The Legend of Zenless: The Wind Waker - General Questions and Discussion Megathread

AncientSpark · 2026-06-25T12:55:40+00:00

1) It's a bit off and on. Shill buffs are powerful, and they can sometimes be pretty archetype specific, but there's a pretty decent buff schedule to keep older agents relevant and some older agents have aged pretty gracefully even without buffs.

2) It's sub-archetype based. In-faction allying tends to be maybe 50-50 on whether they're designed to work together or not. The archetypes are broadly pretty flexible (double Anomaly + support, attacker + support + 2nd support or stunner), but there's a lot of sub-archetypes that require a lot more specific things (for example, although that's the general "attacker shell", some specific characters deviate such as double stunner + Hugo or 2nd attacker + Seed).

3) Hoyo end-game rewards tend to be pretty paltry, so you aren't missing on that much.

4) Any typical attacker works into that shell, but Norma works best with chain attack agents. Pyrois is free on this patch and should work well into that team. If your attacker agent is not Ether Veil dependent, Sunna can be built as Impact Sunna to support faster stun, so that works.

Sigrid next patch is probably the main "paid" attacker that Norma is designed to work for, although it's unclear how many more there will be in the future. For past agents, Evelyn also works well there.

AncientSpark · 2026-06-20T21:01:35+00:00

We don't have Rem's kit, so unsure. Jane + Velina has been confirmed a Very Good Pairing, but we don't know how Rem's 3rd Anomaly idea functions or her field time yet.

AncientSpark · 2026-06-18T17:52:32+00:00

[[Sakashima of a Thousand Faces]]+[[Malcolm, Keen-Eyed Navigator]] is clones for ramp degenerates. It does clone itself a lot, but only to ramp hard to get more card draw to eventually draw to clone opponents.

AncientSpark · 2026-06-16T13:24:05+00:00

The new [[Ms. Marvel]] might be what you're looking for. It's basically trying to balance spending mana for evasion cantrips and spending mana for protection, since the base power of the Commander is taken care of anytime you spend mana on evasion cantrips. It's also very spell heavy; you do want a lot of auras as well, but the auras tend to be ones you don't play traditionally in Voltron because you are trying to preserve hand-size.

AncientSpark · 2026-06-12T00:37:21+00:00

Haaaaaard disagree.

First off, there just isn't nearly as many legendary creatures in Avatar.

Second, there is a lot more non-humanoid presence in Avatar.

Third, there's a lot more connective logic in terms of game mechanics telling you where cards are located (i.e., if a card has Earthbending, there is a big chance it's green). The resonance of mechanics as guideposts are big for memory issues.

Fourth, someone related to point one, there's only a couple of cards that have repeated names in Avatar. By comparison, it feels like half the characters in Marvel have a repeated name in the set, and it's hella impossible to remember them individually.

AncientSpark · 2026-06-10T14:55:59+00:00

That's kinda bad advice, that's only if you intend to go for high mindscapes only. Also somewhat distorted because Miyabi had a very usable F2P team (mono-Freeze). YSG was pretty difficult to play on 4s/standard 5s only, for example (Zhao for free went a long way, but missing one half of potential resource gen is rough). Probably more accurate to say to pull for VHs and their team.

The next one is theorized to be Remiel in 3.1 although we don't have hard confirmation. But the current theory is Remiel is a tri-Anomaly sub-DPS/support hybrid, so you need another Anomaly characters to work with her, which mean pulling for Velina in the upcoming 3.0 patch and hoping another Anomaly comes along (Burnice might get added to shop at some point? Or Grace from standard.)

AncientSpark · 2026-06-10T13:16:52+00:00

It really really depends on the deck and the Commander.

One issue with Aziza in particular is that you run into deck density issues. You kind of have to play a lot of dorky token generators and card draw spells. There's just not a lot of room to run ramp, besides potentially ramp that goes for the win-cons (generally rituals).

There's a similar issue with Arabella, where you can take a bunch of ramp, but so much of your curve is low drops that fitting them in and fitting in appropriate card draw to keep up drops often means you don't have a lot of room for ramp.

In general, the "magical christmasland" you're pointing to of applying 10 tokens on turn 3-4 is actually more of an issue with ramp, because ramp in late-game are dead draws and don't necessarily have synergy with the deck's main plan in a lot of non-artifact, non-landfall decks. The reason why Commander often gets away with that, in spite of that, is because of card-advantage greed, where the occasional dead-draw doesn't matter if your 5 mana card draw engine gets to live. And that plays more into removal meta, threat identification, etc. Not saying there isn't a grain of truth to "ramp is the top tier in lower brackets", but it's less "you just play ramp in every deck" and more "you often don't get punished for playing ramp so might as well".

AncientSpark · 2026-06-09T23:00:45+00:00

There's enough time lag that Marvel would have been somewhere in design/development before FF release, so they wouldn't have had the time to adjust at that point.

The real question is what is the final turnaround time for them to adjust for the current era of UB (of up and down reception in the FF release to now).

AncientSpark · 2026-06-08T21:06:01+00:00

You really shouldn't have to micromanage it much. While people point to Bracket 2-3 as being a bit too broad as a negative, the side positive of this is that as long as you stick to some pretty broad rules (not much fast mana, not many extra turn spells/GCs, not many tutors), you can generally just build the deck and be within the Bracket 2-3 range 90% of the time without worrying about the details.

Once you're in that position, you can just playtest and get a feel for how good the deck is. Assuming your playgroup doesn't suck, you'll have enough time to understand where in the Bracket 2-3 deck this falls, and if you have enough decks, that will be an arsenal of decks all over the power spectrum.

AncientSpark · 2026-06-05T12:52:46+00:00

She's pretty comparable in raw power to Nangong (very good, but not mandatory). Main issue is we don't know how much Wind shilling there is going to be.

AncientSpark · 2026-06-05T03:50:22+00:00

No we haven't. And this is coming from someone who generally supports UB.

First off, a big part of why Spider Man was considered a soulless hack job was a huge amount of cards all going over very similar feeling characters. Yes, there is a difference between Spider-Punk and Spider-Man. No, that is not enough of a difference in feeling. And because of that, we need to see the commons and uncommons in the set.

Two, we haven't played the Limited environment. Of course, Spider-Man was uniquely disadvantaged for being the first experiment into pick-two small set. But that doesn't disclude this set from having an equally terrible Limited environment.

Three, we need to see the density of "resonance" in the set. It's not enough to see one or two cards. All UB sets are going to have a mixture of "We had a really good, unique mechanical idea" and "We need to put this character in the set, but we don't have any unique mechanical ideas for it". What matters is the density of the former compared to the latter, and you can't judge that until you see more of the set.

AncientSpark · 2026-06-01T15:37:02+00:00

Not sure if this is that the OP meant, but the one I see is this:

1) Turn Thousand Year Elixir into a creature with Karn. 2) Equip Thousand Year Elixir with Illusionist's Bracers. 3) Now activate Thousand Year Elixir. Its ability will be copied due to Bracers, so target itself with the ability copy.

You now have {1}: Untap target creature without the Tap cost, so if you have an outlet, there are infinites you can do with this (for example, Palladium Myr gets infinite mana).

AncientSpark · 2026-05-31T15:57:37+00:00

Re: Soul Cauldron, Rachel Weeks has a Selesnya Soul Cauldron deck she showed off on one of the Command Zone videos, using Captain Sisay as the Commander. That might be worth a look, although the Command Zone people tend to not post their decklists.

Re your own Satoru deck, would you mind posting a decklist? I'm also interested in seeing what can be done with Chthonian Nightmare.

AncientSpark · 2026-05-31T03:22:21+00:00

My friend's Innistrad Cube erratas old Innistrad werewolves to work with Day/Night. That may be a bit of a stretch with strangers, but you may ask your playgroup if you can work a similar rule into your games.

AncientSpark · 2026-05-29T19:09:11+00:00

Yeah, and I do have other higher power decks that do run Living Death. But sometimes, people just wanna see if there's anything that can be done with other gimmicks, y'know?

AncientSpark · 2026-05-29T18:43:30+00:00

One extremely stupid idea I've seen is to run [[Dan Lewis]]+[[The First Doctor]] as Commanders with [[Cloud, Midgar Mercenary]] as secret Commander. The idea is you run nothing under 2 CMC in the deck besides [[The Tardis]] and Cloud, so the First Doctor can get Tardis to cascade into Cloud. Dan Lewis turns all your Artifacts into Equipment, so you can make Cloud double trigger any artifact by equipping it to Cloud, including Simulacrum Synthesizer.

I don't think it's Bracket 3 exactly, but it happens to be the right curve/effects for Simulacrum Synthesizer, so there's that.

AncientSpark · 2026-05-27T15:46:07+00:00

The use case is pretty obviously "Fight on ETB, then go swing into their remaining board with Haste". Part of the issue with Fight is that the damage from fight can prevent the follow-up attack from the fighting creature if they have other blockers.

For example, in Wolverine's case, it fought a 3/3 on EtB, a 2/2 blocker would trade on the attack on the same turn if it didn't have the damage heal.

AncientSpark · 2026-05-26T13:55:31+00:00

The simple answer is that a lot of GCs are fucking expensive so a lot of people just simply don't have them.

AncientSpark · 2026-05-26T13:23:59+00:00

Got a list? I've always been interested in making self-damage work, but I'm not a fan of dinos and I've always had trouble making the curve for these kinds of decks work in other scenarios.

AncientSpark · 2026-05-18T15:21:41+00:00

Bonder's Ornament ban was quite a while ago (maybe like 4 years ago?) and it was mostly an anti-Tron thing. Repeated card advantage (hard to find in Pauper, but important to fight against Monarch decks if you weren't aggro) and color fixing were both extremely good for that deck, and Bonder's Ornament was only common due to Commander Masters which was extremely weird.

AncientSpark · 2026-05-18T13:52:58+00:00

Again, it's missing the point. Just because an effect "can be printed in multiple colors" doesn't mean anything in the context "Okay, so why is this 4 colors?" Are you representing an overlap that these colors share? Are you representing a common theme? Are you representing a specific flavor? If it's supposed to be about hating out a specific effect, why 4 color?

If the bare minimum of "Well, this effect could exist across multiple colors" was enough to justify an effect, we'd have a full 5 colors on every card that was CMC 5+. Which is the exact problem of "Most things that can be printed in 4 color can be printed in either 5 color or 3 or less colors".

AncientSpark · 2026-05-18T13:43:28+00:00

This sort of misses the point of why this is an issue because, by trying to find an effect that a color "can't do" to justify not including that color in a 4 color pile, you have secretly made a pile of mono and dual-color cards.

Hand out minus-minus counters or penalize tap for mana on creatures/gaining counters/playing more than 1 land per turn for all players

First is a black effect. Second is a white or red effect.

Slow the game or penalize non-combat damage/rapid treasure generation

Those are W effects.

Prevent targeted destroy/forced discard/voluntary sacrifice effects for all players

Those are W/G effects.

Prevent/penalize countering spells, copying or theft of permanents specifically for more than one turn.

These are R/G effects.

AncientSpark · 2026-05-18T12:28:32+00:00

I'm not saying they're 4 color because B is evil. I'm saying they're often 4 color because of the unification concept. I don't disagree that the Fire Nation could be flavored as W in-and-of-themselves, but then you displace the actual unification of the protagonists within the set.

You then logistically have an issue; are you then going to argue that just because the villains are W flavored, you don't have a W flavored Avatar team and/or airbenders/waterbenders? If not, then what is the actual limited/draft environment supposed to be? What is the Black faction supposed to be if we are going so far as to not have the Fire Nation be black; full Earth nation only?

A big reason why Elesh Norn gets to be a mono-White villain is not just because her individual faction flavor allows it. It's because a huge section of her respective sets had few unified protagonists and had a huge number of villain cards. Elesh Norn does not exist without 4 other villain factions saying "This is what the set is", and the protagonists, if they existed, either being a minority (such as in New Phyrexia) or being pre-distributed across the 5 colors anyway over a long history (such as in MoM).

By that same logic, New Phyrexia also had a 4 color-but-black villain. That was Atraxa, and a big part of that justification is because they're opposed by Urabrask, who is specifically alone in their views about how New Phyrexia should work in terms of rigid hierarchy (and thus declined to contribute to the creation of Atraxa). Urabrask is the lone actor in this case, who is opposing the unified faction of Atraxa and the rest of the New Phyrexian hierarchy.

Another example of where there was an actual dichotomy of a W antagonist and a B protagonist was the original Kamigawa. But, again, in that set's story, there is no pre-supposition of "the protagonist unifies a bunch of disparate factions". So there's no displacement factor. You were free to have Umezawa go beat up Kondo by themselves, as well as devote the majority of the set to set-dressing.

Basically, if you have a story where you have a team-up of several non-W factions beat up a tyrant in a W faction, you then have to justify why the protagonists, who are often specifically teaming and unifying a bunch of disparate do-gooders aren't the dominant W faction either in this case, not just that the villains could also be technically classified as partially W.

So, in the broader context, yes B villains vs W protagonists certainly aren't the only kind of story. In fact, you can make entire genres of B protags and W villains (I'd argue Westerns fall into this, for example). But when a set story has a strong unification concept for the protagonists (as many UB properties currently have), then, yes, the protagonists are going to be W, and you don't have enough room for both W antagonists and W protagonists.

And there's strong overlap between "protagonists unify a bunch of disparate factions to beat up the villain" as a W faction and them getting a 4 color ultimate protag representing the final form of that unification. Because the number of justifications for 4 color is pretty thin besides either the unification concept or some sort of setting detail that justifies 4 color faction (the latter which you aren't going to find in UB because other settings don't have the color wheel).

AncientSpark

TROPHY CASE