If you haven’t, check out part 1. It’s time for more OPINIONS oh no! Let’s preview the rest of Uprising and then I’ll give my thoughts on the design of it at the end. This article might contain negativity maybe?
Kark is just God now. But really this works in almost anything, how amazing. 
Despite being easy to remove, works as a reusable Memory Spirit at the cost of ambush, very nice. 
Was on the fence about this but we’re suckers for helix effects! 
Love that Evil’s getting more healing, especially stuff this effective. 
I hate the terrible design precedent this card presents but I can’t help but be charmed by this particular card. Especially the Air/Ambush/Blitz 
I think I’ll go immediately replace my Flame Strikes… 
Absolutely wonderful DINO PUNCH for decks that want Rage but already have Breakthrough. It’s like a reward. 
Three wolves and at minimum 6 damage to a champion? Please yes. What I like most is how this is making wolf spam a thing. 
This gives so much incentive to run silver champions in Good, and gives more buffs to human spam. 
How can you not love a knight who straight up cheats? That’s some nice blocking mechanics, very original 
A bit uninspired but definitely already thinking of places I want to put it. 
Really cool way to fog an attack or kill something on the block or attack with impunity. 
Save me, Rescue Griffin! This works so well as a chump air blocker since it probably won’t die. 
Coolest draw 2 in the entire game. 
THREE BLOCKERS. Okay but seriously, getting so many demons so quickly with that much speed is charming 
Permanent free Muse stealing. And so many other uses. Very clever 
I always love “under the hood” cards that make you think out the game’s processes rather than blindly play through them 
Add this to the list of really cool unbreakable humans I want to run. Even protects against damage board wipes! 
Does. Not. Target. Ouch.
Cool. Just hard to make room for. Neat blocker if the opponent doesn’t pick one of the 9 billion blocker ignore offense tactics. 
More ambush is always good and works similarly to Brave Squire but without the main draw of unbreakable. 
Choose between 2 things and one that’s the other two cut in half. I love triple-options but not when the choices are all similar. 
Really neat for drinker decks and does let you be kinda reckless, especially if you spam zombies like crazy. Too niche for mega excitement. 
This card was inevitable and we’re actually 75% interested in this one but it made the meh category for being a bit too obvious. 
Event removal is nice. But this card’s effectiveness is inversely proportional to normal removal, where the more damage the champion would cause, the better the removal.
Growing is cool. Recycle is cool. This is not. I’ll just take a breakthrough. 
Seems good at first but can actually lose you the game. 
Feels like they’re trying to dial back ambush significantly with these piddly effects 
Please stop. The worst thing about this is people will use it as an excuse to run more 1-copies. 
It’s another middle-ground card, this time between Fireball and Wolf Bite. Just not feeling something so small potatoes like that.
Definitely way more positive results this time even if not every card “wowed” us. Opinions this time were from myself and Zoey (co-writer) instead of the entire VMundi community. Seems like Uprising will have a lot to offer after all!
Overview
We have a really nice set of 26 cards that “wowed” us, 11 that were “meh”, and 10 that were “please no”. Then 1 card that actually upset everyone and made the rest feel less magical.
Uprising feels like we’re getting away from how Tyrants wanted to include gap-fillers for legitimate strategies that just didn’t have enough cards to feel developed. Almost every card opened up new play styles and opportunities in constructed and limited alike. From how I perceive this set, it appears that Uprising is closer to a limited-friendly set than constructed which makes me sad. In fact, Kark is outright war against constructed as he creates absolutely terrible situations to be in for competition. When you’re not in tournament, you probably don’t have to worry about someone being a tryhard and whipping out a Kark deck but otherwise, the rest of Uprising bolsters a card that already tested insanely strong with just base and Tyrants.
As a player who primarily prefers constructed, it’s not surprising that only half the cards in the set really made me want to buy it. I’ll still be getting a full playset of everything of course, but I won’t be nearly as giddy as with Tyrants. The great news is a few new strategies are going to become even better, such as wolf tokens and big Sage blitz.
IRLAlex (3D) ,
I’ve been glancing at Spore Beast over and over today before really realizing what it means. Drawing on from my past experiences in (mid-era) yugioh, it’s very close to a card like Book of Moon where it inherently doesn’t seem very powerful but can pay off a big way with how it interacts with other cards. The two obvious examples are removing a defending champion of yours to save it from certain death (after drawing out blockers too maybe!) and removing your enemies defending champion in order for a brutal level of breakthrough damage.
It’s the kind of card that seperates Champions from Chumps.
Alice ,
More like “Champions from Chumpions” har har. I hadn’t thought about the Breakthrough play, very nice. I can see it being run with Knight of Elara too as a double-down on blocker hate. But yes, I think this card’s multi-faceted nature is going to come through in a big way during games. And it’s yet another way to punish players who run stuff like Kong with no plan on how to get hits.
Phoenix Gravin ,
If it weren’t for Chamberlain Krak, I’d be a bit more excited for these cards. As it is though, most of them look pretty neat, but the rest are just kind of bleh.
Alice ,
I’m almost certain some of the “dislikes and mehs” were put there because Kark is in the back of our mind.