Preface
During the past few weeks while I have had an increase in health problems, I have had a modest amount of time to try and plan out new types of content to produce for your reading pleasure and have decided to pursue articles that discuss the current meta in Puzzle and Dragons and is more of a conversational piece as opposed to a Review.
My thought process is I wish to share various ideas that have been bouncing around my head or conversations I have had with friends and other PADdicts. These are easier and quite a bit of fun to write and would appreciate any feedback you have. Regardless, I wish to thank all of my readers for your continuous support and understanding these past few weeks.
Introduction
I have been thinking of ways to help revitalize older Pantheon cards and have come the conclusion that Super Reincarnated forms are not doing the trick. This is because they require both an exorbitant amount of Monster Experience along with modestly difficult to acquire Evolution materials for what usually amounts to an underwhelming card. While these cards do have merits to less developed boxes/newer accounts, the odds of those players being able to acquire them is slim and also runs the risk of being invalidated by rolling in Collab/Seasonal events.
I am well aware that GungHo is a company that needs to make money and by having the best cards being the rarest makes sense. With that being said, we are currently ‘enjoying’ an era where the best teams are mostly comprised of rare Collab/Seasonals and 7* Godfest Exclusives for all aspects of team building.
This is a far cry from several years ago when some Farmables and many Pantheon cards were considered valuable to own. Of course the rarer cards were still top tier, but at least we had more options overall.
Taking this into consideration, I still feel the best way to revive the Pantheon series is to give them Weapon Assists 
.
Video commentary
–video coming soon–
Current state of the game
At this point in time, the meta is largely defined by teams with High Effective Health who can also tap into reliable ATK activation along with an easier time for dealing with Void plus Resolve spawns. Building upon this, the two strongest abilities are 7×6 boards and/or Auto Follow Up Damage. Furthermore, we are also starting to see a greater shift towards solo play in difficult content as many teams rely on their Super Awakenings to overcome various spawns.
With that being said, another common trend is the heavy dependency on rare Seasonals/Collab or 7* GFE cards. Take for example my Phenom + Ina team for AA3:
Solo Alt. Arena 3 – Phenom x Ina
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| Card |  |
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| SA |  |
 |
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 |
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| Inherit |  |
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| Latent |   |
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x6 |
x4 |
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x4 |
I have one farmable inherit (
), one farmable sub (
) and a former 5-star GFE Weapon (
). Other than this, every other card is a non-bottom rarity Collab card or 7* GFE. In fact, this is the common trend with my other teams for Alt. Arena 3 and the only Pantheon card I find myself using on a regular basis is Diaochan 
.
By comparison, looking back at my Team Building article for Yusuke 
, Dark Athena 
, and Myr 
had a much more diverse showing of Pantheon cards. Perhaps this was partially due to my less developed box but I feel it is mostly because GungHo has shifted away from Pantheon cards and put more focus on Collab/Seasonals.
From a business perspective this makes sense. For example, Monster Hunter Collab is one of the stronger events as it offers strong value at the 5-star (bottom) rarity with desirable Weapon Assists. This means players are not terribly sad (and often happy) if they roll them when chasing the higher rarity card as they are still valuable to own. By comparison, Pantheon cards are the consolation prize for rolling Godfests (usually 2/3 chance) so many players tend to have numerous copies lying around.
How would Weapon Assists help?
Weapon Assists have become a vital aspect in team building as we will always bring inherits for challenging content and being able to counter various mechanics through awakenings is usually the best course of action.
Initially, Weapon Assists were primarily used to cover key Resists (eg. 
) and that was about it because they provided fewer awakenings compared to current day options. This somewhat forced players into using Weapon Assists to only counter mechanics as there was no more space for Passive Damage or for actives we actually wanted to bring.
Over time, we have gained access to stronger Weapon Assists along with Super Resists (
) which means fewer inherit slots need to be dedicated to Resists. As such, team building has become more flexible as we may potentially have several “flex” slots available that we can cater for the specific dungeon or to shore up a weak point in our team.
For example, Yellow Ranger’s Weapon Assist 
would have been less serviceable a year ago as it only provided a single Poison Resist. Today, I find it one of the stronger Weapon Assists for Light teams as it has a valuable active on a reasonable cooldown along with other awakenings that are helpful. Similarly, Weapon Assists that provide Passive Damage (Rows or Orb Enhances) are starting to become more popular as it enables players to run less damage oriented subs as the average damage of each card can be raised. Either way, neither of these would be possible without stronger options as the first priority is to have sufficient Resists present.
With this in mind, giving Pantheon cards a modest Weapon Assist will breathe new life into them. Many of these cards do have useful actives but cannot be justified to be used as a sub compared to other options. As such, a Weapon Assist that provides either a Resist or two, some Passive Damage, or other valued utility would be helpful.
Capping them at 1-2 Resists or Passive Damage will help ensure Collabs/Seasonals remain the best place to acquire the stronger equips but still giving players a way to utilize their consolation rolls would be ideal.
I understand the concept that in order to have a strong card, others must be weaker, but at this point in time, the gap is too large and to the point that Pantheon cards are seldom used.
Conclusion
Puzzle and Dragons is one of the oldest games on the market and has countless of possible cards to roll/acquire. Unfortunately, many of the Pantheon cards struggle to find relevance despite the fact that they are receiving Super Reincarnated Evolutions.
This is because they require a massive amount of resources to reach their full potential and even then, they are often lacking.
As such, by giving Pantheon cards Weapon Assists, it can potentially revitalize their usage and also give more motivation to roll in Super Godfests where Pantheon cards make up usually 2/3 of the rolling pool.
Let me know what you think about this idea in the comments below along with whether or not you enjoy these types of articles.
Happy Puzzling!
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Mantastic Puzzle and Dragons 
Glad you’re able to still think clearly through the pain! Yes, better assists for Pantheons does make sense going forward. I only worry about newbies to PAD who might feel the game is getting overwhelmingly complicated. Juggling all those assist awakenings on top of regular awakenings can be daunting, not to mention the distraction of next-to-useless other mechanics such as Latent Awakens.
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Yeah there is so much going on in PAD nowadays it can be daunting along with a lack of instructions in game
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Hmm I like your thought process
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Glad you do =)
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Yes, I think that these non-review articles will only become more important as the game incorporates more options and mechanics.
I don’t see how anyone could possibly get the materials for the various super-evolutions without having a strong enough team to make those evolutions pointless. They were so disappointing.
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Yeah that is the biggest problem: the people who can benefit from it the most cannot evolve/level them and usually once they can, they become less valuable
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I’ve only played for about a year, so I don’t really have a good sense of how the PAD meta has evolved.
Has PAD always had a large number of unuseable REM cards? Or is this game’s long history leading to an outdated card pileup that hasn’t been seen in previous times?
It does feel bad to have so many cards be useless and very common to roll, but I don’t really have a sense of what I should expect from PAD when it comes how lenient it should be to NIAP/IAP-light ppl, and how integral chase cards (especially those limited time collab ones) should be for a satisfying gameplay experience.
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With the extra addition of up to 2 more latent awakening slots for Ult Evo and Super Reincarnated monsters, do you think that will be enough to provide them the extra power boost to bring them to wider use?
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Right now, SDR and Killers are the primary latents used so going from 6 -> 8 SDR is not a big deal and would only make a difference on cards who use Killers
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I like this kind of content 🙂
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I like this kind of comment
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Equip would be nice although I feel they would suffer the same problem as their regular form. The best weapon assists right now are all coming from collabs. They offer multi hazard resists, killers, etc. Once you have those, you won;t be using the pantheon version that is subpar. It’s a very hard thing for gungho to balance.
I have a couple ideas too to continue the discussion. They could add a new stat to all monsters (they could use the star rating but it’s not precise enough and they won’t change it since all their odds are tied to it) that basically reflect their “age”. And they could restrict dungeons to cards of certain age. For example, doing Zeus Mercury descend with cards from the past couple years is boring and uninteresting because it’s basically the equivalent of swiping through a dungeon. However, if the dungeon is restricted to cards that have been released before 2017 let’s say, then it becomes interesting and it makes us use those old cards that are irrelevant today.. Meimei will never be used again in the current game except for a huge overhaul that Gungho has no reason to do. But it can be used in content that is 3 years old.
Or Gungho simply bites the bullet and admits that cards that were released 7 years ago simply can’t be good anymore (that’s fair) and removes them from the REM. They could even make them dropable so people who like to collect all cards can still have access to them. Pantheons were the core of the game a few years ago but today, as you point out, except for a couple cards, they are utterly unusable. I feel it’s unfair to players to still have most of their monsters in the machines being those useless monsters.
There are what 25 pantheons or so, so that’s 125 cards that are just garbage, I think we can all agree that GungHo has to acknowledge that fact. GungHo is facing an itneresting problem because their game is super successful and is old now which is generally not a factor for those kind of games that survive just a couple years so they have to think about what to do about old cards.
My guess is that they don’t give a crap and are not even thinking about it :D!
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I feel like Puff (above) makes a strong argument about pantheon cards losing out miserably to event and collab when it comes to weapon assist. But it got me thinking about how gungho could make pantheon weapons unique. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea or not but why not repurpose tans (again) as a on off switch to the weapons active ability? There are plenty of great weapons that have actives that may contradict a team’s needs. But if you can turn a weapon’s active off, get some decent coverage from weapon awakenings and restrict the on/off switch to pantheon weapons, I think it would breath some new life into pantheon cards. But I haven’t thought through the negatives to this. I’m curious to know everyones thought on this.
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Well that is the thing, we have significantly less Weapon Assists compared to cards that can be used as subs so there is a disparity in that sense
As such, Pantheon Weapons can cover a wide array of different awakenings so players have choice. Main idea is that with a few high end assists, you have “flex slots”
As for your idea of turning off an inherit’s skill, that is pretty cool
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When super revo haku first came out and underwhelmed just about everyone I got the idea for a special type of equip GH could give pantheon cards that would potentially fix them. Create an equip that only the original card can use. For example, assuming I’ve rolled two hakus, I can take my second haku, turn her into a ‘banishing claw’ equip that contains any number of powerful awakenings and then equip that onto my super revo haku. Since that equip is tied to haku (possibly only to her super form), balance can be maintained because the base card can never change. The equip can have a buffed up active, really strong awakenings, and whatever else the meta calls for without breaking the current state of power creep.
From a money-making perspective, it now encourages people to roll multiple copies of cards and can open up team building to some long-forgotten pantheon cards.
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That is interesting but I wonder what kind of awakenings the exclusive inherit would give? Super high stats? 7c? VDP?
Would be an interesting way to buff pantheon cards for sure
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I’m smelling a new trend here. Pantheon -> Rainbow medal. That’s all what they can do =)
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This feels pseudo insulting. 5-10 Magic Stones (really 10 because we should only roll in SGF) for ONE Rainbow Medal
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Yeah. But it’s still better than a bundle of 5* cards from cheap collabs collecting dust in my box which also dont have weapon assists.
Beside this i’m smelling another new trend of Gung from making collabs. That is they make only top rarity cards tradable (often leaders) and put some subs on lower rarities which we must really roll for them. That’s exactly YGO collab we are having now.
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On the bright side i’ve just realized that chinese gods now have pixel evolution which are ridiculously powerful (much stronger than even super reincarnated form). Maybe that’s the way for old pantheon cards?
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