January 26, 2015 March 19, 2023

Spell Spotlight:

Rain Beetle

If you have seen my other spell spotlight series you will know that I love mutates. Mutated spells often have different utility value and can be much more valuable than the original card. Today I will be exploring on of the lesser known, simpler mutates that nonetheless have a huge impact on gameplay.

The Rain Beetle Card

Many are unfamiliar with the Rain Beetle card. This card is formed from the combination of ice’s 1 pip frost beetle and the storm version of mutate beetle found in the ice Treasure Cards section of the Bazaar. When these 2 cards are combined it transforms from a 1 pip ice spell to a 0 pip storm spell.

Why is it useful?

To the untrained eye this card comes across as useless. Its low damage won’t even tickle opponents and as such it would seem to be a waste of a valuable round. However with a little thought one can quickly see how the rain beetle card is very useful to the storm school.

Storm as a whole is a class that plays in a constant state of resource starvation. Resource starvation is a state where you are constantly utilizing your pips to either attack, heal or break shields. Due to its low health, storm often has to play a very hard and fast game of attempting to defeat their opponents before they can gain a solid foothold to counterattack. An opponent’s higher health buffer means a storm has to spend more pips to defeat them.

A storm’s lower health means they have to dedicate more pips to healing or disruption. This is further complicated by the presence of shields, which at a 0 pip cost can significantly alter the tempo in the opponent’s favor if a storm slams a high pip cost spell into the shield. Even slamming a low pip spell such as wildbolt into a shield can complicate matters as you did not have a net gain of pips while your opponent does.

This is where the rain beetle comes in to play. At a zero pip cost the rain beetle removes a shield at no pip cost to you and allows you a net gain of pips. This enables you to save pips for a larger attack or even to execute a combo. For a school that has trouble with both shields and pip management, the 0 pip rain beetle is a godsend.

When to use beetle

Having access to a zero pip shield breaker is only useful if you know when to utilize it. Rain beetle is best utilized when you need to build pips towards a large pip hit or combination attack. It is used to clear the way so that you can inflict some serious damage to your opponent when you have 6-10 pips.

Times when to avoid using rain beetle include when you have a large number of pips (10+) or blades. In these cases, it may be better to convert around the shield (in the case of multiple blades) or to break the shield with a colossal low pip attack (bats, kraken, wild bolt in the case of large number of pips) so you can inflict decent damage through the shield while maintaining a dangerous pip level.

That being said, rain beetle is a very useful spell that almost always finds a way into my deck.