Roll for Ilmina today and join us. Together we can protect her precious smile. Also treat your Romia well because she made Ilmina happy. Jokes aside I will be practical in the review.

ps. if you haven’t read the story about the two then you probably should.

New Cards

Ilmina – 8★

As a Leader

Before we start I want to briefly talk about 7×6 board and just some of the pros and cons it does have.
It’s quite obvious that 7×6 board increase the amount of combos you are able to do, but more importantly it brings up the expected amount of each orb type from 5 to 7. This is a number that enables a lot of teams that weren’t consistent due to the high amount of orb consumption just to have consistent activation. Also keep in mind that 7×6 will increase the required amount of orb of row enhances from 6 to 7, but this is not something we care about as what we’re going to discuss about is a heart cross leader.
7×6 board also comes with some down side, the amount of time it takes to traverse through the board is considerably increased, so naturally one will be more reliant on time extension awakenings or leader skills. It will also make teams more vulnerable towards time reduction or awakening skill bind debuffs even though the effect of said debuff ultimately will depend on how easy it is to activate the leader skill. Another issue with 7×6 boards that players often miss is that some of the enemy mechanics are designed for 6×5 board and have added negative effects for players with 7×6 boards, for example the size of spinner will increase from Noah , the size of cloud will increase from Takeminakata and Kotodama will generate Jammer and Poison orbs in addition to the normal RBGLDH boards.

Now ultimately Ilmina will make a decent leader since her multiplier is considerably high especially for a 7×6 leader. She has decent pairing with Miru , and Paimon can also really appreciate her 7×6 board. However these leaders don’t require 7×6 board to operate. Miru herself is a very functional leader and have no issue with orb inconsistency due to the RCV mutliplier allowing her to stack more HP and maintain high RCV at the same time. Ilmina will allow Paimon teams to be more bearable but ultimately you’re still looking to have 5 and 5 to have any meaningful damage, and that’s not mentioning the fact that you still need to take care of the bindable issue with Paimon, so overall it will be a fun team but it has many issues and requires a good amount of tinkering in order to be consistent. Ilmina can also be used for leader swap but there is really no need to go through the nuisance especially since you will be looking to give up the damage from SA in exchange for stability.
Ilmina as a leader will take bind resist for super awakening, it prevents her from having the second combo enhance which greatly reduce her offensive potential and that would be the last reason for me to not run her as a leader but instead as a sub.

So many people would probably wonder how well can Christmas Ilmina substitute in for regular Ilmina in terms of ranking dungeons. To be honest you will have to assess it yourself but there’re a few things I can point out that are important. Some builds relies heavily on Ilmina ‘s skill boosts and sometimes you just cannot make any replacement. Ilmina ‘s killers are very crucial for some build especially since she might be on VDP duty. Christmas Ilmina provides 4x ATK for Light Att. and sometimes this is enough so you don’t have to reach out for the heart cross and reduce combo count. Overall I’d say there are cases where she’s replaceable but you’ll definitely find yourself having to make ends meet by matching heart cross here and there or having issue with tricolor boards but if you are a good player then these smaller problems shouldn’t prevent you from making into crown cutoff.

As a sub

Sub is really where Ilmina shines the most. She has great stats namely very high HP on top alongside team HP awakening and incredible RCV to not mess up the HP to RCV balance for the team. Taking combo enhance will allow her to be a powerhouse on all the light teams, on the other hand taking VDP is also a considerable choice depending on what you’re doing. The main difference is that you don’t need to ensure a 7 combo board just to generate damage, and it will definitely ease team building as it takes multiple actievs to guarantee VDP baord alongside 7 combos.

Sidenote

Let’s all take a moment and appreciate how cute she is.

Yog-Sothoth – 8★

As a Leader

So let’s start the comparison to other versions of Yog straight up.

First thing I want to talk about is the amount of bicolor boards we have available for each version.

This list contains bicolor boards for each version of Yog. This information is important because Yog is vastly used for farming and carrying. The criteria on the farmable cards are that they are either always available or they can be skilled up in some way. Do note that some of the cards are JP only but even without them we’re still looking at a huge selection of cards so we can safely say that in terms of board selection, Fire Yog does have a good amount of option.

Now let’s talk about the leader skill itself, needing 6 to activate is a high requirement and under normal circumstances it will be very hard to come by every turn. This can be solved by using actives that generates but you can only fit so many actives on a team at once. Naturally this wouldn’t be a problem in shorter dungeons and you will not find any issue just swiping through dungeons that only have 6 floors. For longer dungeons you’ll be relying on raw HP for survival, the 9x RCV makes it very easy to stall and that means you will be able to build your team with the focus on having high amount of HP. This kind of play style while doable is not something I would recommend solely due to the fact that there’re plenty of spawns that can deal more damage than the amount of HP players can stack and the play style itself very slow and boring. Overall I’d say just stick to the old Yog swipe duty, it has plenty of options for carry setups due to the large amount of options for bicolor board and if no other options are available he’s still a decent leader.

As a sub

Yog is one of the strongest FUA sub for a Fire team, and on top of that Yog has very high weighted stat focuing towards HP and ATK. Normally that would put Yog as a very strong card, but there aren’t many strong Fire leaders around that will really look for Yog. Yog’s value as a sub deteroirated even more since its active is not able to support anything aside from Fire team. So until a promising Fire lead show up, you will probably only look to farm some descends with Yog.

Romia – 8★

As a Leader

If you do clear the entire board consistently you will not find issue with activating her leader skill consistently. An issue with Romia’s design is that building a team around her board condition will result in a team with relatively low RCV. This ultimately is not too much of a problem since you will still be able to supplement enough RCV from +eggs alone under the 75% shield. Another issue with her is that Romia’s own active will likely mess up your board rather than helping. More often than not the skyfall buff will flood your board with and not allow to appear as much, but that’s really the only problem with her design. This is a long term effect and it will not come in effect on the turn it is used, you can still bypass this by just not using the active and instead save for the inherit.

Romia’s leader skill asks for but you are definitely not limited by it, and in fact you are free to use actives that have more colors than that. Her high multiplier can make up for the lower amount of orbs generated by scattered boards. Romia’s own high HP also helps tanking hits a turn or two in case of orb troll. Overall I’d say she’s a decent leader with some minor issue that will take some experience to avoid but she’s certainly capable.

As a sub

Romia boasts a huge amount of damage already with the high ATK along side combo enhances. The super awakening selection allows her to be useful in multiple situation. In A3 or A4 you can utilize the VDP to kill the radar dragons and in AA you can have more damage from combo enhance and God killer latent. Her active will generate huge amount of damage in the long term and will not cause any issue on Wood or combo team. Overall she’s a very strong sub for Wood team, she also has more stat than Zela in any parameter so I guess that’s interesting…

Sidenote

Love her for making Ilmina smile, and she’s a cutie herself.

Grida – 7★

As a Leader

The leader skill requiring 6 and that is not a easy condition to fullfull all the time. Not having RCV multiplier makes stalling for harder and her active skill having a long cooldown isn’t helping either. Overall just not a good leader because too orb hungry and that’s not mentioning you will want to match TPA just to have damage from her which makes it even more orb consuming.

As a sub

There’re plenty of other Dark subs that have a huge amount of TPA and Grida having mediocre ATK value with no good latent selection does not make her better than any others. The selling point of her is mostly the solo bonus and that’s really just for the “uniqueness” and doesn’t really provide much actual value. Her active skill will open some cheesing option with Venus or Hera Beorc , it can also be used as a “burst option”. I’d pay more attention to the second part and mostly ignore the cheesing since it’s too much work to build and run through a dungeon with it. Overall she’s a very unique and niche option that have some value but most of the time you will be able to find a better way of doing things that doesn’t involve her.

Old Cards with Buffs

Gremory – 8★

Buffs

The buff increased the amount of turns unbind from 2 to 3 and increased the shield amount of heart cross from 35% to 50%. Awakening wise skill boost and time extend got buffed to the enhanced version. Her limit break stat also got increased.

These changes while are great, does not fix the issue with her design. Her leader skill is very active dependent and cannot output any means of damage without it. Gremory also have consistency issue with activating heart cross. She will be relying on raw stat to stall for heart orbs or otherwise rely on a haste system which will crumble once faced with skill delay. Her sub value relies on the FUA alongside high amount of HP, most of the teams cannot benefit from her awakenings and there are no prominent Fire teams that can make use of her so she’s really not desireable even after all the buffs.

Kali – 8★

Buffs

The only buff she received was limit break stat.

That said her design doesn’t have as much problem as Gremory. Kali’s team doesn’t have too much issue stalling for orbs when orb trolled and it’s not that common to get orb trolled for a 5 color team anyways. Her main issue would be the subpool and there is no fixing it aside from just waiting for GungHo to introduce more options. Kali as a leader is decent since there’s no inconsistency issue, but rainbow type leader skills naturally have a harder time activating FUA and VDP so that’s something to keep in mind.

LiuBei – 7★

Buffs

The only buff he received was limit break stat.

LiuBei comes out pretty straight forward as a Fire TPA sub, not having skill bind resist may bring up issue with team building in rare cases, but most importantly there isn’t a Fire team that really needs him so at best he’s something you can look at because you have no other options, and at worst he’s just not considerable.

Fagan – 7★

Buffs

Fagan recieved limit break and super awakenings.

There is not much value in using him as a leader since there are no easy ways to mainintain full multiplier and the type restriction makes team building more restrictive. Fagan however is a pretty good sub on most rainbow teams. He has relatively high HP and can provide decent damage now that he has an extra combo enhance from super awakening. Fagan’s active skill has high cooldown but he also have that skill charge to make it come up faster and that’s also why I’d recommend him more for rainbow teams and not just any typical light teams.

The Neglected ones

Sakuya – 7★

Honestly there isn’t too much value coming from Sakuya, the best you can do is have her as a damage stick since she can output some damage with TPA and combo enhance from super awakening, but her active is not really useful and there is really no distinctive reason on why you’d want her on a team over something else. First she’s bindable while it is fixable by super awakenings, it would just tarnish her value as she will lose her role as a DPS. Aside from that single resist awakenings aren’t exactly useful unless you can somehow provide 4 somewhere else on the team. Anyways my conclusion is that she’s the 7★ that you really don’t want to see coming out of this REM unless you’re part of the Sakuya cult.

Haku – 6★

Early on you can make either form of Haku(Fire or Dark ) and get some value of the enhanced orb awakenings from her. As you proceed later you won’t find her useful aside from maybe inherit her for the active which is vastly replaceable.

Genie – 6★

Most of her value comes from the active skill. The discontinued series of elementals have long lasting shield that will nullify any damage from certain attribute for 3 turns. Genie in particular was popular since it is a usable solution to DQH ‘s preemptive damage and buying multiple turns of survival against HeraDra . Nowadays there are a lot more solutions but she can still provide the same thing in case no other options are available.

Claíomh Solais – 6★

She had her glory days but Manticore came and now her role is just replaced by a farmable. Anyways these high ATK cards with coop boost are often used as button base since those active skill scale directly off of raw ATK. In case you’re too lazy to farm up a few Manticores of your own, Solais only require 5 skill ups so that’s easier.

Castor & Pollux – 5★

I wait for the days where we receive a Light or Dark version of Yuuki or Chern ‘s leader skill archetype, but until then you can dig up old YomiDra A1 farm teams and you should still find use of their active skill if you so choose to farm A1. Anyways it’s best to keep multiple copy.

Freyja – 5★

Not much reason to keep her unless you like her art. She just doesn’t provide much, her active skill is mediocre and Wood devil killers have some very strong competitors that are easily obtainable so she’s not wanted anywhere.

Hatsume – 5★

I will keep at least one of her just in case of some really weird ranking dungeon appear in the future and even then the slot might be replaceable by Laila but aside from that she’s not wanted anywhere.

Venus – 5★

Her active is a Light version of Horus active, now if this active was on a usable card then it will retain some value since it’s easy to inherit over and has its own value of small burst, utility of unlocking and more importantly removing time reduction debuff. However Venus as a base isn’t exactly great and is as best a supporting card and does not provide any value of her own, so overall I have to say she’s pretty useless.

The Christmas Present

Sonia – 8★

So for those of you who wants to stay competitive with ranking dungeons you probably already know why she is good, but for those of you that don’t, here are a few videos that you might want to check out first. Anyways the idea is that Bicolor board is very easy to make combos on and the 2 turn haste will allow you to cycle other actives back if not just straight up making rotations. As per usual with ranking dungeons no one knows what kind of dungeon GungHo will put out but her active is most likely going to remain relevant.

Conclusion

Would I roll?

I obviously rolled for Ilmina and Romia

Should you roll?

Probably not, you’re more likely to get disappointing result and there aren’t anything in this REM that isn’t replaceable so I wouldn’t be worried about losing out on anything.