Rabbit's Reviews #283: Karna (Santa) (4* Saber)

This has been much-delayed due to a sequence of internet outages and holiday goings-on, but… the Christmas 2020 welfare is also our first male Santa, in the form of Saber Karna. Karna’s in a similar position to Summer Yu in that he’s slightly outclassed by a comparable Arts-leaning welfare, but he’s still a silly good Servant in his own right. For anyone who has Skadi and not Castoria, who prefers Karna to Hokusai, or who just wants a strong non-Arts alternative who’s more reliable than Caesar, Karna’s excellent. He has great NP gain, decent sustained steroids, powerful crits, and a battery. He hits all the right notes for a Quick Servant, more or less.

Karna has middling attack and HP as Sabers go, and while he’d prefer a more offensive spread, Sabers tend to have good stats in general, so even with middling Saber stats he does fine. With an 8-hit Quick NP and 4-hit Quicks, Karna has quite good active star—especially with Skadi in play—so it’ll be fairly easy for him to generate enough stars to crit reliably. His NP gain is also good, with reasonably high Arts card NP gain for his deck and fairy good Quicks as well. For passives he has the standard Magic Resistance and Divinity. He also has a unique passive in Hard Puncher, which boosts his Buster Crit damage.

Ascension Materials

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	50,000	x1 Santa Bag
3	150,000	x1 Santa Bag
4	500,000	x1 Santa Bag
Max	1,500,000	x1 Santa Bag

Skill Enhancement Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	100,000	x4 Gem of Saber
2 → 3	200,000	x10 Gem of Saber
3 → 4	600,000	x4 Magic Gem of Saber
4 → 5	800,000	x10 Magic Gem of Saber x8 Void's Dust
5 → 6	2,000,000	x4 Secret Gem of Saber x16 Void's Dust
6 → 7	2,500,000	x10 Secret Gem of Saber x12 Fool's Chain
7 → 8	5,000,000	x24 Fool's Chain x5 Shining Silver Crown
8 → 9	6,000,000	x15 Shining Silver Crown x20 Divine Pulse Spirit Orb
9 → 10	10,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Karna’s skillset is quite strong, pairing general good tools with some nice added utility. Recommended skill order is 1>2>3.

Karna is a super standard Quick Servant in that he wants to win fast and he does that via looping and critting. You’ll want to run him with double Skadi if you can, and you can plug in any of the 50% chargers as backup to make him more stable at what he does. Castoria is probably the best pick overall between her loop benefits and her ability to help the team stall for a bit if the team can’t swing the 3-turn kill, but Reines also gets a shout-out for being the best of the options at pushing Karna’s NP damage, while Waver is only slightly behind and can push Karna’s crits (and especially his Buster crits) even higher.

The Black Grail is, as always, the best DPS CE available. Traces of Christmas is also very nice on Karna, though, as it’s a free full-attack CE that boosts Karna’s damage and helps him loop more easily.

Command Codes that boost card damage are great on Karna, as they accentuate his crit-based damage stretch, which is one of his core strengths. You could also consider giving him star-gen CCs to help him crit more reliably.

Karna’s an awesome ST Saber, and especially given that he’s an SR and a welfare, if you plan to use him often, he’s a great grail target.

The only thing that keeps Karna from being extremely exciting is the fact that Saber Hokusai exists and is better. That said, Karna’s powerful crits are something that Arts Servants in general can’t replicate well (if at all), and he’s more than sufficient as a green Lancer-killer. He’s an excellent addition to the game overall, and he’s well-worth raising.

Overall: 9/10
Single-Target DPS: 10/10
AoE DPS: N/A
Survivability: 6/10
Offensive Utility: 2/10
Defensive Utility: 2/10
Farming Usefulness: 6/10
Ken: 10/10