A big anniversary is coming up at FFTCG! Dawn of Heroes represents the twentieth set and once again we have also received a community spoiler, which we want to present to you today!
The card
Chadley
2 CP, Lightning
Backup
Job: Scientist
Category: VII
When Chadley enters the field, you may discard 1 card. When you do so, search for 1 Lightning Summon and add it to your hand.
Dull, discard 1 Summon, put Chadley into the Break Zone: Choose 1 Forward in your Break Zone. Add it to your hand.
Character Background
Chadley is a supporting character that appears exclusively in the Final Fantasy VII remake. While Tifa is guiding Cloud through the slums of Sector 7, the two meet Chadley. He explains to them that he works for Shinra and asks the two for battle data for his research. Cloud is hesitant at first, but when Chadley explains that he is secretly working against Shinra, he ends up helping him.
As a result, Chadley offers various sidequests and missions that revolve around fighting. In return, you can acquire a lot of materia from him. Especially noteworthy are the boss fights against various summons, such as Shiva or Bahamut, where you can buy the corresponding summon materia after defeating them.
Maybe you will learn more about Chadley if you complete all his missions...
Possible uses
Chadley is a very flexible card and can fill a bit of a void in Lightning. While the element is very well equipped when it comes to recurring (Lightning) summons, things look much bleaker when it comes to searching them from the deck. Either one is limited to certain names, like [7-093C] Zapt or [10-101L] Lightning, is somewhat cumbersome to use and has quite relevant nameclashes, like [7-094R] Seymour, or the search is simply too expensive, like [6-086H] Arecia Al-Rashia. Chadley possesses almost none of these problems. The cost at effectively 4 CP is in the normal range, it is a simple ETB, and while you are limited to only Lightning summons when searching, you still have a solid selection of summons there as well, like [17-090R] Ixion or [13-072R] Odin. In addition, the card name doesn't really have any relevant nameclashes at the moment.
However, even if you don't need a summon right now, all hand cards are too valuable, or all summons are already out of the deck, Chadley is still playable as a simple 2 CP backup. This already shows the flexibility of Chadley: either, as is so common in science, we invest resources to "research" a Lightning summon, or we are already satisfied with our result and just play him as a simple backup without searching. This makes Chadley worth considering not only in summonheavy decks, but also in decks that play only a few but important Lightning summons.
But Chadley doesn't stop there. He comes up with a second effect, which lets you retrieve a forward from the break zone. The effect is admittedly slightly overpriced, but considering the card's flexibility, this should be justified. Furthermore, having both a search and a recursion effect on a backup is very rare in FFTCG. In fact, there are only four so far: [16-005C] Cloud, [9-021R] Varis, [11-053H] Doned, and [14-099C] Eiko (though with Eiko you could debate whether you can really value search that way), though again the first three suffer from quite severe limitations.
Synergies
Even though Chadley can be generically used in lightning decks, there are certain archetypes that particularly benefit from it.
The first thing to note is that discarding a hand card to find a summon is not part of any cost, but an ability. That means it triggers the Black Waltzes. Chadley can also bring the Black Waltzes back to your hand so they can be used again. Whether that gives the currently struggling Black Waltz archetype enough of a boost remains to be seen.
Where Chadley also helps, however, is with a package that is actually in the meta right now: [16-129L] Chaos + [19-105H] Ark. This combo has emerged as very strong, and earth lightning is one of the variants where this is used. The problem is that decks of this kind have to deal with the constant risk of having too many dark cards in hand and thus barely being able to pay for cards. Chadley remedies this by also allowing dark cards to be discarded to make room for other cards again. Later on Chadley also always threatens getting Chaos back to hand from the Break Zone.
Conclusion
Chadley looks like a very interesting card that has the potential to show up in many lightning decks. Lightning finally has a good way to search for important lightning summons combined with recursion, which can never be a bad thing. Will you be exploring the possibilities of Chadley as well?
Let us know on our Facebook, Twitter or the FFTCG Germany Discord!
As always, thanks to SQUARE ENIX for letting us be part of the Community Spoiler Season!