Card Review: Holy Light

[DanTheTimid]

Can't let Logress have all the fun with card reviews right, thought it might be interesting to talk about some more cards in detail. For my first pick I'm choosing the biggest spell Refess has access to, Holy Light.

[card=6]Holy Light[/card]

Level 5
Refess/Grimoire
Rarity ***
Open Skill - Revive all closed friendly units.

Although a 3 star rarity, Holy Light appears in the Refess starter so getting your hands on one of these isn't too hard. With a high level requirement and cost of 5, odds are you probably won't be running more then 1 of these, but the question is, should you even be running 1 of these.

The first thing to look at is what does this effect REALLY do. Any time a unit is closed, if you have another copy of the card in your card file, you can pay 1 sp to revive it. Holy light bypasses this normal method, allowing you to revive 1 or more units with out using up any copies of the card or paying the usual sp cost. Instead your using up Holy Light itself and paying 5 sp. So to gain sp advantage from this card you need to revive 6 or more units (and you need to want to be level 5 anyway, perhaps for Dragon Rider?). To gain card advantage you need to revive atleast 2 units (since your only giving up 1 card from your card file instead of 2). The X factor of this card is that it can revive units for a third time (normally cards can be revived at max twice, unless an effect is used to return cards from your cemetery to your card file).

So to summarize, its horrible from an sp perspective, but if your field just got cleared it can be good from a card advantage perspective. Its X factor only really matters if your running a deck thats build around a single unit since it provides an, albeit incredibly expensive, emergency life saver should you run out of that unit's cards.

The second thing is to look at WHEN we'll want to use it. As I hinted at above, it is a way to keep a card around you REALLY need to stay around, but for that purpose its INCREDIBLY expensive, your better off using cheaper options to help keep that unit around like Raise Shield and Cure. The other situation where it appears useful is when you've just suffered massive field destruction. This again has a couple problems however. For one thing, unless you were purposely trying to get your opponent to wipe out your field, you need to just happen to have level 5 in refess and 5 or more sp available the turn after your field is decimated. For another thing, generally speaking, if your field just got cleared out, your opponent has control of the field, and all your doing is reviving them to get slaughtered again.

So to summarize, the best times to use it are when you're either trading your opponent blow for blow and you both just had your fields decimated but for some reason you happened to have a large excess of sp, or when your dominating the field, have extra sp, and your opponent just had alot of field damage dealing soul cards go off decimating your field. Both instances suffer from needing you to have alot of excess SP and be either trading your opponent blow for blow or already winning, so Holy Light is mainly useful when your already winning to help sustain that lead.

Overal Rating: 2/5
Its not useless... but in my personal opinion and experience its way too expensive and way too situational. It just seems like if you want to keep your units alive your better off using Cure or Raise Shield to help prevent them from ever becoming Closed in the first place. Most of the time if your field got decimated what you want is not those same units back but something that can deal with whatever it was that decimated your units.

[Phades]

This card seems more useful when you are playing with guardian sphinx, where you can choose if you want to use the sphinx effect or as a safety net for the sphinx and any other card that might go down that turn. Ideally, to revive multiple high level units (4-6), in order to try and make up the agl difference with their higher hp counts and "standard" armor values. This style of strategy is generally incompatible with static buffs like raise shield, due to the fact that all buffs are lost upon a unit closing and thus all of your units returning to the field weaker than the were when they were closed.

Personally, I have gravitated away from using it. Many times i wanted to use it, but didn't have the SP. Other times, i was able to use it, but only to see all the unit be crushed by higher agl attackers (this was before i bought cards and got things like dragon rider, but would still happen anyway). The time when it made the most difference was when my opponent was using spells like tempest, fire tornado, and many row or column attacks late game and saved me from being forced to send more cards to the cemetery.

[neonsun]

As a lawtia player i hate this card !!!!

Seeral skillfull refess know when to use this special card.
This card has been the cause of my downfall several times at end game. when u and ur opponent are low on LP , u just clear his board thinking that he wont be able to revive all the units and hence loose the last 1 or 2 Lp points and suddenly his high H cards are back !!
when a sphinx is preseny its even worse !!!!!