With the recent banning of Revitalize, vitality gain techs have lost a power card and control decks lost its Great Wall.  Despite that, not all is lost.  I introduce to you the card that's been lurking in the shadows, Penance.

Penance is a rare action card from set SNK03 aka known as Cutting Edge.  Its stats are 2/5 +2H with Chaos, Life and Order as it's symbols.  See it's ability in the picture shown here.

As you can see, Penance is the only card in the game at the moment that allows you to commit more foundations than is needed to successfully play the card despite its Difficulty and the Control Check made.  This is the key factor that makes it worth its dime.  I'll explain below why.

 This card would only allow you to gain as little as 0 vitality up to as high as the teens with a hefty cost of committing  foundations, but when coupled with cards that still work when committed this cost doesn't seem costly anymore.   And to make things more interesting, female Life characters can recur Penance via Gorgeous Teams.

Let's take a look at cards that can work well with Penance.  I'll divide it up according to the symbols: Chaos, Life and Order.

Chaos has the following cards available that's still usable while committed: Celebrity, Visions of Destiny and Whereabouts Unknown.  Visions of Destiny would only be useful if the character is also Evil and Whereabouts Unknown's use is already known so let's just look at Celebrity.  Celebrity allows you to play an attack as a Block or Reversal while all of your foundations are committed and it's playable while committed.  With Addes Syndicate banned it's less likely for this R ability to get negated.

Life is the symbol that this card recycles on.  As mentioned earlier, the Gorgeous Teams can recur it with females.  Unfortunately the only card that can be played while committed in Life is Financial Distress.  It's free damage reduction that's only playable while you have no foundations ready.  Some would think "What's -2 damage?  I have to have my all my foundations committed.  That's stupid."  Well, it's not bad when you're up against a control build that pins everything in your staging area down or prevents you from readying cards which is the tech Order uses now which brings us to the last symbol, Order.

Order is the strongest symbol now that Evil and All has lost 2 staples, Addes Syndicate and Revitalize.  The following cards are playable while committed with Order: Cutting Edge, Dormant for Millions of Years, Sole Survivor, The Curse Broken and Twisted Moral Code.  The key cards in this list are The Curse Broken and Dormant for Millions of Years.  These cards can be used to commit cards in the opponent's Staging Area.  Cutting Edge is a survival card, Sole Survivor is a hand control card and Twisted Moral Code is a lackluster draw card for decks that utilizes 1CC cards but not worth it since the opponent also gets to draw.  Another Order card could for this sort of tech is Voracious Eater which reduces dmg according to how many foundations you have committed for the cost of committing itself.

Now that you've seen what cards can be used with Penance, let's compare it to it's banned sister, Revitalize.  They share 2 symbols, Life and Order, and both have blocks with the same modifier but different zones.  Revitalize is 20 vitality gain for both players with potential card draw while Penance is only half as much if played right and best used in decks that can survive on being committed out.  Revitalize wins in comparison but now that it's out of the picture I think Penance will see play, especially in female Life-Water or Order-Water builds. Play-while-committed techs probably won't see much play but Penance is a worthwhile savior in dire situations.  Did I mention you could play abilities that would give bonus to your control check?  I'm not going to get into that so use that Two Headed Dragon link in the Links section to the bottom left of this window and look it up buddies.

Til next time.. keep it fresh.