Featured image by Lilium

It’s pumpkin season again, and the time for All Hallows’ Eve. While the holiday itself is great fun, PaD’s Halloween REM has been historically terrible due to the uselessness of common rolls and a general lack of value until the highest tier rolls. This year isn’t much different, but at least one has the option of trading for the chase card.

See here for more details on this machine.

8 Stars

Halloween Cotton is the first card in the game to be depicted with a power tool, and fittingly she brings high damage to the team. On the other hand, she lacks a leader who can fully make use of all her strengths while making up for her low weighted stats, leaving her in an awkward position.

HCotton hits incredibly hard with her offensive awakenings and a balanced typing that allows her to be specialized toward a particularly troublesome spawn. While Cotton’s main appeal lies with her damage output, she does bring the ever useful FUA and her active’s combination of unlock, tricolor board with hearts, and +combo is useful for wide variety of situations. The main issue with HCotton is her relatively low weighted stats, especially when compared to Light Ideal’s 2k+ RCV, and significantly better HP thanks to triple team HP awakes.

HCotton’s leader skill has decent damage, no sub restrictions and simple activation (given enough movement time). Her double shield gives her a respectable 68.36% reduction when activated, but like many leaders with shields tied to damage her stalling capabilities are limited. Two HCotton leaders brings FUA and high damage output but her HP isn’t high, she has no time extending leader skill aspect nor awakenings, and she is bindable. Thus it’s important to look for subs with high HP like Hexazeon , many time extends like NY Yomi , and have an solution for binds like Odindra or an unbindable assist equip .

Although Halloween Verdandi got a new ultimate evolution with amazing art, she merely gained some stats and a marginally better leader skill while keeping the same awakenings and active.

From an awakenings point of view, HVerd is an incredibly generic combo sub. A FUA from super awakenings helps to distinguish her a bit more, but dark FUA options had greatly expanded. Her active consists of a tricolor with hearts board change and a 100% heal, which usually ends up redundant on most teams since the hearts are already sufficient for healing. The active is excellent for HP conditional leaders like Kamimusubi , but they’ve fallen out of popularity due to heavy preemptives and emphasis on consistent damage output in newer content.

HVerd’s leader skill kept the same multiplier, but increased the heart cross shield to 75% and relaxed one of the two HP conditionals from ≥80% to ≥50%. She still requires full HP for full 400x multiplier but has a easier time retaining the 144x multiplier. Even with these improvements, HVerd’s leader skill remains lackluster when compared to the Mirus who have higher damage on average and a high RCV component that allows them to tank hits without heart cross.

Halloween Sonia Gran was the first card to receive skill charge, but her uniqueness diminished as skill change cards with better base actives are released.

HGran has some damage output and some utility that’s diminished by her weak yet long CD active, making her a pretty subpar sub overall. She has some use on Rikuu as an inherit base with a burst active but that’s about it.

Her leader skill didn’t age well, as a 196x rainbow lead that requires all 6 colors is both weaker and less consistent than 4 or 5 color rainbow leads . Her HP multiplier being unconditional is nice, but 2.25x with no RCV component isn’t exactly tanky either.

7 Stars

Note: is Dungeon Bonus, which slightly increases Rank EXP, Monster EXP, coins obtained, and egg drop rate while playing solo. The boost was found to be approximately 1.02x or +2%.

Halloween Z8 is my favorite new Halloween card, partly due to the inherent absurdity of Z8 munching on lolipops but also because he fills a few interesting niches.

For anyone interested in farming but lacking in double row makers from collabs, HZ8’s double row active is highly desireable for making combos or VDP off a full board change. The secondary effect is also great for countering spinners by locking all orbs and it’s faster than actives like BMiru that requires waiting out the CTW duration for the same effect.

Aside from his active, HZ8 also has a no skyfall leaderskill with identical activation as Amen but only 5x from the board clear component. As such HZ8 is nowhere near as strong of a swipe lead, but he is easier to play as a standard lead as 5 orbs left is more forgiving than Amen’s 3.

Halloween Blonia’s her most notable feature is the 2 turn haste bicolor board. This type of active has farming and ranking applications as it allows base actives to be recycled and reused later in the dungeon. Aside from her excellent active, HSonia can be a decent HP stick with her limit break stat increases and team HP via super awakenings, but subs like Nees does it far better.

Dark rows farming has been steadily growing in popularity, and Halloween Nene is an interesting option for relatively high multiplier from just 6 darks and a pseudo no skyfall clause through her match 4 clause. That said the same match 4 clause means HNene suffers against higher combo shields as she cannot use typical full board+double row methods.

HNene’s active skill is excellent for any blue or dark combo teams, but not particularly synergic with farming use. Her awakenings aren’t particularly notable, so she’ll end up as an inherit most of the time.

Ruel is adorable and reasonably strong with her above average attack and offensive awakenings. Her active skill is weak but also only 5cd and easy to inherit over. Perhaps she’ll see some use when dark TPA teams return with a vengeance.

4-6 Stars

Laila

Much like her REM counterpart, Halloween Laila is a row maker with no extra effects and thus fast in terms of animation. As such she’s important for dark farming builds, but not very useful everywhere else.

Karin
(Base)

(Ult)

Better OE sticks exist for both blue and dark , but Karin is functional if you lack better options. Generally though it’s better to stack good subs who happens to have OE instead of having a dedicated OE stick.

Alraune

Rozuel

These two are about as useless as they are cute. Both can be used as dark bind clear subs, but there are stronger farmable options like Eir .

Vampire

Halloween Vampire is about as low as one can reach for a dark god killer sub, especially when Gilles Legato exists and is farmable all year around.

Chiyome

Chiyome is one of the few dark dragon killers able to take dragon killer latents with 2 skill boosts, so she’s occasionally used in farming builds. Kiri’s dark sub attribute technically hits harder, but Chiyome has a nice 5 CD base active for inherits.

Parvati

Parvati’s killers and triple poison resist occasionally come in handy, but her weighted stats and damage outside of killers are non-existent.

Undine

Halloween Undine may look useful for her 3 turn fire damage null, but unfortunately she cannot be used as inherit. She does have a decent base RCV to go with the 3 heart OEs, but there are far better RCV sticks available.

Mulan

Mulan’s active is of questionable use and her only notable trait is 3 skill boosts, she may be helpful for new players lacking in SB cards but I would invest Tamas on a Tengu over her.

Miseri

At 7 autoheals, Misery has the most amount of autoheal of any card in the game. She’s useful for cheesing purposes like on Kiri leads , where 7000 autoheal on a 93.75% damage reduction shield means one can tank 112000 worth of damage every turn without matching hearts. Her poison row creation active is undesirable, but it’s only 5cd and good for inheriting a true gravity on.

MP Shop and Farmables

Note: Halloween Xiang Mei can be rolled or bought for 500k monster points.

Halloween Xiang Mei was previously used for 3pUDR boss kill set ups, using the 6 hearts to ensure a VDP or a FUA depending on the spawn. She can still be used this way, but with Yog himself having a FUA now, SB needs are more easily fulfilled and longer CD actives like Wee Jas can be used for the same purposes.

She received some super awakenings, but HXM still fails to stand out. Better double attacker killer subs exist, better dark FUA exist, and unbindable is largely irrelevant when her leader skill is too weak to be worth using.

Note: Halloween Kali is the reward for JP’s October Quest and can be bought for 300k monster points.

Halloween Kali has excellent art, but not much else. Her active is a 5 color no hearts board with no special effects, and her awakenings and stats do not justify using her as an inherit base.

Note: Halloween Myne is a new descended boss.

Halloween Myne is a farmable 1 CD active card with pretty nice awakenings. Having the active use sub be unbindable is nice for consistency, and her awakenings offer a variety of team support. Locking dark orbs isn’t particularly beneficial or detrimental, but one thing to note is that you cannot use her active when no darks are present or when all dark orbs are already locked. This becomes an issue when facing preempts that change away darks or lock the entire board and when RNG decides to not give you any darks.

Her leader skill has a high multiplier but a strict sub restriction and no defensive component. Not very good as a conventional leader, but the 5x unconditional attack applied to Dragonbounds/Callers means one can use her with base Ney or Cotton in certain ranking strategies.

Izanami

Note: Izanami drops rarely from Halloween dungeon.

A dark OE stick can be useful, but Izanami’s stats are terrible and at the moment there are no particularly strong light preemptives where her light resists come in handy.

Thoth & Sopdet

Note: Thoth & Sopdet drops rarely from Halloween dungeon.

Thoth & Sopdet’s 4 dark resists can be the difference between surviving Divine Queen Hera or a horrible death, but much like Izanami their stats are rather low. They do have a nice and easy leader skill that adds 5s of movement time, but compared to past easily farmable leaders like Durandalf , their damage is seriously lacking.

Verdict

DO I ROLL?

The main reasons to roll Halloween are HNene, HZ8, and HLaila, these cards have swipe farming applications and cannot be obtained through trading post. Sadly, they are relatively rare rolls that only add up to 11.5% rates, so I for most players, I recommend against rolling.

DO I TRADE?

HCotton has really high damage but not much else, if you can find a use for her and enough spare GFEs it’s better to trade for her than to roll in this mostly terrible machine. HVerd isn’t bad so much as average and unremarkable, while HGran is actually terrible and unworthy of her rarity.