Most cards in Episode 3 have various colours on the top, left, or right side of the cards. These colours are very important to learn and understand, as they dictate what cards can be played in what situations.
There are 3 types of colours:
Resistance (or top)
Left (also known as left linker)
Right (also known as right linker)
Here's an example of a card with all 3 types of colours:
- image.png (76.43 KiB) Viewed 6206 times
In the image above, it has a red resistance, left blue, and right blue and red. Below, we'll go more into depth for each colour.
Colour attributes
Each specific colour (red, blue, green etc.) generally refers to a certain type of action:
- Red: Physical
- Yellow: Technique
- Green: Status
- Orange: Pierce/Rampage
- Blue: Stat modifier / Conditional attack
- Purple: Instant Death
These categories are not always followed strictly, however. For example in the above image, Lock on 3 has a left blue linker, which should mean that it combines with stat modifiers or conditional attacks, but it's primarily for physical attacks.
There are also 3 unique colours which players cannot have, and are only present on boss character cards and their unique action cards:
- Brown: Leukon Knight
- White: Castor
- Grey: Pollux
Resistance colours
When using a card to attack, the "attribute" of the attack is determined by the resistance colours. When using a card to defend, the resistance colours communicate what types of attacks the card can defend against.
For example, when attacking using the Shot card, you will be doing a physical-type attack, per its resistance colour:
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What this means is that the defender can only use a defence card which also has a red resistance colour. An example of this may be Guard:
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When using action cards, the resistance colours of the story or field character is disregarded, and only the resistance colours on the action cards are valid. For example, one may use Gibarta, which has the following resistance colours:
- image.png (8.57 KiB) Viewed 6206 times
This will make the entire attribute of the attack yellow and green, even if casted from a card which has a red resistance colour. Notably, this means that the defender may only defend using cards with either red or green resistance colours (both resistance colours do not have to be present on the defence card). Some examples that a player could use against Gibarta are Treatment and Patience:
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- image.png (8.75 KiB) Viewed 6206 times
Note that if multiple action cards are used in one attack, the resistance colours of all of them are valid to defend against, not only the final one.
Aegis Guard and Cancel
With the above knowledge, this should help you understand how Aegis Guard and Cancel work. These are miscommonly understood cards by new players. The cards are below:
- image.png (87.52 KiB) Viewed 6206 times
- image.png (80.04 KiB) Viewed 6206 times
These cards will block the entirety of any attack that the user defends against, but only if the attacks used have a resistance colour of blue, green, or purple. This means that while the cards themselves are powerful, Cancel is primarily for defending against attacks with statuses, while Aegis Guard is primarily for defending against instant-death attacks (such as Megid or the Minor Death ability).
Left and Right colours
Left and right colours communicate what cards can "link" together when using action cards. Let's use an example, by looking at the Sword card.
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The Sword card has various right colours: Blue, Red, Purple, and Green. This means that Sword can use any action cards which have any matching left colours. For example, Sword can use the Heavy Slash action card due to its left colour:
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Notably however, if you are using a Sword, you will not be able to use a card such as Foie, because Foie only has a left yellow colour, as below:
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You may come across cards which have both left and right colours. This means that this card can be used to connect other action cards for devastating combos. For example, Unit Blow can be linked to Sword, and then Heavy Slash linked to Unit Blow, allowing for a very powerful attack:
- image.png (73.04 KiB) Viewed 6206 times
TODO: Get an image of this in action
When doing combo links with cards similar to the above, it is possible to link invalid cards to the story or field character. For example, Sinow Zele only has blue and yellow right colours, however if you were to use the TP Attack card as pictured below, you would be able to link a Heavy Slash card to Sinow Zele through the combo links:
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TODO: Get an image of this in action
And this is all you need to know about the various colours! Hopefully this helps you make better decisions when deck-building!