This week’s Mikey Mouse Club was supposed to be the big Shimmering Skies preview, but then Ravensburger went and dropped an atomic bomb on Lorcana. They nerfed Bucky. That’s right, just a couple of weeks after I explained the whole Bucky/Diablo thing, and literally days before the set championship tournaments fire off. Green Steel Discard players are reeling, the meta is in shambles, and Ravensburger handled this in a characteristically suboptimal way. Again, one gets the feeling that someone with deep TCG management experience needs to be on staff over there. But instead, they did a dumb thing and just errated the card.
Which is stupid because it’s not an error. It’s a retrospective nerf after realizing that players have not only figured out ways to exploit the card, but also that the rules writing for the card didn’t account for how it would interact with other cards down the line. The problem is that in the hands of the Metabros, Bucky has become ridiculously oppressive and meta-defining to the point where a stroll through Dreamborn.ink’s decklists reveals quite a few specifically anti-Bucky decks. My good friend Jabu that plays competitively is always asking me “should I run Bucky or tech against Bucky” before his events, and in our discussions we’ve waffled back and forth on that situation. “What do we do about Bucky” was very much the state of Lorcana before this effective-immediately response.
So Ravensburger, rather than outright banning the card- which, to my mind, would have been the correct response to the unfavorable way the game has impacted even low-level casual league play- is to simply tweak the card in three major ways. The changes might seem minor to the untrained eye, but they are huge- rendering Bucky far, far less oppressive and meta-defining.
First off, the card is now 3 ink, going up from 2. This puts Bucky in the field a turn later, which is especially significant with that Diablo combo as the bird himself is a 3-drop. This means the Bucky/Diablo abuse is delayed a turn, which gives players a better opportunity to answer Bucky and prepare for Diablo. This also puts the oppressive discard function that Diablo triggers as a Floodborn on hold. Even more significantly, the errata card text for the Squeak ability now distinctly specifies that it only triggers if the Floodborn you are playing was played with Shift- which sets a specific precedent in the game as there is no other card that requires that. Previously, you could just hardcast a Floodborn and Squeak would go off.
But the biggest change of the three is by far removing Ward. This is really the nail in Bucky’s tiny coffin. Ward kept the Buckster alive from Brawls, Ba-Booms, Smashes, Dragon Fires, Fire the Cannons, and any other direct removal actions. In Ravensburger’s own words, it made him almost untouchable. Without it, he’s a very vulnerable 1/1 with a target on his squirrely head.
Frankly, I think any one of these three might have turned the tide but Ravensburger went with all of the above and at that point, the card really should have just been banned from the game. Their argument is that they don’t want international sets to be short an Emerald card or something like that but honestly, it would have been easier for everyone including the publisher to just write the card off into the history books and move on. But for now, all the Bucky singles out there are effectively misprinted per Ravensburger’s direction.
I am glad that they did something about it, because Bucky was problematic. As I mentioned in my column on the card, I knew right when I saw the card that it was going to be a THING. And really, that didn’t come into fruition until Ursula’s Return and the Diablo abuse started happening. The fun of the game, especially in organized play and in competition, was most definitely adversely affected by Bucky and I definitely approve of action being taken- now I just wish they would take a look at some of the other cards that make the game less fun like Be Prepared and Madam Mim, Fox.
But in context, those cards still aren’t problematic as Bucky has been- he’s very much one of those cards where the winner is the one that pulls off the combo first, and the loser has to play through a grindy game with a completely trashed board state and little opportunity for reversal. So it’s the right thing to change Bucky, but my argument is that he just should have been 86’ed completely.
But Ravensburger is reluctant to do that for some reason, most likely because the Metabros that are showing up for the 10ks would pitch a hissy fit because their robotic, completely unfun, practically AI generated netdecks would be completely messed up.
As a casual player, I’m more concerned about how fun, accessible, and available the game is for the widest range of players and fortunately this ruling won’t really affect me- I’m still going to favor playing fun theme decks like Mouseketeers, Mermaids and Madrigals, Duckburg, or whatever. But one way that this change has impacted my Lorcana experience is that all my foil promo Buckys that I got from League play are now double in value.
Next time- Flipping the Lorcana Table with Tabletop Simulator
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