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Sunlantern Aya – Beta Content Review
🕑 Added 2024-01-05 10:00:04 +0000 UTC
This People of the Sun variant Aya survivor came out in the tale end of last year during the Black Friday Sale and it represents the third named survivor getting a Sun version of themselves. It is on one hand a little surprising that she has come out before Zachary or Allister, but on the other hand Aya is the survivor most closely associated with late game gear like Lantern Armor, which is the base armor for this hybrid armor set.
Before we go any further, one should consider the typical trend with these “Sun Survivors” in that both Erza and Lucy's variants have been reprinted with expanded content in full plastic. So it is reasonable to expect that the same should happen here with Aya. So immediately you should ignore the ludicrous prices the secondary market are asking for this box (I've seen resellers asking over $100 for this release). Odds are a refined and more balanced version of this will appear later this year.
That written, let us look what's in the box. We get two cards, one of which is a Hybrid Armor Set, the other is the gear card which provides the unlock for the Armor Set. A Mask Head gear card.
The model is pretty nice looking, this entire Sun range has really updated the look of the miniatures to bring the survivors for Sun into line with the newer scale and detail. This resin version is probably not a great game piece, because that roped weapon is a concerning point of failure/break. The part from her left hand round her back and to her thigh is reasonable well protected, but the section after that looks vulnerable.
She's wearing a lighter looking version of the Lantern Armor, explaining why the armor set can now ignore the Extreme Heat campaign limitation, but unless there is a second head in the box, she is missing the mask (I can't check as my physical copy hasn't arrived, I'm still playing with Proxy versions). Screaming Oni/Sun Armor Lucy wore the mask on her knee which I though was a lovely touch. I can't see any sign of the Sunlantern Mask here, I guess, following the trend we might see an alternative head in the full plastic release. I hope so.
Overall, it's a nice miniature that presents a lovely sculpt of a beloved KDM character and while I may not get her on the table too often, I look forward to painting her sometime after I've finished the GCE miniatures (so like 2026?)
Game Content
We'll start with the armor set itself because the mask is supported by what the full hybrid set is doing. This is a base Lantern armor set, so the set has reduced movement (which can be offset by activating the greaves), bonus armor points for all metal keywords and a minor club synergy with +1 accuracy for clubs. It also provides two green affinities, one blue affinity, two red half-affinities and a blue half-affinity for attaching the mask to. The notable loss here is the survival gains that the full lantern armor set provides, the loss of sharp for clubs is not an issue due to how its new set bonuses (and the mask) interact.
The set bonuses themselves do not include any armor points (that is on the cuirass), one allows for the armor set to be worn in PotSun without the need for the Hellfire Secret Fighting Art and the other two have thematically linked but independent abilities. The first of those is that any thrown weapon in this survivor's gear grid gains sharp. An exact parallel to what Lantern Armor does for clubs. We'll get into that with a bit more detail when looking at the Mask, because it has more thrown synergy.
The second ability is for thrown items which is currently an astronomically small portion of the game. There are three thrown items total, all bombs, everything else with the thrown keyword are weapons. Here's the full list with the items in bold:
- The Beetle Bomb – Wet Resin Crafter
- Bone Darts – Bone Smith
- Dragon Chakram – Dragon Armory
- Finger Darts – Crimson Crockery
- Musk Bomb – Barber Surgeon
- Silk Bomb – Silk Mill
- Sky Harpoon – Skyreef Sanctury
- Sunspot Dart – Skyreef Sanctury
- Throwing Knife – Silk Mill
Of those three bombs, the Beetle Bomb doesn't archive itself, so has no benefit/synergy with this set bonus. That means right now, all the Sunlantern armor is interacting with for thrown items is the Silk Bomb and Musk Bomb. We'll look at them here:
The Silk Bomb is a relatively cheap early game craft, and its function is to prevent all knockback and bash for a single round. There are a few monsters here and there that this can have some impact against and if you're swimming in silk resources having two activations of this (or one without an archival) is potentially quite potent. For example the upcoming Black Knight is seeking to kill survivors with knockback (unless Pervical's doggo has had a huge change in mechanics before release, I guess we'll find out later this year. Isn't is so exciting that we get to replace The Hand at Nemesis Node 3 soon?) The Silk Bomb can negate that, which could be strong enough to make a real difference. So situationally, you might take a Silk Bomb, depending on your campaign's monster mix.
The Musk bomb on the other hand only works 80% of the time, but when it does it gives us a very powerful ability in that it cancels a drawn AI card (and costs 2 survival). Which is one of the most potent things you can do, especially if you are seeking to burst down the monster quickly rather than drag the fight out.
I'm still not sold on this though, Musk Bombs are expensive, you need that survival and you don't even get a guaranteed success. But, that written, there is a lot of power behind this as you can cancel very powerful Legendary (L) cards with purpose. You do get to see the AI card before drawing it, so if you combine that with Rawhide Headband scrubbing (moving the L cards up so they're removed as wounds) and there's a spot for this. It's just you're leaning into using a slot on a single use item that can fail – the second use of the Musk Bomb is also important, if you're able to sustain the 7 resource cost of this bomb and you're focused on minimizing the number of turns (therefore AI cards) that the monster has, denying two draws could be really powerful. Though less so against monsters who do multiple things per turn like the Butcher and Phoenix.
It's certainly proven to be interesting and situationally powerful depending on how one has focused their team. However I wish Bombs didn't self archive and instead had limited uses like the Beetle Bomb or even used the ammo mechanic in some fashion. That's not fixed here, but it is an improvement, so I'll take it.
Sunlantern Mask
Crafting Cost: 2x Iron, 5x Bone, 1x Perfect Bone
One of the really interesting portions of this gear card is that it has zero extra mechanical gating, in that you don't need heat, you don't need the Blacksmith all you need are the resources. Because we now have Clothed & Satiated (C&S) as an armor bonus for mixed sets that means we can look at getting the Sunlantern Mask online a lot earlier than the entire armor set if we want. Which is going to be very interesting due to its solid armor points and a very powerful static ability.
The ability in question is that +2 movement, it was designed to offset the movement lost by the Lantern Curaiss, but you can instead just leverage it to increase your movement to 7, which means you have a load more monsters that can be “dash-cancelled” (dashing to force the monster to move and then fail to attack you because you are out of reach), Movement is just a really good statistic in an arena as large as the one Kingdom Death offers for its showdowns. Even the Sunlantern Set itself can benefit from this extra movement if it activates the Lantern Greaves bonus.
The other ability here is great, it directly improves all weapons by letting you hit from more positions, Range 4 is a huge amount, just look at the area of squares it covers.
Here Red is the survivor, dark blue is their normal targeting area and then each layer is the extra squares added to your potential targeting spaces. So we go from 4 -> 12 -> 24 -> 40, which is excellent at increasing your reach (and also Crimson Crocodile Armor doesn't mind too much if it loses its set bonus in exchange for C&S and this kind of spinning top on a string nonsense).
Of course, we don't get to combine this with the really bonkers stuff like Dragon Armor or Phoenix Armor, but Sunlantern Armor itself gives sharp, so we're good enough I think. Still, using it in combination with abilities like Pounce (White Lion Coat), Immortal Spin (Crimson Dress) and Hit Song (Singing Breastplate) so there are mixed sets that could employ this to improve their target area for strong abilities. You can also just straight up use it with sharp weapons if they don't have a massive base strength. I'd also like to spend my 'Clothed & Satiated is amazing' token for this month here. It's amazing.
When the mask is combined with Sunlantern we get to make every single weapon with 5 strength or lower gain sharp (and Range: 4) (including bows). That's a lot of weapons, too many to list here. but I think the highlights are bows, shields and clubs (because they also get +1 accuracy).
That means this mask also gives us an alternative to Shielderang, in that it allows easier levelling of Shield Proficiency with the armor set, it even works with Bacon Shields (but not the Crispy version from People of the Lantern as that's strength 6).
Finally as an aside, I think it's a bit awkward that this gear card is giving the weapon Range without also providing the rangedkeyword, I hope that gets fixed up when/if this goes to a full release.
Summary
Overall I think that this is a really interesting armor set, however it is held back by the limitations of the Thrown keyword and bombs themselves. If we get a Thrown Specialisation/Mastery in the future and also some updated design ethos for Bombs then we could have a really great armor set available to us here. As it stands however, the largest value that this box provides is for people who love playing PotFun because it unlocks the Blacksmith's Lantern Armor without leaning into Hellfire (something that doesn't play super well alongside Lantern Armor as it wants lots of red affinities).
Final Judgement
Situational value here, making the box fine if you got it from the store, already own the Sunstalker and play PotSun at least once a year or so.
For everyone else, just wait to get the full plastic release version when it comes out. I'll repeat that this is absolutely not worth paying any kind of mark up on the secondary market.
