the odd one out of them all. You can kinda fill the Paladin and OTT/Genesis theme by doing something like looking at the top 10 cards, superior calling however many, putting the rest on top/bottom, and the called units gain some power. Its a very boring skill to be sure but its one that I think fits most of the US. Unfortunately its hard to kinda fit in the Angel Feather damage filtering without making the skill a bit too busy. Anything I could think of would feel tacked on just so Angel Feather wouldn’t be left out. I think the superior calling and stacking could benefit Angels since you can build a board and set up for rescue checks, but it doesn’t feel representative of them ya know?

Dragon Empire

Kagero – Retire cards, have more rear guards than your opponent, benefits from open R circles

Narukami – Retire cards, attack multiple things at once, stockpile power from things being retires/things being bound

Tachikaze – Eat your own units to power up, Regurgitate eaten units so they can attack more/be eaten again

Nubatama – Make your opponent discard/bind from their hand, take control of your opponent’s units

Murakumo – Clone your own units, gain benefits from not hitting

So we go from moderately cohesive to all over the goddamn place. Kagero and narukami are fairly similar but even they have diverged from each other a fair amount. Kagero benefits more from keeping the board open in general, while Narukami wants to stockpile their power through their retires. Narukami also has multi target attacks going for it. Then we get to the rest of the DE. Tachikaze has nothing to do with anything in the DE. It has some retire skills but its main benefit comes from eating their own units to power up. Nubatama is also just completely different from everyone else. Their original gimmick of taking cards out of the opponent’s hand is unique to them (with a few exceptions none in the DE that I know of). And their new gimmick Dominate is also completely unique to them and has nothing to do with anything else in the DE. Then Murakumo mainly focuses on cloning their own rear guards. Again nothing else in the DE really does this. There’s also shit like Mandala Lord, Shirayuki, and Dueling Dragons that focus on depowering the opponent’s VG. So the bare thread of retiring rears is only really prominent in 2/5 clans and the rest are all over the place. The only thing I can think to give the DE is a restander because 4/5 DE clans have one.

Magallanica

Aqua Force – Multi Attacking, patterned attacks to make waves

Granblue – Call from the drop zone, multi attack

Bermuda Triangle – Bounce cards from hand to field, multi attack

There is the general theme of multi attacking. Its hard for me to imagine how these disparate methods of multi attacking can come together in one unit though. I think a generic board restand can mesh with how every clan plays, but it won’t really capture the nuances that make them interesting. Perhaps allowing you to choose between bouncing, straight up restanding, or milling/revival to refresh your board. Somehow I imagine it enabling multi attacking, its just hard to figure out how to tie the nuances of the 3 clans together with that.

Star Gate

Nova Grapplers – Stack power/Multi Attack

Link Joker – Make your opponent stop playing the game

Dimension Police – Make your Vanguard really really big, and sometimes your rear guards will get big too

I have no goddamn clue. They all kinda have restanding. But their methods of doing so are all pretty different. And the goals of each deck overall are incredibly different. I just really don’t know how a Star Gate stride could capture all 3 of these wildly different play styles.

Dark Zone

Gear Chronicle – Superior call a lot, multi attacking

Pale Moon – Superior call from soul, make big columns, multi attack

Dark Irregular – Put your deck under your Vanguard, gain benefits for having a lot of soul

Spike Brothers – Put cards from hand into soul, Superior call really big rear guards, Rear Guards go away after attacking

Aside from Gears 3/4 DZ clans do amass a large amount of soul. 3/4 of them also superior call a lot, DI can also sup. call but its one specific card where the other 3 clans revolve around doing it all the time. Perhaps something that allows you to soul charge and then superior call from you soul, kinda like Goauche. Like with Magallanica though its hard to figure out something that can capture the nuances of each individual DZ clan in a single skill.

Zoo

Great nature – stack power, retire power stacked rears and draw

Neo Nectar – clone your rear guards, stack massive power

Megacolony – staring contest the clan

Okay I gotta admit I barely know anything about Zoo clans its the nation I am least invested in. There are some bare bones similarities in the power stacking for GN and NN. But the way they want to go about it is pretty different. You can also make some bare threads with draw power for GN and Megas but again their methods of getting there are too different. Megas in particular are pretty radically different from GN and NN. I’m kinda in the same place as Star Gate where I have no clue.

Other Possibilities

Now of course all that just now is kinda running on the assumption that these ZRs will actually attempt to unify the various clans within a nation into one skill. As you can see even with the bare bones connections between each clan, the nuances of each clan make it incredibly difficult to actually tie everything together into one card.

But that’s not the only option they have for these ZRs. One possibility is they just ignore the idea of making a unified card entirely and build the ZR to benefit one clan (probably the villain clans since they antagonists are using them in GZ). So like the Magallanica ZR is basically an Aqua Force card and if you think its usable with Granblue or Bermuda Triangle you just slide it in.

The other possibility is they are clones of Gear Groovy and just copy your G-unit skills. This idea would either have to be overbalanced by necessity or it’ll be poorly designed and broken as all hell. Imagine if you could combine Bledermaus and Gilles de Rais. Or Nouvelle and Ziegenburg.

This ultimately ended being mainly complaining. Its hard for me to have faith in Bushiroad when they’ve proven multiple times before they will drop the ball when things get going. I hope they prove me wrong but the baseline idea seems like it’ll be poorly thought out and probably damage the market.

As always comments/criticisms welcome. Hope y’all enjoyed.