Back To School: Illusion

Overview

In this series, we’ll take a close look at one of the nine schools of magic and the minions that can be summoned from it. The goal here is to give readers a feel for how the school plays and how they might combine these minions with their favorite mages. In designing these units, it was important to me that the mechanics and flavor were aligned, and I hope that comes through.

Next up is Illusion! Currently, Robin Goodfellow and Vortinbraz have access to this school, which means it can be paired with Necromancy and Druidicae.

Illusion was an especially fun idea to put into the game. These felt like minions which should do unusual things. This was not going to be a combat-oriented school; it always felt like a school for people who like to be tricky. Just getting my head around what these minions should be was an effort. In the end, I decided not to specify exactly what the illusion was so much as the emotional response it creates in those who behold it.

This take on illusions gave a clear directive to the design mechanics. These minions manipulate other characters in both beneficial and detrimental ways. This means a lot of movement tricks and status effects. It also felt important that some of these abilities come out of left field entirely. I hope you find the results as fun and intriguing as I do.

Tempting Hallucination – 1 Mana

What tempts you? Riches? Self-Actualization? Hotties? I'll leave it up to everyone to answer that question for themselves. Whatever tempts the enemy characters, this illusion is it.

Just one character in this unit. That will be the case for this entire school. You'll also notice higher willpower than defense - another continuing theme for the school. At first glance, it also clear that this minion has no direct way of damaging other characters. Get used to that. You may also notice the movement stat of zero. Yep. Don't worry, though, the Tempting Hallucination is extremely mobile thanks to Poof! This action lets this illusion place within 3 tiles, which makes it largely indifferent to some terrain types and to intervening characters while being very fast overall. It can still use the move action, but it won't get anywhere without a speed buff.

Movement and Manipulation

The Distracting passive trait is maybe the most important thing about this minion. If the TH is adjacent to you, you don't count for Wellsprings. Although this minion is only a single character, if it is sitting directly on a Wellspring, then it doesn't matter how many enemy characters are surrounding the Wellspring tile because none of them count for end of Round scoring; the illusionist gets 6 VP anyway.

Distracting means that enemy characters will want to not be adjacent to this alluring vision, but unfortunately for them, this minion has the Enticements action. Each hit pushes an enemy character closer. This is good for exploiting Distracting, but it also works well for pulling enemy characters off of Wellsprings or into the threat range of some of your more dangerous characters.

Now You See Me...

A good solution for dealing with this minion is simply to banish it. That works. The key to using TH well is figuring out how to keep it around. However, if it seems like your little temptation is about to get got, you can always just pull it off the field to deny your opponent the bounty using Phantasmal. This may mess with your activation economy since the activation tokens don't refresh, but the option is useful at times.

Inspiring Vision – 2 Mana

Sometimes Illusions can help you. What inspires you? Courage? Selflessness? Hotties? I'll leave it up to everyone to answer that question for themselves. Whatever inspires your characters, this illusion is it.

The Inspiring Vision is here to hand out status effects. More on that shortly. It has low defense, high willpower, and a robust health pool. This thing can't tank too much punishment, but it won't be trivial to take down either, especially if it's debuffing incoming attacks. It can also deny opponents bounty points using Phantasmal. Like the tempting Hallucination, it has real speed from Poof!

Psych Ops

The Inspiring Vision is one of the game's premier distributors of status effects. Intimidating Awesomeness gives a nice blend of positioning control and offensive debuffs which help keep your team on the board. 6 dice into Willpower is very good. While mages tend to have high willpower, against most minions, this will produce 2 successes, allowing you to stack up a pair of dice debuffs which will seriously hamper that character's output.

Shining Example is just pure goodness. I's a free action! Just hand out dice or willpower buffs for free two up to two allies each time this minion activates. This pairs extremely well with mages or minions from other schools which are more combat oriented. Suddenly those skeletons hit a lot harder when two of them have a dice buff. Give these buffs out to Vortinbraz and a Death Knight and you're positively cooking with rocket fuel.

Doppelganger – 3 Mana

I didn't want the entire school to just be phantasmal things that go poof. Maybe one living being, right? The Doppelganger is a creature of Illusion that fits right in. It's certainly dangerous, but only because of its ability to create the illusion that it's a copy of whatever's around.

Like other Illusion minions the Doppelganger is fast, just not from poofing around. It can't place, but it does have a strong base move of three, and it is unimpeded, which helps. It's not as mobile as the other Illusion minions, but it's certainly no slouch. The Doppelganger is also pretty hard to kill. Defense 3, willpower 4 is a mage-level defensive stat line. the bounty is relatively low for a 3 mana minion at 3. 4 health is on the low side for a 3 health minion, but Stealth is a solid piece of defensive tech which will prevent it from being sniped before it can bring its own abilities to bear. About those....

Stop Hitting Yourself

Mimic is what makes the Doppelganger. You get to steal one of the opponent's actions. This is sometimes amazing and sometimes not. If you can send the Doppelganger into a high-end minion or a mage with a strong base attack, do it. If you're just going to be handing out whatever actions a 1 mana minion has, consider other options. This is extremely versatile, but also extremely situational at the same time. If you have a Doppelganger in your list,the opponent will have to think twice about giving you access to their best actions, though, and that's already a win.

The Doppelganger is not purely dependent on others, though. Mind Games is a solid movement and debuffing action that renders targets vulnerable and pushes them around a bit. When not moonlighting as someone else, the Doppelganger can still reliably do Illusion minion things.

Illusion Mage Pairings

Vortinbraz has some interesting combinations available because he has some hard-hitting and/or fragile minions who love the status effects this school brings. Vorty's personal threat gets better with an Inspiring Vision. the combination of Distracting from the Tempting Hallucination and the vampire's Majestic Presence lets you play a very cruel Wellspring control game.

Robin Goodfellow loves it when enemy characters fail their dice rolls, and the Illusion minions have a lot of debuffs that can help make that happen. The combination with Druidicae minions is also very good, as the Pixie Troupe just loves a willpower debuff, and the Bears and Carniverous plants become terrifying when buffed.

Final Thoughts

Thanks for taking some time to explore the world of Mage Duel. Remember, this is just the beginning. We’ll continue to explore the characters in this game here on the Objective Hex, but there’s no need for you to wait for us. I encourage you to explore the game on your own given that all if tis resources and assets are available for free. Let us know what you think!

Please consider playing Mage Duel: War for the Wellsprings.

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