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For $20 You Can Have the Best Deck Ever

Saikyo is actually not being ironic here.

Once upon a not very long time ago, there was a college student. The college student scraped together all of his pennies and managed to complete his very first actual deck: a Narukami deck. However, upon putting it in an actual game it promptly got shat on by the other boys’ Spectral Duke decks. Wondering where it all went wrong, the student wandered aimlessly around the land until he met a magical wizard. The wizard told the student that by simply exploiting the mechanical flaws in Vanguard itself, he could rise to the top as a master. This began a three year long career of bullying those who once bullied him, but he entered Vanguard with the intent to do well anyway so it was fine. His Protagonist Journey into Evil was finally completed when he bought the deck that encompassed his twisted ideals: a clan unpopular for its Replacement Scrappy tendencies that just so happened to contain the most broken secret of all.

For anyone who’s been following my Twitter account lately (a big shout out to all three of my followers) I’ve been maining something other than my Kagero lately. And now, I don’t imagine that I’ll be using a whole lot else from this point forward. You know me, I don’t believe in playing a dominated strategy, and since I had it on good authority that this really was better, it’s now my main deck. We were made for each other, honestly. I don’t play in the hopes my opponent is having fun and neither it seems does my new Gold Paladin Grade 1 rush deck.

I had some misgiving about Grade 1 rush in the past. I certainly liked the concept as well as the theory behind it, but knew that functionally, they seemed pretty brittle, and had no out to anything that is outside their control as it aimed to stomp them by turn 4. Any longer than that and they were screwed. There was also the fact that at the time, clan fight forbade certain key cards to be included in it so it wasn’t feasible anyway. Now though, we have a shitton of boosters functioning as attackers, or just awesome boosters. And now, with Generation Break being the most popular decks around, I can honestly say that Sebreeze didn’t solve shit. And Guinevere with Igraine is ridiculous.

To put this into context, I pretty much just stole the list from online (which is technically still fine as it encouraged netdecking anyway) and set myself about trying to find as many opponents as I could. It was frankly astonishing. Apart from some outliers like one guy running Tempest Bolt which was seriously not great for me and some extreme sack for about three matches, I was astonished at how unbalanced the entire deck was for something worth only $20 (or if you live in Brexit Britain, 12 beads and 2 fish). Sitting on Grade 1 and just beating the opponent to death completely shut down almost all GB1 decks and for some that didn’t, they died before they ever got to do anything useful.

The big problem with Generation Break and Legion by extension is that they rely entirely on the opponent doing something. You are never the one to create the right conditions, so you’re sitting on a vanilla vanguard otherwise and you will be screwed. Yes, I know I mentioned Generation Break shouldn’t be a write-off, but that was because at the time, I was subscribing to the same train of thought as everyone else that riding to Grade 3 was pretty much a given, a constant. Now that we have the resources to build Grade 1 rush for virtually every clan I’ve had to change my mind. It’s stupid cheap, it clearly dominates meta and the theory is sound. I won’t turn that down, of course not. I only regret I actually could have built the deck last year and probably dominated everything.

Well, I say that, it’s more to do with the fact that the Liberator G1 rush build specifically have more lasting options than other Grade 1 rush, because of Quintet Walls and Guinevere. That alone puts it at more of an advantage over the others. Can you generate 30k shield for one attack when GB1 locks them into normal vanilla columns? You can’t.

What’s even funnier about the deck is that virtually no-one who’s heard of it actually knows what the fuck to do to deal with it. I blame the collective playerbase as a whole. See, for as long as this game has existed, almost everyone will only accept what the entire community as a whole seems to accept, which is awesome for me as I wreck their casual scrub ass up and down the pavement, but bad for the collective community as it means that very bad ideas tend to be the most prevalent. Unlike something like Magic, there’s absolutely fucking no-one who established any well-founded ground rules for people to follow which means that the playerbase has stagnated and rotted. Skill-wise they’ve gotten a bit more savvy but as long as the anime mindset continues to prevail, it’s never going to reach Yu-Gi-Oh levels of foundation. Almost everyone I’ve gone up against used virtually the same moves to try and offset my own, which unfortunately for them I know doesn’t work. Not the way the deck’s built. Pro tip: don’t attack my rear-guards. It never helps.

And what’s brilliant about this is that there is pretty much no way, realistically, that Bushiroad can actually check decks like this. If they decide to stick restrictions on how many of each Grade we can run, not only is that going to piss off everyone who needs to run more of a certain Grade for whatever reason (like something revolving around Asura Kaiser), but checking the ratio of every deck at a tournament would be far too time consuming and complicated. Same clan, have 16 triggers, check restricted cards AND adhere to ratio? No-one has time for that. They cannot blanket-ly ban certain cards either because G1 rush is really easy to adapt. Any booster that grants power or functions perfectly well as an attacker would suffice pretty well. G0 rush isn’t something you can ban.

I therefore urge all my readers to raise awareness for Gold Paladin G1 rush and to take it to as many tournaments as you can, even high-profile ones. If nothing else, watching the people who rarity-whored their entire deck getting their faces wrecked by a $20 deck would be fucking hilarious. It’d be like David vs Goliath, if David got to pilot a Gundam that could melt giant flesh upon contact.

Ponder if I can actually afford to lose any more friends over this deck at saikyocardfighter@outlook.com

I have a Twitter account now. Drop me a line if you really have nothing better to do!