Which characters didn't get into Cipher?

[Jotari]

57 playable characters didn't get into Cipher. At the time of writing this, Heroes has yes to add 242 playable characters, but that's including 49 playable characters who did not exist (or were not playable) when Cipher ended (ie the cast of Engage and new player characters in Three Hopes). These 58 characters who didn't get into Cipher are as follows

Alva, Amalda, Beck, Belf, Boah, Brighton, Caesar, Cain (Thracia), Carrion, Cecil, Conomore, Creidne, Dagdar, Dalsin, Dalvin, Dart, Deimne, Dice, Dolph, Duessel, Frost, Galzus, Garret, Geese, Geitz, Giffca, Glade, Harken, Hawk, Hicks, Homer, Illios, Isadora, Old Karel, Lorenz (Archanea), Macellan, Marty, Young Merlinus, Moulder, Muirne, Nealuchi, Niime, Radd, Ralf, Reiden, Renning (as Renning, he has a card as Bertram), Robert, Roberto, Roger, Salem, Sleuf, Tomas, Trec, Troude, Warren, Xavier, Ymir, Yoder and Zeiss.

Of these unfortunate 58; Duessel, Galzus, Harken, Isadora, Niime and Salem have got into Heroes. Of the lot the one that is most surprising to me that they didn't get a Cipher card is Duessel. He's a rather noteworthy characters who could be made to look sufficiently bad ass and with a reason to be powerful.

On the NPC side of things there are 130 characters who are on CYL (at the time Cipher finished) and didn't get a Cipher card. I won't list all 130 names, but I will mention the individual characters I am surprised didn't get a card. Chief among them is Duma. Shadows of Valentia was released during the height of Cipher's popularity, there are literally Cipher characters in Shadows of Valentia, so it's very surprising Duma is nowhere to be seen. Rudolf also didn't get a Cipher card (but Jedah did). There's a Freyr card and not a Freyja card...which is really weird because Freyja is the main antagonist of a Heroes book, meanwhile Freyr is forgettable enough to not even be playable in Heroes despite originating there. There's also a bunch of Laevatein cards but no Laegjarn cards

Other characters I'm surprsied aren't there that I'll just list quickfire style, Bramimond,  Caellach, Cornelia, Gustav, Hel, Hilda (Jugdral), Ismaire, Jahn, Jarod, Kempf, Orson, Thales and Ylgr, among many more. Overall Cipher trended a lot more towards playable characters than noteworthy villains and NPCs. But sometimes they did give very minor antagonists their day in the sun. I think it's well known that Gromell from Path of Radiance and the three Mage Sisters from Jugdral have cards. What's more surprising is that Excellus has a card. Like, was he really going to sell more decks than someone like Mustafa?

And, of course, because someone obviously loves her, freaking Dithorba has a card. Have to look up the dates on that one to see if Heroes or Cipher were copying one another with the Dithorba love or if it was a joint project. At least Cipher had the decency to include Pamela too.

The neglect of antagonists and major NPCs is even more surprising given they actually gave us some cards for generic enemies. For example, a Fates Automaton, Bael/Gorgon monster card, the Dicsiples of Order (but no sign of any named Disciples of order like Catalena, Levail...or even any of the Senators), a Risen and Risen Chief card, a Witch and a Faceless card (but no Anthony, an actual named Faceless character). These generics seem to be in for mostly gameplay reasons as decks you can use to swarm the opponent. If that's the case, then I'm actually a little disappointed that Dolth, of all people, didn't get in, since he's the guy that summons Necrodragons and there is an actual Necrodragon card, there could definitely be some deck synergy there.

These generic characers make up a list of 34 characters who got a Cipher card but aren't on CYL, whom I will list as I find it interesting. There's the nine generic enemy cards mentioned above, the 8 Cipher original units (including the 4 from Shadows of Valentia who still aren't on CYL), some characters from the Binding Blade manga; Al, Celdia, Gant, Jemmie, Kilmar, Tiena and Zeed, the aforementioned minor bosses Banba, Eriu, Fotla and Pamela, Rowan, Lianna and Darios from Warriors, Feh the Heroes messenger owl, Fomortiis (who absolutely should be on CYL, it's ridiculous he's not) and Rajaion (who probably should be on CYL too) and Soan.

And now a list of other random thoughts after sifting through all the Cipher Cards.

Spoiler

For all Cipher gets praise for an artwork, sometimes they do just genuinely use existing offical art.

Most of the Fallen concepts are a Cipher's Done it, but not Fallen Dedue 😞 But there is a Fallen Hero version of Wrys which...has to be seen to be believed. I was against Fallen Chrom and Fallen Ike in Heroes because they're not canon, but I am all for Fallen Wrys!

Spoiler

The quote that comes with this card is  "I am Wrys, a humble hero. I have no time to spare on healing my enemies - only on burying them."

They love to use canon reclasses and sub weapons for cards, but the male trainee Sacred Stones units and Gaiden villagers didn't get much love, with only a few cards based only on their default classes (though unlike Heroes, at least Tobin gets to be an archer). Amelia and Faye did a slightly bit better, but it's still odd so little class diversity was given to these units who have a lot of class diversity in game compared to what they did with other characters.

Flayn has four tome cards and no staff cards, which I find a little odd. Sure staves aren't a weapon type in her game...but there is the whole literally having a personal staff weapon. She does have some healing skills though.

There is a card where Gregor rides Nowi, which I find a lot more awesome and funny than it objectively isn't.

There's a card for FE6 Eliwood, but not FE6 Hector (despite Hector's FE6 appearance being a lot more dramatic and easy to make a moment of than Eliwood's), but there is a card for Blazing Blade end game Hector, so I've fudged the rules a bit and counted that as Binding Blade Hector since it's older Hector and it honestly feels a bit weird to list Hector as a character who never got a card when he got a whole bunch.

There's a Kellam card which is just a crowd shot of generic shoulders with no sign of Kellam at all XD

Baffling, Lombard gets a card but not Reptor. I guess they just really wanted a Helswath user and Ishtar already filled the Mjolnir quota.

There are five gauntlet characters in the game, Balthus and four different copies of Raphael. You'd think it'd be the opposite way around, right? But I guess Cindered Shadows coming later might be the result (that's also what I attribute to Aelfric's absence). Strange there's no Gauntlet Caspar or Gauntlet Byleth though.

There's a Sanaki card where she dual wields Alondite and Ragnell. Which probably looks hilarious to try and visualize in anything other than a still image. I love it.

This is a seperate analysis to this blog post, which is worth reading
https://fireemblemtcg.tumblr.com/post/652782193757814784/cipher-by-the-numbers-a-statistical-look-back-at

And here is my own data base where you can see all this information presented (on the same data base as all my Heroes information) along with all of the Cipher cards together (sans duplicate and signed artworks), which I think I might be the first to actually do. All the other displays of Cipher cards I've found online sort by the various deck releases.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15xCEE3dd2wjXVgzQS6mMWGya_M_tYRYMR5bcMC3qA5Q/edit?usp=sharing

Edited April 8 by Jotari

[Eyacorkett]

  Hide contents

For all Cipher gets praise for an artwork, sometimes they do just genuinely use existing offical art.

I'm pretty sure that only some promotional cards use pre-existing artwork?

Like checking the Cipher wiki article for Micaiah, the two cards that use existing Radiant Dawn artwork ("Series 19 Box Promo" and "Series 4 Box Promo") are promotional cards included in box sets that are meant to give a preview for the upcoming series

[Jotari]

54 minutes ago, Eyacorkett said:

  Reveal hidden contents

For all Cipher gets praise for an artwork, sometimes they do just genuinely use existing offical art.

I'm pretty sure that only some promotional cards use pre-existing artwork?

Like checking the Cipher wiki article for Micaiah, the two cards that use existing Radiant Dawn artwork ("Series 19 Box Promo" and "Series 4 Box Promo") are promotional cards included in box sets that are meant to give a preview for the upcoming series

Oh yeah, I'm sure it's some kind of special run of cards, because it's all main lords that get it, usually even with their world map or something in the background. It's definitely not a significant % of Cipher's overall library, I was just surprised to see it.

[indigoasis]

17 hours ago, Jotari said:

Spoiler

The quote that comes with this card is  "I am Wrys, a humble hero. I have no time to spare on healing my enemies - only on burying them."

I'm not sure what's more frightening; the fact that this exists, or the fact that there's a legitimate chance for him to show up in Heroes.

Cipher died too soon, man.

[Jotari]

1 hour ago, indigoasis said:

I'm not sure what's more frightening; the fact that this exists, or the fact that there's a legitimate chance for him to show up in Heroes.

Cipher died too soon, man.

It's weird to think that it was only around for five years. Feels much more like an established part of the series. We've almost had as many years post Cipher as we've had Cipher.

[Acacia Sgt]

Nah, let's have Swordmaster!Wrys added instead.

That's basically FE's version of "I'm a healer, but..."

Edited April 6 by Acacia Sgt

[Jotari]

1 hour ago, Acacia Sgt said:

Nah, let's have Swordmaster!Wrys added instead.

That's basically FE's version of "I'm a healer, but..."

From the looks of it, that's a straight up better card than Fallen Wrys. But I still like Fallen Wrys better.

[AzureEmperor]

Not to derail the thread but I never really knew about Cipher and was curious about the inverse of this question, are there any other Cipher OCs that didn't make it into the main series?

[Jotari]

11 minutes ago, AzureEmperor said:

Not to derail the thread but I never really knew about Cipher and was curious about the inverse of this question, are there any other Cipher OCs that didn't make it into the main series?

Yes. There were a total of 8 Cipher OCs and only four (Randal, Emma, Yuzu and Shade), of them appeared in Shadows of Valentia. The other four who haven't been in any of the games are Alice, Valjean, Poe and Niamh (pronounced Neeve, for those who don't know). Shame they weren't the DLC in Three Houses or something. I doubt they'll appear in any games now with Cipher dead.

Edited April 6 by Jotari

[ARMADS!!!]

What the hell? FALLEN WRYS EXISTS?! Maybe I'm being delusional now but with all of the cool premium staff units we've been getting now, I think that he has a chance of being on a fallen banner (though Lena, Nyna and Elice have way more chance than him as a staff unit from Archanea for the fallen banner, I'll choose to be delusional for a bit). From now on I'll be disappointed on the fallen banner each year that Wrys doesn't appear on it (also it'd be specially neat if Daisuke Izuka -the guy that drew the feh arts for Medeus, Formortiis, Fallen Hardin, Validar, Ashnard, Resplendent Surtr, etc (I wouldn't be surprised if he was the one to have drawn this fallen Wrys art from cipher too)- was to make his art for Heroes).

I find it hella weird that some of these characters never got a card, I thought most people liked Harken better than Karel so it's odd that Karel has a card and Harken doesn't, Dart too is someone I always thought was popular enough, and Zeiss too (I mean, he's even required to be recruited and alive for most of the game for you to get the true ending!). Also surprised by the most obvious ones you mentioned like Duessel, Freyja, Duma and actual older Hector. Do they release the decks/packs/whatever they're called by characters that are associated with each others or the lineups are random? (Just asking cause I noticed the absence of both Harken and Isadora and wonder if it's because they were probably gonna be released together if Cipher hadn't been discontinued, or if it's just coincidence).

 Also, seems like FE7's Fire dragon doesn't have one which is sorta understandable since fire dragons are just generic enemies in FE6 but also a bit weird since it's the final boss of FE7, I still wanted he to have one just because he's not votable for CYL.

Also, I love the idea of having Sanaki with both Alondite and Ragnell, there's a card where Lilina wields Armads and it's likely one of my favorite ideas from Cipher (and I've been waiting for it to be used for her Ascended/Rearmed since the concept came up).

[Jotari]

1 hour ago, ARMADS!!! said:

What the hell? FALLEN WRYS EXISTS?! Maybe I'm being delusional now but with all of the cool premium staff units we've been getting now, I think that he has a chance of being on a fallen banner (though Lena, Nyna and Elice have way more chance than him as a staff unit from Archanea for the fallen banner, I'll choose to be delusional for a bit). From now on I'll be disappointed on the fallen banner each year that Wrys doesn't appear on it (also it'd be specially neat if Daisuke Izuka -the guy that drew the feh arts for Medeus, Formortiis, Fallen Hardin, Validar, Ashnard, Resplendent Surtr, etc (I wouldn't be surprised if he was the one to have drawn this fallen Wrys art from cipher too)- was to make his art for Heroes).

I find it hella weird that some of these characters never got a card, I thought most people liked Harken better than Karel so it's odd that Karel has a card and Harken doesn't, Dart too is someone I always thought was popular enough, and Zeiss too (I mean, he's even required to be recruited and alive for most of the game for you to get the true ending!). Also surprised by the most obvious ones you mentioned like Duessel, Freyja, Duma and actual older Hector. Do they release the decks/packs/whatever they're called by characters that are associated with each others or the lineups are random? (Just asking cause I noticed the absence of both Harken and Isadora and wonder if it's because they were probably gonna be released together if Cipher hadn't been discontinued, or if it's just coincidence).

 Also, seems like FE7's Fire dragon doesn't have one which is sorta understandable since fire dragons are just generic enemies in FE6 but also a bit weird since it's the final boss of FE7, I still wanted he to have one just because he's not votable for CYL.

Also, I love the idea of having Sanaki with both Alondite and Ragnell, there's a card where Lilina wields Armads and it's likely one of my favorite ideas from Cipher (and I've been waiting for it to be used for her Ascended/Rearmed since the concept came up).

I'm not an expert at all,  but from what I can gather, cards were not released around any grand theme, but obviously they want new cards to syngerize with each other. So it'd be like a little from column A a little from column B. It seems each series has released from all of the titles (or rather continuities, rip Thracia's individuality), and within those titles there's some kind of connection between units...and then also some completely random choices. The most baffling one for me is the Disciples of Order, generic enemies that don't seem to have support or relevance to any other card, even Ashera herself.