Shattered Destiny – What Lurks Below

By Dan Clark

Welcome back to our second piece exploring the new Shattered Destiny mechanic: Tunneling. In an earlier article, we explored the mechanic on its base level and how it functions. Today, we will be diving further down the rabbit hole by expanding upon how tunneling works, followed by more previews of powerful tunneling cards (including a Legendary tunneler).

Before we dig in, let’s do a quick explanation of Tunneling and go over the rules.

Tunneling is a secretive mechanic that allows a player to play troops without the opponent knowing what lurks below. You can either put the troop into play for its normal resource cost, or you can use the tunneling ability for 2 resources. If you choose tunneling, the troop will tunnel beneath the board and begin gaining tunneling counters at the start of each of your turns. Once the troop has counters equal to or greater than its Tunneling number, it will surface and be able to attack that turn.

Tunneling essentially functions as though the troop is in a different zone. Troops may have abilities in their game text that are affected by what’s happening on the board, but they are not on the board. For example, if you have a troop tunneled and the opponent plays Extinction, the tunneled troop will not be destroyed.

Now that you know what tunneling is, let’s preview some cards that use the mechanic.

With Underfoot Commander, you are able to pump up the rest of the tunnelers to really smash through some extra damage once they surface. Your opponent might be preparing for whatever troops may be tunneling below the surface only to find that the troops are even bigger than what they could hope to handle.

One of the coolest moments with tunneling is setting up that perfect turn in which a multiple tunnelers come into play. The Excavation Bot helps create that big turn.

For example, you could tunnel Excavation Bot on turn 2, then tunnel anything on turn three, then tunnel one or two more Excavation bots on turn 4. For the big payoff on turn 5, the first Excavation Bot will surface, then he can add two tunneling counters to the last bot who will then surface. That bot can then add 2 counters to one of the other tunnelers to surface. You started the turn with no troops in play and now you have three attackers!

Simple and sweet. Grave Nibbler is one of our designs that can come up differently depending on what happens on the board while he is underground. We really wanted to have players feel a sense of mystery as to how to proceed with a game while tunnelers are burrowing through the board. Now your opponent may think twice about killing off your troop if Grave Nibbler may be waiting to munch on the remains.

Once you tunnel this troop, you will be able to see everything that your opponent is up to. Not only that, but they have no idea that you are aware of all of their plans and tricks. And for a Sapphire troop, this 3 ATK is nothing to scoff at either.

This is my favorite troop with Tunneling. In the office he has provided some of the best moments while getting Shattered Destiny ready.

Now, without further ado, I present to you Monsuun, the Legendary Blood Tunneler!

Behold! Monsuun is hiding underground to annihilate the opponent and save all the poor shin’hare lost before he arrived.

There are two main ways to capitalize on Monsuun’s ability. The first is to just counter the opponent and their attempts to kill all of your troops. For example, he can completely undo an opponent’s Extinction and then start attacking in one swoop.

Secondly, you can pair him with the shin’hare’s natural inclination for sacrifice to get additional uses out of each tribute. His abilities are potent with cards like Necrophage Sensei for example, who will keep his permanent bonus from the first time he entered play to come back even stronger.

With HEX, the team knows that we have an opportunity to do something new, innovative, and most importantly, fun. We want to have a marriage of a traditional TCG with new space that is impossible for other games to explore. We feel as though Tunneling is a perfect execution of fulfilling that goal with the amount of secrecy that is built into it.

Our team can’t wait to see how you interact with Tunneling in new and creative ways. Our connection with you and the community is very important to us and hope that you enjoy exploring Shattered Destiny as much as we did in making it.

-Dan Clark

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