It's burger season, and there's no better ingredient than sliced pickle to complete the perfect cheeseburger. For the next thirty days, you will be able to purchase Yaba's Pickle from the shop at 150 DEC per copy, with one copy available for every 1000 staked SPS you got. Is this a good card? Is it worth it? We will analyze this card and compare it to others, before giving you the verdict and my strategy with regards to this card.
Yaba's Pickle is a four mana non-attacking card that is able to take a beating and can be hard to kill. This is not a squishy no-attack card that you can bury in the back and get tremendous support abilities from, this is a heavy-duty defensive card that you can use in the front position. It has a self Heal, as well as Dodge, Shield and Slow. It also boasts 4 armor and 7 health, not bad for only 4 mana. If I had to compare this with another similar card in the meta, I immediately think of Riftwing. Conclave Artificer, the only other non-attacking card within Conclave Arcana, is also a direct comparable.
Knowing how powerful Riftwing can be as a little league tank, I don't want to underestimate Yaba's Pickle. Riftwing is better at avoiding attacks, and has useful abilities to boot, but the Pickle will take reduced physical damage and recover his own health every turn, so we could see Yaba's Pickle perform as well as a Riftwing in the low mana tank role, maybe even better. He is a good candidate for melee attack training whereas some other trainable units are obviously better fitted for magic or ranged damage.
The other comparable, Conclave Artificer, is more suited for the back of the lineup, with his Camouflage and Lookout combo. He is more resistant than Yaba's Pickle in terms of raw HP and armor, and he is a gnome, which allows him to get Painforged with the archon Razi Clanktrap. The Conclave Artificer is better than Yaba's Pickle in the back line, because he won't be targeted, and he can lower the damage from sneak, ambushes and more. Yaba's Pickle has a strong argument to be played in the last slot though, as a target for sneak attacks. His damage mitigation and self heal will frustrate many sneak lineups.
Yaba's Pickle is a strong card in the current meta, but is it worth the price? I currently don't think so, even though regular copies trade for 10 cents, on this first day of the sale. This means 40$ for a max regular copy, if you buy from the market. This is still about 2x as expensive as the cheapest common Conclave Arcana cards on the market. This card is good, but is it worth two cards? At the moment, I don't think so.
If you are thinking of maxing out Yaba's Pickle to bring him to the rental market, there is already a lot of competition, and the ROI is relatively low. This is often the case with promo cards, because a lot more people end up getting them than is the case with any core set card. The market is already flooded with max cards for rent at only 4 cents per day. Most CA cards will give you a better return at this point. This is the main reason I might pass on the pickle, at least for now.
This being said, I still did my pulls for the chance at landing a black foil, and even though that wasn't the case, I still got 5 gold foils in 92 pulls, which allowed me to make a small profit after selling all those pickles. I turned 15$ into around 17$ when all is said and done. This opportunity might not last long as the market is quick to adjust.
This concludes my Pickle analysis. A good card, but maybe not the best asset to hold on to if you are looking for ROI. If it falls closer to 30$, I might change my mind and get one because a promo card will always carry special value. Stay tuned for more Splinterlands and Hive-related content!