Wixoss Diva Starters 1-6 - including translated print-outs!

After playing with all 6 of the first wave of Diva starter decks, I feel like I’m starting to get a good handle on how the format plays out. They’re definitely different than Key format. The first and biggest difference is game time; Diva games are much faster than earlier Wixoss formats. This is partly a result of the lack of Servants available resulting in more LRIG damage on average, but that’s not as big an issue as it may first seem, since defensive decks tend to have plenty of ways to search or recycle these limited Guards. More important is the bias of Diva LRIG decks to aggression. Most level 1 Assist LRIGs are either aggressive or build resources (ener, SIGNI, etc), while attack-phase defensive options are restricted to level 2. Furthermore, there are no playable defensive Pieces. In practice, this means that while in Key you could have 3, 4, or even 5 defensive effects in your LRIG deck, Diva tends to cap out at 2 (your 2 level 2 Assists).

While the gameplay is narrower owing to the faster pace (although still quite good), deckbuilding is considerably more open than the relatively constrained archetypes of Key. Diva does away with LRIG-type restrictions, and while LRIGs are arranged into teams, few of the team benefits are powerful enough to completely rule out mixing and matching. On the starter deck front, however, this leads into an odd bit of tension, since the decks are balanced between solid, staple effects (red banishing, blue draw and discard, etc) and more niche strategies that may or may not be fully supported in the deck (red level 1 in No Limit, trash recursion in Nijisanji, freeze in Universe’s Beginning).

While the rest of this article is going to narrow in more specifically on the starter decks and their gameplay, it is worth pointing out a few other considerations for the Diva format. Each Assist LRIG only has 2-3 level 2 Assists, which means you can likely predict your opponent’s defensive effects more reliably than in Key as long as you know what options are available. Life Bursts are more specialized than earlier Wixoss formats; you’ll rarely have straightforward effects like ‘draw a card’ or ‘enercharge 1’, but conditional removal effects like ‘banish an upped SIGNI’ or ‘an opposing SIGNI gets -8000 power’ are more common. I’m not sure how realistic it is to play around the life bursts your opponent would likely have, but being able to do so will often be more impactful than it would be in earlier Wixoss formats, so it does bear keeping in mind.

As for the decks themselves (beside each name is a link to a printable PDF that lists all cards in the deck, and translates the names and effects - this should hopefully be a useful tool for those of us who bought a deck, but aren't confident in our ability to read japanese (like me)):


Ancient Surprise - for a printable deck translation, click here

I also covered this deck in an earlier article, but having played it against all 5 decks now, it’s quickly become one of my favourites. It’s primarily green, with red and blue splashes (along with red and blue assists). It doesn’t truly excel at any one strategy, but it’s very adaptable, and has a very good mix of different effects, from defensive to offensive to resource generation (of both cards and ener). In their LRIG deck, they have good early filtering to ensure you don’t miss on early SIGNI (both level 1 Assists), a good strong defensive effect (Umr-Down), Tawil Colours (who both pushes damage and builds resources), and a powerful but expensive Piece, Harmony Call, that not only builds a full field of SIGNI, but also gives them all damage pushing effects. For their main deck, they don’t have any especially notable low-level SIGNI, but they have a good mix of effects at level 3: card filtering which helps dig for Servants (Tobiel), a discard effect to pressure the opponent’s hand in longer games (Assylen), and an ener-sink banish effect (Atalanta). The deck’s spell, Polygenesis, is also quite good - it can return Servants from the ener zone, or any other SIGNI you may need for the late game, and the deck’s ample enercharging means you’ll have plenty to choose from. Another point in the deck’s favour is that unlike several of the other decks, there are no real misses or unsupported archetypes here. Overall, the deck generates resources efficiently, and uses these resources efficiently. It isn’t especially fast or slow, but its adaptability can overpower the fast decks and use its resource generation to pressure the slower decks.


Nijisanji Sanbaka - for a printable deck translation, click here

This deck, on the other hand, is probably the weakest of the bunch. It’s primarily white, with a strong black splash (and its LRIGs are a mix of white and black, depending on the configuration you choose). It aims to be a long-game focused deck, with plenty of ways to build cards in hand, a strong Servant recursion engine, and enough removal to consistently force through damage in the later turns. The biggest issue with the deck is that outside of Otogibara Era (who can both recur Servants for defense and remove opposing SIGNI for offense), the deck’s level 3 lineup is a mess. Shizuka Rin does nothing for the deck, and (Higuchi Kaede) is marginal at best. This deck is also the worst offender for half-supported archetypes - it seems like it wants to have a strong trash recursion engine, but it often lacks the ener to make it work (Wonder Land, Morinaka Kazaki), and it both lacks enablers (Shizuka Rin is the only one that adds to trash, and does it far too late to be meaningful) and payoffs (outside of Era, there’s not anything worth bringing back). That’s not to say the deck is without its good points: it has a strong suite of removal that doesn’t give the opponent ener (Ange’s L1 & L2 assists, Era, and their Piece), which can ener-starve the opponent and make counter-attacking very difficult. The problem is the deck tends to ener-starve itself before it can take advantage of this, and it lacks painfully in attack-phase interaction. I think this deck can be quite strong, but more than any of the others, it’ll likely need some inclusions from boosters before using it.


No Limit - for a printable deck translation, click here

No Limit is primarily Red (with Blue and White assists), and unsurprisingly is the most aggressive deck of this batch. Not only does it have a bunch of banish effects in the main deck, they’re all available at lower levels (Romail, Lancelot, Roaring Fireball, Akino*Rock), which lets you hit the ground running and force in damage before the opponent has a chance to get their engines fully firing. Rei draws extra cards at both levels, helping the deck’s overall consistency, and her random discard effect at level 2 can knock Servants or other important SIGNI out of your opponent’s hand, which you can fire off as soon as you hit level 2 thanks to her low grow cost. Akino level 2 provides a strong (if expensive) defensive option that can also be used to force through damage on offense in a pinch. Finally, the deck’s Piece and Level 3 LRIG effect all provide additional sources of damage. The deck excels at forcing through damage early, but it can stumble in the late game. Its banish effects are all limited by power, which makes it difficult to force through SIGNI attacks once your opponent starts deploying level 3 SIGNI. And its own suite of level 3s are comparatively weak: Tlet recovers level 1 SIGNI, which can help fill your field if you’re running low on cards but doesn’t help offensively. Adamasphere can sneak in damage, but her effect is random, and since it only triggers on attack, missing gives your opponent free ener. And Kagutsuchi lets you spend 2 cards in your hand to bring back a level 3 from your trash, but given the overall weakness of the deck’s level 3s, you’re rarely excited about bringing anything back. The deck also has no Servant recursion engine, which can really hurt if your opponent manages to stabilize at level 3 after your early rush. That being said, this deck wants to win around turn 4, after using its Piece on turn 3 and Hirana’s 1/game effect to hopefully close the game the turn after. The deck’s strengths and weaknesses are well lined up to accomplish this goal, and I’ve been generally impressed with the deck’s performance.


Card Jockey - for a printable deck translation, click here

Moving on from No Limit, we come to Card Jockey which is primarily white with a green splash (and red and green assists), and is on the slow side of midrange. It’s also the most luck-dependent of these first 6 starters. It has some decent offensive pressure from DJ LOVIT at level 1 and level 2, wolf L1, as well as the Piece, ENDLESS PUNCHLINE. PUNCHLINE is either one of the best cards of the deck, or one of the worst - the effect is random, and flipping a level 3 or spell and getting in 3 LRIG attacks in one turn can win you the game on the spot, while flipping a level 1 replaces the text on your Piece with “do nothing.” And the deck needs every source of damage it can get, since it lacks any main deck tools to open opposing lanes. What the main deck does have is a ton of consistency - Good Dig finds anything you need, Servants being the most important (it can also help pull out low-level SIGNI from your deck, slightly tweaking your odds on PUNCHLINE). At level 1, Code Art F Lashli helps dig for your spell, making her one of the rare level 1 SIGNI that’s strong at all stages of the game. At level 3, you have a strong resource builder in Hare Hare, who generates either ener or cards in hand on attack. You have an interesting offensive card in Code Art C Handelier, who lets you attack into opposing SIGNI without giving the opponent ener. Finally, you have Athena, a solid, if expensive, Servant recursion engine. The deck’s attack-phase interaction may seem a bit lacking, and while there’s no real difference between using Wolf L2 in the attack phase vs the main phase, she’s a bit more solid than she seems; not only does she add to your life cloth, but she increases the average number of Life Bursts the deck will see by ~1 (so if most decks average 3.5 bursts per game, this deck will usually average around 4.5). This deck has a good number of defensive burst effects, so getting another one on top of gaining another life cloth is quite strong. That being said, life bursts are already quite random, and leaning into them for your defense on top of the randomness of ENDLESS PUNCHLINE means you’ll have games where you make mistakes and win anyway, as well as games where you play perfectly and still lose. If you can make peace with that, this deck does have some neat tools and has a good balance between its resource generation and resource use. Although one or two removal effects from booster cards would go a long way.


Universe’s Beginning - for a printable deck translation, click here

Universe’s Beginning is primarily blue (with white and green assists), and features a good mix of the effects you’d expect from blue: draw, discard, and freezing. It’s another deck that’s on the slower side, but unlike Card Jockey, it has plenty of main-deck damage-pushing effects, and unlike Nijisanji, it’s better set up to manage its ener costs. Not only do you get an enercharge effect from Bang at level 1, but the deck’s Piece and two defensive L2 Assist LRIGs all have very low costs (Nova-Chopper & Bang-Repeat), freeing up ener to devote to your main deck’s offensive engines. Which is a good thing, since your LRIG deck is much more focused on resource building and efficient defense rather than pushing damage, and the main deck tools to push damage are all quite expensive - you’re going to be paying 3 ener per damage from your SIGNI (Shinpachi & Draconids). Given this high cost, the deck does tend to stall out a bit, but fortunately your opponent is going to be having a tough time getting their decks to fire properly as well, given the plentiful discard effects this deck has. The biggest weakness of the deck is its lack of Servant recursion outside of just drawing cards, which means the deck struggles to minimize LRIG damage in the long games that its ener-intensive offense requires. Unfortunately this deck falls into line with my experience with most other Wixoss blue decks: I like the mix of effects the deck offers, but it falls in the mid- to low-tier of deck strength among its peers.


Diagram - for a printable deck translation, click here

Diagram is mainly black with a green splash, and is the second-fastest of the decks. It’s not as aggressive as No Limit, but has stronger late-game tools. It’s assists are nicely balanced at level 1 between an aggressive effect, and card draw, and due to Muzica’s level 3, you’ll be able to reuse one of them (Muzika is also the deck’s only way to reuse a Servant). This, coupled with a 0-cost Piece that can be used to either push damage or draw cards from the trash, lets the deck adapt as the situation demands - which also rewards a player for correctly reading the current game state. Do you need more cards in hand to keep you running into the late game, or do you need to push damage now? The deck’s level 2 assists lean towards low-cost, efficient defensive effects, which you can often deploy at level 2 - which means you need to have a clear plan as to which level 1 you want to reuse with Muzika. I’ve used a defensive effect at level 2, only to find that the level 1 it grew over was the one I needed to reuse (and subsequently lost because of it). The deck also has some neat combos - Sanga level 2 can save you two life if your whole field is cleared, but can also defend smaller openings if you have Bear Park to move around. Due to the lack of LRIG deck banish effects, offense is mostly left to the main deck. Fortunately, the deck has plenty of low-cost power reducing and banish effects, including the spell Downer Sound and all of the deck’s level 3 SIGNI. The deck can struggle against more dedicated decks - it lacks the low-level banish effects that let No Limit push ’s early aggression, but it also lacks the long-game card advantage engines to keep up with Universe’s Beginning. However, it has the tools to give it a fighting chance against either of them, and is able to function aggressively or defensively, with high amounts of ener or low.

 

Overall, the deck you choose will depend on which one you like the look of best - there's not enough of a power difference to rule out any of them (except Nijisanji). Or, given they all cost around 500 yen, you could just buy all 6. These decks are also decently set up for future modifications - unlike Key decks, which I really enjoyed in their stock lists, there are plenty of slots to swap cards out here - weird anti-synergy or just underwhelming inclusions. Further, the play patterns of these decks tend to be flatter than Key decks - there's less synergies to master, and sequencing is less vital. The gameplay is good, but these are the most 'starter deck' of starters Wixoss has put out in a while. Which isn't a bad thing. I'll just say I'm excited to make some swaps in these decks in a way that I never really felt with Key's starter decks.

Additional notes on Diva gameplay

 (No Limit vs Ancient Surprise - No Limit had a rough start, and its banishing effects are letting Ancient Surprise play out its high-cost effects with little difficulty.)

I've played a bunch more games with the first two starter decks of Diva (Ancient Suprise and Nijisanji), and I've also gotten a few games in with No Limit, the third Diva precon (and I've looked over the next 3 preconstructed decks for the Diva format - which are currently awaiting sleeves). Like the transition from original to Key format, I've had to re-evaluate several assumptions I have about how to play these decks. I'm pretty confident with these decks now, so I figured I'd share a few of the biggest things to watch out for, either playing these decks as a new player, or as a returning player used to the decks of the Key era.

Ener management

Ener management played a heavy role in early Wixoss. Carelessly attacking would often just give your opponent the resources to hit you back harder, while attacking opposing SIGNI as little as possible could help starve your opponent of ener and leave them with nothing left to defend themselves after paying a hefty 3 ener to grow to level 4. Key format introduced two big changes that significantly reduced the pressure on ener - coins and 0-grow-cost level 4 LRIGs. Coins were a parallel resource that could often be used in place of ener - several Arts used Coins to reduce their ener costs, and Keys traded coins for powerful effects without any ener requirements at all. And with 0 grow cost, players entered level 4 with a much more robust stock of ener to immediately spend on offense or defense - you no longer had to spend a turn or two rebuilding after your final grow. Later Key decks started to reintroduce incentives for canny ener management, especially with powerful 6-cost Arts that could be game-breaking if you managed to generate enough ener to use them after covering all your other costs (Bloody Strike and friends). But these decks still generally performed at a high level with relatively meager ener budgets.

With Diva, ener management is back in a big way. While in Key there were often turns you didn't need to enercharge at all, you should be using your one enercharge at the start of the turn every turn of the game in Diva. There are several reasons for this, all attacking your ener supply at once. First, we're not really shaving costs anywhere; level 4 LRIGs cost no ener, and Assists total to about the same average cost we're used to with Arts (although more divided - level 1s are usually free and level 2s can be quite expensive). Second, there are a lot more ener sinks - in the main deck and also with Pieces. And while the cost-to-return rate on Pieces isn't great, they're still powerful effects you'll want to be able to access; they can usually push 2 damage or more while building card advantage. As for the main deck ener sinks, all decks seem to have offensive SIGNI that require 2-3 ener to clear a lane (Otogibara Era, Atalanta, Adamasphere), and both have other tools for defense that require ener as well (Otogibara Era again, Polygenesis for a Servant, etc). Figuring out when to spend your ener, and where, are very, very important to maximizing the power of your Diva precon decks.

Of the first three preconstructed decks of Diva format, No Limit is the least stressful as it's costs are quite low across the board (most importantly, the Piece costs 0). However, the deck is also less stressful for your opponent as well, due to the deck's mass of banishing effects which will give your opponent a steady supply of ener to draw from. Ancient Surprise has a lot of costly effects, but generally has the tools to keep up with them - it has several solid enercharge effects (At level 3, Tawil-Colors, and Sen no Rikyu's life burst), and can still operate a solid game plan with less ener resources due to the low grow costs of its Assist LRIGs. Nijisanji struggles quite a bit more, as not only does it lack enercharge effects (including in life bursts) and has more expensive Assist LRIGs, but the deck's core game plan centers around Era, and she is HUNGRY. She does a lot: returning guards for defense, clearing lanes for attacks, or both, and the deck can easily play out an Era each turn (no matter the configuration, this deck has tons of trash recursion). But with few effective ways of generating ener, being able to use her while using your Assist LRIGs and Piece is a struggle that requires a lot of reading of game states. Do you want to use her offensive ability, her defensive ability, both abilities, or do you want to use your ener on an Assist LRIG or Piece instead? It's heavily context dependent, and you'll rarely be able to do more than one or two of these in a given turn.

Card Advantage

If ener is in short supply, the opposite is true for card draw. There are tons of ways of adding cards to your hand, to the extent that even after enercharging every turn of the game I'll still have turns where I discard to hand size. In Ancient Surprise there is Umr-Draw, Tawil Colors, and the Piece Harmony Call that all generate cards in hand or SIGNI on the board. With Nijisanji, there are the level 3 LRIG effects, several Assist LRIGs (Lize level 1 and 2, and Toko level 1), as well as SIGNI effects from Morinaka Kazaki and Otogibara Era. And in No Limit you have Rei level 1 and 2, as well as Tlet. Since cards in hand are much more plentiful then ener, this makes it all the more important to deny your opponent ener by only attacking when you're guaranteed damage. As a side effect of having plenty of card draw available from level 1 (at least one of your level 1 Assist LRIGs will draw cards), you should make sure you deploy two level 1 SIGNI on your first turn. In older decks you could occasionally get unlucky and draw 1 or even 0 level 1 SIGNI in your starting hand and have to deal with taking an additional point of damage during the opponent's first attack, but in Diva the limited attack-phase interaction makes falling behind early even more painful. Using an early Assist LRIG to help you fill in your field at level 1 won't hurt you later in the game, given the number of ways to generate cards in these decks. 

Servants

Since the start of the game, we've been used to having 8 servants in our precons, and up to 12 options to play around with during deck customization. Diva only has one Servant so far. Fortunately, all three decks have ways to get more uses out of their limited servants, and I've still had plenty of games where LRIG attacks only manage to deal 1-2 damage over the course of the entire game. Ancient Surprise can pull the Servants from ener with Polygenesis, which turns enercharging into a kind of card draw, and also lets you use Servants that ended up in your life cloth. Nijisanji has Era, and tons of ways to return Era from your trash to use the effect turn after turn (although it takes a lot of ener). No Limit doesn't have anything, but it's aggressive enough to not care as much. It takes some getting used to, and on average you'll still end up taking more damage from LRIGs than is usual in games with Key-format decks, but it's not as miserable as it might seem, given you've cut the number of Servants in your deck in half.

Questionable inclusions and anti-synergy weirdness

What is Rin Shizuka doing in the Nijisanji deck? She adds cards from your deck to your trash, but that's not a theme the deck is really built around at all. Sure there's a few ways to bring SIGNI back from the trash, but by level 3 you'll have plenty of cards in the trash just by paying ener costs. And this deck can't even trigger her up ability, and even if it could it only helps add more cards to the trash, which again, this deck doesn't need. In a similar vein Kaede Higuchi in Niji and Assylen, Natural Stone in Ancient Surprise both don't really help: Kaede's effects don't really accomplish much, and Assylen discards on an attack, which is nice, but there's so much card advantage that one or two isolated discards makes no real difference to the game. These decks are scatterbrained in a way we've not seen in any previous Wixoss starters, and I think (charitably) the reason is they want to give a base for modifying them. Fortunately they still play fine out of the box (Wixoss's core rules and mechanics are really robust), but several of the cards that look like they should have relevant effects will be acting as vanilla, text-less SIGNI in most games. These decks already have more vanillas than usual - the two multicouloured SIGNI, and Ancient Surprise and No Limit have a vanilla SIGNI with a powerful life burst (Sen no Rikyu, Verdant General, etc) - so this leaves the gameplay at a much more basic level. In that sense they play a lot like the first wave of introductory starters way back from the start of the game (White Hope, Blue Appli, etc), so if you're coming from the more advanced Key decks, adjust your expectations accordingly. The games are still good and involve a surprising amount of important decision-making and planning, but they're not the precision machines of Key.

Diva Debut Decks - Ancient Surprise and Nijisanji ver. Sanbaka

 

A new format in Wixoss is rolling in, and with it are the first two new starter decks for Diva format (Ancient Surprise and Nijisanji ver. Sanbaka). Unlike my previous reviews, this will be less about the specific game plans and strengths & weaknesses of the decks, and more about what they mean for the new format, and Wixoss as a game in general. 

Major changes

Like Key format introduced 0-grow-cost level 4 LRIGs and extended to coin support to all LRIG types, Diva makes some pretty major changes to how Wixoss plays. First up, Diva LRIGs stop their normal growth at level 3, not level 4. To match this, level 3 LRIGs now have more abilities. Instead of ARTs we now have Support LRIGs and Pieces. Support LRIGs work similar to ARTs, as they don't attack, don't affect LRIG-type restrictions, their effects are on-play only, and they have various grow timings (Main Phase, Attack Phase, Spell Cut-in maybe?). Except Support LRIGs can increase your main LRIG's limit, you can only play cards that match the colour of one of your 3 LRIGs, and they grow following their LRIG trype. For example: Umr-Down is similar to Don't Move, in that it downs 2 SIGNI for 3 ener at Attack Phase timing, but since it's a level 2, you need to grow into it from a level 1 Umr support LRIG. To make this work, players are able to add 2 additional level 0 LRIGs into their LRIG decks, above and beyond the usual limit of 10 cards. Finally, there are Pieces, which are similar to ARTs but require a specific team of LRIGs, either by team name, or by LRIG colours. On the SIGNI front, power numbers are up across the board, with the average level 3 SIGNI sitting at 10 000 - 12 000 power, which had previously been standard level 4 power. Also, life bursts are slightly more powerful.

Balance

This sounds like a lot. When these changes were introduced, there was the usual gnashing of teeth that this would unbalance the game, especially in All-Star format where the new cards would be played alongside older cards. I can happily report that these changes are not as severe as they seem, and in many ways are actually a reduction in overall power level. Yes, all Diva LRIGs are essentially 3-stops, which means they hit faster than the usual level 4 decks. But the level 3 Diva LRIGs are all quite a lot weaker than the average level 4, and are actually not far off the 6-limit level 3 LRIGs of the Key era, which draw a card and provide a coin. The power of Support LRIGs is right in line with the average ART, except they follow a specific grow order which could force you to play a suboptimal level 1 to access a useful level 2. So you might have to play Draw Two (Umr-Draw) if you want Don't Move (Umr-Down), whereas with ARTs, you could just play Don't Move and another powerful ART, and leave Draw Two in your binder. And Pieces are bizarrely weak. They're expensive, and are mostly Main Phase only. The only Attack Phase timing Piece we've seen so far is laughable.  Nothing in Diva comes close to the power and versatility of Keys. As far as the SIGNI, the Life Bursts aren't dramatically different from the established standard (although we do see a bit more powerful effects on lower-level SIGNI, beyond the usual 'draw a card' or 'enercharge 1'), and while the power changes can throw off a lot of older effects aimed at sniping low-level SIGNI, the abilities are close to what you'd expect from level 3s (ie: still not as powerful as level 4s).

Importantly, these two decks are well balanced against each other - unlike the previous, overpowered Nijisanji collaboration deck from the Key era you don't need to worry about any overly one-sided games here.  The only major difference is that this Nijisanji deck lets you choose any of the three LRIGs to be your main LRIG (leaving the other two as supports), while the Ancient Surprise deck can only use At as its main LRIG (leaving Umr and Tawil as supports). 

They're less well balanced against other, older starter decks, though. These decks both have 11 LRIG deck cards, which sounds weird, but if you ignore the extra two level-0 LRIGs, functionally, these decks are running 9-card LRIG decks, or 1 shy of the limit. This can make playing these against older starter decks a bit tricky. They're more powerful than the original starter decks (which generally only had 8 cards in their LRIG decks), but noticeably weaker than the Key format starters (which had full 10-card LRIG decks). My feeling is that even going up to a full 10 (actually 12) card LRIG deck, these decks will be roughly in line with early Key format decks, like Blue Catharsis or Black Direct, or even a little weaker. There's less Attack Phase interaction, and Pieces so far are all weaker than even generic ARTs like Phantom Garden or Victim Defense, to say nothing of Rays of Edge.

Gameplay

In terms of gameplay, these decks are a step down from Key. Going back to an incomplete LRIG deck after the full 10-card decks in Key is unfortunate, but the lack of Attack Phase interaction is outright frustrating. Ancient Surprise has 1 Attack Phase effect (Umr-Down). Depending on your LRIG configuration, you can end up with no Attack Phase effects at all in the Nijisanji deck. Further, there's currently only 1 Guard legal in Diva to stop LRIG attacks. This leaves games feeling a lot less interactive, and really knocks the experience down several pegs from what we were used to in Key, where decks had an average of 3 options in the attack phase. The level 3 LRIGs also feel less individual - they have a decent variety of effects, but since they're only level 3, and the effects are therefore weaker, their presence on the battlefield doesn't feel as important or impactful as we're used to with level 4s. That being said, these decks are cheaper than previous starters (like, $5, less than half the usual price - which was already well below the average charged by other tcgs), so buying a booster or two to improve them (or a few singles) means the price remains roughly the same, and it's super affordable for anyone who just wants to give the game a trial run. 

Most importantly, looking at the format as a whole, it balances well with the previous iterations of Wixoss, which is impressive given how much they've changed. It's a huge credit to Wixoss that they're wiling to make these big changes if they believe there's a part of the game that could benefit from it - in Key they freed up more ener at level 4 by reducing grow costs and adding ener-free Keys, and now in Diva they're making level 3 a lot more impactful. Power-creep is a constant pressure on tcgs. One of the things MTG has aimed for in the past is power-shift, or moving power between spells and creatures, so that as one part of the game gets more power, the other moves to a lower-powered baseline. It's a technique that still lets you print powerful and exciting cards, without going full yugioh and power-creeping constantly. In my eyes, Wixoss has been a master class in doing power-shift properly, more so than any other tcg I follow (and certainly better than MTG recently), which after nearly 7 years is a pretty solid accomplishment for a tcg. What we've seen of Diva so far reinforces my confidence in the ability of Wixoss to continue its history of solid design into the future. I just hope they print some decent Attack Phase Pieces...