Card Highlights #3 - Eyes of the Chancellor

Welcome to Card of the Week! The purpose of this series of threads is to prompt strategy discussion and answer any rules questions about specific cards. Feel free to share stories of how you’ve used the featured card in the past, speculations of how you might use it in the future, and any strong synergies or counters you may think of. And feel free to message me with any card requests for next week! Otherwise cards will be chosen randomly.

Previously on Card of the Week

Card Highlights #2 - Firehouse


It’s only a problem if you’ve got something to hide. This week’s card is Eyes of the Chancellor:

This is probably the meanest of all the upgrades. As a Detector, it will continuously reveal any and all opposing Stealth or Invisible things, forcing your opponent to play more “honestly”. However, you are under no such restrictions, and can hide one secret from your opponent each turn. Additionally, knowing the contents of your opponent’s hand at all times is very powerful. You can perfectly play around whatever they might have, or if you had a choice between destroying one of their tech bulidings or heroes, now you know exactly which one to go for.

In-spec Synergies
Spectral Tiger - Eyes of the Chancellor can make any illusion untargetable for a turn because it doesn’t :target:, but Spectral Tiger really likes being Invisible because 5 atk is enough to break a tech building. You can even pull this off the turn you play Eyes of the Chancellor, because it has haste.

In-color Synergies
Injunction, Community Service - knowing exactly when these cards will hit, and how hard, is very strong.

Out-of-color Synergies
???

Counters
Nature Reclaims, Assimilate, Versatile Style - any of the standard Upgrade-destruction effects apply here. However, since you’ll know when these are in your opponent’s hand, you can time your Free Speech to protect Eyes of the Chancellor, or apply enough pressure with your other things to discourage them from spending the gold on their answer.

Surplus, Setsuki’s Maxband, Hyperion, Garth’s Midband - anything that draws cards will give your opponent some resilience against you perfectly playing around their hand.

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I made your Card of the Week series a newspost.

PRESSURE’S ON, LETTUCE. BETTER NOT MISS A WEEK FRIEND

:wink:

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One of my favorite uses for EotC was to swing Brave Knights into Tech buildings, and then be able to squad lead him directly after. #Ilovereadiness

I have made great use of Reputable Newsman (didn’t have a Free Speech in hand), Injunction, and a tech building kill to completely lock out a player’s board. You need that knowledge to make those kinds of gameplans work, and you can’t draw Lawful Search every turn… (or can you?!)

Definitely one of my favorite cards in Blue.

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I never feel like I can keep enough board to make this card work. I’d love to see a PbF game where someone used this…?

It’s tough to keep board with Blue in general. A Tower on turn 2 or 3 definitely helps though

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It seems like this is tailor made to counter Ninjutsu’s stealth. I’m really curious how and when it comes in to play in that match up and how it compares to tower. This is especially interesting because you mention Setsuki Maxband as a soft counter.

How useful is it in other match-ups? Anarchy, Feral, Demonology both use stealth / invisibility as an important part of their gameplan, while Future and Peace also have stealth / invisibility options. I’m guessing that Feral and Demonology hit too early for this to be a counter.

How does this rank against other buildings and upgrades? I see it has haste, so you can get the action this turn for some great invisible trades. That Brave Knight combo sounds especially useful, assuming you have the gold.
If we compare it to spells, Unphase and Behind the Ferns both give invisibility / stealth while Versatile Style gives detector.

The only times I’ve used this is against Mono-black, to prevent Metamorphosis’ed heroes. It works well against that though.

As for keeping a board in front of it, Reteller + Hounds + Macciatus can do it pretty well.

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Fair warning, if you or your friends are prone to analysis paralysis, you definitely want to stay away from this card!

Because you draw your hand at the end of the turn, you’ll likely have perfect information as to what your opponent’s hand will be and how much gold they’ll have, so it might be hard to resist the urge to sit there and plan out both your own turn and every permutation of your opponent’s next turn.

Fortunately, @Leontes is the only person who’s played this card against me and he’s a pretty fast player!

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Love this series. I would actually really love to see Versatile Style analyzed. Versatile minor effects tend to get discounted a lot in card games, so it would be good to see a how/when of it!

Question: EotC is a detector, but it can detect only 1 invis unit per turn or all of them?

All of them, detector sees all, tower is specifically restricted to once per turn by its effect.

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So under the versatyle style effect even grave sees them all?

yes, grave is a detector (unfortunately only during your turn, not until your next upkeep)

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I just played this card in a game.
http://forums.sirlingames.com/t/cafs-2016-realpihalbe-mono-black-vs-bomber678-feral-strength-truth/

It’s yet to be determined whether it will be useful or not…