Cirno (Scarlet)

A6 Cirno was released on April 11th, 2022 in "Festival Prayer: Ice Fairy of the Scarlet Night." For more up-to-date analysis, be sure to visit the  Official Discord Server.

Fairies are the embodiment of natural energy in Gensokyo, but almost all of them are considered weaker than even the lowest youkai. One of the few exceptions is Cirno, an ice fairy who can usually be found playing around the Misty Lake near Scarlet Devil Mansion. And when she isn’t busy playing, she can be found constantly getting in the way of incident resolvers, from way back to the Scarlet Mist incident (Touhou 6) to as late as the Social Upheaval incident (Touhou 14). While she might be considered weak in these encounters (appearing as a very simple challenge to players), Cirno gets her time to shine in her self-proclaimed fairy war and even as an incident resolver in Hidden Star in Four Seasons! However, this Cirno is only a reflection of the Scarlet Mist incident.

For farming, Cirno doesn’t have any impressive story card farms and cannot reliably one turn farm most one waves either. Her Last Word, Permanent Red Ice Fog, might not be entirely backloaded, with a 1-3-1 spread, but unlike most A-Type Multiverse Friends, she has no Spirit Power restoration whatsoever to make reaching 2P for great damage feasible in a single turn, and maybe not even two. It might have a large amount of Killer bullets, targeting humans, fairies, and even beasts, but that isn’t enough to patch up her mediocre damage output. It seems like this fairy gets bored easily of doing the same task over and over…

Cirno’s potential for challenging content fares a bit better. Taking her title as an ice fairy into better account than her L1 form, Cirno is able to spread out up to 5 Freeze anomalies on all opponents in a single turn: 2 from her first skill, Freshwater Iceberg, and 2 more with a 50% chance for an extra anomaly from her second spell, Snow Sign: Diamond Blizzard (though note that this is the post-ATK effect, not a pre-ATK). From there, she can use her first spell, Hail Sign: Hailstorm, to melt all of the frozen barriers. However, there are two issues with this. Hail Sign: Hailstorm is only a Solo-target spell, and since the Freeze barriers only last two turns, you might only be able to anomaly break a singular target. Additionally, the Melting part of Hail Sign: Hailstorm is only at 3P, and as mentioned before, Cirno has no method to quickly build up Spirit Power without Friends or story cards.

Outside of the anomalies, Cirno mainly serves as a Yin and CRIT-focused debuffer. With her second skill, Superfluidity, granting herself Quick and Permanent Red Ice Fog casting 2 levels of Yin DEF and CRIT DEF DOWN (1T), the scarlet ice fairy can be a good source of an early debuff before another attacker sweeps later the same turn. However, her Last Word and her third skill, Zero-Point Motion, most importantly the 2 levels of Evasion DOWN (1T), share another issue: their debuffs last for a single turn. While Zero-Point Motion’s cooldown can be decreased to 3 turns to serve as a handy, consistent slight bit of accuracy support, her Last Word is stuck being a pretty average debuff option. Hail Sign: Hailstorm can at the very least serve as another decent debuff option, with 2 levels of Yin DEF and Evasion DOWN (2T), though again only for a single target.

Finally, Cirno’s elemental breaks are kind of all over the place. A 0P All-target Water break on her spread shot, Hail Core, is always helpful, but Cirno doesn’t really specialize in any other element after this. Hail Sign: Hailstorm actually has no element-less lines, and 3 Water and 3 Wood isn’t the worst, but Snow Sign: Diamond Blizzard is very unremarkable with 2 Water and 2 Wood if you truly want to boost it all the way up. Permanent Red Ice Fog doesn’t fare much better, as it is another split between 3 Water and 3 Fire this time. She might have a fair amount of elements, but nothing impressive enough to stand out as a great elemental breaker.

Cirno’s A6 form has a good amount of tools to throw around, but being unimpressive in almost every field makes her likely the least favorable A-Type Multiverse Friend at the moment. But at the very least, she is trying really hard as a fairy! Maybe she can be the strongest some other day.

The Hard scaling and chances for the secondary effects of Cirno’s attacks are as follows:

Hail Core:
Yin DEF UP: 50%/100%/0%/0%/0%/0%
Hard: 0%/30%/30%/0%/0%/0%

Freeze Dryer:
Target CRIT DEF DOWN: 25%/25%/0%/0%/0%/0%
Hard: 0%/30%/0%/30%/0%/30%
Cooling (1 Freeze anomaly): 0%/0%/0%/30%/0%/0%

Hail Sign: Hailstorm:
Hard: 30%/40%/50%/0%/0%/0%

Snow Sign: Diamond Blizzard:
Target CRIT DEF DOWN: 0%/0%/40%/50%/0%/0%
Hard: 50%/60%/0%/0%70%/80%

Permanent Red Ice Fog:
Target Yin DEF DOWN: 0%/100%/0%/0%/0%/0%
Target CRIT DEF DOWN: 0%/0%/0%/50%/50%/0%
Hard: 70%/70%/70%/0%/0%/0%