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Should You Pull? Festival: Perfect Teatime With an Old Friend

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Should You Pull?

Yes. Alice Margatroid (Cherry Blossom) keeps up the standard of impressive A-Type Multiverse Friends and serves two main purposes: a highly powerful Slice-oriented Yin nuke and supporting the team indirectly through elemental breaks, anomaly breaks, and some debuffs. Her heavy nuking potential makes her capable of farming many story card stages, especially when maxxed out. All of her spells have an element attached to them, making her rather versatile for challenging fights.

Her prayer will also feature Youkai Mountain Anniversary, the limited card found on the Story Card Festival! It mainly serves as an alternative to 2-7-1's The Witch of Scarlet Dreams with an extra Body Bullet power boost, making it technically better than the farmable card based on the Friend's spells. With such a useful card, this only adds even more value to a prayer with a heavily-valued Friend already!

While A7 Alice is a highly-valued Friend, the competition she is co-running with is just as good or even better. The main contenders are E1 Flandre Scarlet, an Ultra Festival Friend that is very high in power, A7 Yukari Yakumo, another A-Type Multiverse Friend that can be useful in many instances, and R8 Youmu Konpaku, another strong Ultra Festival Friend with an even longer runtime than everyone else. Other special prayers, such as 1st Anniversary Lucky Bag, Story Card Collection, and Festival Collection are also rather tantalizing to pull for. 

1st Anniversary has many prayers to look out for, and most of them are rather viable to collect the Featured Friend on, so ultimately look at what you lack on your team and which currently running prayer has a Friend who can assist in that.

A7 Alice will be visiting until May 25th at 7:59 UTC, giving you about 10 days to pull on this prayer. To sweeten the deal, Alice comes with the usual Ascending God Crystal Step-UP, providing a low-cost opportunity to try at least 10 pulls for 60 God Crystals. With x2 Fortune Dust gained for each God Crystal pull, this option can be a cheap way to get 20 Fortune Dust as well!

Quick Overview

+ 0P Metal shot for Metal break spam
+ Many self-Yin ATK and Agility buffs
+ Very easily covers 5 elements on spells (Fire, Water, Wood, Earth, Metal)
+ Inflicts Paralyze and Burn on a skill and can break them with a spell
- Low team utility/support
- So many elements on spells can cause difficulty regarding enemy affinities

[Numbers in brackets are buffs at Max Limit Break or stat sticks at Max Enhance]

  • Spirit Power 1.50 [2.00] UP 
  • Body Bullet power 15% [25%] UP (1T)
  • DMG from Kappa 25% [30%] DOWN (2T)
  • Agility +15 [+55]
  • Yang DEF +45 [+125]

Alice Margatroid (Cherry Blossom)

Alice Margatroid is a magician youkai, even if her appearance resembles a totally ordinary human. It is possible for humans to dabble in the magical arts too far and become youkai, although it is unclear if this is the route Alice went down. In fact, Alice is rather reserved, preferring to live alone within the Forest of Magic and rarely leaves outside of performing the occasional doll show in the Human Village. And it’s not like she could really leave her house during a dreadful, endless winter.

Alice kept to herself during the Spring Snow Incident, the incident of Touhou 7: Perfect Cherry Blossom (or A7 when referring to LostWord’s universe indicators) in which snow endlessly fell in the middle of Spring. Reimu Hakurei, Marisa Kirisame, and Sakuya Izayoi stood up as the incident resolvers to find who stole their “spring essence.” When encountering Alice, who the magician seems to have a familiarity with when it comes to Reimu, she teases the resolvers with potential clues for the incident’s mastermind before picking a bullet battle fight. Her battle style has her hold back power based on the strength of the opponent, which she is able to gauge while she sits back and sends in her country-assorted dolls to fight.

In LostWord, this aspect of A7 Alice is kept rather accurate, to the point where all of her attacks, skills, and even characteristics rely on the worldly dolls. What stands out right away from Alice’s bullets are the heavy amount of elements. Not only does she have a 0P Metal Focus shot, Orleans Doll, but her spell cards and Last Word have a wide assortment of elements. Alice is known as The Seven-Colored Puppeteer, illustrated in Perfect Cherry Blossom by her bullets consisting of (almost) rainbow colors: red, orange, yellow, green, light blue, dark blue, and purple. While not fully replicated in LostWord, she still gets a rainbow-like assortment of elemental coverage, that being Water, Fire, and Wood on Puppeteer Sign: Maiden’s Bunraku and Earth and Metal on Malediction: Hanged Hourai Dolls. Her Last Word, Spring Act - The Phantom of the Grand Guignol, is a very powerful Yin attack that uses all of the previously mentioned elements and heavily buffs her Yin ATK and Agility, the latter meant to increase her Slice-based damage. Her other pre-ATK spell effects are mainly to boost her own damage, such as Malediction: Hanged Hourai Dolls’ 2 levels of Yin DEF and CRIT DEF DOWN on the target (3T). One other thing to mention about her attacks are the heavy amount of secondary effects included in the bullet lines, rewarding players for using the attacks at 2P or 3P. Most of these effects just contribute toward doing even more damage, such as Puppeteer’s Sign: Maiden’s Bunraku providing a level of Agility UP on the 5th line. 

Fortunately, her skills are a lot more straightforward. Her first skill, Dutch Dolls, is Alice’s form of Accuracy support by 2 levels (3T) along with 2 levels of Agility UP (3T) for the whole party, helping her own and other Friends’ Slice scaling. Coming afterwards is her second skill, London Dolls, which apply 2 layers of Paralyze and Burn anomalies on a single target, which can be followed up by anomaly breakers located on Puppeteer Sign: Maiden’s Bunraku’s final bullet lines. Since this first spell is All-targeting, it can be easy to get other anomaly inflictors on a team and allow Alice to break even more barriers beyond her already great elemental coverage. Last but not least is her third skill, Kyoto Dolls, being your typical Spirit Power booster by 1.00 as well as a party-wide 2 levels of Yin ATK UP (2T) and self-Agility UP by 3 levels (3T). Alice’s skills are the perfect tool to increase her own power if an enemy is proving to be more of a nuisance than she first expected.

Alice’s primary issue is a lack of teamwide support, as her Yin and CRIT DEF debuffs and the previously mentioned teamwide buffs on skills are her only direct form of support. Otherwise, it’s more of the team supporting the shy magician than the other way around. Additionally, with how many elements are on her spells, especially Puppeteer Sign: Maiden’s Bunraku, it can become problematic if an opponent resists a couple of the elements Alice is going for, which can easily decrease her damage. Luckily, Alice can strike back just as hard with aspects such as her Slice scaling as well as her Killer bullets, especially the anti-Human bullets on Spring Act - The Phantom of the Grand Guignol. These issues only slightly hold her back from being one of the best Friends of the game, which is saying a lot when her L1 form was a lot more supportive and lacking in power.

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About the Author(s)

I mainly go by Neku on Discord and primarily focus on writing articles for Touhou Lostword. You can usually find me on the Touhou Lostword Official Discord (Neku#9644) if needed for edits regarding any information on that side. 

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