UFS Design Breakdown: Team K'

I ended up having less time than I expected to get this one done but here is the second entry into this series, this time focusing on the character cards of Team K'.

But first, some trivia about our favorite hero team leader (at least mine), in french the Dash is pronounced "Prime", which made K' a lot cooler to pronounce. K Prime does sounds kinda cooler right?

Best WAIFU right here!

Anyway... Back to Team K.

So what I'm going to do is first analyze the team as a whole. KOF XIII, for all the ill I have harnessed for this expansion set, still had the great idea of making the teams matter either through the symbols, some shared abilities, or some team-only cards. And then I will finish the article with K'. The two other characters will be analyzed in the next article.

The Team

I'm sure they won't forever forget about Vanessa. she will be back, right??..

First off, I think the very first thing everyone will notice about that team is pretty clear.

6-27

It has to be a joke, right? Part of me want to believe that all members of the team having the exact same hand size and max vitality is simply a mistake done during the making of the spoilers, the other is seriously considering that this similitude was intended...

I won't linger too long on why this is silly as I expect that most here know why you shouldn't just copy-paste those values, but still I need to point that handsize and max vitality are the very first things that will define a character in the player's head. Mess those two values up, either by giving a bulky character a very low max vitality or the opposite, and you are well on your way to create a terrible card. And frankly, who could ever justify Kula Diamond having the exact same health as freaking Maxima!

Look at this giant cybernetic MONSTER!!!

The team also sports an ability that is shared among all its members:

"E(4+): If you block this attack, your block gains 'Breaker: 1'."

I kinda like and hate this ability. Love because the ability is about Breaker, a keyword that first came to the game with the first SNK set. Since it was a SNK set signature keyword, along with Desperation, with a pretty big push in Fortunes and Glory, the set where K' was introduced to the game. Thus having the team care about Breaker is kind of a nice touch. Hate because once again it does it in the worst possible way.

To begin, the ever-present (4-5+) cost... As I have said in the previous article, one of the biggest problems of the KoF XIII set is that the costs are all wrong.

Somehow, Team K' is supposed to care about Breaker. But now they shouldn't care for it enough to the point of a (4+) check being needed. The message being sent here is kinda schizophrenic.

And this ability takes a slot on a character card that could use a more distinctive ability. Although I can commend the idea of making the member of a team share some kind of effects, this shouldn't be forced to the point of it either surcharging or worse diluting the character and this is exactly what this ability does to the members of Team K' as I will show.

This ability is also tied to another big flaw of the set, Theme. But I will come back to this later in the article.

Character Card: K'

Now, the flagship hero of the NESTS era, K freaking Prime!

K' has a special place when it comes to the KoF mythos in my opinion. I started playing KoF back in 1999 (yea time flies) and was introduced to the series thinking K' was its "main character".

It was quite the discovery to learn that he was actually the SECOND main character of the series, Kyo being actually the closest thing to a main character. After years of Ryu never aging up and Mr. Bison still going after him, discovering a fighting game series where the plot evolved to the point of the main character changing was an eye-opener.

Since that day I ditched Street Fighter for King of Fighters and to this day King of Fighters is the superior game in my book.

So yes, K' does have a special place in my heart and that to the point of him being the first character I wanted to build a competitive deck around.

Quite the great card!

K' and his support in Fortunes and Glory was quite the well designed character. He was able to empower attacks with low damage as long as you kept the momentum coming, and he could seriously hamper the opponent with his control check manipulation. Overall a fair character, simple, and with some depth. Although his Signing could have been better with a less expensive E, but nothing game-breaking here.

That plus the resemblance of the ability to an ability I've always liked in Pokemon, Technician. This ability in Pokemon allows you to empower attacks that are too weak to be viable but still had great effects like reducing the opponent's speed or attack. Thus with this ability some Pokemon were able to use attacks that did a great job at controlling the battlefield.

K' E allows him to do just that. Many attacks would hypothetically pay for a very powerful effect by having reduced damage. K' E allows you to make the damage viable and then profit from the potent effects without worrying about your offense. Quite the nice touch.

Pretty much lots of fun ahead if it was not for those two:

 

Now all you had to do was auto-include those two and call it a day...

But that's a story for another time.

Pretty much, Fortunes and Glory K' provides a pretty good standard to which we can compare RoT K',

HELP!! MY HAND IS ON FIRE!!!

Since we have already covered the two big elephants in the room, the max vitality and handsize AND the the shared ability, we could go straight for the last ability.

But before I will talk about what I consider the greatest thing about this card, its support.

RoT K' support is by far the best support I have seen on a character of the set.

  

Can someone say COMBO??

The focus on a theme, on a mechanic here is great, but more importantly those cards tell a story, a story about how you could pulverize your opponent in the most combotastic way possible.

That coupled with the natural affinity of the character for combo cards? What's not to love!

The foundations too are great and they do a way better job playing around the team's true theme than any of the support of the other members of the team, Kula and Maxima.

Oh shoot! You mean I have to get this foundation back to my hand?? The pain!

So overall K' support shows that the character's Theme IS combo, and it also shows something more that I will discuss later.

And now to the last ability

Unlike the other parts of the card, this one is pretty much okay. The focus on combo is well-made, the cost is a bit heavy but the effect provided here is potent enough to warrant such a cost, recursion being quite the powerful thing in UFS and the cost offering ways to play around it (let's bounce that face down foundation or that one that is super easy to play again) unlike a (4-5+).

But once again problems arise when it comes to sticking to the theme. Suddenly the need to have the next combo card have -3 difficulty, or -3 difficulty to its block modifier...
As much as the first one could be useful, the other part of the ability once again dilute the card.

Is it there to push the breaker theme? The theme pushed by a terribly gated ability? When the card screams "let me care about Combo only"... Even the -3 difficulty is unneeded there and if anything would have made a great second ability a better one than the shared E(4+).

E, discard 1 momentum: If this attack deals damage, your next combo attack this turn gets -3 difficulty.

E, Add 2 foundations from your staging area to your hand: Add 1 combo card with a difficulty of 5 or less from your discard pile to your hand. Playable once per turn.

And here we have a cleaner, simpler, more focused card.

Also notice that the new E allow for more Signing than the Breaker E.

As I said earlier in the article, the ability messes with the Theme of the card, and that with the best intention possible, trying to create a team's theme. In the next article I will discuss why even that attempt was flawed, as a hint, it had to do with the second thing K' support showed. Until then, keep Breaking!

+1 block and Breaker 2?? That one will leave a mark!