Haka's Savage Mana

[lynkfox]

little bit of a thread necro here... but I would assume its Toxic because he's absorbing energy from Badguys, and so that energy is Bad. Just my 2 cents

[TakeWalker]

It's toxic because he eats his enemies souls and then farts them back out. :B

[Trajector]

The Maori had lots of poisoned weapons, didn’t they? That would be toxic damage.

[PeterCHayward]

I'm not aware of the Maori using any poisoned weapons, and google doesn't show any results for it either.

[Killswitch]

According to my findings, they would sometimes use poison tipped bolts/arrows.

[PeterCHayward]

Bolts? Like...for a crossbow?

I am now verily intrigued to hear more about these Maori weapons.

[phantaskippy]

They also used lasers made of vaporized lead.  They'd burn a toxic hole right through you.

[jesse_garcia_87]

I'd always imagined it like Haka just builds up a huge amount of sweat from fighting, then headlocks the one target and does the damage just by having the enemie's head near his super-powerful armpits. I know I'd be out of a fight if anyone ever did THAT to me.

[gater]

It’s the life essence of defeated villains with which he empowers his physical strength. That essence is evil, making his attacks toxic to living things. How is this confusing to anyone?

[FrivYeti]

Bit of a hostile way to resurrect a nine-year old thread, but welcome to the forums.

To answer your question: the reason this was confusing to people was that it did not seem to match up with Haka’s power set as typically presented in the game and the surrounding lore, and indeed your interpretation wasn’t quite what the developers had in mind.

When the Haka episode of The Letters Page first released, C&A confirmed this:

When he takes the life of something, there’s a bit of void (not Void) that’s left and that he can draw in and store and eventually unleash on a foe as a debilitating attack. He typically uses this attack in the form of a shout or battle cry, but it’s not the force of the sound itself that’s doing the damage (thus not Sonic as the type), but it’s this accumulated “death energy” that he’s releasing, which is where the Toxic part comes in. He doesn’t even really do this intentionally as he’s just interpreting it as this mana concept given his cultural background.

It wasn’t that the energy he was absorbing was evil, it was just that death-energy was being treated as Toxic rather than Infernal for the purposes of the card.

Ultimately, this capability didn’t end up matching the ways in which Haka developed as a character, not the least because he doesn’t actually kill most of the foes he defeats, which (along with the awkward slightly-racist nature of the card) was why it was removed from Definitive Edition entirely.

[fjur]

@FrivYeti

why it was removed from Definitive Edition entirely.

Except, I’m not so sure it was. Rather, I think Savage Mana was actually substantially reworked into Definitive Haka’s Taonga Mana card. Indeed, neither the effect nor the name is the same, but both names share the word mana and the new card’s effect is somewhat reminiscent of the old—it still represents Haka drawing strength from victory, but now fits with him better both mechanically (it synergises with his card drawing and discarding mechanics) and narratively (he’s now longer killing people and absorbing their death energy and then doing a death shout), in my view. Plus, it removes a bunch of wonky interactions where he would, e.g. tuck the entire Organization under the card.

[LonelyMan]

Or even better, the cult of Gloom. Organization at least will always have the Operative and her one shots, but Gloomweaver’s original deck can be reduced to nothing but one Ongoing and three copies of a One-Shot which now reads entirely “Play another villain card”. Apparently Haka’s stomach is the true Realm of Discord.

[Rabit]

Savage Mana was ridiculous against The Matriarch… “What birds?”

[FrivYeti]

Oh, that’s fair. I think of it as removed because, as you said, Taonga Mana plays on drawing strength from victory, rather than absorbing the lifeforce of his defeated enemies, but it’s definitely the endpoint of the design shift, yeah.