Keyword Updates: Chibi & Set 2

Greetings Soul Master Community!

As all of you have seen, ever since we started this adventure in creating a card game like no other, we have used some wording and keywords that eventually became a bit confusing due to their overreliance to explain or limit the actions we wanted to take ( I’m looking at you Defender). Taking all of this into consideration and with the perfect support of a team dedicated to this, we have been slowly rolling out the wording changes and presenting it over various products since Chibi Awakening set and Outerlands and more.

Today, we will be looking at some mayor keywords that have been updated to ensure that everybody can be on the same page, new or old players alike.

Blink, this keyword was previous known as the “This unit can be played as an ability”. Officially that is the keyword for that term to avoid having the confusion of “If I play the unit as an ability, can I counter it with Athena’s Counterspell?” This also removes the Unit - Ability that some cards had to ensure that they can’t be KO’d easily by using a simple Cleanse keyword.

Intercept, this keyword replaces the old orange Defender keyword located in a few popular defender cards such as Bastion, Shadow, Snow and Blood Jar to name a few. With this updated keyword, the action of defending your units or commander from an attack will now fall in the established Interception of the attack as the unit gets in the way of the attack. This allows us now to focus on using the Defender Bubble timing restriction or effects to be a simpler explanation for new players and makes sure that if you have a skill or ability card that activates during the Defender Step, it does not conflict with the action of resting your unit.

Health and HP. Before both units and commanders had Health as the identifier of how much life they had on the field. We understood that having both a unit and a commander having health could be mistaken as a player putting the life tokens on top of a unit and consider that they have stackable health that just gets fully heal after each combat or turn. Officially now, commanders have Hit Points or HP that is the amount of damage they will take before evolving if possible. Every hit you take now removes a simple life chip or counter and it becomes a bit easier to distinguish between buffing the units health and raising a commander's HP. 

Shield Power. This one is rather simple in terms of what it affects. When discarding cards from your Shield Energy to protect yourself, it felt redundant using the same name to explain the power used to reduce the damage taken. We decided as a team to official change the name to Shield Power since it allows us to properly explain the power cards have to reduce damage or buff your damage if you are using a Duelist keyword. We understand that the wording can be confusing later on in future cards or older cards that can become popular to use and refer to Shield Power as Shield Energy but in essence they remain the same just a different way to simplify and more properly represent the power of shielding and the cards in hand.

On Play from Hand. This was one that was a long time coming to properly identify the effects that people thought would be active from anywhere. This will properly replace the timing bubble (On Play) and now have the extension to know where will some abilities trigger and if they have special additional conditions to work. This also brings the similar concept of (On Cast from Hand) where if the cards have an additional cost to play the cards, they can be simplified in the sequence of how to properly cast the card and all the associated cost without the room for error to modify the selection the player made before trying to resolve a card that suddenly became impossible to resolve. 

Your Turn will replace the (Main) bubble. This helps us clarify that even though your combat happens during the Main Phase of the game, some players could get the wrong idea of not being in combat to activate said skills and create a situation where misplays could be abound. With this new bubble update, almost all or many of the bubble words of (Main) will specify if the action can be only done during your turn or during combat and so on depending on the restrictions of timing.

When Attacking time bubble. Many amazing cards that we play in the game were made with a simple line of “When this unit/commander attacks, do something” and it created a bit of a problem because some people thought it could apply to any attack from another place or can be delayed sometimes. With this new timing bubble, the units and commanders will always have that skill or action activate as soon as they declare an attack and try to resolve it during the pre-defender stage. 

Conjure. Commanders or special units (Arsalan) have now this keyword at the bottom. The word Conjure refers now to the basic action of declaring and attack placing X amount of resources from your resource deck into the field. This is a proper fix to avoid the confusion present since the demo decks that said “Attacks generate 1 resource” and then the updated change of “When attacking generate X resources”. This keyword now allows us to be able to modify easily how much resources a commander on attack can generate and also be able to bypass the stack in a certain way to allow better resolution if needed. 

These are some of the key terms updated recently with the release of Chibi Awakening and Outerlands with more soon to come if needed. Thank you so much for passing by and keeping playing more Soul Masters!

- Will ‘DizzyDiabetic’ Winders