Crystal Ball

### Text

When you cast a spell directly on a character, add a spell to your shop and you can cast another spell this round.

**Crystal Ball** is a treasure card. It allows all spells that target characters to not consume your spell for the turn, and instead cause the shop to sell another spell.

## Strategy

Despite how it may appear at first glance, **Crystal Ball** is one of the most powerful treasures in the entire game. **Crystal Ball** is the only thing in the game that allows you to reliably cast multiple spells in one turn, which is practically required for the Mages build.

**Crystal Ball** lets you chain multiple spells in a turn, allowing you to invest more heavily into spells to buff your characters. Beware that on its own, this comes at the expense of money to buy new characters, and while you can invest in old characters up to a point, many endgame boards have many level 5 and 6 characters. Mixawizzle and True Love's Kiss mitigate this to a point, but it remains quite expensive and lengthy to transform your characters into higher level characters.

**Crystal Ball** does have some incidental value even if you aren't investing too much in old characters, letting you use Feed the Kraken and The End more nimbly. Once you have reached level 6 and have characters that really make good use of stats - Good Boy, Shoulder Faeries (or more accurately, the characters they get their stats from), Ashwood Elm, and Echowood being prime examples. Still, it's a balancing act as to how much you want to use this treasure.

Magic-oriented heroes like Merlin and Potion Master appreciate this treasure's ability to make the most out of their abilities. Peter Pants is almost entirely reliant on Crystal Ball to win, as he can find it extremely quickly due to having so many level 3 characters in the shop, and he can find many copies of **Mixawizzle** and **True Love's Kiss** to get characters that are above level 3.

### "HatBall"

Where **Crystal Ball** is at its best is with cost-reduction effects to let you truly spam spells - the most iconic of which is Merlin's Hat. (**Crystal Ball** and **Merlin's Hat** together is combination known to the community as "HatBall".) However, note that Moonsong Horn and Aon, if you can get it Slaying, are also capable of reducing spell costs for a similar effect. There are multiple ways to defray the costs of many spells, so if you intend to pursue a heavy magic strategy, **Crystal Ball** is worth picking over **Merlin's Hat**.

Once you have **Crystal Ball** and a good cost-reduction ability, your spell casting ability expands immensely, and you can spend entire turns simply looking for spells to buff your current characters. Since you are doing so many things in your turn, you may find yourself running out of time, and you need to act quickly; just don't forget to spend a little time on what characters you actually want, and what formation they should be in! Mages are ideal as they will scale with each spell you cast, which also means you do not need to spend much money replacing them - Spell Weaver and **Aon** can become endgame characters, and Scion of the Storm, while expensive, scales with spells you spent before finding him, meaning you aren't in a rush to. Also, try to maintain a good, legal target for each of the cheap targetted spells, as you cannot cast them (and so do not get the new spell in the shop) unless they have a valid target. For example, having a Treant is good because Expo-Natural Growth is a targeted spell. You should try to cast True Love's Kiss and Mixawizzle when they appear to gain access to higher-level characters, though you may need to be creative on how to use them well, as a "Hatball" strategy tries not to buy too many high-cost characters outside of **Scion of the Storm**.

The "HatBall" combo can be topped off with several other mage-related treasures to produce a potentially unstoppable board:

* Big Book of Spells means you'll find your targeted spells more reliably
* Potion Master's Cookbook adds a permanent +2/+2 to each cast
* Forking Rod doubles your output per spell *and* gives you two more spells each time you cast
	+ Wand of Weirding can do the same thing as Forking Rod but it won't usually be better since hopefully you're mostly casting spells that cost 2 or less
* Black Prism gives you up to 11 spells for the price of 1, allowing for insane scaling (and if you're brave enough to **Mixawizzle** or **True Love's Kiss** with it, some really wacky scenarios).

## Notes

* If a spell is cast multiple times via Forking Rod, Wand of Weirding, or Black Prism, a spell will be added to the shop for each spell cast, up to the Shop's capacity of 7 entities in-shop. If **Crystal Ball** is copied via Mimic or Celestial Tiger, multiple spells can be added per cast. With enough cost reduction, this dramatically improves your ability to find targetted spells without rolling the shop, boosting the number of spells that can be cast per round.
* Most targeted spells lose their animations when you have **Crystal Ball**, helping you potentially cast many of them in a turn.
* **Crystal Ball** will add a spell and allows casting another spell if Genie's Wish produces a targeted spell.
* **Crystal Ball** works on targeted Spells cast from hand due to a Hero power.

## Gallery

*Crystal Ball* card art*Crystal Ball* card art
## History

 June 18, 2021 | Released in *Storybook Brawl's* Early Access launch.