MMM - Plus-sized Patriot Pursues Paleontologist Piloting Pirate Patroller, Plundering Prizes Passingly (2022 Manga De Wakaru Collab)

Where can I contact Lasengle and serve my lawsuit for making Bunyan attractive? You can’t just take a pseudo-joke Servant in overalls then give them the finest university-age lumberjack look ever conceived. Ah well, at least the bizarreness returns in her 3rd Ascension.

It feels like the Alter Ego lineup has padded out a lot lately, what with Bazette, Taisui Xingjun, and now Bunyan being added. But putting that aside, Super Bunyan doesn’t exactly measure up well on her base stats. With the worst Attack stat of the 5* Alter Ego lineup (though still about average for 5*’s), Super Bunyan only gets compensated with the 3rd best HP, and even then there’s a sizeable gap between her and the 1st and 2nd places of Kiara and Sitonai.

But as always, that sort of thing can be compensated for with strong passives. In Bunyan’s case…well, she has something. Her C-rank Magic Resistance and Item Creation aid her resilience against debuffs and her own ability to dish them out, while Likes! Power EX is more or less part of her gimmick that centers on her NP. It doesn’t provide any tangible benefit besides enabling the gimmick to work.

One thing I should point out from the Append Skills is that Bunyan gets anti-Berserker bonus damage from one of her Append Skills, easily the best Class to get for it. That essentially translates to a 20-30% damage boost against one of the classes she is viable to use against. While not a game changer, it’s a pretty notable benefit.

So Bunyan isn’t working off anything particularly impressive to start with, but that’s hardly a death sentence.

With a base NP gain of 0.86%, and a 3-hit Arts card, Super Bunyan has an impressive 2.58 base Arts gain, well above even what you would expect from a single-Arts deck. Unfortunately, having great NP gain on a single Arts card naturally doesn’t do much against being a Buster Gorilla, which Bunyan certainly is. Her 3-hit Busters will provide 2-3% gauge in Arts chains, which isn’t the worst, but are otherwise deadweights for NP gain.

Thankfully, Bunyan’s NP gain is also supplemented by her respectable 4-hit Quick card, and 5-hit Extra, which in conjunction with her good base NP gain mean she largely balances out on NP gain despite having fewer Arts or Quick cards to work with.

On the stargen side of things, Bunyan’s deck, again, hampers her a little, but 3-hit Busters are decent for stargen, and her Quick/Extra hitcounts are respectable enough to produce some stars in Brave chains.

Servants typically end up sacrificing a lot of utility for BBBAQ card decks, but Bunyan at least is strong enough on the NP gain and stargen front to compensate.

So how is Super Bunyan on the whole? On one hand, she’s got big things lined up for her:

However, the bigger they are, the harder they fall:

Upon reflection, it’s funny how there are now two Alter Egos with a specialty in growing big, and it’s sad that the only thing keeping me from saying Kingprotea completely outclasses Bunyan offensively in most cases is that one is ST, the other AOE.

But putting that aside, Bunyan’s issues mostly lie with simply not having enough offensive output to justify using her, even when she has her Like! Stacks set up. Musashi and Jalter can hit Alter Ego class advantage targets for equal or more damage than Bunyan can even when she’s near full power, and they also have the benefit of hard defensive tools and critical damage backing them. And that’s putting aside the various Arts/Quick Servants who pull off the ramping damage exceedingly better than Bunyan ever can.

That’s not to say Bunyan won’t perform well with Buster supports backing her. Her potential damage output against Berserkers is actually some of the best in the game, it’s just since every Servant bar Mashu can also hit Berserkers incredibly hard, it’s not exactly a high-demand role. While she’s a fine option for a ST Alter Ego if you lack one, Super Bunyan won’t provide much new to a Servant roster if you already have one in the back pocket. It’s kind of like getting Bazette but without any of the fun gimmicks or CQ-specific utility out of her.

She’s still very cute, though. And you can’t argue with a crazed film director and secret agent being part of the deal.

It’s always wonderful when Fate manages to turn a typical fat, Buddha-like deity into a conglomerate of ratgirl maids without even blinking. To be fair, there’s a reasonable mythological precedent for it, but I wonder when the fat Buddha deity will actually be a fat Buddha deity for once.

Being a Caster, Daikokuten is already working with a lower base statline than most Servants, but within their class they don’t have it too bad - With the tied 5th best Attack stat for SR Casters, and the tied 6th worst HP stat, you can probably tell they’re largely middle-of-the-road. Possessing the same statline as Helena and Nursery Rhyme, there’s not anything particularly unique to their stats, but they’re certainly better off than some Casters.

The same can’t really be said for Passives, though. Daikokuten possess particularly poor Territory Creation and Item Creation, meaning their boosts to Arts cards and Debuff rate is minimal, and their only personal passive is E- rank Divinity, which arguably gives more weaknesses than it does benefits.

So from the get-go, these rats are looking pretty mediocre.

With a BAAQQ card deck, and 0.55% base NP gain, Daikokuten’s base Arts gain, once Territory Creation is factored in, comes out to 1.683, more or less dead on average for their kind of card deck. While this keeps on theme with their current trend of mediocrity, their Quick cards more than make up for it.

Possessing 5 hits apiece, both of Daikokuten’s Quick cards provide very good NP gain for Quicks, as well as plentiful stargen. Their Extra’s similar hitcount of 5 is similarly decent for NP gain, on top of the respectable star generation that comes with.

As one might expect of a Quick-focused Caster, Daikokuten has very good star generation for their card deck, and their NP gain, while unimpressive in the Arts front, is more than compensated for by their solid Quick cards.

So how is Daikokuten on the whole? On the one hand, they’re clean, orderly, and ready for business:

However, they’re also just a filthy swarm of rats, clamoring about the kitchen:

All things in consideration…these mice ain’t half bad. Quick farmers have seemed, at least more recently, slightly under-compensated by Lasengle and end up having very strict farming setups with barely-manageable refund for little payoff compared to Arts or Buster setups. Daikokuten’s generous refund numbers and plethora of team support is definitely a move in the right direction, even if they suffer from the curse of the Caster attack stat. But hey, Scheherazade was once the same and now she’s one of the better Arts Caster farmers out there, so who’s to say Daikokuten won’t get some generous strengthenings in the future?

Even with those drawbacks, they make for a very competent Quick farming option with plenty of useful tools to bring into CQ’s. Rath™ Seal of Approval.

Intro text here

And last, but not least for this MMM, is a new 1* Servant addition (for a limited time) in the FP gacha. Since it’s not a question of spent resources, but how much you’re willing to hit the FP gacha button to get her, I’m going to briefly surmise what Mary Anning can provide to a team, rather than analyze her kit in-depth.

Mary as a Servant essentially has 2 roles, which I’ll talk about in turn.

First is as a female-only Arts farming support. Providing a 15% Attack buff, 15% Arts Up buff, a 10% NP gain buff and a 30% Critical Damage buff for 3 turns, a hefty star bomb, and a 10% gauge charger to any female allies, Mary has a pretty nice support suite for a Servant that only costs 3 deployment points to use.
While said numbers may not seem like much individually, together they add up to a 32.25% damage boost and a 26.5% refund boost for Arts NPs, as well as the other miscellaneous buffs that can rear their head in CQ’s, rather than farming.

This is all useful simply due to deployment cost efficiency when farming. Mary costs 13 less deployment points to use than an SSR Support like Waver or Castoria, which effectively translates into an extra SSR CE to put on the team for event exchange farming. There are times (in particular, when using Habetrot on an event Caster node) where double Castoria or other more costly setups are legitimately overkill, but there may not be worthwhile alternatives to run in place of one’s own Castoria to try and get more efficiency out of your CE lineup.

That’s where Mary comes in - cheap, effective, and viciously biased toward women. While the gender restriction on her key supportive skill is a little annoying, it’s not as significant as it looks. I went through every Arts Servant in the game and counter the males among them who were viable for farming, and ended up with 11 Servants. And of those, 3 were Fionn, Percival, and Lancer Ryoma, who kind of end up invalid since Mary can act as a Lancer farmer herself (but more on that later). That’s versus the 21 Female or Genderless (since they also benefit) Arts farmers that exist. So the vast majority of Arts farmers can benefit from Mary, including most of the big name farmers like Habetrot, Space Ishtar, Summer Musashi, Summer Kama, and Summer Kiara.

By filling in for an otherwise overkill support, or simply providing a solid option for people on a budget, Mary makes herself quite useful with her skillset alone.

But the second use for Mary is as an Arts farmer herself. With her own buffs and double Castoria support, she gets a decent 56.4% refund from her NP before any overkill is factored in, more than enough to manage a 3-turn loop even if a battlesuit swap might be needed in some circumstances.

And how does she shape up in terms of damage output? Frankly, not bad at all. With her free NP5 from being an FP gacha Servant, and a proper setup with attack fous and double Castoria, she manages 53.6k damage against neutral targets, which is more than enough to farm with class advantage. And that’s not even considering the easy payoff grail investment would provide for her damage output.

Mary Anning simply makes for a useful low-cost Arts support to keep in your pocket, as well as a reasonable Lancer for farming, should you not have access to the typical options like Percival or Fionn. While she won’t be a mainstay in efficient farming teams, she’s a niche pick that will probably pay off to have raised for when you need extra deployment points. So keep your local Paleontologist and her cute lil doggo in mind, would you? Rath™ Seal of Approval.