Many decks in the current meta and over the past year have relied heavily on the consistency-focused Festive engine and generic draw power introduced way back in Edge of Paradise. Story of a Lifetime, Stay in Paradise, and Angel's Blessing are now on the chopping block for rotation. This means all Rune decks—particularly Mysteria Rune—will be in dire need of some new support. Enter Dual Barrier, the latest piece of Mysteria support aimed to fill in some of the gap that the Festive engine will leave behind. Dual Barrier is a 3PP Choose spell that can summon Anne, Belle of Mysteria or Grea the Dragonborn. For Enhance 5, it summons and evolves both followers. For Enhance 8, Dual Barrier then grants Storm to all allied Mysteria followers.
Chances are, you had to do a double take upon hearing the names of these summoned followers, and for good reason. Anne, Belle of Mysteria and Grea the Dragonborn are actually from Rise of Bahamut, released in early 2017. Nobody knows what these boomer cards do, but as you may suspect from their release year, they are hilariously simple by today’s standards. Anne and Grea are both 8PP 3/3s evolving only to 4/4, with Fanfare effects that summon the other. While evolved, Anne has “Strike: deal 1 damage to all enemy followers,” and Grea can attack twice per turn. What Dual Barrier is at face value is a way to put more Mysteria names into the pool for Majestic Sorcery to revive while being a spell itself, so Dual Barrier will not dilute your pulls from Freyja, Hanna, and Exchange Party. Anne is nothing special, but Grea’s having the rare double-attack effect has a bit of potential for opening up alternative OTKs, assuming you have at least one active Exchange Party and some way to evolve her. The biggest takeaway however, is that Dual Barrier is not made for the current Mysteria. There’s little to no reason for the Mysteria Rune we know today to want anything that Dual Barrier does, which means Mysteria as a deck would need to undergo enormous changes to bring Dual Barrier into relevancy. Given this coming rotation causes the simultaneous loss of almost all of Mysteria’s card draw, this is actually quite possible.
Not every single card in Mysteria Rune needs to draw, but generally the cards that are exempt from this hand-size prerequisite are cheap ones to be easily spammed out. If a card is going to cost a lot—and 3PP as a baseline is a lot for a Rune spell in 2023—then it had better serve a pivotal purpose. Traditionally for Runecraft, cards that are acceptable to play for 3PP are ones that draw multiple cards. You will notice that every strong Rune deck in recent times has, without fail, had a busted 3PP draw two of some sort: Chess has Check, Dirt has Magical Reserves, Spellboost has Meltina, and Angel's Blessing is basically the Runecraft MVP for the past year.
The best time to tempo out a 3/3 that does nothing is on turn 3 going first—however, going first is also when increasing your hand size is the most important. There’s a significant and largely irreconcilable disconnect between 3PP Dual Barrier’s ideal-use case and what the deck will generally need. Although Dual Barrier allows you to run fewer Mysteria followers in the deck, the way to take advantage of that is by playing Freyja and Hanna to guarantee the key Mysteria pulls.
Dual Barrier’s two Enhance effects are a bit of a mixed bag. For 5PP, auto-evolving two followers with very useful board-clearing effects is actually really solid for a theoretical Evolve Rune. Blooming Dancer is essentially the new-age Dogged Detective as a generic self-evolve, and Olivia & Sylvia sees random amounts of play, so there is a non-zero level of support for the archetype to become real once more. There’s simply a glaring lack of win conditions like Tetra or Vincent and ways to evolve before the evolution turns like Marie. Putting it like that, Evolve Rune does not look likely, unfortunately for Dual Barrier.
Dual Barrier’s Enhance 8 as a win condition or supplementary win condition is an angle for making this card good, and in all fairness, you do get 12 damage at the bare minimum that can easily be increased to 20 or more with any 0PP Mysteria followers, Spellboost cards, or Exchange Party. The issue of course is that this is an Enhance 8, which requires a fair amount of additional setup to be a proper OTK. Mysteria’s existing win condition in Majestic Sorcery already wins frequently by turn 7, with turn 8 being guaranteed and turn 6 being the upper limit, mostly obtainable by the faster Spellboost variant. With Majestic Sorcery however, you already get a fat board clear to make most Wards a non-issue, whereas Dual Barrier offers nothing beyond the Storm followers themselves. Being locked to a win condition that is always the same speed as the slowest possible speed of the existing win condition while not even being more reliable at that slower speed is frankly just disappointing.
One possible advantage of Dual Barrier’s Enhance 8 is that you can play around transforms and board locks completely by finding an OTK exclusively with the followers summoned by Dual Barrier and followers from hand. This is obscenely extra and, once again, not even good since many of the decks that would be transforming or board locking will probably win before Mysteria’s turn 8 to begin with.
Metatron will still exist for another full set, but Burial Rite Shadow is right there, going Metatron into the immediate Myroel power play with Deathly Tyrant's Feast soon to follow roughly half the time—and we are to believe Enhance 8 can compete against that? Surely not.
Dual Barrier is a card that appears completely at odds with Mysteria Rune as it is built and played today. It’s an expensive card in all forms that doesn’t draw, has seemingly no relevant niche or utility, and conflicts with superior options on almost every turn. A truly cataclysmic transformation of Mysteria Rune as a deck would be the precursor to Dual Barrier’s becoming particularly relevant, though it’s not hard to imagine the card seeing spots of play, given the dreadful exodus of banger cards from Edge of Paradise. Dual Barrier, if anything, is a card that will see play out of necessity and not because it’s strong.
This card might not be that good, but let’s appreciate those well endowed abs for a moment.