Hello Splinterfriends! It's been a while since I've posted anything other than pure tournament reports.

 Today thinking about the new summoners revealed on yesterday's town hall a sudden surge to share my thoughts about them took hold of me so here I am! Lots of news came out yesterday so I strongly suggest you to search around for them if you have not already, it'll be worth it.

 RiftWatchers is the new mini set, following up on the most recent set Chaos Legion. There will be one summoner for each of the existing elements, but this time they'll be of the **epic** rarity.

  The epic rarity matters for bronze and gold gameplay, where a epic summoner will unlock a higher level for rare monsters, level 3 for the former and 7 for the latter. Outside of that there's nothing much more to be said about the rarities, my guess is that the splinterlands team wanted the mini set to be really small and making the summoners epic fills the gap for that rarity.

 By the way, the art on these new summoners is sick, congratulations to whoever is responsible for that. If this was a physical TCG this would be one of that situations that regardless of playability of the cards the art alone makes me want to have the card, just to look at it.

 Starting with the best summoner by far in my opinion. This savage angry looking lad will change the dynamic of the game, at the very least on modern. Giving Close Range to the entire team is deceptively strong, reason being that ranged monsters are balanced around the fact that they need something taking on front for them. The design space for ranged cards until now took in consideration their limitations, take away that limitation and ~~broken~~ interesting stuff is bound to happen.

 Vampiric blossom exemplifies greatly to me the impact of Fernheart. This card is at best meh without him, even in the rulesets that benefits it. There's nothing that wrong with the card, the stats are fine, the abilities have a niche to fill, but was virtually unusable until now because it had to compete with other ranged cards for the place on the team, and realistically there are very few slots for a ranged card on a given team. If you were willing to run 3 ranged cards in a given composition, chances are that probably there would be 3 stronger ranged cards for the spot, make a 5 or 6 ranged card team and you could argue there's a place for this card.

 Other cards that I can see getting a huge boost on viability are: Venari Seedsmith, Iza the Fanged, Barking Spider and Cornealus. I'm excited to do *ANT STRAT* with Seedsmith and Iza!

Oh yeah and the summoner gives +1 health too. I guess he's Fernheart after all ha^{_{haha sorry}}.