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Competitive Stalling (or, 12 Crit and a Field Nuke Solves All)

Saikyo wants to know one thing: what the hell is taking you so long?

At my local tournaments I am almost always among the first to finish. I’ve never had to go into time even against the most stubborn bastard who refused to bend over and just let me violate every inch of his deck’s orifices and consequently I end up spending a gap between rounds having to inspect the My Little Pony TCG crowd out of boredom and some sort of weird fascination.

You could never get me to play a deck that aims to defend and not specialise in attack instead. It has to at the very least be able to somehow hybridise both strategies. I don’t care what sort of unholy alliance may result, if it’s interesting and fast I’d pick it up. Or I would if School Etoile, Olivia wasn’t as costly as the rates your mum charges.

I aim to win fast and to win decisively. I said before that my biggest problem with traditional the X builds is that they make bad choices that slow their game to manageable levels and that they are actually totally preventable. For me, a deck has to basically do what it does to extremes for it to go anywhere. Unless it’s Granblue, seriously, don’t spam the mill. I don’t want to get into a situation where I have to nickel and dime my opponent in order to achieve what I want, because the longer it takes for me to take off, the longer the opponent has to turn the whole deck-fucking thing on its ear.

You may call this skill-less, and you may be right, but 12 Critical Triggers is one of the steps to solve this problem. Apart from me being able to point several articles from people smarter than I explaining why this lineup just pwns, it’s also because I absolutely need to get ahead in damage as fast as I can to bump off the opponent. If it goes to time, whoever has the least damage takes that round, and I want to make sure I’m not that unfortunate bastard.

Think about it. Imagine you play a deck that plays the defence game in a competitive tournament. Now imagine you play against a similar deck, and neither of you particularly bring the pain that well when the chips are down. In this case, it would simply boil down to whoever’s defence sucked the most to produce a winner, if the judge doesn’t call time on you first. This may not be a deal-breaker as long as you also follow some rules such as 12 Crit and you just so happen to run stuff that would love it, like OTT in Silent Tom, but (and I don’t think this would extend to everyone’s locals) when I see two decks head towards time, it’s usually two decks and two players sort of flailing at each other like two half-blind cats trying to basically chip away at the opponent.

It all boils down to the fact that in order to actually reasonably go anywhere, you have to eat away at the opponent’s hand. And the only way you’re going to be able to do that is to take more cards away than they can actually add to their own collection. Once you hit Grade 3, you’re getting a Draw and a Twin Drive (three if you Stride, but you pitched a card so it still sort of counts) so you get three cards every turn. You have to therefore take away AT LEAST that many cards away to stagnate the opponent’s game. A deck that takes advantage away, coupled with 12 Critical is this ideal taken to the logical extreme; accelerate damage so they have to quickly guard, eat their field so they waste hand trying to maintain their offense, or just not get attacked and conserve advantage that way.

I think the biggest problem is the fact that Bushiroad do not realise that every strategy is not equal. As far as I know Witches for Shadow Paladin seem to be pretty well-liked, but making rear-guards weaker? I know decks that can crap on the column and make it gone FOREVER. I wouldn’t have a problem with it if it could use this to achieve some sort of greater whole, but often it can’t. The recent Gold Paladins, for example. They play the chance game. What for? Shadow Paladin stole the only gimmick that would make it somehow justifiable, so it’s just a sad deck, trying to anticipate something that would fuck up their field, until they bump into Aqua Force or Nova Grappler and they cry.

Of course, that’s only if the Nova Grappler/Aqua Force deck was competently built. A lot of people don’t realise how much they are dicking themselves over running something that doesn’t exactly help as often as they would like, like Draw Triggers. I cannot count the number of games where I thought “you know, if that were a Critical I’d be dead right about now”. Because of that, I’ve seen games where decks that can tank but should in theory dominate get stalled to death because their offense was lacking and it could have been totally preventable.

So if your deck is one that is basically spending every game hoping the opponent won’t be a douchebag, on the off-chance you get paired up against someone who is hoping for the same, all it would basically boil down to is whoever happens to get lucky this time, because all the big boys will curbstomp you into the fucking pavement. It therefore makes more sense to play the non-dominated strategy, the one that can basically do what they can, albeit with a different approach possibly, except they happen to also be able to eat through enemy cards faster than they can hoard them. In a best-of-1, I’m not playing a dominated strategy. Nope, it has to be 12 Critical, card-hoarding hater or there’s no point to the whole thing, like sitting on a flaccid cock.

Request the story on how I doubled Critical-ed my opponent out of every round at a tournament once at saikyocardfighter@outlook.com