This is one of my favorite times of the year—preview time! New cards are what keep this game from getting stale. They breathe new life into old formats. They build anticipation for the moment that you’ll crack your first new pack. And you get to see them here first.

Anyone who’s read anything I’ve written knows that I consider myself a Sealed Pack specialist. I can’t look at new cards without thinking of their potential in Sealed Pack play. I’ve done two previews so far, and they were at opposite ends of the spectrum for that format. My first one was for Black Panther, T’Challa. This card was a Sealed Pack bomb for the Avengers affiliation. He had the potential to be humongous, and more often than not, he was. My second preview card was for Tattooed Man, Living Ink. He had some real Constructed potential, but he just wasn’t up to snuff as a Sealed Pack card.

X-Men is the newest set on the horizon, and it brings a couple of new elements to the fold. The first is Mutant. Mutant is actually a new character class. There are three different types of Mutants. Physical Mutants are those with enhanced bodies, such as Colossus. Mental Mutants have amazing psychic powers, like Jean Grey. Lastly, Energy Mutants have the ability to harness energy to perform awesome feats, like Magneto. If a character is a Mutant, the presence and type of its Mutant class is indicated on the card.

Effectively, Mutant is more of a keyword like willpower than anything else. It serves as something to check to fulfill requirements, such as recruitment. It is checked on plot twists. It is even referenced in special abilities. It describes the type of abilities a character has, but it doesn’t give any abilities on its own. You can contrast it to reservist, which gives characters a new ability.

Now that you know what a Mutant is, let’s meet one up close and personal.

She’s a beauty, isn’t she? And the card’s not too bad, either! Emma Frost, Friend or Foe should be very good. One of the first things I look at when evaluating a card is its ATK / DEF value compared to its cost. For a cost of 5, Emma brings to the table a well-proportioned 9 ATK / 9 DEF body with range—which is average. Since her size isn’t anything to shout about, she’s gotta have some good abilities. And believe me, this one’s got some skills.

First off, she has a sort of Mental Mutant loyalty. You can only recruit her if you have another Mental Mutant in play. Loyalty is a bigger issue in Sealed Pack than in Draft. In Sealed Pack, you can’t guarantee how many characters of the appropriate affiliation you will open, and thus you don’t know if you will have enough to fulfill the loyalty requirement reliably. I don’t anticipate Mutant loyalty being any different. You usually have four teams and a small unaffiliated contingent in each set. In terms of Mutants, there are four major types: Physical, Mental, Energy, and non-Mutant. This should ensure a mix similar to the one that you see in the teams of a set.

In Draft, you have much better control over the cards you end up with than in Sealed Pack. If you get a card that is just begging to be played but has a loyalty requirement, you can tailor your draft so that you can play it reliably. This makes Emma a stronger Draft than Sealed Pack card. However, if the card pool you open has enough Mental Mutants to support her reliably, she’ll be stellar for you.

No matter what I’m writing about, I always seem to find a way to work the following statement in: While characters actually kill your opponent, plot twists win games. Basic Sealed Pack strategy can be boiled down to that statement. If your plot twists are good, then any card that allows you multiple uses of the same plot twists should also be good. Assuming that you are playing a standard Sealed Pack game, the game will end around turn 7. If Emma is your turn 5 recruit, you get an extra plot twist on turns 5 through 7. That’s three extra plot twists! That may not seem like a lot, but each use of a plot twist is enough to turn a single combat your way. You effectively get to own three separate attacks. That’s a sure way to win the game.

The strength of her ability will obviously rely upon the strength of your plot twists. If you manage to get your hands on a few stellar plot twists, then chances are that you will draw at least one of them before the game is over. This means that you’ll get multiple uses of the stellar plot twist. I think you get the idea by now.

In order to use this ability, you have to discard a Mental card. This means that your deck will need to be packed with them. Emma depends on them for multiple reasons. If it appears on multiple cards (which I have no doubt it will), this new Mutant loyalty will have an interesting effect on Sealed Pack strategy. With standard loyalty, as long as you are drafting a team, you have filled the loyalty requirement. In order to recruit a Terra, you should draft Teen Titans, and if you drafted her, you probably did. It was easy to keep on top of them. However, with this new type of loyalty, you have two different things to keep track of.

It’s important to limit the number of teams your deck contains. The more coherent a deck is in terms of teams, the bigger the advantage it has. Such a deck is more likely to be able to take advantage of team-specific abilities, like team attacking and reinforcement. For this new loyalty, however, you will also need to overvalue cards of the appropriate Mutant type (in this case, it’s Mental). This means that in order to build the most coherent deck you can, you will want to focus on drafting Mental Mutants in your teams. This is much more specific and harder to do than, say, just drafting X-Men; now you’re looking for a specific subgroup within your team. That severely limits your options. It will be very interesting to see how this affects Draft strategy, and you can bet it’ll be something I look into.

All of that said, I think that she’s certainly in the right team for a Mental loyalty. Professor X, Psylocke, and Jean Grey are all members of the X-Men. I’m not sure they all have cards in the new set, but it wouldn’t be the X-Men without them, so I’m assuming they do. I suppose it won’t be too long until we find out, so you guys should be ready to throw down come Sneak Preview time. I know I’ll be looking forward to it. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Tomorrow's Preview: