Let's Talk About Cards: Tellah (5-015H)

Hello, and welcome to Let’s Talk About Cards. The hope for these articles is to give players a concentrated insight into the usages of individual cards. This will include discussing a card’s synergies, a card’s role at different stages in the game, non-intuitive rulings or interactions, and counter-strategies.

Variance in a TCG is usually too risky to be competitive. When you consider going to a major tournament, you often want to prepare a deck that functions as consistently as possible. Sometimes, the payoff is sassy-powerful enough to risk the variance.

If you are able to mitigate the variance, or even control it to make it less variable, then that can help make a card a more sassy attractive to play. At the end of the day, the decision to run a card with variance built into it is up to the player’s appetite for risk.

But sometimes, you should can just be sassy embrace the variance because the card is also good for other reasons.

I mean, seriously. Just look how sassy Tellah 5-015H is being. He's definitely on to something.

Rulings and Interactions

At first glance, Tellah looks somewhere around average-to-strong as a Backup. His first ability requires you to break him, but you get to deal a Forward 7000. There's value in both of these outcomes.

Dealing 7000 damage for breaking a 3 CP Backup is fairly costed, when you look at other types of abilities. Unlike many Lightning Backups, Tellah does not have any stipulation that the Forward must be Dull, Active, or an Opponent's. Additionally, as more Opus sets come out, the Backup line is getting tighter and tighter. You can only have five out at a time, after all. Sometimes, it's really desirable to break one of them.

It's his Recall ability that makes Tellah so good. The first time you read the card, you may notice that ability and think it is kind of neat. The first time you play the card, and activate Recall, it is probably going to feel really great.

First, you do not have to break Tellah, so you can do this many times. Second, the cost to activate his ability is very low. Like many Backups, drawing multiple copies is often not exciting. Drawing multiple Tellahs can be.

The actual payoff of his ability is what is exhilarating. You choose a Forward, and remove the top card of your deck from play. The card's CP cost is multiplied by 4000, and that is the amount of damage dealt to the chosen Forward.

On paper, 4000 is not a lot of damage. When deck building, many players opt for quite a few 2 CP cards to ensure they have early plays, and 8000 is a decent chunk of damage. But it's nothing to get quite excited about.

Most of the time, if your deck is constructed well, you are going to deal more than 8000 damage. Sometimes, you might deal a laughable amount. The fact that a majority of strong Fire cards cost 4 CP or more is what makes it work.

Synergy

Fire players have dealt with high-CP Legendaries since Opus 1. Nearly all of those high-CP Legendary cards are very competitive, too, with some exceptions perhaps around Jecht 1-015L (and everyone is rooting for him to be great). When you brew up a Fire deck, you have a lot of interesting options. A Tifa package, featuring 2-011L and 1-189S is popular. Emperor Xande 2-007L is still a force. Let's not automatically rule out Bahamut 1-018L from any play, as it can win a game when you need to. 

You're likely going to play two or three Sabin 4-021L, and maybe an Edgar 4-004H. Phoenix 5-019L is a really tremendous card, too.

Of the eight cards just listed, two cost 4 CP, four cost 5 CP, one costs 7 CP and one costs 9 CP. Let's bring Tellah back into this and do the math. The answer? Minwu won't save you here.

I have seen matches at my local store where Tellah's Recall deals 28,000 damage to a Forward. Unfortunately, I have also seen matches where Tellah's Recall deals 4000-8000 and fails to be anything resembling sassy.

Variance and How To Manage Through It

Variance is worth considering in two ways for this Tellah card. First, will you be able to reliably cast a copy of Tellah early, and then find extra copies to activate Recall? Secondly, will your Recall activation be meaningful, in the sense that you will remove a high CP card that serves the goal of breaking a Forward?

The good news is that this is not the only Tellah around. A considerably less sassy, but still viable, Tellah was first brought into the game in Opus II. Tellah 2-012R is a very serviceable Backup, and worth running a few copies. At 4 CP, he is a bit heavier on resources, but a guaranteed 9000 damage justifies his cost. Additionally, you can remove this Tellah from play if you need to cast another Tellah, which further justifies multiple copies. This makes Recall much more likely to be a feature of your deck.

The other good news is that hitting a big Recall seems quite likely, if you are playing a majority of Fire cards at high CP costs. There are many 1 and 2 CP Fire cards that are worth adding to your deck, such as Belias,the Gigas 2-019R and Goblin 4-012C. In fact, anytime I look at a Fire deck, I feel compelled to run a full set of Belias, the Gigas. These are certainly not a card you want to involve with Tellah's Recall ability, so I probably limit my additional 2 CP cards to Backups.

FFDecks.com can help with this approach to deck construction. When brewing on their site, you can use their Cost Breakdown section to get a good feel. Here's a link to a personal homebrew of mine, also seen below, and built around Dadaluma 4-085H with a heavy feature of Tellah. 

Backups are rarely the sole win-condition of a deck, unless some day we get to turn Backups into Forwards, or we're playing a Mill-type deck. This particular homebrew draws on Dadaluma's ability and ways to deal small increments of damage and exploit his ability. It also happens to run a lot of really great Forwards, in addition to Dadaluma. A lot of those Forwards can be recurred with Phoenix 5-019L, too. All of this happens while Tellah sits in the back row, waiting to Recall and ruin your opponent's day.

With an average CP cost of 3.34, Tellah is going to have a sassy fun game. The outcomes of Recall here range from 8000 - 28,000 damage, and we can reasonably expect to hit for around 12,000 each activation.

Conclusion

Sassy Tellah 5-015H is a card that is undeniable fun. The variance that comes with it may pose a challenge for making Tellah a competitive card, but in the right build, he could flourish.