Day 4 of Empires of the Ascended (Predict Mechanic Reveal)
Hey everyone, Precipic here with the fourth day of breakdowns for the revealed Shrima expansion cards.
Every morning (around 9AM PST), head to Mobalytics to see the cards revealed live!
The main feature of this package was Predict, a new mechanic that may hint toward a potential Zilean release.
In this article, we’ll cover what each card does and analyze their viability based on the known cards at the time of publishing.
New Shurima Empires of the Ascended cards revealed today:
- Ancient Preparations (Landmark)
- Clockling (Follower)
- Aspiring Chronomancer (Follower)
- Xenotype Reseachers (Follower)
- Khahiri the Student (Follower)
- Khahiri the Returned (Follower)
- Preservarium (Landmark)
- Promising Future (Landmark)
If you missed out on previous ones, check out the rest of the card reveals.
Learn more about today’s reveals with additional breakdowns from Swim below.
New Keyword: Predict
The Predict mechanic is a new one is Legends of Runeterra, what it does is that it lets you choose 1 of 3 cards and put them on top of your deck.
This is a pretty powerful effect for adding consistency to decks.
Many of the cards in this reveal package involve Predict. If you’re coming from Magic the Gathering, it has similarities with the Scry.
Ancient Preparations
- Ancient Preparations
- 1 mana Landmark
- Text: Play: Predict. Countdown 2: Summon a Clockling.
- Clockling
- 1 mana 2|2 Follower
Ancient Preparations seems pretty decent in terms of value. A 1 mana 2|2 is pretty decent on rate and the added Predict effect gives it enough value to make this a pretty good turn 1 play.
It’s hard to imagine what exact deck wants this card since it’s a little too slow to be a good aggressive card, but it’s also a bit too small to be a great control card.
I think that if your deck wants 1 mana 2|2 that gives you a little bit of value this is a pretty great card for that deck.
Aspiring Chronomancer
- Aspiring Chronomancer
- 2 mana 2|3 Follower
- Text: Predict
This card just seems great to me, a 2 mana 2/3 is already a pretty good statline, but it’s nothing insane. However, the Predict effect makes it pretty reasonable.
Cheap units that give your deck more consistency have been shown to be playable in Runeterra and while they aren’t as good as drawing a card, it still gives you enough value to make it a Shurima staple.
Xenotype Researchers
- Xenotype Researchers
- 3 mana 3|3 Follower
- Text: When I’m summoned, grant 3 random allies in your deck +3|+3.
This card is super cool. At a baseline, it is a 3 mana 3/3 that gives you quite a bit of value.
However, in a deck with a very low unit count, a deck with a very large amount of draw, a deck with a lot of ways of searching units out (with predict or other effects), or a deck with a lot of units that do similar things (like a full Elusives deck) this can give you really nuts value.
It can allow you to almost combo off with units that are way larger than they should be for certain spots in the curve. However, you don’t even need to fully build your deck around it if you are lucky enough to high roll it on turn 4.
Khahiri the Student
- Khahiri the Student
- 3 mana 3|3 Follower
- Text: When I’m summoned, grant me +1|+1 if you’ve Predicted this game.
This card is potentially a 3 mana 4|4. That is a pretty efficient statline if you can have predicted by turn 3 every game.
If there are a lot of really powerful cheap Predict cards I could see this card being pretty good.
Khahiri the Returned
- Khahiri the Returned
- 6 mana 4|4, Fearsome, Follower
- Text: When I’m summoned, create a copy of me in your deck. When you see me in a prediction, grant all allied copies of my everywhere +2|+2.
This card is kinda interesting. Initially, it looks pretty bad as a 6 mana 4|4 Fearsome but it has a couple of things going for it.
First off, you don’t need to pick it off of your Predict for it to get buffed, so you can just have this steadily grow while you just play a normal game of Runeterra and eventually just start dropping 6 mana 10/10 Fearsomes.
Second off, this buffs copies of itself everywhere which means Khahiri’s that are already in play can be buffed.
However, this card is very very slow and would only be powerful in an incredibly slow and grindy game.
This card is pretty difficult to evaluate and depends heavily on how slow of a region Shurima wants to be and if the game allows for slow win conditions like this.
Preservarium
- Preservarium
- 2 mana Landmark
- Text: When I’m summoned, draw 1. Countdown 2: Draw 1.
This card is just very good. Effectively it’s a 2 mana draw 2, however you have to wait for 2 turns to get the second draw.
That is still incredibly worthwhile because of how efficient of a draw effect like this is.
In Runeterra, a draw 2 is usually cost at something like 4, but this costs 2.
I expect this to be a staple in a very large number of Shurima decks.
Promising Future
- Promising Future
- 4 mana Slow spell
- Text: Grant an allied landmark “My Countdown completion effect activates twice”.
It is very unclear how good this card is without seeing the full set of cards, currently, this is not worth running with any of the landmarks revealed so far.
This is the fourth day of card reveals! If you missed out on previous ones, check out the rest of the LoR card reveals.
