All of your Garou have +3 Renown when voting on Peaceful Moots and -2 Renown when voting on Warring Moots.
| June 15, 1999 | |
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| Type: Totem | |
| Keywords: | |
| Requires: Children of Gaia. | |
| Text: You do not need to discard a Sept card to turn one of your Garou to Crinos form. All of your Garou have +3 Renown when voting on Peaceful Moots and -2 Renown when voting on Warring Moots. | |
| Quote: | |
| Phase:5 | Artist: Anthony Hightower |
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Power: 17
As totems go, this is one of the best. You've got two basic abilities, the free Crinos shift and the voting power. The free shift not only ensures you will always have the ability to begin in Crinos, but also allows you to build a stronger Umbra deck (discards to shift form and world can empty the hand quickly) or any other strategy that uses discards as cost. On the voting side, it obviously has applications to moot ideas. Obviously, the idea would be to include Peaceful moots and avoid Warring ones. Combine with Sleeping Brook (Uktena, +4 on Peaceful moots), and you've got a 9 Renown near-Cub to play with if done right. A nice pair of abilities.
Usability: 10
Unfortunately, the Children of Gaia are apparently not that popular with the other tribes, only having three cohorts. However, any auspice could take advantage of this Totem, provided a Child was available. Theurge decks would probably get the most use out of it, with the Sept Draw of 3.
Limitations: 18
Two balancing factors play a part in this card. First, you've got the limitation on who can play the card. Perhaps not a major weakness, but I personally have had trouble coming up with strong Children decks. It seems that any time I get started on one, a different idea attracts my attention. Then again, there are some strong individual Gaians that could certainly be worked into a deck. A fair balancing factor, I would say.
The second limitation is the penalty on Warring moots. There are basically two edges to this sword. First, it discourages the use of Warring moots, such as the useful Ditch Fight or Tribal War. Second, it leaves you open to the Warring moots of other players. While not mathematically balancing (-2 vs +3), it can still hurt if you've taken the brunt of it. Best pack other vote boosters just in case.
Decks: 18
This card would fit very thematically into a Children of Gaia deck, with some nice abilities to boost one of the weaker tribes. As noted above, a Theurge deck would find good use in the card savings for Crinos shifting, especially one built to visit the Umbra. Likewise, a deck that focuses on card discards would find a definite use for this card. Combined with Deep Understanding, and even with a small Sept Draw, you can be tossing away two cards for an ability without significantly impacting your hand. And, being the only Totem that affects voting power, it would also make an excellent component to a Moot deck that accounts for the voting weakness.
Flavor: 18
Wow, nice artwork. Hightower draws one fine looking unicorn - very realistic. If I didn't know better, I'd almost think he used a live model (well, yeah, he probably used a horse, but don't spoil the illusion). And, well, you can't get much better at matching art to card name. It is a picture of a Unicorn, after all. I've got mixed emotions on the card text, though. The moot renown modifier matches Unicorn's portfolio perfectly. The free shapeshifting baffles me, though, since Unicorn is a totem of peace. The only way I can see this is if it was to get the smack down on some Wyrm, but your alpha can just as easily go kick some Garou heads.
There's no quote on the card, but the card text uses up the space comfortably, so I'll give the nod for quote. In any case, most of the Totems don't have quotes anyway. Thematically, Unicorn fits in very nicely with the Children during their release. As far as storyline goes, not much is going on, but it fills out the Children.