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Should You Pull? SS Mina & Tapu Fini

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TL;DR: Should You Pull?

What Does It Do?

Sygna Suit Mina & Tapu Fini are a Fairy Type Poke Fair Support. As a fun fact, Mina is also the first 3* unit that is not obtainable for free to have an alt (Hurray?). Sygna Suit Mina & Tapu Fini’s most notably trait is their signature B Move, B Protect, is the first move capable of providing Damage Guard Next to all allies; prior to this, Anabel & Snorlax were the only pair capable of giving multiple Damage Guards to themselves or an ally. On top of that, B Protect also restores 20% maximum HP, increased to 30% in Fairy Zone, and resets lowered stats during rain. Sygna Suit Mina’s Trainer Move is Pretty As A Painting!, which increases teamwide Special Attack by four stages, increased to six in rain, and provides Gradual Healing for all allies. Her only attacking move is Draining Kiss, which provides some health drain on top of her existing regeneration, while she also has access to Rain Dance, which can concurrently exist with Fairy Zone and buff the plethora of Water type abusers available. 

Sygna Suit Mina also has a series of significant passives; her Fairy Zone Debut and Extension provides a free first round of Fairy Zone that lasts well beyond the first rotation as per the design of the other Tapus. Team Whimsical Special DR 3 provides a teamwide damage reduction against special normal moves while in Fairy Zone, giving her team even more durability. Finally, she also has her Poni Ocean Breeze; the passive allows her to increment teamwide defenses gradually, providing +1 Defense and Special Defense every time a field effect is activated. This means she can gain buffs  through not only her own Fairy Zone and Rain Dance but also through the other field effects (weather, terrain and zone) of her allies. Alas, the effect of this passive pales in strength compared to the Move Up Next passives of her fellow Tapus in general. 

Generally speaking, the contexts of which warrant Sygna Suit Mina’s extreme defensive capabilities tend to be few and far between, confined to Extreme Battles, High Point Master Mode Clears or solo or greedy Legendary Gauntlet clears. While her qualities are far from bad, she has a heightened reliance on unit partners that are more sufficient relative to her surrounding cohort of supports, while her defensive capabilities may feel redundant over her more offensive counterparts such as Sygna Suit Kris and Suicune as well as Sygna Suit Brendan and Latios that maintain potent defensive capabilities while providing significantly better offensive buffs. With Fairy and rain being dominant compositionally and riddled with competitions, Sygna Suit Mina also has to contend with her significantly more synergistic and offensive counterparts in order to carve out a place for herself.

How To Use It?

Sync Grid Considerations & Lucky Skills

While not as reliant on copies such as her upcoming counterpart Sygna Suit Lana & Tapu Lele, Sygna Suit Mina does show a significant disparity in performance based on the number of copies relative to Sygna Suit Hau & Tapu Koko as well as Sygna Suit Acerola & Tapu Bulu, both of whose base kits are rich enough to function with higher reward without significant reliance on heavy investment. Alongside the aforementioned Sygna Suit Acerola, Sygna Suit Mina is also the second Support unit after Anabel and Snorlax to get  a 5/5 grid expansion as a Poke Fair, making her all the more expensive to make full use of.

One copy and two copies tend to be barren, with the former providing only Stalwart and Flameproof and the latter providing acceleration tiles such as Whimsical Acceleration 2 and Racing Rain 2, as well as Rain Gear 1 and Dragon Guard for further damage reduction. The acceleration passives should take precedence, as they can notably be used together to provide a good combination of gauge, which Sygna Suit Mina lacks support for at base. 

Consistent with the other Tapus, Fairy Kingdom at three copies is Sygna Suit Mina’s signature tile. More than its ability to extend Fairy Zone on sync as a steroid, however, its ability to provide yet another round of defensive buffs that are incomplete with her standard rotation alone, while also extending the duration of her powerful special damage reduction. Team Sharp Entry 1 is Sygna Suit Mina’s exclusive source of crit, which, while a shame for viability, is still an important component that allows her to smoothen the setup time of various synergistic units. Notably, Team Sharp Entry 1 also allows Sygna Suit Mina herself to get more meatier heals on Draining Kiss on a coin-flip, which assists with her durability otherwise littered with limited windows of healing. 

Four copies is where Sygna Suit Mina achieves her most significant benchmark with access to Rain Dance: Catalytic Infliction and Adrenaline 1, both of which are important components for her scope of utility and cost balance as a field effect setter. As potent as her base acceleration passives may be, they are generally inferior to raw move gauge acceleration and can be used together in unison to provide even faster gauge especially for greedier compositions. At full copies, Sygna Suit Mina gains access to Draining Kiss: Master Healer 1 as well as Synchro Healing 1. While the latter is more useful and is more streamlined with the traditional energy routes Sygna Suit Mina will adopt, Draining Kiss: Master Healer is much less appealing due to its cost and awkward location. The necessity of these passives are also extremely limited to scenarios of self imposed high difficulty that she excels in, meaning that they usually aren’t important for standardized gameplay. 

As a Support with a variety of potent syncing effects, EXing Sygna Suit Mina tends to provide stellar value, meaning that it would not be a waste to invest in it especially when her sync is also part of the value she provides. 

Adrenaline 1 is helpful if one’s resources are limited to invest her till the fourth copy, as it is important for her queue to be maintained due to leading with Rain Dance oftentimes in her rotation. Head Start 1 can also be useful as it can help to offset Rain Dance’s duration risking quad queue in a similar vein to Adrenaline. While Vigilance may seem like a good choice, her ability to provide two rounds of Critical Hit Defense means that it’s only ever useful in prolonged contexts where the duration does not persist.

Games Modes

Sygna Suit Mina and Tapu Fini are a heavy-duty defensive Support tailor made for the most demanding, but unfortunately uncommon, content environments. Nevertheless, Sygna Suit Mina’s high durability and B Protect make her standout in the Champion Stadium when taking several otherwise dangerous parameters in unison, such as Ally Drop 3 at Start and other offensive parameters such as increased Attack and Ally Half HP. Sygna Suit Mina’s slew of anti-gimmick passives and field effects are also helpful against a variety of Legendary Arena battles such as against Moltres, Cresselia, and Tornadus with their status effects, while also having the durability to do solo runs if need be.

Team Sharp Entry 1, Team Smart Start 1 and her other Sync and Entry passives also make her a fine choice for the Battle Villa, albeit not as lucrative as other Support alternatives. Extreme Battles, namely offregion Extreme Battles, are where Sygna Suit Mina may have serious consideration if not preference relative to other pairs; it is in that context where her extreme defensive profile and protection is best utilized.

Team Compositions

Sygna Suit Mina’s propensity for Fairy Zone may lead one to believe that Fairy types provide the best synergy with her. While this is not untrue, the majority of Fairy-types generally respond better to the alternate Fairy Zone setters that provide significantly higher synergy. For instance, Sygna Suit Wally & Gardevoir’s ability to buff speed, ramp and provide debuffs and Fairy rebuff give Sygna Suit Mina a run for her money when pairing with pairs such as Diantha and Gardevoir as well as Palentine’s Serena & Whimsicott, both of whom fail to acquire the necessary steroids with Mina without an external partner. Even the more independent Fairy-types such as Summer Marnie Grimmsnarl and New Year’s Lisia & Galarian Rapidash can benefit from Wally’s qualities better, with the trio even being capable of functioning together as suggested in New Year’s Lisia’s SYP. The introduction of Sygna Suit Hau & Tapu Koko as a Fairy setter doesn’t Sygna Suit Mina much favors, as his traits are similar to Sygna Suit Wally’s while trading utility for more offensive pressure, and better respond to the surrounding Fairy cohort at large. Summer Lyra & Jigglypuff are an exception their to her steeper demand with sleep as a steroid, which was previously only doable only by Elio and Primarina, while Sygna Suit Mina’s compression of Fairy Zone and offensive buffs unlike the other Fairy Zone users allow for a better alternate sleep user such as Serena & Delphox or Sygna Suit Cyrus & Darkrai.

Sygna Suit Mina’s place in Rain teams is also a tight competition, albeit arguably less so than in Fairy. Despite the presence of a variety of rain staples such as Sygna Suit Kris & Suicune as well as Champion Calem & Greninja, Sygna Suit Mina’s superior defensive profile may respond better to the progressively common cohort of rain abusers that are already extremely self-sufficient and simply require a sturdier defensive backbone, namely Sygna Suit Lysandre & Volcanion and Archie & Kyogre, especially in content that has steeper demand. Outside of these, Sygna Suit Mina’s defensive profile is generally indiscriminate to most sufficient offensive components, functioning similarly in a vein to other defensive counterparts such as Aura Cynthia & Lucario, Anabel & Snorlax, as well as Sygna Suit Morty & Ho Oh.

Showcase Video

Is It Worth Pulling?

Due to her polarized defensive design and more limited offensive support capabilities, Sygna Suit Mina and Tapu Fini are likely the least recommendable relative to their surrounding Tapu cohorts despite not being bad by any means. While a sound choice of a Fairy facilitator, her muddled place in the current Fairy game state relative to concurrent counterpart Sygna Suit Hau & Tapu Koko particularly makes it difficult to warrant her unless you are a player challenging themselves with self imposed, difficult content, as well as the prospect of more, self-sufficient Fairy units akin to New Year’s Lisia showing up and warranting her as an exclusive backbone in the future.

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