This Space
For Rent

How’s Ren’s New Deck Holding Up?

Are you REALLY ready for a tournament with only this? Saikyo finds out.

In light of the Team League in England happening basically this weekend I decided it would be a somewhat appropriate time to talk about one of the releases we receive this June the 19^th. I can’t really ramble on about Fighter’s Collection (I’ll let the COTD reviews speak for me) and the Messiah deck won’t be finished until July and is therefore not entirely interesting enough to talk about.

People have been praising the new Legend Deck as being one of the best options to have for a tournament-going wannabe who seems to be a little on the cash-strapped side. Some have even been so bold as to claim you don’t need to change a single card and it could still win.

Really? That seems to be a bit presumptuous, would you not think? And I’m not saying this because “anything can beat anything hurr durr” is a fucking stupid argument, although that certainly does have relevance in this instance. I will not deny that there are some pretty nifty looking combos here that would hold up decently well competitively, but I can’t really advocate suddenly swanning up to Nationals with a deck like this until G Booster 3 for a few reasons.

The primary issue I had when actually using the deck was it severely lacked the bite it needed when it mattered. Phantom Blaster “Diablo” was basically the sum of your entire effort and to be honest, while it is functionally not a bad finisher, it has basically no way to maintain the momentum should the opponent survive. Diablo only has at best two shots, and you have to maintain your own card advantage relative to your opponent’s for the sake of guarding. And that sucks massive donkey nuts when Blaster Dark Diablo has no other function other than to Stride some more. Into what? Grim Recruiter or that Fighter’s Collection guy? You want something a bit more decisive than that.

And that’s what I found annoying about it. It’s hoarding advantage a la standard Royal Paladin, but compared to something like Kagero that can nuke fast and nuke hard, it can’t maintain enough advantage to tank to respectable levels any faster than a normal field-filling deck and is slow to translate any of it into meaningful advantage until later.

Speed, really, is the most decisive flaw with the entire deck. It cannot explode out of the gate right off the bat and doesn’t really bring any new meaningful advantage that hasn’t already been seen before. Grim Recruiter is basically going to come first (Blizza for those who absolutely feel they must rush to the GB2, which I won’t blame you for since we have no TRUE Stride-enabling G1s yet) and neither provide any REAL incentive for the opponent to worry. Not to mention most of it is restricted to GB1 to actually happen.

I mean, I don’t play Jewel Knights really but at least Swordmy exists for field filling for early rush, you know? Or hell, Seekers have Blaster Blade Seeker so that you don’t spend Early or Mid-Game bored out of your thick skull.

Seriously, until Phantom Blaster actually arrives your main option is Blaster Dark, who doesn’t even try to bring anything new afterwards until GB2 cards like Chronojet Dragon and can’t even provide an on-Stride skill unless you intend to waste 1 Phantom Blaster on the very first turn, and your fail-con G3 Badhabh Caar who does nothing to fuel any of the Blaster Support in here until Phantom Blaster MAKES it happen. The slack is entirely picked up by the RGs and they don’t do anything really without external set-up. So there’s consistency issues here, certainly, and they don’t get fixed until July when a better fail-con and G-Unit come into focus.

No, I wouldn’t try to actually use this competitively until later when there’s other established choices. It’s too slow until support in G-Booster 3 makes it acceptably faster, not to mention tankier, and it seems a bit too vanilla for what it is trying to accomplish overall. Against a fast Kagero or other rear-guard hating deck it will struggle against everyone else who actually spent money to perfect their card-pool and can take more than you can gain (see my Card Advantage article for clarification). Suffice to say you’re basically getting this for the foot in the door to G Booster 3, or just getting Phantom Blaster “Diablo” to run in your old Revengers build because Phantom Blaster “Abyss” exists.

Basically, the only reason I could see this doing well is if almost goddamn everybody enters with this and enough of them squeak by on chance to get rid of other decks. Just another reason not to use tournament results as proof of anything good.

By the way, I’m aware of the fact I still intend to enter this year regardless, so don’t bother trying to point that out.

Let me laugh at your ignorance by submitting tournament results from Japan to me at saikyocardfighter@outlook.com.