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Hand Hoarding Vs. Field Hoarding  

 Why has Oracle Think Tank fared better against retire-decks and Neo Nectar just failed?

You know me. I’d sooner use something actually proactive when aiming to win, since the longer you give the opponent to assemble everything, the longer the opponent has to dick you over in one shot. And since Kagero is the “never let the opponent do anything for long” clan, that’s what I and several other people use. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; you have to tank at a level surpassing everyone else or it’s simply not worth castrating your offense.

However, if you cannot avoid the clans that build up their own physical card advantage because you can’t find any of my recommendations to fight such things anywhere, what is the most feasible way to go about it?

Oracle Think Tank is probably the most viable solution to the whole shebang (or at least it will be so until I find out if anything new for Bermuda Triangle works, anyway). I would say this has several advantages over stuff that hoards cards like Gold Paladin and Neo Nectar. But why, you may ask? They work to mitigate the stuff that’s lost similarly. Only difference is that the advantage is to the field, rather than the hand.

Exactly. And that’s why OTT is better. And is also largely the reason why Murakumo is so shit, but that’s a story for another day so let’s move on.

Adding more to your hand rather than your field presents several advantages. For starters, increasing your hand gives you considerably more freedom as to what to do with what you obtain. Sure, unlike something like Neos it’s totally random, but that can be compensated for by using stuff that’s already in your hand. If it just so happens you can actually search for stuff then that’s more power to you since you definitely know what you’re getting and can plan accordingly.

Allow me to elaborate. By adding more to your hand, anything that you don’t need can be saved for late in the game when you need to guard things, and having a ton of options late game is what has allowed Oracle Think Tank to hold its own decently well. Enough, anyway. Compared to stuff that plonks units straight to the field, the capacity to tank is a whole lot less since unless you call interceptors, you can’t use the shield of anything you summon, and the purpose of the new advantage is already spoken for; you attack or boost with it or it’s replacing a dead card, which isn’t even fucking adding to card advantage unless it’s for another attack. Or if you want, throw down what you draw and swing away like a merry little sledgehammer berserker.

But Saikyo, you say, surely calling stuff from the deck saves you calling cards from the hand so the advantage is basically similar, right? Possibly, which brings me rather neatly to my most important point. Adding more to your hand doesn’t carry a restriction save for deck size, unlike the field which will only allow up to five new cards at most. The later the game progresses, the fuller the field tends to be, so it becomes less potent as the game drags on, unlike increasing the hand which has much more freedom and doesn’t come at the expense of what is currently on the field already. Because of that, the freedom to spam draw-related skills is higher. I mean, something like Takemikazuchi who can grab two cards suddenly, combined with support like Susanoo? +3 right off the bat no matter what the situation currently looks like. Increasing field basically relies on your current field sucking harder than a fucking Dyson, so it’s chance reliant.

That was basically why I advised not relying on the Legend Deck until July, when we have a unit that works to increase hand. The Legend deck was all about calling Grade 1 units, and those tend not to budge anywhere compared to the front row, outside of field-hating decks, anyway. Once the field’s set up, what happens then? You just vanilla your way through until the opponent drops their nuke of choice on your head and you lose.

The other issue I have with decks that almost entirely work to increase advantage this way is that it tends to basically be their only trick, or if not their only trick, reliant on that gambit for any of its other party pieces. Oracle Think Tank at least has a few different flavours of Vanguard such as Amaterasu, who is pretty amazing, to sit on not to mention Silent Tom for an optional finisher. Specific Royal Paladin builds are of course exempt such as any Seekers running Thing Saver but they got all the cool shit anyway, and suddenly building a field from nothing are just blips on the radar like Gildas and Alfred Exiv.

The only kind of tank I would accept is levels of tank that grow to frankly absurd levels. It has to be able to at the very least consistently equal the advantage that the opponent can take away from you every turn. If you’re lucky perhaps they can then perform slower than your deck and you can safely no-pass them for days. That’s why Gold Paladin, Neo Nectar and similar suffer; the users think they are even until the enemy blows through everything all of a sudden and over and over, like the dick-sucking champion of the world.

Ask me about my win-loss ratio to OTT (I mostly win) at saikyocardfighter@outlook.com