First impressions on Cats.

[Barracuda88]

Some quick thoughts here after 9 games with a movement deck that included pretty much all of the new units. These opinions are subject to change of course with more play and optimization.

-As expected the Cat Witcher is the meat of the deck. A bit vulnerable on deploy, but if it sticks (and brings a friend), he's an absolute beast late in the round.
-Saboteur can play for about 7, maybe 8 on a very good day and with a lot of work, but on a "normal" day you'll probably get like 5-6 out of him, and overall he doesn't seem like a good use of 5p.
-Mentor is iffy. It's not situational per se, but has to be played at a very specific moment to get the best value, and that moment is never in the beginning of the round, and sometimes that moment never comes at all, so the card bricks. I like it, but with the bricking potential it might not work at high level, idk.
-The Adept so far just seems like a worse version of Enchantress. Him being a witcher doesn't really give any benefits, and the row limitation basically amount to a bad adrenaline requirement. Bad card.
-Gaetan is decent in his straight value, but he can also make things awkward for Gezras and other things, so careful planning and set up is needed.
-The Sabertooth is meh. Nice proactive 7 point play, but not a lot of straight value. Most of the value comes from forcing the opponent to row stack and whether or not that's worth 9p is debatable.
-The Castle is kind of weak. It spawns a 5p card on deploy, usually a Cat Witcher, which is nice, but it's an 8p Cat Witcher basically, because the castle's resilience is pretty useless and the order ability is very questionable in its value, being limited to allies only and as a result being left unused a lot. The jury is out on this one. Seems pretty weak, but I feel there's maybe room for gameplay improvement here.
-Gezras is beastly, but again, very tricky to maximize with the Cats roaming constantly back and forth, and opponents stacking ranged and Gaetan, etc.

Conclusion: hell of a fun deck so far, with most of the points actually coming from the good old Sentries and Matrons. Small sample, but my only losses were to Viy

 

[plastiq33]

Sabertooth is imo not meant for the cat witcher/ engine overload decks and performs much better in an uninteractive/ unitless or trap deck.

Cat witcher adept is pretty good if you can swarm your row quickly with things like justice, oak critters etc. It has a pretty high ceiling but is not great in a lot of situations.

Obviously cat witcher and gezras are really strong right now, not much downside to including them in just about any ST deck.

 

[Barracuda88]

Sabertooth is imo not meant for the cat witcher/ engine overload decks and performs much better in an uninteractive/ unitless or trap deck.

Cat witcher adept is pretty good if you can swarm your row quickly with things like justice, oak critters etc. It has a pretty high ceiling but is not great in a lot of situations.

Obviously cat witcher and gezras are really strong right now, not much downside to including them in just about any ST deck.

I mean, it's true enough about the tiger, but it has to be the first card on the board to get value, so on red coin it's basically a dead card, unless you deliberately lose R1 and then play it in R3, which is almost never ideal.

Otherwise, the impressions are mostly the same. Adept and Saboteur are pretty bad. Castle is actually better than I thought, and so is Gaetan. Gezras is great, though I wouldn't go as far as claiming it's auto-include. In unitless or trap decks you mentioned, for example, he's kinda useless. Also not ideal in dwarves lists, even though they stack.

 

[sfruzz]

Cats are pretty good. These cards can be included in a deck using the worst leader ability (Invigorate) and still somewhat perform. You can put them in a Movement deck, in an Elves deck, in a Harmony deck. Basically Cat Witchers are good on their own.

-The Castle is kind of weak. It spawns a 5p card on deploy, usually a Cat Witcher, which is nice, but it's an 8p Cat Witcher basically, because the castle's resilience is pretty useless and the order ability is very questionable in its value, being limited to allies only and as a result being left unused a lot. The jury is out on this one. Seems pretty weak, but I feel there's maybe room for gameplay improvement here.

I like the Scoia'tael location card. It's quite flexible. In some round you want a Cat Witcher Mentor, in others the regular Cat Witcher. In a short third round, with this location there is no risk of having to play a Mentor on an empty row. Worse case scenario you play a Cat Witcher with Adrenaline.