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Why Overlords Are Like Overbearing Parents 

We hate ‘em, but Kagero players will never survive without them.  

So predictably I jumped onto the Overlord bandwagon faster than my last trampoline party, and I’m fairly sure that I’m not going to meet anyone who gives two shits about Blademaster either way. Save for people who built it for fun, I don’t think anyone has stuck with Blademaster at all.

So why is it then? Why is it that Kagero players always end up returning to Overlord? Like a mum that simply won’t leave you the fuck alone to drink or buy porn, they hang over your head forever and ever.  And yet you still can’t bring yourselves to get rid of them assuming the aim is to go somewhere. God knows I’ve tried.

I suppose part of the reason is largely down to the state of Kagero as a whole. What I enjoy the most about Kagero and anything similar that can control a board is that it hasn’t got a lot of general weaknesses that can be quickly exploited. I mean, getting rid of problems as well as maintaining pressure is as good a strategy as any. The problem with almost any Kagero deck that doesn’t involve Overlord however is that that’s pretty much all it does. Yeah, I guess you can argue in favour of decks that can do one thing very well and still succeed, but let me explain.

Kagero’s issue is that against anything that can recoup its own card advantage equally well, as well as combine it with something else, is going to have a small advantage, particularly if their own gambit is generally more intense. Looking at Blademaster decks as an example, it’s all about retiring and combining it with a few cards that can power up columns. Columns, however, are pretty much Blademaster’s only source of real soft advantage, but unless that can be combined with something else like Criticals, each column is only worth one damage. I’m not saying that Blademaster is by any means poor, but it’ll basically go 50:50 against superior call decks and I’m assuming that you want to push your win rate a bit higher than that (60% is what it’ll take to convince me, personally).

That’s one of the advantages Overlord decks have compared to Blademaster. It’s almost as good at board wipe to a point that it’s pretty negligible: hell, does Blademaster even have Defeat Flare Dragon? I don’t think so. On top of that, its own soft advantage is a lot easier to control, now that the Legend deck is a thing. What do I mean by easier? Well, Magia and Hollow, and anything similar. It’s no secret they counter board wipe, to a point. (Wish they’d get better finishers.) But in the case of some of Blademaster’s best cards, they cannot gain oodles of meaningful power without first retiring rear-guards, and if they don’t have any, they’re stuck being vanilla, which sucks considering I haven’t seen too many Blaze cards that are so pants-jizzingly amazing that it excuses all of that. Overlord decks in comparison only need new Nehalem with the far easier condition of simply attacking and if you’re feeling haxxy, new Tahr, which makes 27k even without something like the Ace.

Speaking of the Ace, that’s another thing going for it, and that’s pretty much why even Blademaster-focused decks need to start with new Undeux and have the Legend as backup. I mentioned before that both can do columns, slightly easier in Overlord’s case, but the Ace is pretty much why Overlords are pretty much the most realistic Kagero deck. In a reasonably pure Blademaster deck, its best G Units are basically retiring more cards or Nouvelle Vague L’Express, and to be frank there is absolutely no reason why Overlords cannot run those options as well given we have 16 cards in our G-Zone now. The Ace is your best source of soft advantage in the event there isn’t anything worth murdering right off the bat. It’s supposed to be used in conjunction with Nouvelle to provide two sources of pressure on the opponent’s hand. That’s what Overlords have that Blademaster doesn’t: versatility.

What I’m getting at here is that marking exactly what needs to be murdered compared to just murdering cards without discrimination is what should be considered. I’m not really for murdering a column of cards if all it was doing was attacking me for normal numbers and was doing pretty much nothing else. You need to resort to a really good source of soft advantage because of how predictably costed hard advantage is, which can sometimes work against you. When fighting a deck where rear-guard threats are few, you simply murder the few and watch as they can’t replace them with anything just as good or better. Only when there’s something actually dangerous like Commander Laurel or Silent Tom should you need to use retirement skills, because I’m pretty sure the rest aren’t doing anything. Otherwise, something like Blademaster is looking at Counterblast 5 for a +5 hard, a bit more allowing for Root Flare or similar, and you can do better than that.

That’s the main issue with retiring/locking/warping as a whole: it’s only really good with eliminating problems proactively, and sometimes that isn’t enough if the few rear-guards can compensate with either columns or more cards. Denial Griffin was frankly a godsend to me because now I could cockblock problems while they were 1. a visible threat and 2. happening. In the middle of the Battle Phase, the opponent usually can’t do anything to fix the field up before their next attack and so you’ve saved yourself some advantage I timed correctly. But again, Denial Griffin can be happily run in any Kagero deck, so you may as well shoot for the one that’s the most practical: Overlords.

And what’s probably more depressing about the whole thing is that in order to make a different flavour of Kagero that basically isn’t just retiring on top of more retiring, you would have to introduce a good reason to run it over something else. Short of a Kagero deck also having incredibly good draw power as well as a competent enough finisher, I cannot think of anything else it COULD do, because there’s more clans than there are mechanics. Overlords continue to get all the support because they were the ones who got the skills that were the least tangentially connected to whatever they had in mind. Or it was just absurdly strong nostalgia bait. So there you have it. Overlord decks continue to be pretty much the only one that matters because they can do almost all of Blademasters tricks, with some unique and better tricks of its own. Happy? Oh wait, as a general rule people hate meta. No, of course you’re not happy. What am I saying…

I want a unit that seals calling through skills. Call me a fucking idiot at saikyocardfigher@outlook.com

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