The release of Altered is now roughly a month in and the first expansion has just been announced: Trial by Frost. As the name suggests, we will travel to Cais Adarra, a steep range of mountains shrouded in eternal winter. We can’t go unprepared to this new region, we will take up our gear and will expedite to this hostile environment of ice and snow. Will we be the first to conquer this expedition? Let’s take a look on the first Trial by Frost card spoilers!

Card spoilers

Arcolano Milk

Arcolano Milk is the first revealed Bravos card. It introduces a brand new type of permanent: Gear! Gear will be put in target expedition and will stay there until you move forward with that expedition. If it leaves the expedition, it will go to reserve. So you can play this permanent twice. This permanent does not count towards your landmark limit.

At first glance this card might not seems very interesting. But if you take a closer look, it can be very useful. Whenever a character joins the expedition of this card, it will gain a boost and Fleeting. It will normally be very effective for cards that already have fleeting as they will get a boost. You still can play cards from your hand in your other expedition, as they won’t get the boost and the fleeting effect. As this card only cost 1 mana you can play it first and give the turn to your opponent in an effective cheap way. Or you can play this as your last card to setup for next turn.

For Kojo: If played in the companion expedition, when Booda joins he will get a boost. As he is a token, the fleeting effect doesn’t really matter.
For Basira: this will be an easy way to trigger it’s hero ability. Just make sure you play your character in the expedition this is in.
For Atsadi: So far I don’t see any specific plus to play this.

Further more:

• Some uniques care about permanents. This counts towards cards that care about permanent, but does not that care about landmarks.
• Bravos has a lot of ways to remove fleeting, some cards by themselves others need some help. Cards like Bravos Bladedancer (rare) or Sun Wukong (rare) will make excellent use of this card.

Demeter

The second card is a Muna card: Demeter. This Plant Deity has Eternal as long as she is in the forest.

Due how the days are working, for this card it is important to be in a Forest during Rest. Which means if you play this card and are winning an expedition and moving out into a new Region without Forest it will go to Reserve or be discarded at the end of the turn. So there are to ways to play this:
1. Play this to win the expedition and travel to the forests. This way you move forward and still having this card on the field. Note that you don’t have to be on a Forest region while playing this.
2. Play this to set up the next day on a Forest region. If you can’t win an expedition this day, you can setup for the next day having Demeter still around.

Effectively you can have this card out for few days in a row. Which is needed due the high cost of this card. 6 from hand and reserve is a lot, so having it staying at least one additional day is really required to make it worth the cost.

For Teija: I think this card can be played. It is a plant and giving a boost to an Eternal character is never a bad idea, even better when it stays around.
For Arjun: Not sure about this in Arjun as it is probably to high of a mana cost.
For Rin: This can surely go in a Rin deck. 6 in Forest on a card is high, so winning on this Region type should be easy and so is drawing that extra card. If it stays for another day, it probably will get you another card.

Moth Larva

Lastly the third card that they have shown, is Moth Larva. A small 1 cost character that can be boosted from hand. As you notice the boost will be given when there are two or more exhausted cards in Reserve. For now, we don’t have an idea how they get to be exhausted or what that means. Therefor I will not go in detail about this card.

Hopefully this is the start for a great spoiler season! We still need to see the rares of these cards, but it sure looks promising with these new cards and new mechanics like Gear permanent. Although they are very close to what if have in game yet. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The game needs to evolve, but at a steady pace. For me this pace is currently right!

What do you think about these new Trail by Frost card spoilers? Are you agreeing on these cards? Or do you have another opinion? Let us know in the comments below!