Fear = Tempo

Hello everyone, BurnedByKevin here! Today I wanted to quickly talk about the trait Fear, and why I think it’s going to be worth playing it in the Seance Metagame. 

Seance has introduced so many new evasive beasties, that are going to have a huge impact on the game. As we all know, spirit and burrow are the most annoying beasties to deal with and usually have the best results in survivability. With that being said, this is why I think Fear is going to be even more relevant moving forward. 

Most decks do not have direct interaction with evasive beasties outside of flame having the most direct page damage spells or using First anniversary or toxic water to name a few. This usually results in tricky game ones if you aren’t prepared for it. Now if we incorporated more good cards with the fear trait, that have interaction with the board and beasties that are hard to target, once again burrow, spirit, even magiproof, this can put us a step ahead literally.

Now of course fear is a chance of the roll or coin flip, but if landed the tempo play is 100% worth it. Now it doesn’t eliminate the beastie permanently, it sets you up to have a blocker next turn, or forces the opponent to play different, or put them a turn behind by recontracting the beastie. Now let me tell you another reason fear has more utility than you think, as we all know power up red is a game ender card, outside of void spell, 2nd anniversary, or direct destroy pages, fear is probably the easiest choice of chance to counter it. For example, your opponent contracts Powerup red, you are either tapped out, or don’t have the answer at the moment.

Your turn starts, you have a beastie with fear, and a 50% chance to bounce the beastie back to hand, resulting in getting rid of power up red. Now we all know this is not guaranteed, but seance has given us a HANDFUL of low cost beasties with fear where you can pretty much up your chances of succeeding with fear, but not forcing bad cards into your deck. Tempo is huge in any TCG, and fear is going to set the bar very high in this format and moving forward. Here are some of my favorite beasties with fear from seance and a couple from older sets that are powerful, and relevant!