The Legend Reborn | Interdimensional Dragon Knight, Lost Legend

Bushiroad the madmen.

Much to my joy, Bushiroad has decided to throw me a bone and pass us what looks to be Gear Chronicle’s first VR in Standard play. I’m sure everyone’s seen it at this point, but just in case I’ll link it here.

As the first of our Standard Gears cards revealed, Lost Legend is all we have to base any predictions or theories, but thankfully he gives us a lot to chew on.

Firstly, I’m just gonna get his second skill out of the way. It’s honestly pretty mediocre, just looking at it. CB2 for a draw in Standard era’s a pretty big joke cost-efficiency wise, but having the option’s nice. Who knows, the deck might not even have any CB costs so the CB2 won’t affect your plays at all. We’ll see what happens.

Now, onto the good shit.

His primary ACT skill is massive, acting as a pseudo-stride at the same cost of discarding grades of three or higher and distributing another force gift at the end of the turn when he is re-ridden.
This alone makes Gears out of the gate the most consistent and fastest at racking up a Force gifts, getting two Force gifts on-field on first grade three turn (albeit the second one at the end) as well as the fact that you don’t even need to see Grade 3s you want to ride to ramp up the gift, since you only need to pitch Grade 3 or more rather than actually have to ride a new Grade 3. If you do have an additional Lost Legend in hand and want to overextend to double dip, you can ramp up force even further by manually riding for gift and using Legend’s ACT.

This isn’t even getting into the actual stride applications. Being able to pick and choose what Vanguard you’ll be sitting on gives Gears plenty of options every turn that comes. That’s just powerful and provides unparalleled flexibility for the clan. It makes me very excited for what Grade 4s we’ll be getting in the future. We’ll most likely only see a small handful in the first wave, but if handled well it should be great.

But alas. As awesome as Lost Legend is, it does end up giving us some consistency-related nuances we need to deal with, specifically with Grade Ratios.

With the introduction of an entirely new Grade, which you’ll definitely want chock full to make the most of the skill, Gears will definitely have a harder time keeping their Grade lineups consistent enough for re-riding purposes, though I’m currently in belief that this problem will be remedied by support. A Nouvelleroman clone or something similar will definitely be a big help. A deck refresh to move Grade 4s in the drop back to deck so that they can be run at lesser numbers more safely would be excellent as well. We’ll just have to wait and see what the Booster has to offer.

Lost Legend dropping in the stream was a very, very pleasant surprise that I was happy to have woken up to. It makes me more excited than ever for Gear Chronicle support to drop. He looks slick, his skill’s great. I’m overjoyed.

That’s enough out of me today. I’ll see you in the next one! (Which is probably not going to come for another couple months. Just saying.)

- Chang