Card of the Week: Shaolin Hoedown
By Michael Stadermann
Shaolin Hoedown
Event
Cost: [Han] [Han] [Chi] 0
Toast It :: Every player, starting with you and going clockwise, may choose a Character he or she controls. All chosen Characters are taken control of by the player to the left. Each player who gave away a Character gains Power equal to its cost.
I’m going to break my rhythm a bit this week and talk about a card that is very obviously good. I believe Shaolin Hoedown may become the signature card of the set, surpassing even Potlatch in how often you see it played. The only two things I dislike are its name and its rarity; if you find that you have no use for your Hoedowns, please send them to me.
Shaolin Hoedown is a card so versatile that I hardly know where to start. It’s power generation, zap defense, Mentor defense, denial, and janky tricks all in one card. It remains yet to be seen how far exactly the card is over the power curve, even though it’s not outright broken. Almost any Hand deck will be able to make good use of this card. I’ll go over each use in turn.
The most obvious use for the Hoedown is, in my opinion, protecting your investment. If anybody does anything bad to your characters in a permanent way, just give them away and regain the power spend. Yes, you heard correctly: anything. If someone zaps your character with a Nerve Gas or Shattering Fire, give it away. Imprison really becomes a joke with this card around (ok, it can still fail an attack, but the power swing is completely gone). In all cases, responding with Shaolin Hoedown means you’re handing the opponent a character which will die before he can make any use of it. When someone wants to take control of your character with Shadowy Mentor, why not make their life easier and give it to them freely? Now, you don’t lose your investment anymore, and instead of creating a huge power swing, your opponent at best gets a discount on a hitter. And the most amazing thing is: all of this comes at no cost to you. Zero.
But Hoedown doesn’t just recoup cost, it does much more than that. It can generate power for you. There are three cards that combo fairly easily with the Hoedown to accomplish this: Unexpected Rescue, Wing of the Crane, and Mysterious Return. With both Unexpected Rescue and Mysterious Return, Shaolin Hoedown manages to slip through a loophole. Both events explicitly state that the character cannot be sacrificed, but neither says anything about giving it away. While out of faction, Unexpected Rescue gives the biggest boost, especially if you can make it more Expected, by using I Ching or some other deck manipulation: play Unexpected Rescue, drop the big stick, intercept with him, hand him off with Hoedown, collect the power and put him back on top of your deck at the end of the attack. Congratulations, you’ve just generated power and probably killed an attacker with a two card combo that costs 0 power and can in theory be played after your second turn. Mysterious Return and Wing of the Crane have two disadvantages over Unexpected Rescue: you have to play the character first, i.e. you’ll have to pony up the power for him in first place, and you actually have to spend a power. In return, you get more control, and will know exactly how large your payoff will be, plus you’re staying in faction. Mysterious Return plays exactly like Unexpected Rescue. When you play with Wing, however, you will want to play Wing first, then respond with Hoedown, so that the character immediately goes to your smoked pile after he changes ownership. If you let the Hoedown resolve before playing the Wing, the Wing might be canceled by Who’s the Monkey Now?, Festival Circle, or similar cards, which would leave you down a hitter and a denial card. If you play the Hoedown in response to the Wing, then the character belongs to you until the scene begins resolving, at which point the opponent may no longer play any effects to cancel events targeting “his” characters. But there are more ways to make power with Hoedown: by using the opponents’ characters. Of course, you want to use non-permanent control effects, like Tortured Memories, Bribery, Tranquil Persuader, Peasant Leader, and Purist Sorcerer. You take control of the character, and when you’re done, you give it back, gaining power in the process. Better yet, you can Hoedown at the end of the turn before yours, unturn your controlling character during your Establishing Shot, and do it all over again in your turn. Using the same technique, you can also take from the rich and give to the poor (provided that the poor are sitting to your left). The Hoedown is the last control effect that resolves, so the ownership permanently moves to the opponent to your left.
A third use for Hoedown would be as a denial card. If your character is being attacked, you can give it to the attacker (if he’s sitting to your left), and the attack instantly ceases and fails, since your opponent may not attack his own character. Alternatively, you can use Hoedown to shuffle around interceptors on a board that’s completely turned otherwise: give or receive an unturned character that can then turn to intercept where needed or stop a Superleaper. This use of Hoedown is like a mini-Cloud Walking, except that it can enable you to block Superleapers even when everybody’s turned.
If you want to enter the realm of jank, you can play Shaolin Hoedown as a way of giving people unwanted characters. There aren’t many of those, but FAE Schwartz comes to mind, as does Nitro Jack. If you’re playing Jammers anyway, consider Ba-BOOM! as well. You can use Wing to smoke the character. Ba-BOOM! doesn’t go off when you smoke him while he belongs to you, but once you give him away, he can become a 1-cost Neutron Bomb. A less directly harmful version is loading one of your foundation characters with useless states, then giving him to the opponent right before you attack with your Shaolin Agent. There are other occasions where you may want the opponent to just have another character, though. Scrounging or Plasma Trooper would be examples of cards that benefit from the opponent having more characters.
A supreme challenge of your Fu mastery is to have an opponent give you a character that’s actually good when you play Shaolin Hoedown. As stated above, that’s actually not easy, because even if you tempt the opponent to give away his stick by Imprisoning it first and then playing Hoedown in response, there is no time for you to save the character. If you play anything in response to the Hoedown that will save the character, the opponent will just not give him to you. There are ways of achieving this ultimate Mind Fu trick, though they are mostly tough to pull off and more things that you brag about later than actually win games with. The first way is setting up a situation where the character is different when the opponent controls him than when you control him. An example of this is Iala Mane (new), Kar Fai, Temple of the Shaolin Dragon, or 18 Bronze Men. All of these give characters of a certain type that you control +1 fighting. The setup works as follows: find a hitter of the type that you are boosting, reduce him to 2 fighting, then play a Brawl, followed by Hoedown (be sure to say something like “… and then I’ll recoup my power for this Blue Monk that will die. Anyone else want any power back?”). If your opponent is inattentive, he may give you the hitter, and then you can turn to heal him. Another way involves delayed smoking effects, such as Uncontrolled Mutation. In this case, you play the Uncontrolled Mutation in an appropriate situation, then find a pretense to follow up with Hoedown (maybe you’re giving away an attacked character), and hope that the opponent will pass you his character. Then, play Charmed Life, and the character is yours. Phew! Didn’t say it’d be easy, did I? But it’ll be sure to be talked about for a while if you can pull it off properly.
Finally, the usual caution disclaimers. Be very careful whom you give your characters to, especially if they’re intended as blockers and may survive. The guy you just gave your character is the guy who’s going next. Be sure you didn’t just help him win. Also, Shaolin Hoedown is an early- to mid-game tempo card. It will not help you in the turn you go for the win, since it doesn’t actually cancel the opponents’ denial events, it just lessens their impact on your resources. Your attacks will still be failed, Hoedown or no. An appropriate use of Hoedown is also to give your opponent the 2-cost foundation you played in turn 1 around turn 3, when you’re just 2 power shy of a big stick, especially when you have cards that allow you to roll right over the potential interceptor, like a Superleaper, Festival of Giants, or The Willow Bends.
All in all, I think Shaolin Hoedown is a powerful, versatile card that we’ll be seeing in many decks very soon, and I think this article will help the process along.