Hello Danmaku!! fans. Today we have for you a preview of the upgraded main deck for Traditional Festival of Paradise. In the following weeks I’ll have updates on several other playable decks. Because I go into depth on these posts, I’ll be breaking up the posts and releasing them over time.

Danmaku!! 1.0 had some rough edges that in terms of gameplay and readability. As we released expansions, we cleaned up the wording on many cards while adding new, mechanically unique cards. Danmaku!! Traditional Festival of Paradise combines these changes by adding all of the new cards, updated rules templating, and redesigning cards that weren’t working out as well.

Wolf of Black Market expanded on the exchange mechanic introduced in Lunatic Extra. As a result, exchanging is now a core feature of Danmaku!!, regardless of which expansions you choose to include in your game. Each player has an exchange limit that starts at one exchange per turn, but players now always have the option to exchange 3 points for a card from the main deck.

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Lastly, don’t forget we’re doing a Playmat Preorder event right now. This is your last day to order so I’m going to be showing you some of our awesome playmats!

Main Deck

Let’s start with the core of Danmaku!!, the blue main deck. Loaded with basic effects and a majority of the defensive cards, this deck is the bread and butter of the game. In TFoP, the main deck has increased from 80 to 100 cards and now offers a wide variety of cards beyond the basic Shoot / Graze / Power. As we incorporated cards from expansions like Lunatic Extra or Mutiny of Belittled Spirits, we made tweaks to those cards so they would work regardless of which expansions are being played. For instance, cards that referred to the “lunatic deck” specifically now refer to “any playable deck.”

Danmaku cards

Danmaku!! 1.0 had a whopping 24 Shoot cards in it, leading to hands full of attacks and players not having enough Power cards to do anything with them. The biggest change is to Shoot itself. The number of Shoot cards is reduced to just eight cards and renamed Charge Shot. This change simplifies its B side by making it ignore range entirely, giving it a unique position among the new Danmaku cards. We imported Erase Shot, Revenge Shot, Trick Shot, and Twin Shot into the main deck to massively increase the variety of shot types.

We renamed several cards to create a unified naming scheme across all of the Danmaku cards in the main deck, which we refer to collectively as “shot cards.”

• Shoot was renamed to Charge Shot

• Seal Away and Purification were combined and renamed to Sealing Shot

• Last Word was renamed to Wide Shot

• Laser Shot got Purification’s art and renamed to Homing Shot

For those who loved the Remilia artwork that used to grace Laser Shot, worry not. It is being repurposed for the new card Last Word, the ultimate Invocation card available in the Market Deck.

Invocation cards

Danmaku!! wouldn’t be Touhou without Spell Cards. Danmaku!! Traditional Festival of Paradise brings more variety to the Invocation cards as well. Big Box introduces two new invocation cards to the main deck that were originally added in Lunatic Extra. Bomb, Capture Spell Card, and Spiritual Attack are unchanged from their Danmaku!! 1.0 versions. Occult Ball lets a player choose between drawing a card from any playable deck or activating their spell card. Spell Assist is an invocation card that you can give to an ally. You can give it to an enemy as well — providing “assistance” when your enemy is making a mistake is the yokai way.

Powerup cards

Danmaku!! is Power!! Like any other card type, we added variations on the basic Power that were introduced throughout Danmaku!!’s expansions. Full Power originally appeared in the lunatic deck. True to Touhou, this Powerup really helps you when you’re losing, but isn’t nearly as good if you’ve already got a bunch of Power cards. The seasonal equipment, popular alternate powers from Mutiny of Belittled Spirits, are also now standard includes in the main deck. These powerups give you a beneficial one-shot effect when you lose them, willingly or not.  

Dodge cards

The dodge card space is actually pretty difficult to design for. Graze is still the most common by far. Jizou Statue provides a different approach, allowing you to face tank damage instead of avoiding it altogether. Meanwhile, Erase Shot helps maintain a healthy danmaku to dodge card ratio.

Defense cards

Wait a minute, what did we do to Focus? It’s now an on-board dodge card! You can break your focus at any time to quickly get out of the way of an attack. Don’t underestimate the chilling effect this can have on your opponents. Nimble Cloth comes from Lunatic Extra and effectively allows you to turn any card into a Graze. Supernatural Border hasn’t changed, and we expect it to remain as popular as ever.

Artifact cards

With the main deck going from 80 to 100 cards, we needed to add at least one new artifact to it, but went one better, bringing the main deck artifact total to five and giving you a 5% chance to catch a “rare” card when drawing from the deck. In addition, each of the artifacts got a little buff to make them feel extra special.

Anti-Yokai Gohei finally gives Reimu some representation in the artifact department. This stick gets bigger with every expansion and gives you Reimu’s passive. If someone steals it from you, you get a benefit from the available expansions.

Mini-Hakkero was a big target for upgrades, since some people would rather trade it for a lunatic card, earning the nickname “Big Occult Ball.” Now that it makes distance almost irrelevant, protects your Powerup cards, and makes activating your Spell Card super easy, we expect more people will be playing it to keep.

Stopwatch gained the ability to turn around and skip part of your turn. Now you can conveniently disappear when troublesome incidents or mobs appear.

Seven Star Sword is now part of the main deck. Instead of waiting a turn after playing it, you can now draw on the same turn you place it, but need to hit someone first. In line with the changes to remove references to specific expansion decks, it now allows you to draw from any deck. With both Taoists and Buddhists represented in the main deck, 7SS takes on the aggressor role.

Sorcerer’s Sutra Scroll got a bit of a gameplay change. instead of drawing one card when playing it, you draw two cards during your discard step. This plays into the card’s increase to hand size, making it a very defensive card that also gives you more fuel to trade in on a future exchange step.

Card ratios

I’ve mentioned several times that these changes smooth out the main deck’s card distribution. Not only is there more variety in the main deck, but thanks to so many cards pulling double duty, the percentage chance you’ll get a card of a particular type has actually increased across the board. More on the incident deck will come soon. Please wait warmly!