All images courtesy of Altered TCG/Equinox
Hello everyone and welcome back to another Altered article! Now that Trial By Frost is upon us, with prerelease events happening all around the world last weekend, there are some very exciting new cards and mechanics to talk about.
What’s New in Trial by Frost?
At the time of writing, I haven’t had the opportunity to mess around with the new cards too much outside of some sweet new upgrades in Kojo, so this article is really going to be a bigger picture overview on the new mechanics, themes, and support for underrepresented heroes in the new expansion.
I think a lot of people, myself included, were slowly getting worn down by the existing meta and lack of updates that all card games face in their first release. Thankfully, Trial by Frost has finally released, and with it, so many fresh new mechanics, cards, designs, and strategies that have invigorated my interest for Altered. So without further ado, let’s get into it!
Exhaust
Perhaps the new mechanic in Trial by Frost, exhaust is a type of temporary removal that we’ve seen in other card games in recent time, disabling cards for a turn. While a card is exhausted, it functionally has no text, and eats up a spot in reserve, ideally forcing your opponent to lose card advantage by playing out more cards in hand to deny some sort of double advance on your side.
There are even some cards in Trial that give advantages like boosts by discarding cards in reserve like Aroro, Savior of Asgartha, or gain additional bonuses when checking the number of exhausted cards. As a mechanic, exhaust is a nice second-set keyword to slow down from the all-or-nothing removal style of Sabotage, but can engender a similar sort of negative reaction if the intention was to ease up on how brutal Sabotage can feel at times, especially when it’s coming from a faction like Ordis.
It’s certainly an interesting disruption mechanic, but so far I can only really see the vision of enabling cost reduction on a card like Flutter of Moths, as a rebalanced form of resupply on a slew of Axiom cards, and being a control top-end card in Winter Nova and The Snow Queen.
There are certainly some standout cards with the mechanic; Skadi in Bravos, and a whole catalog of cards for Yzmir come to mind immediately. But I think the cards that want discarding a card from reserve for some small bonus is a step too many over the line. Having a card be temporarily shut off for a turn is just as good as sabotaging it in the crucial turns, and the characters that exhaust are statted way better than the ones with Sabotage.
I can foresee a lot of these characters appearing in decks simply due to their good stats and occasional upside.
Removal Got Better in Trial by Frost!
One of the areas that Trial by Frost greatly improves upon Beyond the Gates is in its removal suite. There are a lot of very exciting removal spells, especially Avalanche and Blizzard, two new board wipe effects that seem poised to keep up in tempo with a deck like Sigismar’s constant stream of characters and tokens.
Tiny Jail really highlights Trial’s other new focuses, the Cooldown mechanic, and a further emphasis on character statistics. In direct contrast to some of Beyond the Gate’s removal spells checking on hand cost, a lot of Trial’s removal is either slightly more expensively costed but unconditional and exhausting the character in reserve, or can target a wider range of hand costs, but is gated by statistics instead. Cooldown on quite a few of these choice spells, like the aforementioned Tiny Jail and Freeze, act as though they were on the same delayed parity with the exhausted character, which would ideally function on a similar cadence to the existing removal spells.
I quite like this direction they’re taking removal, in particular more board wipes so that someone trying to play a control-style deck isn’t constantly getting out-tempoed by a deck that’s constantly outputting under-rate characters.
Why Are Bureaucrats Back Again?
After Robin Hood was rightfully errata’d to no longer be the menace he is, Waru and Mack fell out of favor in the meta, at least as a top-tier deck. However with the new mechanic of exhausting cards as a way of temporarily shutting them off for a turn, a whole new suite of disruption and control-oriented cards join the game.
I’m not exactly sure if this is the healthiest approach for the game to take in giving Waru a sudden influx of more disruptive bureaucrats, especially a few at three hand-cost in Dong Da Shen and Ebeneezer Scrooge, but their disruption is less all-encompassing than Monolith Legate or Robin Hood, and at least work less aggressively than something like Legate and Attorney.
There’s also this subtheme in Ordis of cards gaining extra abilities when your expedition is behind, which I find quite interesting, but am unsure of whether the added flexibility is worth the increase in hand-cost. Is the extra two points in Ocean on Ordis Overseer that much of a dealbreaker in comparison to Ordis Cadets who will always make the token no matter what? Field Reinforcements is a really well-designed card, but I’m ultimately unsure whether either of those effects are actually worth the mana when its combined. In my eyes, a card like Charge! is so ubiquitous to any style of Ordis deck that some of these more conditional ways to put bodies onto the board feel worse than existing options for now.
I hope to see Equinox make some more advantages on cards when an expedition is behind, but in such a tempo-oriented game, it seems like a tall order.
Support for Underdogs in Trial by Frost?
Quite a few of the 90 cards in Trial by Frost are seemingly dedicated to some of the more casual or underpowered heroes in Altered right now. The three that immediately come to mind are Rin, Atsadi, and Auruq, who each receive very specific support that directly calls out their abilities. Cards like Break the Ice and Winter Outfits are very explicit in how they mitigate or reward you for playing more characters with a statistic of zero, and the Icebound Tundra acts as a secondary version of Auruq to always guarantee a 5/5/5 body if you fail to flip into a giant monster.
Rin is given a whole slew of cards that turn expeditions into Forests, allowing her to trigger constantly and also helping to mitigate the downside of playing a ton of characters with low non-Forest statistics and having to contest on Oceans or Mountains. There’s some interesting spider-webbing across the Rin and Auruq support since there’s some natural cross-synergy in the faction-shifted cards. After all, it’s natural for there to be more zero statistics when you’re playing heavy Forest characters and vice versa, so having a lot of their gear and characters crossover is a nice way to support both heroes with only one set of cards.
Atsadi, however, is just so alone on a remote island doing his own thing that so much of his support is basically all about only himself. Some of it is in the form of ways to mitigate the downside of wanting to play a single big character every turn in Eros, who lets you play a second character for free immediately, or the Eat Me Energy Bars which turns that lone character Gigantic.
Amarok is also a nice character that acts as a three hand-cost in early turns to start ticking up the Heroism counters on Atsadi, but the problem with this round of support for all three of these underplayed heroes is that the playstyle and way the game works currently basically can’t allow for them to slip up even once. Missing a flip off of Auruq can be backbreaking and waste all that effort in building up those counters; Rin needs to actually still win on Forests when the expeditions are turned into them; and Atsadi is still incredibly vulnerable to spot removal, especially when given that there is a sudden influx of new removal.
That’s not to say this wave of support isn’t needed; if Altered wants to have some of the more off-the-wall heroes be more represented or in a playable state, these new cards are exactly the right direction for them to take. The issue is always when overtuning a card leads to the other heroes in the faction co-opting it and using it better, which is some of the fear I have of the Gulrang cards. But I remain hopeful for future expansions.
Conclusion
There are some really exciting new cards in Trial by Frost that I have plans to slot into my existing decks, as well as many that spawn entirely new decks and archetypes by the strength of newfound synergies. I really hope to be able to dive into some of these new cards, and will begin incorporating them into my Starter Deck upgrade series as well as future deep dives.
The future of Altered looks bright, and I’m so happy about that.
Want more Altered content? Check out my reviews and upgrades for the starter decks: Bravos, Ordis, Muna.
