The Components

As with all of the Blue Moon decks, The Mimix includes 31 cards, one leader plus a deck of 30 play cards, all printed on sturdy Tarot-sized cardstock.

The artist for the Mimix is Todd Lockwood. He's probably best known for his fantasy art. He helped to define the style for Dungeons & Dragon Third Edition and also did work for Magic: The Gathering. Some samples of his non-Mimix artwork are available at his own web site.

Lockwood has been given a tribe of Amazons to portray and he does so with gusto. Intricate tattoos cover the Mimix's largely naked forms, which are otherwise shrouded only by scraps of leather or furs, or else hair that's positioned just right. The Mimix are very human pinup girls: gorgeous, but also a little repetitive. The largest differentiation between the cards comes in the vibrant backgrounds, which are colorful and largely monochromatic.

Mixed in with the Amazons are the mostly male shamans who make up a minority of the deck.

Overall the art in the Mimix is good, though a bit more standard fantasy than most of the other Blue Moon decks. It's also sufficiently risque that I'd be hesitant to use the cards in some company. The component quality and card usability are of the same high standard as the original Blue Moon and as with the other supplements, the cost-to-play ratio is a little lower than the original game (which is entirely expected for supplements).

I've given The Mimix a high "3" out of "5" Style rating: slightly above average.

The Gameplay

The Mimix comes with a new deck of 30 cards which can be used to play Blue Moon. It contains 3 leadership cards, 23 characters, 2 boosters, and 3 support. This is more characters than any deck to date; the originals had 18 each while The Flit had just 14. In contrast, there's almost no emphasis given to either boosters or support.

Most of the character cards in The Mimix have special icons: 13 (of which 12 are usable) have the "pair" icon and another 3 have the "free" icon. More on these below.

Looking at these notable elements from the deck-design point of view, the weakest pairable cards ("Wild" and "Young") are just 0 moons, while the most powerful ones ("Amazon", "Heroine", and "Virgin") cost 2 moons each, making the pair relatively expensive.

Paired Characters: As noted, 13 of the Mimix have the pair icon. These are split into 6 pairs, each of which can be played together if you have both cards, plus one singleton--"Heroine of the High Flames", who's pair, "Heroine of the Great Plains", is sadly in the Vulca deck in the main game.

Each of the pairs of characters is exactly recipricol. One's fire rating matches its pairs earth rating and vice-versa. Thus, you can easily see what a pair's total value in an element will be just by adding its earth + fire.

The weakest pairs, the aforementioned Wild and Young sum 6 and 5 respectively (e.g., Young Bear is 3 fire and 2 earth while Young Fox is 2 fire and 3 earth). The most powerful pairs are the Amazon which sums 8 (at 4/4) and the Virgin pair which sums 7 (but allows more variety at 1/6 and 6/1). None of the paired characters have any special text.

Without using the rare boosters, support, or free characters, Mimix thus max out at 7 value in each element (with 4 being a truer mean) for a single character and 8 for a pair.

Free Characters: The 3 "free" Mimix (Moon Rising, Sun Setting, Stars Shining) are all pretty weak: 1/2, 2/1, and 1/1, respectively. However, because they're free they can be played with any other character, giving a nice boost in the absence of boosters or support, which is just what the Mimix need.

Mimix Strategy

Playing the Mimix is all about playing the pairs. You've got tons of character cards, so you shouldn't be afraid to play them, and you want to play them as pairs whenever you can, to make up for the general lack of boosters and support in this deck.

The trick is, of course, getting the pairs. You don't want to just depend on luck for this; instead you should concentrate on using the cards you have that can help you set up pairs. Three of the shamans allow drawing from the draw deck and one allows drawing from the discard pile. Since these shamans are all measely 2/2 cards, and two of them have the stop icon, it's not easy to play them, thus you should whenever you have the opportunity, to try and increase your stock of pairs.

One of the hard decisions with the Mimix is always when to play a character when you don't have its pair. Generally it's better to do this with the weaker cards than the strong ones; you can quickly remember which category a card fits into by looking at its moons (from 0-2) or by summing up its fire + earth values to remind you of its paired total (from 5-8). In addition, remember that the Heroine doesn't have a pair in this deck, so you shouldn't be concerned about playing her. Likewise because the Virgins are so offbalanced (6/1 and 1/6), it's almost as good to play one singleton as it is to play the pair together, provided that you're dueling in the right element. (It may even be a better strategy, overall.)

You should also be more willing to play an umatched card if you haven't yet used the cards which let you retrieve a played card yet. "Call Spirit of the UnderWorld", a Leadership, allows you to choose a card from your discard. "Call Spirt of the Battlefield", another Leadership, lets you pull something back from your combat area. Finally, the fourth Shaman, "Shaman of the Afterlife", recovers some random cards from your discard pile. (It's thus most useful early in the game, but right after you've dumped an unpaired Mimix.)

I see much of the Mimix gameplay as a dance between Shamans and the Amazons. You play the Shamans whenever you can to create pairs of Amazons, and otherwise you tread water until you're ready to drop a pair down together, hopefully as a crippling blow.

When you drop pairs, you should try and match them up with the boosters, support, and free characters in this deck. However, they're very rare and thus should be treated as real commodities. Don't spend them early, if the numbers are still low, unless you think that your opponent just offered his best shot. Do try and use them when you're dropping down a good pair, in the hope of totally overpowering an opponent. (This can be quite important since the Mimix otherwise max out at 8 for a pair.)

One other notable aspect of the Mimix is that they're almost entirely balanced between the elements. (There's actually a slight bias toward fire due to the absence of that extra Heroine and an imbalance in the support/booster cards, but it's minor.) As a result, unless your curent hand composition demands otherwise, you should try your best to play against the strengths of your opponent. That means, for example, play earth when you're fighting the Vulca.

Counter-Strategy: The Mimix's greatest weakness is ultimately their dependence on paired, no special-effect characters. Thus, particularly effective cards against them are ones that limit the playing of cards (say, to just one in the combat area) and ones that require them to play characters with special effects. The latter can knock the Mimix straight out of a fight since every one of their special effect cards is a 2/2.

Generally, pressing a fight quickly can hurt the Mimix. The faster you hop to the high numbers, the less likely likely they are to be able to build up to their pairs. In addition, always try and jump the duels straight up to "3" or higher. This will prevent them from playing their Shamans unless they waste a bosoter or support when they do so (and that's not even possible with the two Shamans who have stop icons.)

Support can be particularly effect against the Mimix, because they have to match it with expendable cards, so don't be afraid to play Support against them early in a fight, forcing them to waste better resources throughout the battle.

The Game Design

The first four decks of Blue Moon cards seem to have two main types. On the one hand you have the "complex" decks, which take real effort to play well. This includes the Hoax from the main box and the Flit from the first supplement. On the other hand you have the "simple" decks, which center on brute force without a lot of finesse. That's the main box's Vulca. The Mimix, with its need to collect sets of people but otherwise simple play, is somewhere in the middle. As such I've eke in a "4" out of "5" rating for Substance, somewhat above average, but I offer the additional comment that it's going to be one of the easier decks for beginners and casual players to play.

Conclusion

The Mimix is the second expansion for the Blue Moon expandable card game. It centers on set collection through Shamans and Leadership cards which help you to collect pairs of Amazonian women who together can crush the opposition. It's more simplistic than some other decks, but still allows for very distinct gameplay.

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