Failure, failure, endless failure. Poor Asta has lived a life of failure, born without magic power in a world where even children can weave mana into fireworks with their hands. He has survived through pure strength and grit, using humble elbow grease for tasks most people will use fancy magic for.
This is a world where even farmers will use magic just so they don’t have to hold their tools by hand! His goal is thus utterly impossible, as how does one become the Wizard King if he’s not a wizard? As he fails to get a magic grimoire during his failure of a graduation ceremony at the local wizardry school, his rival and good friend smugly leaves victorious, until a thief tries to take his grimoire.
Ever the loyal friend, Asta tries to fight the dangerous magical thief using nothing but his bare fists, but to no avail. That is until a dinged-up grimoire chooses him, one that does not require magic, but actively burns magic out with a spell befitting a musclehead like Asta: He can now cast SWORD TO THE FACE! Welcome to Black Clover: M.
Black Clover M is a gacha game and turn-based RPG with a big emphasis on the usefulness of buffs and debuffs. It tells the tale of a certain Asta, a kid who dreams of being the Wizard King and uses a giant magic-draining sword to fight mages in a world where he is the only one without magic.
While the story is pretty typical as far as fantasy anime goes, it does the job and the actual gameplay needs quite a good number of brain cells to get past once things get rolling. We hope this beginner’s guide for Black Clover M helps you on Asta’s adventure to become the Wizard King.
HIDEOUT
The Black Bulls Hideout is unlocked once you get past part of the early storyline. This is Asta’s home base and has quite a few amenities with which to get more items via crafting or dismantling things.
-Charmy
Food And Fish
Go to Charmy (the tiny little doofus) in the Black Bulls hideout and you can cook food! You will need ingredients to do so, which you can buy from area merchants found all over the world, along with Fishing in the overworld maps where ponds are found. Food gives you buffs that improve battle rewards such as Gear drop rates, Yul drop rates, EXP gains, and Bond gains.
Related: Black Clover M Tier List: Ranking Each Character in the Game
Fish regularly, learn the recipes, and buy the ingredients needed for the food you want to get the drops you want. You can craft some food items as more powerful versions of themselves if you have certain extra ingredients in your inventory like Salt or Charmy’s Special Sauce. Always take some food for the road, particularly anything that boosts Yul gains, Gear drops, or Bond gains for grinding quickly and easily.
-Gordon
Skill Page Salvage
Go to Gordon (the gloomy creepy stick figure) in the Black Bulls hideout to Salvage Skill Pages that you don’t use. You will be given Skill Minerals and Skill Shards if you do so, which you can spend in the Shop’s Skill Page Salvage Exchange Center for Skill Page gacha tickets of varying quality.
-Grey
Item Conversion
Go to Grey (The ominously wide smoker) for Item Conversion. Item Conversion allows you to convert multiple pieces of lower tier Talent Seeds, Gear Upgrade Stones, or Accessory Upgrade Stones into fewer pieces of superior such stones. This is very important if you need rare Upgrade stones and other similar items.
-Vanessa
Design Accessory
The Design Accessory function allows you to craft accessories using spare Accessories along with Abrasives. If you have old Accessories you don’t use anymore, this is a good way to get rid of them as you have a chance to get a better one to replace the old junk you spend.
Disassembly
Disassembling gear converts them into Accessory Upgrade Stone Powder and Gear Upgrade Stone Powder. These powders are needed to craft Accessory Upgrade stones in the next section.
Craft Upgrade Stone
Here you can use Accessory Upgrade Stone and Gear Upgrade Stone Powder to craft Upgrade Stones. These are needed to upgrade Gear and Accessories. The higher the level of the upgrade, the better materials you need, so you need the high-tier stuff to upgrade high-tier Gear and Accessories which have higher maximum levels.
Design Gear
Design Gear allows you to craft new Gear using old Gear with Yul, and you can base the creation either on the Gear’s tile shape or its base stats. You might want to craft based on stats and simply deal with the inventory finagling game later, since the act of building sets is important and you will typically be able to fill spaces together provided you don’t mix long sixes and wide sixes together too often.
Craft Gear
Craft Gear allows you to use Materials to craft a certain set of Gear every season. This gear is typically of a very high tier, UR or LR, and as such this process is highly expensive and requires a ton of grinding. If you hate dealing with percentages though, this is where you go.
CHALLENGES
Challenges are your place to grind, with Normal Challenges your primary source of resources and Advanced Challenges being a place to get harder resources at certain times and seasons. It is usually a good idea to spend spare stamina in the Normal Challenges by picking a mission you are sure to beat and then using Auto-combat to grind it while doing something else.
Normal Challenges
The Normal Challenges tab is where you will go to grind most resources: The Evergreen Forest drops EXP Potions. The Dungeon drops Gear. The Memory Realm drops Realm Currency. The Hall of Illusions drops Gear Upgrade Materials and Yul.
While the Normal Challenges on the left of the screen can be easily ground as long as you have Stamina and have a similar layout, the ones on the right side of the screen tend to always have some form of limitation beyond your stamina, like how the Memory Realm needs tickets to enter or the Hall of Illusions does not drop rewards when fighting previous levels.
Limited Challenges
Limited Challenges are exactly that, limited challenges that have a set amount of attempts, and are divided into Daily Challenges and a single Seasonal Challenge. These Challenges usually have much better drops than Normal Challenges but tend to be more difficult and occasionally even come with their own storylines. Rewards are based on difficulty, and losses don’t spend attempts, so don’t hesitate to try out the hard challenges unless they’re so blatantly above your paygrade that you can see it at a glance.
ADVENTURE JOURNAL
Your Adventure Journal points you toward tasks you can do in the general vicinity of the map you’re currently in. If you aren’t sure what to do in an area, you can check here for tasks.
Citizen Requests
Citizen Requests are mission chains that allow you to do things for certain citizens in the area you are currently adventuring in. Each Citizen has a chain of missions, and finishing one Citizen’s chain of missions unlocks another pair of Citizens for their mission chains to be finished.
Memory Shards
Memory Shards can be found in each overworld map, and this button tells you which shards can be found in a certain area. Collecting all the memory shards for a Mage gives you that Mage’s own unique Skill Page. You can find the shards at a chance simply by walking around an area and tapping the Explore Button when it appears. You can also find them in chests in the zoomed-in walkable areas like Kikka Castle Town.
Bond Patrol
Bond Patrols have increased Bond drops, allowing you to rank up your Mage’s Bond levels for extra rewards. You usually need to rank up your Mage’s Bond level before ranking up their Rarity, as certain Bond levels are prerequisites for certain Rarity levels. High enough Bond Levels is also how you get Costumes for your Mages, so go here if you want to unlock their fancy outfits. Certain Bond Patrols drop a secondary resource in addition to Bond, which is dependent on location.
Fishing
Fishing is a way to get Food Ingredients and Stamina for free, though you only have 6 attempts per day. The faster you hook a fish in, the better the reward, but the timing has to be extremely perfect for the highest rewards. One good thing about Fishing is that Fish isn’t the only thing you can catch here, but other ingredients such as Potatoes and Onions. However, we have to question the safety of using a random, soggy, possibly mold-blighted potato you fished out of a pond, even if you cook it really hard.
TACTICS
As a turn-based RPG, Black Clover M will eventually throw enemies at you that you can’t just grind past or cheese by using over-leveled Assist Mages. As such, knowing how to think your way through battle is important. All the more since the Auto-combat AI is so dumb not even the Auto Preset function helps in any fight that poses an actual threat to your team.
Mage Partnering
Certain Mages have Partnered Attacks, where if you bring their friend, they can do team attacks together for 6 Mana off one Mage, but putting their pair skill on cooldown for both. Note that for this to work, you need to have them either in the first two slots or the final two slots on your team: Mages do not count as being partnered if they’re split between the two halves of the team!
Inspect Enemies and Focus Down Dangerous Targets
If an enemy deals a lot of damage in a single turn, kill them first in your next run! Very few enemies use taunts except in PVP. Some enemies also have annoying skills, such as healing, buffing their buddies, summoning more enemies, or causing debuffs and stuns. While the Role indicator helps identify enemy threats, you are much better off reading their skills or watching them fight for the next time you see them.
Then prioritize and focus dangerous enemies into the dirt, especially the ones that die quickly yet cause loads of problems if left alive too long. You can inspect foes before battle by tapping their icons in the battle preparation screen, and during battle by tapping the Turn indicator to the right of the screen. In fact, sometimes focusing deadly enemies down might be more important than matching the rock-paper-scissors elements, though be careful in such cases.
Use Support Skills First
Opening with Support skills, whether it be damage buffs, defensive shields, or other stat boosts, is typically a good idea. The earlier you get say, a damage buff, the faster you can get the mission done overall. As for more defensive skills like shields, you have the option to either use them immediately so you can make it to the boss with your HP bar pretty high, or time them right before a boss enemy’s ult so it blunts that attack’s teeth.
Save Heals For Later
Healers are valuable members of the team, and healing spells in the game lean toward being powerful but quite slow. Case in point, Mimosa’s team heal is her ult, her single target heal has a long cooldown, and her basic attack’s healing (which targets whoever is lowest in HP) is strong enough to dampen damage if the enemy has a habit of constantly switching targets.
As such, save her skills for really bad situations, like say one of your Mages being severely injured, or if you’re unable to knock out or stun a boss before it uses its ult. That way, you can erase the damage done by powerful enemy attacks while your healer contributes damage numbers to the battle, as even healers deal loads of damage if they match the rock-paper-scissors weakness of their target!
Basic Attacks Aren’t Basic
Basic Attacks tend to not be as simple as they look: While they have no cooldown, they aren’t necessarily weaker than Skills. Case in point, the starter Mage Asta has a wide attack skill that hits the whole enemy team and can delete two buffs at a 40% chance, but his Basic Attack is what you use to do real damage vs single targets, as it hits much harder than his skill.
You also have as an example Mimosa whose basic attack has a surprisingly strong heal to go with her damaging leaf ball attack (roughly half her single target dedicated healing spell, which is funny since this basic skill lacks a cooldown AND does damage!).
And Noelle’s second skill shield doesn’t count for much unless you also pair it with her Basic Attack, which comes with a hefty DEF bonus for whoever has the least HP on the team to go with her water bolt. Even if a skill is ready, it may be better sometimes to just use a basic attack since they’re always guaranteed to do damage.
Check the Turn Phases for Kill Priorities
To the right of the screen is the Turn Indicator, showing you who is in line to attack. The line goes down, so whoever is at the bottom is going to move first. A Mage’s Speed stat determines whether or not they attack first when compared to everyone else’s speed stat, allied or hostile. If you can get away with it, try to kill or stun enemies right as their turn arrives, so they’re not able to do harm.
Auto Is Limited, Even With Presets
The game’s auto-combat is fairly dumb, and the Auto preset system is based on turn number rather than situational context. You can’t tell the AI to use say, Mimosa’s ultimate heal only when enough allies are at so-and-so HP but instead, tell them only to use it on the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd turn, whether or not your team is at full HP!
As such, reserve Auto-combat for easy fights or grinding runs, and use Manual to command your team with precision during dangerous fights. Especially against bosses, as good tactics (or at least having more brains than the AI) can let your team punch above their weight.
Power, Sense, and Technique
The game has a simple rock-paper-scissors mechanic that can help with team building. Power frightens good Sense, Sense outsmarts practiced Technique, and Technique outfinesses raw Power. Hitting a target your Mage is strong against improves the attacker’s crit rate by 10% and ATK by 20%, and both go down by the same number for the attacker when attacking a target they are weak against.
An advantaged attacker also gains 1 SP upon hitting one or more targets, though NOT 1 SP per target. You will know if an attack is weak or strong by checking the arrows on a target’s head, though once you can set up several teams it’s worth knowing the enemy composition carefully so you can send in a hard counter against them.
MAGE TYPES
Knowing the kind of Mages you have is important to make a balanced team. Thankfully, each Mage has a handy dandy indicator of the type of Mage they are: Defenders, Attackers, Debuffers, Healers, and Supporters. You have 4 slots in a team so pick your mains wisely, though the writer is partial to healers and attackers.
Defender
Defenders are the squad’s tough guy, able to take hits for the team. You’re usually hoping the enemy goes after this guy first, which tends to happen as Defenders often have a taunt skill. The protagonist, Asta, is a Defender who can clean debuffs from himself and delete buffs from the enemy, but only his basic skill and ult does any noticeably heavy damage.
Attacker
Attackers are your main damage dealers, able to hit very hard, but not able to take hits back. They typically need Supporters and Healers to keep them alive and are usually the main priority for healing whenever a situation goes badly. They can usually do enough damage to hurt even enemies they are weak against, but will crumple against such foes should they hit back, unlike Defenders.
Debuffer
A second form of Attacker, Debuffers can hit harder than Defenders but not Attackers, at least in one blow. That being said, they often cause Debuffs, which can range from poison and burning to defense reduction and even stuns. You can use these guys either to soften the enemy up for Attackers.
Supporter
Supporters give buffs and shields, and Defensive Supporterss in particular are useful for bossfights as you can time their defensive skills to come out right before a boss throws out an ultimate skill. They can raise damage power, give a Mage some shields, and buff certain stats, among other things. You’re hoping these guys get their turn first most of the time for yourself and not the enemy, so if you have any turn that can prevent enemy Supporters from using their skills first such as speed reductions or early stuns, slam them with it.
Healer
Healers heal, and are the only real source of healing in the game since your Mages don’t exactly have HP potions to chug. As such, having a Healer is vital, especially since most battles last 3 waves or even more, and while shields, buffs, and debuffs don’t persist between waves, HP does! They usually have a basic attack that heals a low HP ally while dealing damage, and a pair of skills for healing.
Sometimes, it may be better to use the attack as it heals too anyway, and that way you can save their bigger healing spells for dangerous situations, such as if you forgot to put up a shield for the Boss’ ult and yet your whole team survived, albeit with the last drops of their HP left. Keep your Healer alive at all costs, especially in the early parts of the fight!
MAKING MAGES STRONGER
Powering up your Mages via grinding is a time-honored RPG tradition, and it is no different in Black Clover M. You can level your Mage up as a whole Mage or by their individual skills, though there are many roadblocks in the way of doing simple leveling, so here they are. You can inspect a Mage by pressing the small magnifying glass icon on their portrait, and from there, you have access to the various ways to make them stronger.
Leveling
Leveling is the most obvious way to strengthen your units: Just shove a ton of EXP Potions in the general direction of your Mages and boom, their stats are improved. This isn’t a very large hurdle as EXP Potions are very easy to come by via the Evergreen Forest Normal Challenge, which you can repeat until you run out of stamina. The real trouble comes with the other ways of powering up, which often act as a wall for leveling up!
Equipment
Equipment can give a sizeable boost to your units. Each unit has a set amount of space to carry gear with, and each piece of gear can either take up 4 slots in a square, 6 slots in a horizontal rectangle, or 6 slots in a vertical rectangle. Gear also comes with set bonuses, where equipping a set together gives an extra boost, usually for every 2 items of the same set of 4.
Space your gear carefully, and Rank Up your units to increase their available gear space. Don’t use Auto-Equip as it neither cares for Gear Sets nor space efficiency: It will slap Gear into spaces haphazardly, often leaving a few empty spaces that can be easily filled with some rearrangement.
Bonds and Rarityboosting
The main hurdle you suffer for powering your Mages up early on is Rarity boosting. Each Mage starts at a certain rarity (R, SR, SSR), but they can be upgraded to higher rarities, all the way to LR for any Mage. The higher a Mage’s current rarity, the higher their maximum Level, going up by 20 for every Rarity improvement.
To do this, you need to rank your Mages up both in their Bond Level and then with Shared [Fragments] via Ranking Up. High Bond Levels are needed to access higher Rarities for a Mage, and you increase Bond levels by using that Mage in combat or giving them bond gifts, which unlike most Gacha games with bond levels aren’t Mage-specific, but class-specific.
Enhancement
If you get duplicates from the Gacha, you can use those to raise a Mage’s star level. This improves their overall stats, making them stronger. Starring your Mage up unlocks a passive for them at Enhancement 2, and boosts the passive up again at Enhancement 5.
Skill Upgrades
You may have been leveling your Mages up, but you notice that supportive or healing skills in particular aren’t doing as much as you expected. You probably forgot to upgrade their Skills! You can go to the Skills page and select individual skills to upgrade them.
This makes them stronger but requires Skill Upgrade Materials from the Hall of Illusions along with a notable amount of Yul. You should prioritize which skills you normally rely on for certain tactics, though you can’t go wrong with upgrading a Mage’s Basic attack if you’re unsure.
Skill Pages
You can also power up a single skill using Skill Pages. Skill Pages give passive buffs, and if matched properly with their owner, give specific skills an extra special effect such as say additional attacks, healing, or buffs and debuffs where there were none before.
You upgrade the Skill Page by starring them up with duplicates, as they and Mages both drop from the gacha. While some Skill Pages are useable by all Mages, some Skill Pages are only useable by certain Mage classes, and matching a Mage’s own unique Skill Page with them is what you’re usually gunning for.
And this marks the end of our Black Clover M Beginner’s Guide. We hope this helps you throw Asta all the way to the Wizard King’s throne. If you have your own tips, leave a comment below!