Leader Analysis: Krishna

Starting a new PAD related blog to talk about the meta and a leader's placement in the meta, as well as analyze the strengths and weaknesses of a leader. I will largely be using Setsu's aggregate tier list (https://setsupad.wordpress.com/) as a basis for which leaders to analyze, but I will do them on newly announced or upcoming cards as well for first thoughts and such.

The first leader I want to analyze is what I believe to be the gatekeeper or standard of what a leader should be to be regarded as meta: Krishna. Upon Ult Krishna's release, many parallels were made to compare Krishna to Xiang Mei, as they are both fire row leads. It was pretty quickly determined that Krishna would be stronger than Xiang Mei due to his non-restrictive subpool, inclusion of guaranteed OE+, and no heart match requirement.

SUBPOOL: Krishna's leader skill only requires that you use fire cards, which means the sub pool can be literally anything fire. Krishna can be run with either TPAs or rows, but most teams will want to move towards rows to round out damage. 

POTENTIAL: Krishna's potential is limited by how many relevant row subs you can bring to the team, while maintaining a balance between utility and power subs. Consistency will always depend on your orb match skills, but Krishna can do fairly well for higher tiered content. 

EFFICIENCY: Krishna's orb efficiency is not the greatest, due to needing at least 9 fire orbs to fully activate, though 3 separate orb matches do decently. If running a TPA Krishna, 8 orbs may be sufficient to carry damage but as mentioned above, most teams will move towards being row oriented. A row + 3 match will work for most things, however, but often needs to have an active to guarantee that, or use board manipulation and stall to get those orbs, which may or may not be an option. 

STABILITY: A static multiplier to HP and RCV make Krishna extremely stable, with a slight weakness to gravities and poison, and also to being bound by god, devil or fire binds which exist pretty frequently in arena. Having a variable multiplier also helps in dealing with good control, and using a leader-immune badge or having unbindable bind clear can keep Krishna healthy in most cases.