Friday, April 10, 2015

Puzzle & Dragons: Japan's PAD Academy Rare Egg Machine Cards (Updated with edit about Scholarship Student, Isis)

Update: My 3 rolls were mini Amaterasu, mini Pandora and Discipline committee member Athena(!). I was extremely lucky to get Athena and studying the options for her evolution, I would have preferred for her attacker and healer type to be swapped. The spectacle version is supposed to be the "unique" one and going from a healer to an attacker with high RCV will definitely be more fitting. Green also has tons of attackers with double two-prongs while the support for green healers is definitely not enough. For example, Ultimate Evolution Sun Quan has the healer buff but his main colour blue is off.

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This rare egg machine is really similar to the recent Christmas Gacha last year so it is bound to draw a lot of comparisons. PAD Skyozora has the full information in Chinese, the leader and active skills are the same as their counterparts so the changes to look out for are the awakenings and the stats
which can be seen from the pictures.

I'll jump right into my comments for the cards:

4-stars Silver cards: We get the mini Hero pantheon along with Isis and Amaterasu this time. They are all similar to the mini Chinese Gods (especially the Heroes with the same awakenings) and cap at level 70. Isis and Amaterasu actually have useful awakenings which synergies well with their bind removing active skills so they can be useful subs even though their stats are low. For the Heroes, the only particular useful ones will be Yamato as a low cost leader replacement for Fire Sprite, Parrot red fairy (Edit: I forgot the red fairy's leader skill is different from Yamato's so you'll need a friend mini Yamato for low cost descends) and Pandora as a sub for un-evolved Juggler teams for low cost dungeons like Gaia Descended. (Edit: If you have the regular versions, these can serve as expensive skill-up cards too)

5-stars Gold cards: Regular Heroes and dark Chester. While these are at 3x rates, I think the dark Chester will drop more as it is not part of a God pantheon. It is still 3x the rarity of the cards so don't expect to get the regular Heroes easily. In the Christmas Gacha, I was hoping for a regular Chinese God as it was also 3x but gotten one of the Wizard series girls instead. (Those were also at 3x) Dark Chester do has his use as a skill bind resist sub and this egg machine event will probably be a good time to get him.

6-stars Gold cards: The two remaining mini-s for this event: Mini Chiyome and Red Odin. They both have triple two-prong awakenings and can probably go into red teams like Krishna or Urd teams who are using Red Valkyrie and Awoken Hinokagutsuchi and are already very powerful. I think mini Chiyome definitely has a spot in red teams compared to mini Red Odin who loses 2 skill boost awakenings which is actually an issue IMO as it makes him less useful compared to the regular Red Odin even with the triple two-prongs.

7-stars Gold cards: These all have very nice artwork IMO and will definitely be useful as they are very similar to their regular counterparts. However, I don't think they are must-haves. Isis, as a leader, looks flexible for sub choices but in most descend dungeons, you'll want to focus on one type to gain more from the active skill type boosts. Santa Kirin seems better when compared as Kirin is light type at the very least and has more awakening skills right from the start. Athena's "slight artwork and type change from evolving" feature is really cool though! Edit: Isis is a pretty good sub to deal with binds because she covers dark with her sub colour. You can put her into colour combo leader teams like Light Kali, Yuna, Kenshiro, etc.

In conclusion, the useful cards IMO are the 7-stars all the gold cards (including the regular Hero gods and Chester), especially mini -Chiyome (more so if you have a red team), silver eggs like the mini -Yamato, -Pandora (Edit: If you have an unevolved Juggler), -Amaterasu and -Isis. Getting any of them is probably useful for your box and with the high amount of silver cards among them, this rare egg machine should definitely be worth rolling at least a few times.