Orange Temple Strike – Babidi Saga

Uncommon – Card #78

Physical Combat

Physical attack doing +2 life cards of damage. If successful and your opponent has more Non-Combats in play than you, your opponent discards 1 Non-Combat card at a time until his number of Non-Combat cards equal yours.

What an interesting card. I call this the Red Lightning Slash of Orange. Sorta.

If this attack hits, you can say good-bye to all your opponent’s non-combats. Of course that all depends on how many you run. That in mind, you shouldn’t run too many if you want to use this card to maximum proficiency.

Orange Physical will be running Joint Restraint Drill, so you will probably have at least one non-combat out if you can. If you have Destruction Drill out, that can take care of the slack the physical misses.

What makes this card nice is the fact it can be used in non-Tokui-Waza decks and it gets around Orange Focusing Drill. It forces your opponent to get rid of Nons one at a time, which means Focusing goes away first, then the Drills can as well. This can be a life saver if Orange Drill or Roshi DB decks get too many non-combats on you. Either that or maybe there are a few annoying non-combats you can’t massively get rid of, or you just lost all of yours. Fact is this card can reverse many situations. But it has to hit first.

This card isn’t a shabby physical attack even if your opponent doesn’t have any non-combats. With the sheer lack of good Orange Physical attacks, I can see this card having a home in many Orange Physical decks because it deals decent damage with a great if successful effect. If bigger Orange Physicals are made, this card might fade away, but right now that’s not true.

Your opponent also gets to choose what he keeps, which can be bad, because maybe there was one specific card you were trying to get rid of. That said, this card works best in decks that run next to no non-combats, which makes this a board clearer. Opponents will not want to risk letting this physical attack go through when time comes if they wish to keep their nons, so you might lure out a block.

Orange also already has a pretty good time getting rid of Non-combats with Orange Stare Down. With this card as well, Orange shouldn’t have too much of a problem getting rid of non-combats, which is great for board control. I can see this card in freestyle anger, an archtype which has fallen away quite a bit.

Standard: 3.2 out of 5.0 (if successful hurts, but the sheer power of this card gives it a high rating) Tuff Enuff: 2.0 out of 5.0 (same deal here but non-combats aren’t as heavily played, especially due to drills disappearing way too quickly)