MMM - Mysterious Modified Magi-Mari Makes Meeting, Mingling with Mercifully Meager Man-At-Arms-Made-Mutt (Summer 2022 Gacha Part 1)

Aw, how cute. They think we won’t call her Proto Merlin.

Her inclusion signals a significant victory over Arcade and its wicked, wicked machinations of inventing highly-desirable Servants to be their exclusives, but with it came a terrible price - a confirmation that outside of funky workaround exceptions like “Summer” Proto-Merlin, we won’t get Arcade exclusive Servants in normal FGO.

The pain, truly, to never experience Santa Suzuka in this lifetime. My brain trembles with sorrow.

But more importantly, where do you get off calling yourself Merlin’s little sister? You’re supposed to be an Onee-san! Big Onee-san energy, damn it!

As an SSR Pretender, Lady Avalon only has one competitor in Oberon, and frankly that means a stat comparison is a little hard to make meaningful. She has less Atk and more HP than Oberon, so frankly she’s just more defensively aligned. And considering she is (shockingly) a full-blown support like Merlin, that’s simply better for her. More HP means you get to live longer, and continue supporting the team with your tools.

It’s also worth noting that as a Pretender, she also has a more useful class advantage than most supports, and certainly more attack, lacking the 0.9 Attack modifier Casters are slapped with, and possessing about 1k more Attack than most Casters have, too. Point being, she can hit pretty hard if she wants to.

For Passives, though, Lady Avalon has a lot on the table. The Caster-class staples of Territory Creation and Item Creation are here, boosting her Arts cards by a small degree and making her debuffs land rather consistently, in addition to the Merlin-class (shocking, not a thing) skill of Mixed-Blood, giving her that amazing 5% gauge each turn.

But because it’s boobie Merlin, you’ve gotta have something extra. Rapid Casting (Bewitching) is Proto-Merlin’s unique passive, and one which provides possibly the strongest passive effect seen yet (that isn’t tied into a Servant’s kit gimmick, at least) - 20% starting NP gauge. Yep, just free gauge, every battle. Naturally, it stacks with her Append Skills, so she can waltz into a battle with 40% gauge without a CE.

In combination with her 5% gauge each turn, she naturally has quite the head start on getting her NP out, something that’s very good to have. It also allows her to immediately NP on turn 1 with a lot of 50% gauge CE combinations, which is also a big plus.

Alas, Lady Avalon, you fall prey to one of Lasengle’s most insidious traps - the 3-hit Arts card. With 0.53 base NP gain, her base Arts gain with Territory Creation factored in comes out to 1.65 which is both very average, and also…very similar to Merlin’s NP gain, I guess.

While that may not seem like a good start, remember Lady Avalon is on a BAAAQ card deck, and she’s getting that freebie 5% gauge each turn whether she uses a card or not. Frankly, her Arts cards could be the worst in the game and she’d still rack up a lot of gauge.

For her other cards, though, it hurts a little more. Lady Avalon’s Buster and Quick are pretty mediocre even though they have high hitcounts, and her Extra more or less generates average NP gauge.

On the flipside, her stargen is pretty great for her card deck. A high hitcount Buster and Quick will do that for you, in concert with the Pretender class’s high base stargen. So long as her Quick’s in there somewhere, a Brave chain will produce a very nice amount of stars, doubly so if it’s a Mighty Brave chain.

As expected of Magi-Mari, she’s able to turn the bane of most Servants into an otherwise respectable kit of NP generation and Stargen.

So how is Lady Avalon overall? On one hand, she’s a beauty you could only dream of:

However, she only lives in your dreams, nerd:

I don’t think it comes as a shock to anyone that copy-pasting Merlin and replacing every mention of “Buster Up” with “Arts Up” results in a top-tier Servant. And Lady Avalon is even better than that, having overall a better kit than the original Merlin, especially if she’s whaled for and got that juicy NP5 to destroy the concept of a NP Gauge economy with.

The way her kit is oriented essentially means she’ll be acting as the functional replacement to both Tamamo (outside of very niche cases) and Merlin in Arts teams for difficult content, while also being a very respectable supportive option even when not working with her card type. The Pretender class is functionally very good to be in with how exclusive it is, and I’m pretty certain Lady Avalon can manage some dumb solos versus Alter Ego bosses if you let her try it.

So yes, Rath™ Seal of Approval, with a recommendation. Nobody saw it coming.

Do you see that adorable little blonde cinnamon roll over there? Yes, the one with the fluffy ears, expression always eager to please and the all-powerful red armament built to protect the lives of others? I really want her in my Chaldea.
No, not Gareth! The dog, of course!

Coming in as a 4* in the biggest class roster of the game, Gareth has many a Servant to compare herself to in her summer form. Unfortunately, she doesn’t exactly shape up well for her base stats. With the 2nd highest HP stat of her class and rarity, paired with the 3rd lowest Attack, she’s very cleanly focused on bulk, and sadly does so while also being an offensive Servant.

So she’s working with a few thousand less attack than most of her competitors will have right from the get-go. Additional bulk is naturally still nice in many situations, but most of the time the difference in HP between Gareth’s hefty 13.7k HP and a Saber with a huge attack stat and 11.5k HP won’t matter.

Yeah, it’s not exactly great. Gareth is light on the passives side of things, too - She only packs the typical skills of her class, with decently powerful Magic Resistance to shrug off debuffs, and Riding to boost her singular Quick card. Regardless, they’re not very impactful.

We can only hope things can improve for our beloved, loyal doggo. And Gareth.

With a base NP gain of 0.82% and a BBAAQ deck with 2-hit Arts cards, Gareth is really going the way of the vanilla Saber. Her base Arts gain comes out to the golden average of 1.64, neither good nor bad in the grand scheme of things.

Her other cards are slightly more interesting on the NP gain front. With 4 hits on her Buster cards, they produce a respectable sum of gauge when benefitting from the Arts chain bonus, and while her Quick is largely mediocre, if not terrible, her Extra card is solidly above average, providing a very good amount of NP gauge when Gareth gets to a Brave chain.

The bottom line is, if Gareth gets an Extra chain out, her NP gain will look a lot better than when examining her cards individually.

On the flipside, her stargen is mostly what you would expect for her card deck. Her high-hitcount Busters help a lot with generation, as does her aforementioned Extra card, but the general mediocrity of her Quick and lack of the card type in general means she’s no regular star-spewer.

While nothing exceptional, Gareth’s generation stats on the whole are pretty solid.

So how is Gareth overall? On one hand, she’s bright as the scorching sun, and doggedly determined to be by your side:

However, I’d rather take the retriever behind her if I’m being honest:

I’ll be blunt here, Gareth could be a welfare and even then she’d be not particularly competitive. While she has the makings of something useful in her reasonably high-power NP steroids, and access to a gauge charger, her kit ultimately doesn’t take her anywhere besides a mediocre damage output in a very limited farming setup.

Add in that she’s placed in the position of being a Summer Servant, less likely to get a skill upgrade and extremely unlikely to get a NP upgrade, and you can see where the problems compound themselves. She’s hardly great currently, and she’s not likely to improve.

It hardly helps that some of her “gimmick slots” on her skills are effects that don’t alleviate those issues. Dishing out Burn damage means nothing for most Servants, then again for one without Burn amplification in their kit, and her multitude of means to generate stars without an effective way to utilize them bar praying to the star distribution gods is frankly pitiful.

I think this dog’s staying in the shelter. Not the retriever, though, they’re coming with me.