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MMM - Crowned Commander in Constantinople Coordinates Critical Call for Crystal Consumption (Constantine Gacha)

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The Modern Magus Magazine

Well well, it seems the White Day gacha came round just a couple months late this year.

Given Constantine’s plot relevance to LB6.5, I suppose it’s not shocking they would choose to package him in a pre-release campaign, and it’ll likely help distinguish the Paladins of Charlemagne who will be in the proper story chapter gacha with him, who clearly isn’t French or a crossdressing English prince.

With that in mind, we have a single Servant to review, and I’m dealing with my 3rd bout of that virus that was all the rage last year, so let’s make this smooth.

LB6-5 Prerelease
NA Release Date: 05/01/2024
Introduction

I gotta tell you, if you’re going to be the last king of a dying dynasty, then at least go out with some spectacular drip. Constantine certainly has it going on there.

All he needs is glasses. Give me the glasses.

Servant Data
Rider
Riding B+

Increase your Quick Card effectiveness by 9%.

Magic Resistance B+

Increase your Debuff Resist by 18%.

Independent Action C++

Increase your Critical Strength by 7.2%.

Overview

As a 5* Rider, Constantine has a pretty broad range of competition, even if the Rider class’s stats don’t tend to be too spectacular in the first place. Constantine is undoubtedly defensively orientated, with the 4th worst Attack stat of his class and rarity, paired with the 4th best HP stat. Though if I’ll be honest, he’s practically tied with Medb on the HP front - they have a 15 HP difference between each other. I don’t think I can count a single time a Servant of mine has survived on 2-digit or less without other factors in play.

In any case, he’s pretty bulky, and trades a significant sum of offensive power for it. While that doesn’t bode well for his prospects as a damage dealer, he’s thankfully more of a support, so the bulk is probably more worthwhile.

On the Passives front, Constantine has nothing too crazy. The expected Riding and Magic Resistance of his class provide a notable boost to both his Quick card and ability to shrug off debuffs, while Independent Action C++ is an…interesting inclusion with an equally interesting rank, giving him a decent improvement to his critical damage.

On the whole, Constantine is a defensively-leaned Servant, but doesn’t sacrifice so much offensively that he can’t pack some punch from what he has in his passives.

NP Generation
Servant Skills
Noble Phantasm
Conclusion

So how good is Constantine, actually? On one hand, he’s got years of tradition reinforcing his position:

Constantine has some pretty gnarly offense backing him. While the lack of a damaging NP is obviously against his favor, his offensive boosts to his Buster cards and crits means he can seriously bring the hurt when he needs to, and with Rider star weight and his numerous star generation tools, he can do so consistently as well. It isn’t as impactful as the damage output of someone like Super Orion or Himiko, but certainly good enough to be notable. Considering he’s half-focused on defensive support, it’s not a bad cop.

It goes without saying that the walls of Constantinople are great defensively. He doesn’t have too much difficulty building up his gauge given his charge charger, NP gain buff, and decent gain in general, and versus the majority of offensive threats his NP will completely neutralize damage taken for the turn, as well as bolstering his own offense. Paired with his own taunt, he can even protect the team from Single-Target Defense Pierce NP’s if need be, due to the Invincibility packaged for himself.

However, he’s also built on unstable foundation about to collapse:

The issue when you are fundamentally a supportive Servant is that you ultimately get compared to the big contenders in the field. And when squared up against the likes of Castoria or Skadi, some pretty clear weaknesses in Constantine become clear. Lack of any team or targeted gauge charge means his capability for offensive support is pretty heavily outclassed, even for pseudo-supports like Koyanskaya of Darkness. Add in that his NP, for all its uniqueness, is completely outclassed by Castoria’s, and is mostly matched by Skadi’s, and there becomes less and less reason to consider him.

It’s better to full-ass one thing than half-ass two things. While Constantine’s mix of defensive support and Buster crit-focused offensive prowess is cool, it doesn’t lend itself to a powerful Servant. Constantine isn’t offensively powerful enough to be a damage dealing threat on his own, or at least not one competing with similar, stronger options, and supportively I’ve already covered his downfall. The hilarious outcome of this is that he ends up being too supportively oriented when trying to deal damage, and when supporting his Rider star weight ends up stealing stars from the damage dealer. While Reines shares the same issue, she at least doesn’t have star generation built into her kit, and has much more potent supportive tools to compensate.

While it may seem like I’m ripping into Constantine a lot, he’s a case where he has plenty of power in his toolkit, but it’s either mismanaged into effects which don’t help him that much (like his NP gain buff), or spread too thinly to give him a powerful niche to abuse. His supportive capability for Roman allies could be considered that, but when squared off against Merlin or Koyanskaya of Light he still falls short if you want to deal big damage with your Romulus or whatever else.

Really, the thing that will stand out for Constantine above anything else is his NP’s defensive support. While I feel the game has grown past the days of hard defensive options like Jeanne’s NP being a rarity to clear difficult content, the truth is that it doesn’t make having one around any worse. You only get one Support Servant in a quest, after all, and being able to not take Castoria for once tends to broaden your strategies a little.

That’s only considering an incredibly unlucky or recently-joining F2P player, though. Most of the time, in the vague bubble of “A player with a large enough Servant collection to form most meta team compositions with the addition of a Support Servant”, Constantine doesn’t add anything new to the table.

Situations where utilizing him as an offensive Servant solely because you need the extra protection of his NP may come into play, since frankly Constantine / Merlin / Castoria sounds like a pretty disgusting iron wall of a team, but that’s for a hypothetical which won’t constitute the majority of situations.

He’s fun, useful if you really lack access to the Servants who outclass him, but he’s not really anything spectacular.

Outro

A short one, and also a little painful to write. Some of my friends are essentially colossal history buffs, and as a result also Byzantine fanboys (since it is a really cool Empire and historical period), which means I was pretty hyped up for Constantine.

But hey, not all your favorites can be spectacular meta threats - just ask this Karna fanboy.

With that out of the way, we have LB6.5 on the horizon, and a whole lot of western knights, too. Roland? You already know it. Charlie? Seems almost assured. Kreimhild? Possible, and interesting to see where they take it. If they put in Ogier or Olivier then I’ll be content. Until then!

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