In this week's blog, we're going to talk about our most spiritual guild and the second official guild of the game: The Ajai.
While some guilds base their name on a famous person like Psionus or give themselves a cool name like "Fang & Claw", some guilds are simply named after their people. The Ajai are a group of people that are strictly located to the Spirwood, a forest known for its hovering spheres of blues and greens that are believed to be wandering spirits drifting peacefully. In the Spirwood, aggressive animals are very minimal. You can also find thin pillars of varying shapes littered around the forest, acting as platforms for the floating lights to dance upon. The forest represents the Ajai very well - they are a generally peaceful folk who live in the quiet and roam the woods for everything that life has to offer them. Even when sparring, you can barely hear the shuffle of footsteps.
The Ajai are spiritual practitioners that excel in the aetheric force of chi, a force believed to be an important circulating energy that supplies life and knowledge to those that become one with it. The strongest and most prominent of followers stay in the Monastery of Ji, a crumbling temple within the Spirwood founded long before the Ajai came and made it their primary mecca for spiritual practice. Within the monastery, the strongest of monks can not only rejuvinate their bodies utilizing chi, but can project it over long distances to create armor-piercing projectiles that enter the soul and leave it damaged.
Historically speaking, The Ajai are pivotal in an unintended way. When the Northwalkers left the Ademian Kingdom to travel north, they first had to go through the Spirwood. Some found the monks of the Ajai here and decided to join them in their practices, while others continued to follow their spirit of adventure and continue their travels beyond the forest. While some of the newcomers blended well with the Ajai, others utilized the martial arts taught to them as a tool of power to boost their ego and power. Some of the original Ajai joined the newcomers in their thirst for blood. They were all exiled quickly. From their exile, the ex-monks birthed a new ability: The ability to nullify aetheric energies and create anti-magic fields around themselves. These abilities would become abilities specific to The Silence, an anti-magic guild bent on ridding the world of overly powerful magical energies and equalizing the field between those that have gained their aetheric abilities and those that had yet to discover them. The Silence would become pivotal in the defeat of the Ademian Kingdom and the destruction of the first Elementalists.
You can read more on The Silence in Amoas in next week's blog, as they are guild #3 of the core 8!
As stated in the previous blog, every guild has 5 mechanics (or "keywords") that make up every card in the guild. Let's check out the mechanics for The Ajai:
Fluidity – When this unit enters the field, announce if it is in Diga or Veri stance. This unit can change stances once per turn.
Chi Master – This unit ignores damage reduction and can ignore the opponent's barrier when attacking. (This mechanic mostly has units that work well with aura - blessings.)
Collective Mind – Tap this unit and spend [X] to search your deck for an aura - blessing of [X] cost or less and place it on a unit or unit zone of your choice. You must use at least 1 resource.
Purging Fist - You can remove a -1/-1 token, 2 madness tokens or 2 wilt tokens from a unit when this unit taps to attack. This ability doesn't work on Mad units.
Serenity - This unit restores a player by 1 or removes a status effect when it dies. You can pay 1 resource when an on-damage ability would trigger or 2 resources when an on-death ability would trigger to cancel it. You can only use this ability once per turn on non-legend cards.
As you can tell immediately from looking at a few of their abilities, the Ajai are very aura - blessing focused. They're the only guild in the game that have a keyword centered around pulling auras and playing them immediately, and their armor-piercing chi attacks help you surpass Deflect, Rotting Flesh (from the Necromancers) and barriers completely. Serenity is also an obvious keyword that works with their legend by restoring people with an added effect of forcing a calming effect on other units.
Based on the mechanics you see above, it can be very difficult to see how Purging Fist or Fluidity works without seeing their second abilities. Purging Fist is a strange (and in my eyes, pretty funny) mechanic that not only works well against negative token decks, but also powers up the more tokens they remove. Purging Fist cards can also bring added effects to the ability through removing curses or restoring. Heck, even one of their legendary units restores with their fist instead of dealing damage. It's a funny mechanic, but it works very well if you happen to be generating negative tokens of your own. It makes pairing them with the poison-focused Wilt mechanic or the insanity-inducing Maddening mechanic an interesting mix.
Fluidity, on the other hand, is quite simple once you dig into the secondary abilities of its units. The Diga stance (or "diagonal" stance as I tilt the cards to represent the stance) represents offensive abilities, where units will increase their attack or gain piercing abilities. The Veri (or "vertical") stance tends to give Fluidity units defensive options that increase endurance or deal damage from a safe distance.
Overall, the Ajai are probably one of the easier guilds to play as they have plenty of aggressive options that don't require a lot of tracking. If you've been fiending for a kick ass martial arts group that has great power-up advantage through blessings, then you've found your guild!
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