Talk:Illyasviel von Einzbern/@comment-65.92.156.36-20170825214358/@comment-28209103-20170827061742

In short what Shoujo Fake said

to deliberate in Arts team it is advised to keep the arts chain going every turn, however even for the best arts team you only have 9 Arts card. First of all you should know that the cards have 3 round cycle; there's 15 cards and you draw 5 every turn so your deck will be reset at 3rd turns, this means there's limited ammount of certain type of card, in this case I'll use Arts as example. (note that different card type have different tendency you want to exploit)

so let's say you're running full Arts card with Medea, Tamamo and Nitocris for 9 Arts cards, now let's say that for the 1st turn you're drawing 4 Arts card and 1 Buster, therefore you only have 5 Arts left on the deck and naturally you can only do another single arts chain. This is where the NP comes in, for Arts team the NP can be counted as another Arts card and such you can use it to cover the missing card. HOWEVER rarely there's servant with NP that can be exploited like that, on top of my head there's only Tamamo, Nitocris, Hans, Medea (and lily), Archuria, Chloe, Scheherazade and BB. To some degree Mashu, Merlin and Waver are counted, however usually waver are saved to chain damage combo, while Merlin usually are paired with Buster type (in this case Illya and Xuan better fit him). Mashu depends a lot on 3rd skill to spam her NP.

In fact it is extremely rare for you to draw exact 3 Arts card for 3 turns so having one of those in your team will help a lot, and as you can see only Hans and Medea is below 4 stars and not limited, Medea in particular charge her NP really fast on top having skill and NP effect that boost her Charge while also able to boost NP gain of allies. If you used her right you can fire any NP every turn to cover her lower output.