A Rock-Hard Strategy
First up is the Pandora support. I'll only touch on a bit of her here, since half of her deck falls under Water, and she isn't nearly waifu enough to make me restructure this article plan to accommodate her. She looked like an interesting Ruler during her initial spoiler article as a more modern take on Machina's Machines, focused more on tempo and keeping her resources going rather than an OTK. It was obvious from the get-go that her limiting factor would be her Golems, and the few we initially saw weren't terrible, but weren't necessarily impressive either. The resonators themselves didn't get much better in the full set, but her range of support certainly did.
Conjure Constructs spawns three Golems, giving you 1-card access to satisfying her Judgment requirements. As the spell costs a total of 3, you're essentially getting three 1-cost resonators, and their stats are certainly in line with that. There's no sacrificing performance for convenience here, which is always nice to see in a deck like this that has such an over-reliance on field presence. Sacred Temple of Light operates under the same principles, being a non-resonator that can convert itself into field presence for Pandora. It's a bit more expensive, being a total 4 cost, and only fetches you one resonator. Normally this is pretty bad value, but it's a very powerful tutoring effect on turn 4, and your opponent won't be able to stop the resonator from hitting the field with basic cancel cards. Obviously your target will be Gear Atmos, being the only Golem above a 4-cost (aside from those two water guys I can't talk about yet, because this is a Light article) that is worth grabbing. If your opponent doesn't have an answer set up, this play could spell doom for them right there.
For the same price as Conjure Constructs, Pandora also has access to Summon Magic Warriors to help fill her field up. There are some obvious pros and cons here: You'll be getting one less card than you would with Conjure, you're limited to what you happen to see in the top 7, etc. But on the flip side, you're getting real units instead of tokens, and real cards (potentially) have effects. You can also grab one 5-cost card, and cheesing one of those bad boys in on turn three can definitely swing the game in your favor.
Outside of the direct support, Pandora got some generic spells you can have fun with. Light of Transmigration, on top of being the most kawaii card in the game, works like Dream of Juliet, or Lumia Simulator 2017 for you newer players. It doesn't have quickcast, so you'll be hard pressed to make real plays with it, but it can certainly enable some shenanigans in the right decks. The only real Golem target is Atmos, to spam creature destruction, but I feel that it's real potential can be found elsewhere. There's also Reduction, a sort-of Charlotte's Bear Magic for Light. It costs 1 more, doesn't wipe abilities, and doesn't have remnant. Clearly FoW learned that Bear Magic was way too easy resonator interruption, but as long as that's in rotation I don't see Reduction getting too much use.
Panda-monium
This is what everyone really came here for, isn't it? To see what toys GloriousPandaMasterRace ended up with? Well, sadly, we've already seen the best of it. Gem Beast is basically a vanilla 2-drop that gives you a gem on-death, which loses out to basically any other means of making a Gem in terms of value. Jewel Bullet might have been neat if it were quickcast, but using a Gem just to deal 800 damage is pretty mediocre. Profitable Transactions, though, is pretty aptly named. It lets you convert gems into actual advantage, lets you use all of its effects if you want to, and is as cheap to play as it possibly can be. I kind of question how good this card actually is, given it takes resources to generate gems and this thing can burn through them pretty quickly. If we see ways to destroy Gems get popular, this card definitely provides a way to squeeze value out of them if the opponent tries to get rid of them. I guess only time will tell on that front.
Moving on to the new resonators, we see Jeweler of Sasasu Palace, and I just don't see why you'd ever use her. Maybe, like Profitable Transactions, if the opponent has plenty of ways to destroy your gems she would be good, letting you swap the targeted one for a fresh one. But with those stats and for her cost? She doesn't even generate a gem, just change the color of one. There are plenty of cards that let you make a new one for cheaper. And going deeper down this rabbit hole takes us to Panda Acrobat. If I saw a 5-cost resonator whose only effect was "On enter, rest target resonator" I would probably laugh and keep looking for good cards. Panda Acrobat isn't that card, though. He actually uses up a Gem in order to trigger that effect. I can't even say that he'd be strong in draft, since he doesn't have any way to capitalize on the rested resonator.
Wing Rider Panda is a solid idea, but that's really it. If you gave me a vanilla 6/12 four-drop that had flying, I'd probably throw it in the pile with Panda Acrobat. But this guy requires you to have a blue Gem to get flying? Too much work. Even his variant form isn't much better, although it sports more ATK, which is what you want out of a flier. It suffers the same problem as most of the Light and Water start decks: It's a vanilla card gated behind the latest mechanic.
That certainly isn't to say the Panda deck is bad. The last spoiler article we saw gave us some real goodies for the deck: Discovery is an amazing, cheap way to generate Gems and advantage. Gem Blade Emerald may be vanilla, but she gives you a big tempo swing by basically playing herself for free. Shin-Shin and Rei-Rei are going to be your win condition, building up a stockpile of light Gems to flood the board with multiple copies of these guys. Have you ever seen a field of four 1000/1000 beaters on turn five? You probably don't want to. The Gem mechanic has a lot of potential, and as long as we get more cards like these three and less like the former resonators, I have no doubts that it'll be a powerful mechanic.
Overall, Pandas are in a good place. They don't have a ton of super viable options right now, but they do have a solid game plan and a way to turn that into victory, which is an excellent start. Since we're supposed to see support for them for the rest of the cluster, I can only hope we get more variants that focus on different attributes of Gems.
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