There were a number of clarifications and errata added to the rules Index this week and that’s going to be very important to know for the Water Tower kicking us off.
This week there were updates to the Discord to create a Content Creator Forum instead of a channel. What this forum does is allows for a much easier way to sort through and find the type of content that you want to watch, or know about for MetaZoo. There are filters for news, openings, music, NFTs, gameplay, grading, collecting, shorts, lore (which they should just call the Turmentic filter), and live streams. If you’re adding content to this forum you can select multiple tags if your content fits more than one. So for me for instance most of the shorts that I upload are marked both as news and shorts. This is a really interesting replacement for the Content Creation Channel. I’m curious to see how this evolves in the future because people are figuring out that if you do go in there and comment on the thread. It then brings it right back up to the top for the people that have the sorting by most recently active, which could be by design. Either way, it’s a very interesting concept. I like it a lot better than what they were doing with the content creation channel since you can find the type of content that you’re interested in finding.
Announced this week that they will not be raising MSRP in 2023. This is on the heels of other TCGs doing just that this year. An example of that is Pokemon last year. The MSRP of Pokemon was a little over $140 for a booster box or $50 for an ETB. Starting with Scarlet and Violet they’re upping their prices to $60 for an ETB and about $160 for a booster box. That’s a sizeable jump in the price of the Pokemon ETB and booster boxes. MetaZoo is committing that they will not raise their prices this year.
We’ve also got a few hints this week of a new toy line coming from MetaZoo. It’s unclear if this is going to be part of the partnership with Invasion Toys at this time, or who they’re going to be working with. We do know that the toys will come with an eBay Native booster pack as well as a promo. We got to look at what these blister packs are going to look like.
We look at the packaging we can see beauties on there for Van Meter Visitor, Cumberland Dragon, Grim Reaper, and I’m not quite sure who these fingers belong to. With the eBay Seance partnership, we did see that there was only one pack included in the tarot boxes. I imagine that this is going to be very similar so if you want multiple definitely plan on getting multiple blister packs. That’s easy to do when there are so many different toys that will be coming out with Native.
Another interesting update in the gaming space with MetaZoo is that they’re looking at doing VR. It was announced that they’re going to have a VR experience across the country at different collectible shows this year, and I’m not sure what this means. Is it going to be a game is it going to be an interactive experience where you’re just kind of in the land of Cryptid Nation? If I was betting eating a sample on this, I would say it’s probably going to be an interactive experience of some sort. Imagine being able to stand next to a Piaza Bird or Quetzalcoatl or ride on the back of Chessie in the Chesapeake Bay. Imagine coming up on a Squonk in a virtual forest and as you make eye contact it just explodes into a puddle of tears. So this could provide a really fun way to understand the size of different beasties as well as some of the interactive capabilities of some of the beasties as well based on their lore.
We finally got a first look at a Water Tower plushie this week, as well as this one for Ogua. At the Water Tower, I did theorize in the Let’s Talk MetaZoo Live Stream with Turmentic recently, that since those cards for the Water Tower have the Chibi Ogua growing up into Ogua, maybe they’re going to be doing something similar at the Water Towers with the Plushies that they did with Collect-A-Con last year and the Cumberland Dragon eggs. It’s still unclear how many Plushies are going to be available at the Water Tower but I am hoping it’s more than one, and that we do get that growth of the Beastie. Since we’ve seen the art for the playmat for the Earth Tower we know that Chibi Pinkmess is part of the Earth Tower design. So it’s likely that we’re going to be getting Pinkmess plushies at the Earth Tower. It’s already been confirmed that Snipe is going to be a featured plushie at the Lightning Tower. I’ll be at the Water Tower in just a few weeks and I can’t wait to get my hands on these.
While we’re on the subject of plushies we kind of got our first look at the Mothman Plushie for the Valentine’s set. We have the side views of the plushie holding a red heart and this here is a good indication of the size of the plushie. It looks like it’s going to be very similarly sized to the Cumberland Dragon Eggs. Now at this rate without any of the shipping notifications going out it is very very unlikely that anybody’s going to have these in hands for Valentine’s Day, but I imagine they’re going to go up very soon.
It was announced this week that partners are going to have their shot to have their logo on exclusive MetaZoo cards. The exact details of when we can expect our favorite Partners to have cards in the wild are unknown. Whether that going to be with Native like these teasers showing or if it’s going to be for a later set. Me personally, I think this is great you’re celebrating your partners as well as adding another level of collectibility to these cards and I know for me I’m going to be looking to collect every single Immortal Workshop card that I can now with this tease of the partner logos.
We’re getting our first full look at Ababinili. This Beastie cost 3 Flame and has 35 LP. You can have 3 per spellbook and it has Fleet, Flying, and Spirit. It has bonuses for Daytime and Desert. Two Terras that I expect to be featured at the Flame Tower. The arena effect here is very interesting and it really makes you design your spellbooks to be Dual Aura. If an opposing Caster is damaged by a non-flame Beastie with an aura cost of 1 they take an additional 25 damage. So in that example, if you have a Dark-Flame spellbook with a baAbabinili in the arena and you have Napa Rebobs and a banana, you’re hitting for 100. That’s not all, with this Arena effect all Flame-beasties you contract gain and immediately activate Flash. So while this card does encourage you to do Dual Aura, there are also benefits to a straight flame Spellbook. It’s attack Dangerous Flames does 3 Burn and hits for 40. It has a 4th Wall effect of, if you’re in direct sunlight it deals an additional 10 damage. So if Daytime and Desert are both active at the Flame Tower this is going to be a Beastie to watch out for. It’s going to be hitting for 160 and it has added effects for other beasties in the Spellbook.
We got to look at the Earth Tower Jersey this week as well and it’s a brown jersey with very similar art to the playmat that we’ve seen. It has Sinkhole Sam, Pinkmess, and Giraffe Possum. Now thinking about that more plain design in the background there, I’m thinking that actually might be a general Casters Jersey that’s going to be available for purchase to anybody.
For our top story, there were a number of updates to the Rules Index this week and some of these are very important if you’re going to the Water Tower and competing. There there are new clarifications for Loveland Frogman, Flying Manta Ray, Grim Reaper actually had a lot of clarifications, Fur Bearing Trout, Drowned Pianist, Fetish Artifact, Sam’s Backpack, Hiro, and Ziri. The updates to Loveland Frogman flying Manta Ray and Drowned Pianist are very important for the Water Tower. All three of those are Water Pages and may show up in the event. We also had some more rule clarifications for general gameplay and this included clarifications for Artifact Essence contraction, combat damage vs within combat damage, effects that cause a Beastie to attack, losing vs removing traits and placing vs sending pages to a Zone. Most of those are honestly self-explanatory. The most important one is the clarification between combat damage and within-combat damage.
We also have a number of new cards with Errata in the newest round of updates Dampen, Intergalactic Space Council, Colorado Springs Elf, Sarah Good, The Hermit, and the MetaZoo Hanukkah Ornament have all been errated. Dampen and The Hermit had some very interesting Errata adding text that clarifies that they affect something in the resolution chain and the clarification of those two cards really makes me question the fundamentals of how those cards have been played, and how they’re meant to be played. With the current wording.
We did have a recent episode of Cryptid Conversations where we talked about every single one of these clarifications and Errata and gave our thoughts on them. You can catch that right over on the Caster’s Corner Youtube Channel.