Shadowverse Evolve Master

November Update

Have just finished writing and published the Ramp Dragon Guide for Set 4, so please check that out if you are interested!

Regarding future plans on this Patreon, my current intention is to publish one major piece of content per expansion, which will generally be the deck that I am playing the most.

In addition, instead of doing a raffle for coaching, members with a subscription above $5 should just contact me directly to organise a session. Too many people were banking their sessions, when in truth, it was something I wanted to use as a form of regular content for users. If I receive too many applications, I will implement a raffle system again.

As for why I've made these changes, please see below:

Over time, it's become increasingly clear to myself that although I enjoy Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond quite a lot, it is also, ultimately, a casual game for me. At first, I legitimately considered pushing out very regular, high-quality content for competitive players in a similar fashion to what you might see in OP TCG, but the difference is very apparent.

For example, this week, I purchased an Imu guide from a respected player, as I don't have the time to grind and gain all the matchup specific information with Fusion World Nationals coming up. Although it was a fairly costly guide, I also believe it's worth the money. Not only because of the time and effort that the author invested into it, but also because it's likely to, on average, make back the money in terms of a performance improvement (aka better prizing).

In Worlds Beyond, it's quite a different ecosystem. At its core, it's a free-to-play game, and although the prizing is good at the top end (1 million dollaridoos for winning worlds), let's be real, the odds are extremely low. What's left is maybe you can make a few hundred to maybe a few thousand dollars for a good performance in SVO if you make top 8 and above.

However, Shadowverse is not supposed to be a Bo1 game. There's far too much variance involved to the point where although there is a pretty high skill component to the game, it can also just not matter at all, on a somewhat frequent basis, at that. So I imagine to many players, the value proposition in receiving coaching or purchasing guides is just not that high, which in turn, reduces the incentive for content creators to push out this type of content.

In other words, if we consider the amount of people willing to pay for this type of content vs the amount of time and effort I have to put in to create it, then it's obvious that it's not worth my time (on a $ to effort ratio). To put it another way, the reason for me to create this content is literally just because I have a passion for the game and am willing to take a loss.

And even then, I would generate more value putting all the info I consolidated into the Ramp Dragon guide into a literally free video on Youtube. I could probably get like +50 subs a pop on something like this, and that would be worth more than the value I generate from running the Patreon.

With that in mind, I've decided to make the changes above to avoid burnout so I can continue providing value to users. I think it will be a different consideration if, at some point, there is nobody that continues to support this Patreon, at which point I will consider closing it altogether or adjusting the strategy.

I also note that there may be some subscribers here who are simply subscribed to support Shadowverse Master as a whole. Please rest assured that to date, that out of all the revenue we've generated via this Patreon, that I have not taken a single cent for myself. It's all gone back into the company so we can continue maintaining the website and delivering content for the community.

On a final note, I also welcome feedback from users, both those that were previously or currently subscribed. If there are certain things you really liked seeing in the past or things you wished I would deliver moving into the future (or things that you didn't like), let me know as well. Thanks all!

Skybound Dragons: Ramp Dragon Guide

With the release of Skybound Dragons and the buff to Liu Feng in the second half of Heirs of the Omen, Dragon is well positioned in the current metagame and a great tournament pick with few poor matchups.

In my own words, it’s a deck of low time investment, high returns. You might be able to get more out of a different deck by grinding tens or hundreds of hours, but with Ramp Dragon, you can just read my guide, play a few games, and get a great win rate anyways.

After maining Dragon for Set 2/3, where it was a rather poor class, I’m happy with where it landed for Set 4. I was able to climb to GM this season with an 85% Diamond Group score. I am currently in the Ultimate Tier mostly through just playing my dailies (chest event was quite a grind…) I believe I could climb more and to BEYOND rank, but I opted to push out a Youtube Video and write this guide instead, as my time is rather limited and I will be extremely busy soon with preparation for Fusion World Nationals.

Decklist

Notably, I will include two different decklists, which I think are both very strong. One is my original list, which uses 3 Odins. The other is a popular Japanese list which completely cuts Odin. I think both are valid and target different metas. Without Odin, I think certain matchups become extremely difficult to win, like Haven and Control Portal in particular. This guide will work for either build, so give them both a try and see what works for you.

Dragon Sign: The most basic form of ramp. Unlike Liu Feng, can be played on curve and ramp immediately. Against aggro decks, you will likely opt to play a follower on turn 3, but against all other decks, it’s usually correct to play this on turn 3 if you have a followup 5pp card. In general, I do not recommend coining this out on turn 2, it is rarely correct.

Genesis Dragon: Your giga-reach that represents 12 damage with Super Evo. Notably, if your opponent has low-pressure, it’s usually correct to cash in the damage immediately, as your other storm options, such as Garyu/Forte/Azrafit are often able to push damage through wards, whereas Genesis Dragon usually cannot. Note that this card does not require Super Evo, so given the option, it’s usually better to use a regular evo if pushing damage rather than a super evo. One scenario that can come up is that if you only have one super evo, you push with this card first without evolving it, then seal the game with the Super evo on Garyu/Azrafit.

Garyu: Insane when played ahead of curve. It’s really hard for a lot of decks to react to the Super Evo of this card, as it effectively places 3 huge-statted followers while clearing the opponent’s. Worthwhile to note that it is acceptable to play this card for tempo without using evolve against a number of decks in the meta, especially against empty board or when you haven’t unlocked Super Evo. Since you only have 2 super evo points anyway, it’s a good way of conserving it for a bigger play later on. I will usually consider holding off on using Super Evo Garyu against decks like Haven, if I’m not getting a lot of value off the evo. Another thing to note is that sometimes, it’s better to swing with the Silver Dragon first and then Super Evo afterwards to apply a barrier to it. This is good against cards like Jeanne, for instance.

Azrafit: Basically, this card lets you get lethal through wards, and in an emergency, clears otherwise impossible boards. Ideally, you want to have a super evo, otherwise the card only has 1 health, and your burn damage to enemy leader is locked to only three. Combos with Galmieux crest, making it easy to get around 8 damage onto enemy leader with it. You usually want to play this card as your finisher, as your other options may be stopped by wards.

Liu Feng: 3pp 3/3 ramp with evo. Generally self-explanatory, it’s especially good when going second. Keep in mind that it auto-evos after overflow, and that it has synergies with Ocean Rider and itself at 6pp (manual evo Liu Feng to get access to overflow effects)

Ocean Rider: Exceptional in the early game and late game. It helps you protect your face, but in some matchups, can help you snowball chip damage, thereby protecting your face, pressuring the opponent, and making it easier to kill them later. Post overflow, the value for this card is rather insane, as it gives you two megalorcas instead of just one. Very common to combo ramp at 6pp with Ocean Rider to immediately get value off two Orcas.

Neptune: A new addition to the deck. Mainly good against aggressive decks like Sword and Puppet, buying you at least one turn, if not more. It’s not that great vs control decks, but even then, it spits out three bodies, so it’s not the worst. Since we only run 1 copy, it can’t really brick us, even in the matchups where it’s not as good.

Odin: With how the meta has developed, it’s important to run three copies of this. Enables us to race other decks, is necessary as a low committal storm option against Control decks, as well as setting up two-turn lethals. Obviously insane against Wilbert as well.

Lyria: 1/1 barrier is a surprisingly strong statline for a 2pp follower. I like tempoing this out against Sword early, as they run a high density of 1 health followers, and we really don’t care if they play a 2pp 1/2 follower, especially when we can potentially punish this with any megalorca generator. Obviously, the main reason we play this is because of its enhance effect. For only 1pp in the late game, it tutors our entire high-end, which means that this card is playable both in the early game and the late game, and improves consistency in the end game, as we’re typically happy to draw any of our high-end curve, especially at the ratios I landed on in the final construction (that is, we will never draw more than 1 Genesis/Neptune/Azrafit, which is great).

Galmieux: To be honest, this card often feels like a brick, but even so, I believe that we have no choice but to run this card, simply because of its versatility. There have been countless games where I have secured lethal using this card’s 7pp enhance effect for storm, which in and of itself, makes it worth consideration.

You should also be familiar with how to use the 0-cost spell, as well as Galm’s 3 damage ping conditions. It’s annoying when you have no choice but to rely on RNG to clear an early game board, but even so, there’s simply no other card at the 5pp range with evo that does what Galm can do, except maybe Merman, which tends to scale worse into late game, while not providing us with a strong crest.

We also have some interesting combos at 10pp, for example, commonly you’ll play 3pp Liu Feng, auto-evo, trade into a follower, get a 0pp token, then use the token to force Galm to ping the remaining ward of 4 or less health. Also, don’t be afraid to use the 7pp storm to simply trade board, sometimes this can be correct, as it’s saving us an evo point and bridging us to a higher tempo play.

Call of the Megalorca: One of the best 2-drops in the game, 2/2 rush is just insane in the context of what Dragon wants to accomplish, and lets us protect our face while opting for favourable trades. Has some overflow synergies with itself and Neptune, worth keeping at the back of your mind.

Filene: Obvious 3x staple since release. It’s one of your few deterrents to your opponent slamming 3/3s on you (Abyss, Portal and Sword), works well with Call of the Megalorca to prevent them from using their 2/2 to trade into your Filene as well. Although not so common, its evo effect to deal 1 damage can sometimes come in handy early game, whilst its overflow token is very strong and can wipe an entire board with an evo point + 5pp. Notably, Filene combos very well with Galmieux (almost certainly by design), and it is fine to play Filene out for tempo late game to get the token in spell, so you can clear boards with 3pp on demand (without Galm, you’d lose the option to evo Filene to get the ping damage to use Filene’s token effectively).

Wilnas: A very strong addition to Ramp Dragon. Yes, people are more prepared for this card than before, but that doesn’t change the fact that if your opponent can’t out this, they lose the game. This can force your opponent to make very inefficient plays, which you’re still happy with. Ideally, you want to play this at 7pp after ramping, so they can’t use Odin as an efficient response. It’s also just a very strong payoff after ramping and taking damage, as it clears 3 followers on the board, and demands an answer or the opponent takes 10 damage to face, which often leads to you getting a free turn of development the turn afterwards or outright lethal.

Zooey: Third form of ramp is finally here. Basically, curve it out on 5pp and you skip to 7. Although it feels bad to have to evo this to clear, it’s not really that different from using Liu Feng to evo + trade and not even have the body left over, so it’s fine. Also has a 10pp effect which gives it storm (so sometimes you just lethal with this) and has a last ditch effort to become invulnerable but go to 1 max HP. This is pretty relevant against Sword in particular, but many other decks have a lot of counterplay to this, especially if you didn’t chunk them to a low enough HP range to lethal through wards/healing. That said, you can chain Zooeys sometimes as well, I also recommend holding last evo point for your actual finisher, rather than the Zooey.

Seasoned Merman: A very powerful 5pp tempo play. Against decks that struggle to deal with wide boards, I recommend evolving this to gain +4/4 in stats on board. It’s also just a generically good follow-up to turn 3 Dragon Sign and is one of the few outs to things like Zwei.

Forte: Classic 6pp 5 damage to face. Due to the intimidate effect, it makes it very awkward for opponents to deal with, often locking your opponent into suboptimal plays. However, it’s risky to throw Forte into an existing board, as if they do clear it, they will just trade damage with you. I like playing Forte at later stages of the game, it comboes well with Galm’s crest or auto-evo Liu Feng at 9pp for instance, as you can use it to clear the board. Ultimately, you need to assess what type of outs the opponent’s deck actually has access to before dropping this.

Ferocious Flame: A popular choice in some deck lists. It’s a great consistency tool that helps you find your game plan later in the game. Occasionally, you’ll get some great tempo value by shooting off things like Octrice in the early game. It also comboes well with cards that typically have issues with going face, like Forte/Galm, allowing you to clear board and not take reprisal. The issue I find is that if you use this card early, you end up running out of cards in hand quite quickly

Gilnelese: A tech option that some builds run. It’s very powerful early game to control tempo and heal up. It’s also a neutral card, meaning it is not searched by cards like Ferocious Flame. It’s worth noting that on turn 10, it can also get us a 5 damage burn token, but vs most matchups, it’s not going to come up.

How to use the coin:

The general guideline for using the coin is to evaluate your next few turns in advance. Dragon is a simplistic deck, there are no combos you really need to consider, most of your turns consist of playing 1 or 2 cards, so it is easy to think about what your next few turns will look like.

As mentioned previously, it is rarely correct to coin out Dragon Sign. This is because it skips you from 2pp -> 4pp, but this is quite weak for Dragon, as the only good follow-up is Gran and Djeeta, which in our current iteration, we no longer use.

In most cases, you will use Dragon Sign on turn 3 without expending coin, jumping you to 5pp. On turn 5, you will rarely use coin, unless forced to contest board (such as Liu Feng + Ocean Rider). If you ramp at 5pp, you will be at 7pp the following turn. You will have the option of coining out Garyu, which against certain decks is quite acceptable. Ideally, you would do this against decks that will struggle to clear 3 big bodies (as Garyu himself is 5/5 and there will also be a 4/5 ward), so against decks like Abyss, it’s a solid play. Otherwise, you can feel free to play however you like (Liu Feng + Galm, Lyrial + Wilnas, etc).

If you have only ramped once, your ideal 6pp turn will be Wilnas with coin vs most decks. This will clear a majority of boards in the game while disrupting their game plan (as clearing Wilnas will become their primary focus). In addition, common punishes like Odin will be unavailable for the opponent at this juncture.

For the second coin of the game, a similar principle is applied. You need to consider your next few turns and how you intend to use your super evos. In this regard, you do need to consider your Lyrial pool as well, as sometimes, you may need to “gamble” on your hit. I also urge you to consider the situations where you need the coin to threaten lethal with Genesis Dragon, and, specifically, whether or not you might regret coining out Azrifit if it locks you out from a Genesis the next turn.

Game plan

There are a few game plans you should look out for in the early game, dependent on your hand and matchup:

The go-first Dragon Sign curve

The ideal curve against most decks is the “Dragon Sign” curve. In other words, going from 3->5pp via Dragon Sign, and then gaining access to cards like Merman to stabilise board, or Zooey to jump to 7pp (if going second, Liu Feng is an alternative). Of course, from 7pp onwards, almost all of your cards are live, which is where you need to take advantage of your pp advantage – first by stabilising board, then by pressuring their face.

Going first usually gives you more leeway with going double ramp as well, mainly because there’s usually not much else you can do at 5pp with no evo point anyways, so you’re often forced into it anyways. After this point, you’ll have taken heaps of chip damage, but you can stabilise with your high-drops and force them to respond to board – especially because they won’t have access to cards like Odin yet.

The go-first early game tempo curve

Generally speaking, Dragon’s early game is not that bad when it’s not ramping. Opening a 2 drop and then Ocean Rider on turn 3 can push quite a decent amount of chip damage while protecting your own face. Filene on turn 2 locks them out from coining out a 3/3, and if they choose to play a 2/2, you can use either Call of the Orca or Ocean Rider to ensure 2 to face.

Often, though, you may find yourself fizzling out at turn 4, which will cap your aggressive potential, but that’s okay, since you’ll probably have pushed around 4 damage while protecting your own health total.

The issue with this curve is that you do still need to ramp AT LEAST once. That said, it’s not a big problem when you do so, whether it’s turn 4 Dragon Sign or turn 5 Zooey/Liu Feng. Afterwards, you go into your standard game plan. You won’t have a large max play point lead, but this curve keeps you the most healthy and opens up earlier lethal opportunities.

The go-second tempo curve

Typically, this curve works best when you have Liu Feng for the turn 4 evolve. Compared to the go-first version, you want to have something along the lines of turn 1 coin out a 2-drop, turn 2 Orca, turn 3 Orca, turn 4 Liu Feng evolve. This curve is much worse without Liu Feng, as you will find it very difficult to find a timing to ramp. Dragon Sign on 4 is okay if you opened everything other than Liu Feng, but it gives up your board lead and only pushes you to 6pp, which is a weak point for this curve.

Ideally, your 6pp will be a combo of Dragon Sign/Liu Feng/Ocean Rider, though depending on your build, a 5pp with Ferocious Flame is pretty good too. After you cross this point, the game plays out as normal

The go-second Dragon Sign curve

Against non-aggressive decks, you can take it easy and play turn 3 Dragon Sign without any worries. This will set you up for a turn 6 Wilnas coin, which is very, very strong.

Against aggro decks, like Sword or Puppet, your ideal way of playing Dragon Sign is coin out a 2pp card, then play a 2pp card on turn 2, then Dragon Sign. This makes you take the least amount of chip damage.

Of course, there’s also the double ramp curve, which I only recommend against slower decks or if your hand has no other real direction. Most of the time, the criteria for this is either Neptune or Wilnas, and even then, it’s dependent on matchup and board state.

Matchups

Sword – Slightly favoured

Dragon – 50-50 if mirror, favoured if Cocytus OTK or Fennie

Evo Abyss – Favoured

Mode Abyss – Slightly Favoured

Puppet – Even

Control Portal – With 3x Odin: Slightly unfavoured. With no Odin: Unfavoured

Roach Forest – Favoured

Haven – With 3x Odin: Even, without Odin: Unfavoured

Spellboost Rune –  Favoured

Dirt Rune – Favoured

Sword – slightly favoured

Originally, I thought this matchup was completely unwinnable, but after revising the decklist and play style, it became increasingly more winnable, to the point where I’d even consider us favoured.

Going first, you want to mulligan for a 2-drop, Ocean Rider, and, ideally, one form of ramp. In general, if you don’t have a 2-drop, it’s better to mulligan away ramp, as you only need it for turn 5. Missing your early curve is very rough, as you take too much chip damage, making it possible for Sword to ignore your plays and all in you.

Ramp option is “okay” going first. Turn 2 2-cost into Dragon Sign on 3 into Merman is a perfectly acceptable keep. However, missing even one component will lead to taking a very large amount of face damage.

Going second, you want to mulligan for 2x 2-costs and Liu Feng with the aim to coin out your 2-cost on turn 1. This will save you an incredible amount of health and, usually, control over the board. Sword’s most powerful tempo cheats are turn 1 Quickblader and  turn 3 Valse. However, their 2-drops are generally understatted, with them being limited to 2/1s and 1/2s respectively.

In both cases, Lyrial is a good 2-drop vs Sword. Although it doesn’t contest their 1/2 very well, you’re happy if they play it as it can be killed by orcas anyway, while deterring them from playing their 2/1. She also trades into t1 Quickblader, which is always nice too. If it sticks on the board, it can contribute to taking down cards like Octrice.

Going first, don’t be afraid to drop Liu Feng on turn 3 or 4 if it’s your only option. Generally speaking, against Sword, you only really need to ramp once, and Turn 5 is not too late for the first Ramp, Zooey being a good option in most cases.

I typically do not recommend rushing into Dragon Sign on turn 3 when you can instead develop and contest the board. Going first, it’s usually better to slam ocean rider than it is to play Dragon Oracle. The exception is when you have the direct connection to Merman or Zooey -> Wilnas.

After the early game, your gameplan is reasonably straightforward – stabilise and force the opponent to divert attention to your board rather than going face. Garyu is exceptional at this, as the only real out they have to him is Sinciro (which they’ll use at some point no matter what anyways). Wilnas is good if you can drop him before they have access to Odin. Cards like Garyu help us chip their overall health total, and it’s our goal to either run them out of evo points or to put them in a position where they have to make defensive plays to try and prevent our lethal options.

Notably, your lose condition is usually tied to how much chip damage you took early game. Usually, Sword’s win condition is tied to Sinciro (+ Octrice token if they have it), into something like Odin for lethal. This only really works for them if they know there’s no fear of reprisal from you, hence why having a high hp count makes a huge difference.

To illustrate, if they Sinciro you for 8 damage, dropping you to, let’s say, 10 hp, then your response can easily be a Garyu to push 5 damage to his face, potentially dropping him to 12 hp. Now they have to consider healing because if not, they potentially die to Genesis Dragon evo. Conversely, if your hp was at 7hp, you risk dying instantly to Odin, which limits your range of plays. In other words, a low health total constricts your range of movements, which is why it’s so important to control the early game vs Sword.

The other component is that Zooey prevents Sword from getting a 2-turn lethal pattern. In previous expansions, if they went face with the expectation that you can’t heal enough to escape lethal the following turn, they must now deal with the problem that Zooey forcibly buys you an extra turn, more if you can chain her. In addition, Sword has limited Ward potential, and they frequently cannot protect their own face while storming yours, meaning you chip them for 5 damage and set up your own 2-turn lethal.

Last, the inclusion of Neptune allows for a significant amount of healing (4 on her own), while being capable of clearing all boards except those involving Valse. Sword’s burst damage and board clear is heavily reliant on having access to evo points, so simply by healing up, you can run them low on gas, to the point where they can no longer kill you.

In order to do well against sword, just remember to control the early game and be familiar with Sword’s range of lethal patterns. Things like Sinicro being 8 (12 with Octrice), Albert 12 (7 through ward with super evo), Odin 7, etc. This will help you know when you need to be defensive vs when you can safely tempo board and have safety nets like Neptune or 10 Zooey to protect yourself.

Dirt Rune – Favoured

I’ve tried the tempo mulligan and the hard mull for ramp mulligans respectively, and my final position is that hard mulliganing for ramp is superior.

The way I see this matchup is that despite Dirt having a lot of removal, a lot of it is tied to Dirt or evo expenditure. In addition, they have trouble closing the game outside of setting up Lilanthim ahead of time, so you can take chip damage and it will hardly matter.

Although they can almost certainly clear your board every time, it’s never “free” for them. Their most flexible removal options can only be used so many times until their hand runs out of efficient combinations to out your board. By ramping, you’re able to put out threats which come out too early for their removal curve to efficiently out. For example, if you have evo’d Wilnas on the board on turn 5 while they’re stuck on 5pp, they’re not going to have great outs to it. Especially since the turn after, you just drop another big follower, and then another, and then another.

The key cards to play around are as follows:

• Don’t let them get free Normans off, and make sure that you can actually deal with a Norman that drops 2x Guardian Golem. If your play gives them a perfect Norman evo, then it’s quite possible your play is wrong, and you should search for a different line. A good example of locking out Norman is playing something like Forte/Wilnas the turn prior. They cannot play Norman while outing Forte/WIlnas/Garyu/Neptune etc

• Don’t let them get perfect Lilanthim angles. The range of efficient plays they have is very low prior to 8pp. They will struggle to clear your Garyu if you drop it before they can Lilanthim, meaning that’s the turn you can usually force out a non-Lilanthim super evo. If you can force out their second super evo, they lose access to their otk, because they’ll no longer be able to super evo her from 5/5 to clear board.

• Going wide is usually good vs Lilanthim. Their max clear is 3 cards, sometimes you can go super wide with Orcas, which will make them hesitate to drop Lilanthim or burn super evo, especially if they’re staring down 3-4 unanswered damage + potential storm the next turn

• Keep track of their Earth Sigil count. Lilanthim is not a threat if they don’t have enough Sigils to protect her from your super evos

Similar principles apply even if you don’t ramp early, the main difference is that you get a better early game for a less abusable mid/late game. Dirt Rune has few tempo cheats prior to turn 4, their first few turns are literally limited to 2/2s or a 2pp 4 damage spell. This means that you can actually take control of the board by coining out your 2pp cards, or using Ocean Rider (which even if they can clear your 2/2, they’ll take the 1 chip damage after). This means you can put some early pressure on their life.

You still need to ramp at least once for your main late game tools to come online in time, but without double ramp, it’s slightly harder to abuse Dirt Rune, though it’s still fine imo.

Spellboost Rune - Favoured

It’s similar to Dirt Rune as a matchup, except you need to always be cognizant of Anne & Grea. Ramping is generally strong in this matchup, as going wide with Garyu will almost always require them to fire back with their own super evo (outside of highrolling multiple wind blast/william). Once they’re out of super evos, the game is literally over, as they have no win condition afterward.

For that reason, it’s generally better to just dominate the board rather than rushing towards cards like Forte, which are, sadly, easily outted by a literal 1pp spell (wind blast).

Ramp Dragon Mirror – Even

Mulligan: 2-drops, Zooey, 3-drop (going first, after 2-drop is secured), Liu Feng (going second)

In my experience, I get the best results in this matchup by controlling an early board. Having a turn 2 play is essential, if one player misses their turn 2 and the other doesn’t, it’s usually a ridiculous lead. A 2/2 that hits their face three times is more damage than a Forte!

For this reason, I like to hold off on playing first Dragon Sign when I can tempo out. Going first, it’s totally fine to just go wider rather than playing Dragon Sign. Since the only real tempo cheat that matters is Merman anyways, so if you don’t have that, it’s not even worth considering ramping imo.

Going first, Turn 5 Zooey being your first ramp is perfectly fine in this matchup. You only really need to ramp once in this matchup anyways.

Wilnas is very interesting. You should assume that a majority of Dragon players are running Wilnas, so I’d be very cautious about dropping first Wilnas without having an out in hand. There’s nothing more backbreaking than Wilnas killing Wilnas and then not having an out.

First Garyu is usually a large advantage as well. Where possible, aim to have barrier on your Silver Dragon (unless they have Galm active, then it doesn’t matter). The thing about Garyu is that it doesn’t out Garyu! Even if the barrier is gone, the second Garyu player still has to trade their 4/5 storm into the 5/4! By the way, in 90% of situations, you must clear all followers of their Garyu or you will lose the game shortly afterward. For this reason, you must always be cognizant of the possibility of them dropping Garyu, and, naturally, how you intend to out it.

Ensure that you consider and seal off their most obvious plays:

• Don’t let them get free Odin swings to your face (unless you have Neptune or similar punishes in hand)

• Try to keep outs for Wilnas wherever it makes sense

• You can prevent Garyu by playing intimidate followers, as it’s generally impossible for them to clear while playing Garyu

• You can prevent Odin punishes by playing 2+ followers on board; even a 2/2 can be a deterrent from them playing Odin, as even if they get 4 (+ evo) damage on you with Odin, they’re taking minimum 2 damage from your board, so the play isn’t even that good for them

• Genesis Dragon can be sealed off by having any ward on the field

• Be wary of Galm crest, it can allow for otherwise impossible clears from the opponent

Against other variants of Dragon, they typically have to allocate a portion of their deck to weak tempo plays like Fennie etc. The best way to deal with them is to continuously pressure them, with Garyu in particular being exceptionally difficult for them to out.

Against the newly popularised Evo Dragon, I think your win rate depends on how many Odins you run. The thing is, we do not win a protracted game state against Evo Dragon, they never run out of resources and they can go wide once they have their Super Evo engine stacked. So all we can really do is to continuously pump out boards that test them for answers. If they miss some combination of healing and removal, you can often snowball that to a win.

Evo Abyss (Favoured)/Mode Abyss (slightly favoured)

Mulligan: Filene (going second), Liu Feng (Second), Dragon Sign, Zooey (going first or combo keep with Dragon Sign)

The matchup to these actually play out pretty similarly with a few key differences. Mode Abyss has a superior late game if you fail to kill them early, as you need to deal with Cerb/Ginsetsu, of which Ginsetsu is usually game-ending. Our main issue with Mode Abyss is Reaper’s Slash. If they draw multiple of these, the matchup swings to their favour.

Evo Abyss is usually easier to deal with, they have less late game potential, though you do need to worry about the possibility of Drain from their 7-cost reanimate plays (which can be played around with intimidate)

The key consideration to this matchup is that Abyss has a lot of issues dealing with your high-end (Wilnas/Garyu) if you ramp two times early. In addition, their punishment is often limited even when you ignore their board to ramp. WIlnas himself will usually reset the board, and even if you’re at 10hp, they don’t have any 10 damage lethal options, and if WIlnas survives, they’re also on 10 hp (lol). Garyu is similarly a problem for both Abyss decks when dropped early, he’s just too many well-statted bodies while pushing face. Super Evoing Garyu into an 1-card board cannot be outed by Cerberus on its own. Multiple high-tempo, high-pressure turns like this can usually close out the game pretty fast.

For Evo Abyss, it’s not rare for them to be forced to Belial to out your board, but they’re just screwed anyway cause you’ve either got lethal or you can Garyu to pressure them again. Mode Abyss has few outs to Wilnas as well, the exception usually being some combination of their 3pp spells (if they even have it) or reaper’s slash. It’s quite frequently the case they won’t have the out if you ramped twice, so you can just snowball to win like that.

Now, if you don’t have double ramp, the game is harder, but not necessarily a problem.  You can definitely take control of the board against Abyss early, a lot of their removal in the early stages of the game are RNG as well, so cards like Ocean Rider can really mess with their game plan, as they run the risk of hitting a 1/1. That said, you must ramp at least once vs Abyss, otherwise your high-drops will come down a turn too late to be useful.

Typically, you don’t really want to play a long game against either deck, which works out for you, because most games, you won’t have to.

Control Portal – likely our worst matchup

Mulligan: It’s awkward, because it could be puppets too. Technically, all ramp, but in reality, you can’t really keep that vs puppets…

Probably the worst matchup, not gonna lie. With Odins, it’s playable, but still quite unfavoured. Without Odins, I think you can’t win unless they brick.

Basically, this matchup just relies on praying they whiffed in at least one way or another. Your best hope is to ramp twice and then slam a Wilnas down and pray they don’t have an out. Make sure to pre-evo so it doesn’t die to stone breaker (6 damage).

Your other hope is that they can’t out your Garyu. Congregant of Destruction is usually a one card out, but…. I guess it’s possible they don’t draw it. The only way to play around this is to slam Garyu as early as possible (in which case they’ll still play it but pray that they hit the right targets lol) OR mitigating the odds by playing 1pp Lyrial to go wide.

In general, there’s just no way to deal enough damage to them because none of your cards in the late game stick for more than a single turn AND they have access to a lot of healing and wards, so you can’t really win if you don’t stick Wilnas/Garyu on the board for a turn.

Puppet Portal – Slightly favoured

Mulligan: 2-drops, Liu Feng (2nd), Ocean Rider (combo keep with 2-drops)

Similar to Sword, you don’t want to take too much damage in the early game. The balancing act, however, is that you also need to find a way to put them into lethal range as a deterrent.

A common situation that will come up in the early game is when they have a 2/1 on the board and Enhanced Puppet in hand. You might feel deterred to play a follower that will be destroyed by Enhanced Puppet anyways, but if you don’t play a follower, then they will simply curve out a 3/3, which is just as bad for you, unless you have Dragon Sign -> Merman as a counterplay.

The swing point for a majority of games will be on turn 5. Zwei Evo has always been a problem for Dragon, and it remains this way even now. In many cases, you will simply have to accept that you’ll take 5 damage from the Zwei. Focus on clearing the 6/1 instead and try to take back the board on the following turn. The only way to avoid this is by ramping into Wilnas, but you will usually take a bunch of chip damage in return.

There are often some difficult decision trees when it comes to the opponent’s 7pp turn. In most cases, you need to be wary of the possibility they drop Odin and evo to face for 6. The issue with this is that they get to poke your face for free, developing a multi-turn scenario where they chip you again with Orchis into an almost unavoidable lethal. The way to counterplay Odin is to simply have multiple followers on board, even if this means you’ll deal less damage. Speaking of which, if they are not able to access Odin, dropping Wilnas or Forte can be a game-winning play, only countered by direct removal like Sylvia which they may not have in hand (or even run multiple copies of).

Going into their 8pp turn, you’ll face a similar dilemma against Orchis. To play around Orchis, Wilnas/Forte are very good at deterring them from dropping her. However, it runs into the potential issue of them dropping Odin instead. If they do not have sufficient puppets prepared in advance, playing a 2/2 makes it a much more difficult decision for them. Since you will have ramped, it is often not difficult to accomplish this.

Usually, a key card that increases our win rate is Neptune. Her healing usually puts us out of lethal range for the rest of the game, which forces the portal player into an extended game state, which is often suboptimal for them. I note that while I consider this matchup slightly favoured, if they invest heavily into hard removal like Sylvia (healing + clear) and 4pp instant-kill spells, then the matchup becomes a lot more difficult.

Ward/Crest Haven – Unfavoured

Another matchup where your success rate depends directly on how many Odins you run. If you don’t run Odins, it’s very difficult to win, might be better to just concede and save time. Even if you do run Odins, it’s not a great matchup, though notably, Ward is much more winnable than Crest.

For the most part, I recommend mulling aggressively for Ramp. This is because most early game development is significantly impacted by Grimnir, which they hard mulligan for, and their 4pp 3 AOE board clear. Filene is the only effective 2pp card, as it outs Grimnir, but even then, I find it’s low impact.

Conversely, if we ramp aggressively, we gain access to our high pp plays, which can put significant pressure onto the Haven player to have the specific outs to our board. Cards like Garyu can be tempo’d out even if we don’t have access to Super Evo yet, as it forces them to clear a 5/5, 4/5 and 5/4 at the same time.

To win, we need to pump out big bodies over and over again, hoping that one of them sticks on the board, at which point we can start storming their face and overwhelming their ability to heal. However, without Odin, it becomes practically impossible to punch through Wilbert, which significantly impacts the win rate in the matchup.

Personally, while I find Ward Haven is possibly even favoured with Odins, pure Crest Haven is really hard to beat if they don’t brick. There is still too much board clear and health recovery for us to deal with, and the prerequisite to winning still requires us to draw a near-perfect combination of cards.

Roach Forest – Favoured

This matchup went from extremely hard to pretty easy in the span of one expansion, mainly because we actually got support and they did not.

My preferred mulligan is usually for Call of the Megalorca, Ocean Rider and -one- ramp. Going second, Liu Feng in the preference, while going first, it’s Dragon Sign. You only need to ramp once in this matchup, usually.

Early game, you want to contest their board with your 2/2 rushes. This will keep you healthy and also force them into using cards like Glade, which can be easily answered, especially with Liu Feng. Once we’ve ramped, we can look towards pushing storm damage to their face, keeping an eye out for their possible lethal burst. Cards like Garyu put immense pressure onto Roach if they don’t have lethal yet, allowing us to deplete their hand and health.

Note that cards like Forte are very effective at poking the Roach player if they have limited board space/reach. For example, suppose they have Godwood/Fairy/Fairy/Cairn on the field. If you Forte against this board and you’re healthy, you’re unlikely to take much damage back in return as they have nothing to trade into and can’t reach critical mass for Roach lethal.

Filene is also a very important card to understand how to use in the late game. Personally, I like setting up the Filene spell in hand early, by playing it overflow but not using the spell immediately. What you want to do is to set up a 2-turn checkmate scenario. You either want to storm them to lethal range or build a very wide board, then use the +1 cost effect to lock their hand. Typically, they will be unable to kill you, and clearing the board would result in a massive loss of resources (that is, to say, if they can even clear it). This works especially well when you have cards like Zooey as an extender, which means they’ll take an additional 5 damage before your real lethal turn.

Overall, the fact that we have more consistent ramp options and access to Zooey at 10pp, which can lock a Roach player out of an extra turn while taking 5 damage, makes this matchup much easier for us than before. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve lost to Roach this expansion.

VODS and Coaching

I posted a Video covering the decklist with a bunch of commentated gameplay here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn7NipSKZVM

Feel free to reach out to me via DMs for any questions you might have relating to the deck, and to see if I have capacity for coaching.

Final thoughts

For the first time in a while, Ramp Dragon is in a good place in the meta, where one does not feel kneecapped just for running the class. It has a good matchup spread which makes it a reasonable bring to bo1 2d tournaments, and it’s easy to pilot, especially with the notes prepared in this guide.

The deck can also be adjusted to make it stronger (and weaker) against specific decks in an ever-shifting meta, making it a reasonable choice for the entirety of the expansion.

Fennie Dragon Guide

Admittedly, a lot of my time has been spent grinding Take Two, but when it comes to Rotation, a deck that has fallen under the radar but has a relatively strong matchup spread is Fennie Dragon. While it was nothing more than a meme in the previous format, I consider it much stronger in Heirs of the Omen due to the addition of multiple cards that improve its consistency and survivability. It has a decent matchup spread against popular decks, which means that it can be a decent bring to a bo1 2-deck format, as you can find edges against the most popular lineups (crest + spellboost)

In addition, the current state of the meta gives the deck much more time to set up its win conditions than before, with many of its natural predators (chicken enjoyers) like Roach and, to an extent, Loot Sword, are not as popular as their counterparts in the previous expansion.

Decklist:

The decklist is taken from a Japanese Dragon player that reached the BEYOND rank recently. I will explain each card choice and their applications:

Ferocious Flame: Use early against aggressive matchups like Loot Sword where taking chip damage can be very dangerous. Extremely strong post-Fennie, as it guarantees you a dragon follower (which is half pp) while clearing board and only costing 1pp. It also has the combo potential with 7pp Storm Galmieux to clear board and swing face, whereas in many other situations, Galmieux cannot safely swing face. Can also be used to clear your own board locks, especially with Galm crest active.

Filene: Post-overflow and with evo, it can be used in conjunction with its token to clear every board. Against certain decks, like Roach, it can buy you a turn as it is often difficult to pull off large OTKs without it. This also works vs cards like Cocytus or Izudia, you just need some planning ahead of time to make the most of it. If you have galm crest, you can just play this a turn prior (and hold the fangs in hand) to instantly cast Whitefrost Whisper on demand.

Feel free to play this early for tempo too. It is not necessary to greed for its overflow effect. Notably, there will be games where it can brick your hand post-overflow as well, especially without Galmieux crest active for evo-less clear.

Ruby, Greedy Cherub: Shuffle Genesis Dragon back into deck before using Fennie. In addition, it's just a solid turn 2 slam to protect life total. I'd also note that this card is very good at decreasing your hand size post-Fennie. You'll have a bunch of games where you have too much draw and this card helps reduce your handsize quite well.

Ocean Rider: Good for early clear and lets you "miss" turn 2 due to its rush effect. Strongest after overflow as you get two orcas, which also means two healing under Orca crest.

Dragon Sign: It's ramp! We need this to get Fennie on-curve before the opponent start setting up lethal. I think it's not necessary to get "multiple ramp", one is generally enough. Notably, if cast on turn 3, it gives us Galm a turn early. I also don't think it's necessary to coin this out on turn 2. Most of the time, there's no real benefit as the only way to take advantage of the ramp is to play 2 2pp cards, which is not that high of a chance to hit.

Greatness Ascended: If you have Fennie active, drawing 3 cards can be game-winning on its own, for obvious reasons.

Liu Feng: Your ramp for when Dragonsign isn't available. It's generally totally fine going second where you can evo it on turn 4, but it's a little more awkward when going first. Conversely, the card is much easier to use post-fennie/overflow, as 2pp 5/5 rush is pretty great.

Olivia, Heroic Dark Angel: Generically strong card at 7pp but you won't always have a good target in hand. Best saved in hand early-on, after you get Fennie active, you can combo this with a 5pp Genesis and super evo both to clear board while pushing face.

This card is just insane when discounted with Fennie. At 4pp, it's just way too cheap. If double discounted by Fennie, the card is literally 0pp and at triple discount, it RECOVERS you play points, which is crazy. Basically, when Olivia is discounted, the draws lead to multiple more discounted cards and it becomes way too hard for opponent to play around

Galmieux: Strong board clear early and the token helps extend "Board Clear Reach" once the crest is active. Note that she does 3 damage to a random follower when she takes damage, which you can often manipulate via the order in which you trade/play your cards.

Note that Super Evos take zero damage, but still proc Galmieux crest. Also consider when to burn the 0pp early, as sometimes, you'll be forced to cast it to go back down to 8 cards in hand (but you'll have a board and feel pretty bad pinging your own board for no reason).

There are some scenarios where you might deliberately hold the 0pp to safely drop Fennie (For example, holding 1 0pp spell so you can instant clear luminous mage tokens). Galm token is also useful for preventing the opponent from board locking you (you only need 1 token in hand to full clear all your 2hp Orcas, as your first token will make you a 2nd token).

She also has storm at 7pp. Most of the time it's pretty risky to use, but Ferocious Flame and a previously cast Galm Crest can mitigate this issue.

Goldennote Melody: Draw 2 Heal 2, what's not to like!? Obviously, very strong once Fennie is active, and you want to generally save this so that you can get two discounted cards at once.

Fennie: In a vast majority of your games, you need this card to win. Halving your deck is essential as your cards are not good enough to win unless they are discounted. Generally speaking, 1 Fennie is enough to win games, but multiple Fennie is unbeatable vs decks you can stabilise against. Your opponent will try their best to create board states where you cannot safely Fennie, it is up to you to determine when you can risk it or not (more pointers in the guide itself). When going second, aim to use your coin on 7pp to cheat it out a turn early.

Raging Lightning: Nobody ever expects this card. Primarily used as a lethal enabler, as you will usually have less health than the opponent. The fact that it hits cards of equal highest hp is also much stronger than you'd think, situationally, it can be manipulated to clear 2-3 followers, and this card can be absolutely crazy against Abyss. Against Haven, you usually have to hold this in hand to setup lethal (popping barrier on leader or 3 damage generally being strong when aiming for OTK setup)

Seasoned Merman: Your anti aggro tool/orca generator. Notable that on evo it gives you an extra Orca.

Neptune: The reason why your deck refuses to die once Fennie is active. The amount of chip healing is insane once your Orcas come out at discounted rates, especially when considering the Orca cards are clearing the opponent's board and forcing them to respond. It's not necessary to always super evo this card if you don't have to, as the crest is tied to the fanfare.

Genesis Dragon: Most of your lethals will involve Genesis Dragon in some shape or form. Try to save an evo so 2 genesis + evo is 20 damage. Always keep in mind that Genesis Super Evo is 12. People often miss lethal because they don't realise just how big 12 damage is. For example, if opponent is at 20 hp and leaves a 5 attack card on board, you have lethal with Genesis + Raging Lightning.

General Game Plan

This deck typically composes of three primary phases of the game: Pre-fennie, Post-Fennie Stabilisation, Post-Stabilisation phase.

Pre-Fennie phase

The pre-Fennie phase consists of clearing enemy board while ramping. In most cases, you will lose some amount of health in order to ramp, which is fine.

Going first - you want to play a 2/2 on turn 2, Dragon Sign turn 3, Galm/Merman turn 4. After that, you should prioritise ramping or clearing board.

If you missed Ramp on turn 3, shift your focus towards clearing the board and preserving your health. You can still draw into Dragon Sign or Liu Feng later, which will inevitably cause you to lose tempo and health, so you need to protect your face by controlling board.

Going Second, you gain access to the highroll curve. This consists of Turn 2 2/2, Turn 3 Dragonsign, Turn 4 Liu Feng evo, Turn 5 Coin into Fennie.

In most of your games, you will only draw 1-2 ramp. Notably, when you draw Dragonsign going second, you usually don't need to coin it out on turn 2. It is often better to just play your 2/2 then Dragonsign the following turn.

The early phase is a great time to push out Galm and get her crest active, but cards like Merman will help you control the board against a majority of decks.

In the games where you only ramp once, use your 2nd coin to get Fennie out on your 7pp turn.

If you fail to draw Fennie on curve, many matchups will become very difficult to win. You are effectively forced to stall out with Orca package until you find Fennie, but if you get it too late, you will simply lose. If your opponent bricked and took chip damage, you will still have the opportunity, rarely, to win through Genesis Dragon.

In some games, you will be unable to play Fennie on curve. You need to consider the board state and ask the following questions:

• What is my current health total

• What is their deck's likely burst damage over 1-2 turns

• Can I clear their board next turn if I Fennie this turn? (cards like Neptune are very effective at clearing board. Galm crest being active is also huge)

• When will I get my next chance to Fennie safely?

Generally, if you ramped, it is much less likely for them to have a board which you must deal with immediately. In most cases, if they have two followers on the board and one can be cleared with Fennie, I will slam Fennie down with evo point.

Post-Fennie Stabilisation Phase

In a lot of games, you will be in a dangerous position with your life and your opponent will build massive boards that are difficult to clear. Your priority in this phase of the game is to survive.

The longer your Fennie is active for, the greater the advantage is for you.

Therefore, the longer you live, the more likely you will win.

This doesn't apply to every matchup, such as Rune which has access to Cocytus + Dclimb or Roach with potential 20 damage lethals. However, for decks that have to chunk you before going for lethal, it is entirely possible to stabilise through healing and board clear every turn.

The hardest part is immediately after Fennie is played. All of your opponents will intuitively understand that they are on a clock the moment she resolves her effect. This means that they will throw everything at you to try and kill you before you draw your best cards at a discounted pp.

Naturally, you will be at either 8pp or 9pp depending on if you coined out Fennie. Let's talk about a few different scenarios:

• Opponent puts out minimal pressure: Use this opportunity to draw and heal as much as you can

• Your opponent puts out a huge board: How you respond will depend on how your hand looks. If your first discounted card is a high impact card like Olivia or Neptune, then you can feel free to play those. The problem is when your first discounted card is a brick. If you have something like Filene in hand, you can try to draw first with cards like Goldennote, then you can opt to use her evo + Whitefrost to clear

• In some situations, you will have no immediate answers in hand. In this case, you must gamble by trying to draw cards. At 9pp, it is a decent gamble to go for 7pp Olivia. She would refund 4pp and therefore, a majority of your followers will be able to super evo along with her (4pp Neptune, 3pp merman, 3pp galm etc). At 8pp, you lose access to the Neptune top deck, but otherwise it's relatively the same. However, note that playing Olivia carries the risk of instantly losing the game if you draw no follow-up. Therefore, it is usually recommended as a last resort.

• Ferocious Flame is generally very good here, as it guarantees you a Dragoncraft search for only 1pp. Greatness/Golden note is generally good too, especially at 9pp, as you will have 5pp left over, allowing Filene/Neptune/Olivia as power-outs.

• Always try to consider what the opponent can do two turns from now. This is generally quite easy to do against decks like Sword, as the majority of their plays take up a bulk of their pp and are reliant on evos to do damage. In a majority of cases, you can roughly predict that their turn 8 will be to chunk you with Sinciro super evo/valse -> Turn 9 Albert SEVO, so you want to plan your future turns around being able to clear/heal out of range.

Post-stabilisation phase

This is the phase that automatically activates if you survive the first turn or two of Fennie being active.

In general, it will eventually reach a point where your opponent will no longer have any real win condition, at which point you can continue healing, clearing, building board, playing additional Fennies until you have lethal with Genesis Dragon.

You have two main ways of dealing lethal:

The first is through double discounted genesis + evo point. This is the most straightforward lethal pattern. Note that against decks with 2 health wards, saving a 0pp token from Galm can allow you to deal 2 AOE damage to all followers before going for a Genesis lethal.

The second is by securing a board and playing until your follower leaves some amount of your followers up OR if you are able to safely swing 5 to face with Galm storm. At this point, you will only need a single Genesis Dragon to
lethal. Cards like Raging Lightning also provide the exact amount of reach that most players will either not expect - or simply cannot do anything about.

Against decks with a heavy amount of healing, like Haven, you should not overcommit to hitting their face as they can easily heal it back up with cards like Maddening Benison. However, against decks that have limited healing, it is perfectly fine to just throw your 5pp Genesis Dragons into face.

It's worth noting that against a lot of decks that have no 20 to 0 lethal conditions, your victory is essentially already guaranteed in this phase even if it takes you 5-8 turns to actually draw into it.

Mulligans

At present, the mulligan is very similar across all matchups:

Keeps: Dragonsign, Liu Feng (going second), Fennie

You can consider keeping a 2 drop if you already have one ramp and Fennie in hand. Against Sword, I wouldn't keep Fennie unless I had ramp in hand.

Keep Filene going first against Abyss. It's your best out to Beryl and there's not many ways for them to punish it as it has Bane.

The explanation for this mulligan is actually quite simple: your deck doesn't properly operate if you aren't playing Fennie at least a turn early. Therefore, you need to draw ramp and you need to draw Fennie, so you mulligan aggressively for both. Taking early chip damage isn't gamebreaking in most matchups, as they will be healed back up post-Fennie/Neptune anyways.

Matchups:

Spellboost Rune (Slightly favoured)

Spellboost doesn't really do anything to you early game. You can actually map out the majority of their plays throughout the game:

Turn 2/3: 2/2s

Turn 4: Sagelight Ward if they have 2 dirt

Turn 5: Anne and Grea/Bergent

Turn 6: Norman

Turn 7: Kuon

Turn 10: Enhance Kuon/Cocytus Climb

Of these, the ones to be most concerned about are the turn 5 and turn 6 plays. Everything else can be cleared easily or don't pressure your face enough for it to matter.

Anne and Grea is difficult to out if the ward and the Anne & Grea are both healthy (5/5 and 6/6). In these cases, you should just continue to ramp, and failing that, build as wide a board as you can. Although Galm doesn't full clear, I think it's perfectly fine to evo her into the 5/5 ward to ping Anne and Grea for 3. It'll set you up for double 0pp token to out whatever board he plays next turn. You take 6, but it's not a big deal as you'll likely heal it back later.

You also need to be concerned with Norman. Usually, it's hard for them to back-to-back this with Anne as it requires two earth sigils and if they are using their coin on turn 4 to Anne & Grea, they need to open with specific hands to access this curve. Naturally, you do need to out this, as it represents 13 damage on board. Holding Filene is usually a good answer, especially if Galm is active, as you can just ping the board with the token then Filene's evo to full clear for 5pp.

It's quite rare for them to have consecutive turns of pressure, even though they can hypothetically go Kuon on turn 7 and super evo. If your health total is high, they probably won't go for it.

Your aim is still to resolve Fennie as soon as possible, as long as it looks possible to stabilise over the next few turns.

Once Fennie is active, you want to build extremely wide boards every turn and force the Rune player into difficult positions. If you are able to make them expend all their Super Evo points before turn 10 Climb, you will outscale and beat them.

However, if they are able to reach turn 10, you are at high risk of dying to CoC Climb or Kuon Climb OTK (the latter you can play around by being at high hp and with multiple wards). I would generally recommend using a Filene spell when they are about to go into their turn 10. This blocks Cocytus + Climb, which will usually buy you a turn or force them into a suboptimal line.

In essence, you must make the most of the time when you are strongest: Right after Fennie and before their Turn 10. This is why ramping and resolving Fennie is the most important part of your gameplan, as this is the only way to force them to burn through their super evos.

Roach Forest (unfavoured)

Depending on the skill level of the Roach player, this matchup can be extremely bad for you. However, a lot of Roach players suck, and so you can win the game simply by staying at 20 Health (forcing the existence of multiple 0pp cards), and using a timely Filene spell to prevent them from lethalling you (read my roach guide to understand their lethal calc, which you can utilise yourself to figure out when you are most vulnerable). If in doubt, one guideline is to use Filene token spell the turn before you want to aim for Lethal.

This is a matchup you cannot win without resolving Fennie early. Only through discounted, high pp followers, can you force the Roach player to expend their resources and find opportunities to kill them with a discounted Genesis.

Loot Sword (unfavoured)

This matchup is difficult because they have a lot of chip damage and burst damage, which add up very quickly and around the same timing as your Fennie turns.

In general, there's two ways to win in this matchup. The first is to forsake Fennie altogether and pray you draw all your tempo cards on curve. If you answer their boards as they arise and have multiple Neptune, you can heal out of all their aggression. Once they're out of evo points, their main burst options will become significantly weaker, at which point you "outscale them".

Conversely, if you open multiple ramp into Fennie, you will generally be at a lower health total but the potential of stabilisation increases significantly if you can draw a single Neptune.

The game plan against Sword is similar irrespective of which method you're forced into by your draws. It is to grind them down to the point where they can no longer lethal you. This is not a matchup you win by dealing damage to them. It is a matchup you win by ensuring their damage can no longer kill you.

Your board is unlikely to survive against a majority of their late game plays. Sinciro will invalidate any board you have, so when considering your future turns, try to think about how you will clear an 8/9 from empty board.

They will utilise burst from Sinciro/Octrice/Albert/Centaur/Tentacles/Odin. Most of these cards require evo to function properly. In addition, they will all come down on consecutive turns, hence why it's important not to take too much early chip damage, or it will be impossible to heal and clear at the same time.

This is definitely one of the worst matchups for Fennie at the moment, but on the plus side, it's being kept out by Crest Haven/Spellboost.

Crest Haven (favoured)

The thing about this matchup is that they don't do that much early and their plays are somewhat predictable. To win, you need to understand what their deck does.

Their deck functions primarily through Marwynn's crest effect, which scales based on the number of Crests they have active. Of these crests, only Wilbert, Grimnir and Marwynn are permanent, the rest will countdown and decrease over time. Once they have five crests active, they can use Maddening Benison for free to heal for 10. Using cards like Unholy Grail or Jeanne, they can full clear your board and use Marwynn's crest to burn your face for 3-5 damage. In addition, most of these crest effects do not activate if they attack, so you are not forced to clear their board every turn. They will only attack if the amount of damage they deal through attacks is higher than the crest damage.

They can finish the game by using either Gilnelese's 5pp spell or the 4pp amulet to ping your face for 9-10 damage.

Notably, a majority of these can be played around by simply going wide. They only have 3 Unholy Grail in deck, so in general, going wide will protect your health total (not to mention Post-Neptune, building a wide board literally heals you anyway). Keep track of the Unholy Grail count in particular. If they have used 2-3, you can consider plays involving Olivia super evo to make it difficult for Jeanne to answer you.

Unlike many other decks in the meta, you have a ridiculous amount of healing so you have a lot of time to assemble a lethal hand.

In open deck-list, keep note of their ratios, especially cards like Odin, so you can be aware of how much burst damage they have access to at any given time.

Early game, they do practically nothing to you. Focus on ramping into Fennie and, ideally, playing multiple Fennie. This is a matchup where you will want to burst them down with double Genesis in most situations. Sometimes, you'll run into situations where they slam Wilbert. This is the only difficult turn as it lines up with Fennie. I think it's okay to evo Fennie and slam it into Wilbert, even if it doesn't clear. The next turn we can focus on outing the rest of their board. If their Wilbert actually traded into anything, then it dies, which is ideal. You don't really need to clear the 2/4 wards right away, as they will probably not attack with them anyway if Marwynn is active.

Note that it is difficult to setup Genesis lethal without discounted hands or chip damage due to the crest that gives their followers ward. This is why in many games, you want to set up multiple Fennie effects to widen the range of your plays.

You also need to be careful of them giving Barrier to their leader. This can be easily resolved by using a Super Evo to ping their leader. Ideally, your best OTK option is Olivia, Double Genesis + Super evo for 20 damage lethal through ward (you will need double Fennie active to do this)

Raging Lightning should be saved in hand to enable lethal against Crest Haven, as you will almost always be able to use this to ping their leader.

If they're bricking, keep in mind the way their crest effects work. It's often incorrect to overly pressure their health because they can punish with Maddening Benison. However, suppose they are going to 9pp with only 4 crests. They actually cannot Unholy Grail + 5th Crest + Benison. Therefore, you will have a rare opportunity to make a play like Olivia + 5pp Genesis to face to make it extremely awkward for them to survive.

In most cases, the matchup will take a long time to finish, but your ability to heal and setup lethal is very difficult for Crest Haven to play around and you should come out ahead more often than not.

Mode Abyss (favoured)

Early game, all you really have to worry about is Beryl, which you can mulligan Filene to out. Apart from that, focus on your usual game plan and get to Fennie ASAP.

Their deck is actually pretty similar to yours. It doesn't do anything until they have their Sham Nacha active, similar to how your deck doesn't do anything until Fennie's active. However, if we ramp, we reach Fennie before they reach Sham Nacha, which is where we will get the bulk of our advantage. In addition our deck is much better in the grind-game, especially once we have some time to fully set up post-fennie.

The things you need to watch out for are their tempo plays, primarily in relation to Congregant as we don't have that much hard removal in the deck. Apart from that, we just clear their board, go wide every turn and grind them out until they run out of gas or we find Genesis lethal.

Portal (all favoured)

Portal decks literally don't do anything. They try to chip damage and we just heal it up with Neptune. They try to kill us with Odin but we just heal up lol.

What are they even doing? They can't stop us from killing them and they can't find a realistic way to kill us. If you don't brick, you win.

Mirror

This matchup is interesting because it is possible to win without Fennie, and in fact, we can be punished for greeding into Fennie too hard.

The only component of the game you need to be overly concerned about is the turn heading into Fennie from both sides. It's fine to just trade Fennie turns if you're about the same in ramp. However, when one side doesn't have Fennie, the correct play is to go as wide as possible. This means we're forcing them to trade health for Fennie's fanfare effect. In addition, because we are both ramp decks, it means they have only 1-2 turns to stabilise, and both players will potentially have access to Genesis for lethal.

Understanding this dynamic is quite important. If one side gets to Fennie for free without the other player using Fennie in response, they will run away with the game completely.

It's also possible for the enemy ramp deck to run cards which we do not. This means you do need to watch out for stuff like Garyu/9pp disdain guy/Odin/Forte. Fortunately, almost all of these cards get ousted by Filene, but it's worthwhile keeping this possibility in the back of your mind.

Conclusion

Ultimately, this is a deck that has definitely flown under the radar and I think players should definitely consider it for ladder and tournament play. It's also great for people who don't want to invest the time into mastering decks like Spellboost Rune, or do not want to play the mirror match all day. It is easy to learn how to play Fennie and pilot it at a high level, which is much better than playing a deck like Spellboost Rune sub optimally. Once you get the hang of the deck, you can mostly turn off your brain and just win games with fairly low effort. It comes with a thumbs up from me, at least.

Many thoughts 17/08 + Raffle Results July

Over the past few weeks, I've been very unwell. Without going into details, I have only just started feeling better over the past few days. It's impacted numerous things, including time taken off my full-time job to recover, as well as my YT content creation and my ability to practice and play TCGs in general.

This weekend, I travelled to Adelaide Regionals for One Piece and finished 10th after Swiss and lost the top 16 match to Belo Betty. It was the last OP11 tournament for Oceania, and I played GP Luffy, which I think is a terrible deck in the current meta. Unfortunately, like I mentioned earlier, I was too sick over the past few weeks to practice other decks. By the time I did feel better, the online sim had already updated to OP12, so I decided to play GP Luffy even though I did not think it was very good, since I owned the cards for it and felt like my level of play on the deck was fairly high. I lost round 1 to Betty, which I believe to be a hard counter matchup (+ their first life was Lindburgh trigger lol) and my top cut match was against another Belo Betty player. Hey, it's not as bad as Roach vs Ward Haven, but it's still pretty bad.

I was going to skip the event altogether, but I'd booked my flights and ticket in May, but it worked out, as top 16 is a great result considering the circumstances.

I am hoping that things will return to normal from next week onwards. I am starting to feel physically much better. In addition, I intend to fix up some issues with my diet and to start doing more exercise. I've been a little ignorant of the way this thing works. As it turns out, living an unhealthy lifestyle doesn't just shave a few years at the end of your life when it no longer matters - it has the potential to impact you negatively even while you are younger. Obvious, yes, but sometimes you need something to spell it out in front of you to process it fully.

In terms of Worlds Beyond, how did you guys enjoy the Roach guide I put together? It's something I pushed myself to complete despite being very sick at the time. My current plans are to push out more guides on a similar level of quality once Set 3 drop, I'm not seeing much of a point to putting one together now when there's only two weeks left of Set 2 to go.

Raffle Results - July

YC Tier: Richard
Supporter TIer: Mohsin

As always, winners of coaching may contact me over Discord to organise a session. Next Raffle will be in two weeks for August (or backdated if I'm late)

Future of the Patreon page

At some point, I need to consider the best course of action for this Patreon moving forward.

The value proposition to you guys is that I consider myself one of the best Western Shadowverse Players of all time, and that the Patrons can feel free to ask me for advice and get insight via guides, etc. In addition, the coaching benefit is especially high value when the number of subscribers is low, I have a general view of how much my time/hr is worth, and if you ran the maths, it's actually at an all-time bargain right now.

Notably, however, there are certain challenges I'm experiencing right now. Firstly, I have no intention to compete in Worlds Beyond. I really enjoy the game, and I am enjoying my current position as a content creator who happens to be very good at the game. However, the existence of this Patreon creates a unique challenge where I need to consider holding back content from YT because I potentially want to put it on Patreon instead, for instance. For example, with the information I had in that Roach guide, I could have put that on YT instead in a video format.

There's also issues where the value proposition isn't adding up on my end right now. As I just alluded to, with the money I earn on Patreon, I'd probably be better off just putting it on YouTube for free and then earning ad revenue off that, while increasing my subs/engagement metrics as well. There's also just the problem that I don't have infinite time. In an ideal world, I'd just do everything, but in reality, I have to start considering where to allocate my limited bandwidth, especially when there are also games like Gundam TCG/Riftbound which are probably higher value than Shadowverse. Don't get me wrong though, I do Shadowverse because I like the game, so there's intrinsic value that has nothing to do with money as well.

So there's probably multiple solutions to this problem - for one, I'm probably not really marketing the Patreon enough, although there's a bunch of other ways to address the situation and I'm just not quite certain as to where I'm going to land on this. For example, I could also expand to Metafy and distribute over multiple platforms instead of just Patreon. Will continue to ponder this topic.

In the meantime, the current plan is to truck along as per usual. Once set 3 drops, I intend to put together another guide that you guys can use for ladder/tournaments etc.

Set 2 Roach Guide

Introduction

In my opinion, Roach Forest is one of the highest skill ceiling decks in the game that will reward you proportionally to the amount of time you put into learning it. It is a deck with few poor matchups and an essential deck to learn for tournament play. In set 2, it has a few more lopsided matchups than before (Ward Haven is a hard counter, whilst Aggro Abyss can be quite difficult) with actual counterplay options like Odin being in existence. Nevertheless, most of these problems can be navigated against with proper planning and adequate matchup knowledge.

Decklist

Roach: Your main lethal tool. If you draw two in hand, you don't need Godwood Staff bounce for lethal. Likewise, if you have Godwood Staff, consider finding opportunities to use the first Roach to chunk face and then the second for lethal (with godwood bounce)

May, Journey Elf: One of your most broken cards that allows you to break most boards. Most useful on turn 3 to gain board control but can be utilised at all points of the game. Consider recycling if the hand allows for it (like with Bug Alert)

Godwood Staff: Perma cards in hand plus bounce effect to enable Roach bounce for 0pp. With Odin in the game, defending this card requires you to have multiple threats on the board or for their life to be low enough that they can't Odin and banish Godwood.

Lambert Cairn: Versatile card. Worth noting that on Lethal turns, if you're missing 1pp cards, this card is on-rate as two 1pp cards even when hardcast for 2 (potentially bouncing this from field). So, for example, if this card is on field, it’s a good target to bounce with Carbuncle as you will be able to expend 3pp to play 3 cards.

Bayle, Luxglaive: Best used for the lethal turn but gauge when you need to use this card to regain the board. Note that sometimes, the opponent will have to extend very heavily to clear him as he is a 4/4, allowing you to potentially gain an evo point advantage.

Glade: No longer a must-have 3-of due to the addition of Ambush From Above to control the board and Garden's Allure to regain hand size. Nevertheless, there will be many situations where Glade will be your only answer to an enemy board. Also, he draws two cards!

Garden's Allure: Your ultimate hand management tool. Excess copies of cards like Godwood Staff, Glade, Carbuncle etc can be easily removed. Note that you can fuse once per turn per copy of Allure. You can also fuse more than one card at a time. Finally, when you have too few cards, you can fuse tokens to regain hand size and attempt to draw into your other card draw.

Fairy Convocation: Excellent at all stages of the game. With less (no) copies of Fairy Tamer, keeping this in mulligan is great to enable early tempo plays. This card is exceptionally versatile in allowing you to cost-effectively clear board or build combo.

Titania, Queen of Fairies: The crest effect to add a Fairy to hand is very strong and sets you up for infinite resources. Assists hand management for Roach OTK or setting up removal  cause you always get a 1pp Fairy at start of turn without the need to spend pp to generate them. Additionally, the stats aren't too bad to tempo this out, and the transform effect lets you clear a lot of threats, including cards like Anne and Grea.

Bug Alert: Flexible card for clearing board. Note that it works very well with bouncing Lambert Cairn on lethal turns where you lack 1pp plays. Priority targets usually include cards like Elf Child May (so you can reuse her for future turns to preserve evo points), Lily (good vs decks where you expect them to constantly play high hp followers), and Roach (for when you want to poke their face then end with Bug Alert to bring Roach back to hand.

Lily: All of her effects are good, including her stats. She is not even that bad to curve out on turn 2 vs decks that have few outs to it. Obviously, she lets you clear otherwise unclearable followers by putting them to 1 hp. Ideally, you save evo point, but you can also use her evo to ping for 1. You don't always need to play this at Combo (3), sometimes you can already clear the board with just her 1-damage ping on evo. This can come up sometimes when you need to conserve certain cards in your hand or use the combo (3) effect on something else. In some game states, you will prioritise Lily's draw on evo to keep your hand size up, such as in games without Glade/Godwood.

Ambush from Above: Very strong removal spell with a particularly nasty combo on turn 3 with 2 Fairies. However, I note that this can be rather awkward against cards like Bonemancer in particular. Notably, it CAN hit the same target twice when using Combo (3), so sequence your trades correctly.

Baby Carbuncle: You can either curve this out on turn 2 if necessary or use it to bounce cards like May when you have excess Carbuncles in hand. The Super Evo is usually used to extend lethal damage, which you can look at the formulas later in the guide. However, you should also identify situations where you can simply play for board tempo. The fact that this card gives you 3pp on Super Evo means you can just clear their board, build a big one, then demand an answer from the opponent.

Fairy Fencer: Just a very solid 2pp 2/2 with some scaling into late game with SEV discount that makes your hand easier to manage. Helps fill in a lot of curves and gives you with more early game board control. Doesn’t fully set you up for Combo (3) like Tamer, but a 2/2 that comes with a Fairy is higher immediate tempo.

Good Fairy of the Pond/Water Fairy: One of the best 1-drops in the game and sees a return due to its strong applications vs aggressive decks and almost guaranteed damage against slower decks. 

Super Evo Alternatives: Forest has some of the best super-evo targets in the game. The only problem is that the amount of space you have to run them is limited, so you can only pick a few. Notably, I think that with the addition of our new hand-management spell, Garden's Allure, it is possible to run more of these than before, if one should so choose. However, in most games, you want to allocate one super evo to Carbuncle, which means we don't really benefit from adding more Super Evo targets if we can only use two per game anyways.

Lymaga: Surprisingly strong against a number of matchups (mid-sword is a huge one), where locking their board can ensure your survival, Also acts as a one card out against Amelia + Luminous Mage Super Evo (you board lock them one turn then kill them on the following turn - they also take around 5 damage)

Aria: Weaker in the current environment, but very strong going second in the very specific scenario where Super Evo'd Aria cleanly trades with rest of Fairies going face. The most cuttable option at the moment.

Olivia: Still one of the best options on Turn 7, made even better with Garden's Allure allowing you to manipulate hand size. Mainly used for the tempo to buy you an extra turn and heal/chip for 2, but extremely strong when low in hand size or if they left a Fairy on board that you can evo to face.

Main deck alternatives:

Fairy Tamer: One of the best turn 2 plays, where the slight tempo loss doesn't result in a significant health trade. Sets up Combo (3) for Turn 3 with cards like May, so you will regain tempo.

Fay Twinkletoes: It doesn’t really see play this set but can be good for the element of surprise. Having 3 2/2s on the board is potentially game ending but deck space is tight and card can be clunky outside of its best use cases.

Odin: It’s playable/good in every deck.

Roach Maths

I can provide a few frameworks and formulas that can all help calculate lethal:

Method 1:

With Super Evo:

If you have Carbuncle, 7pp is 10 damage.

If you don't have Carbuncle 7pp is 8 damage.

From there you can just add +2 per 0pp in your hand OR for each pp above 7pp. If you don't have 2 Roach in hand OR Godwood on field, then you lose 2 points of damage. If you have Lambert Cairn on field, +1 (obviously). If you have nothing to kill with Super Evo, then minus one damage.

In addition, this assumes that each of your cards cost only 1pp.

Method 2:

This is what I shared on my Youtube video.

Method 3:

This is just logical reasoning. Your two roaches will cost 6pp. So the number of cards you can play is whatever your max pp is, minus the 6pp of two roach, PLUS your 0pp cards.

Then from there, you can just add the numbers together. Example, you have 8pp, 1 0pp card in hand and two roach in hand. Therefore, you have 3 cards to be played before Roach, then you play Roach as 4th Card, then Roach as 5th card, so your overall damage is 9 + evo damage (3) = 12.

Carbuncle is effectively considered TWO 0pp cards. So in the same situation, except with Carbuncle available, you have the 0pp card, Carbuncle, 3 1pp cards and 2x Roach to be played. Or, to use the method described, you have Carbuncle, which is Two 0pp cards, an actual 0pp card, 2 1pp cards, and then two roach. So your 6th card is Roach and your 7th card is Roach. Then one damage from super evo, so 14 damage.

Roach Lethal

There are certain pre-requisites before going for lethal.

• Your opponent actually has to be in lethal range.

It sounds really obvious but a lot of Roach players don't consider this. You need to actively consider how to put yourself in a position to OTK your opponent dependent on the matchup. In most matchups, healing is relatively limited, so you can set up a 2-turn lethal by poking them with Roach on the first turn then doing the full-combo on the second.

For example, against Rune, setting up a 2-turn lethal is harder because of Norman's existence. They can heal 8 or put down two difficult wards to clear. This will severely impact your ability to OTK. While against Forest, the outcome of the game is almost always decided through 2-turn lethals, as you cannot realistically poke them down with any card other than Roach.

2. You generally need a way to play two Roach on the same turn

Of course, sometime you can kill them with a single Roach and super evo it to face for lethal. However, in most situations, you need to be able to play two Roach on the same turn to secure lethal.

To do this, you will need either need two Roach in hand or Godwood Staff on the board from a previous turn (which turns one roach in your hand into "two"). Let's call this the optimal or max damage line.

The situation where you don't have two Roach or Godwood Staff in play results in one less damage. For this, you simply need one roach and Bug Alert/Carbuncle.

For the Carbuncle line, you play Roach when you have 5pp remaining, attack enemy leader, play Carbuncle, bounce Roach, super evo, recover 3pp, play Roach again. For the Bug Alert line, you have to play Roach at 7pp.

3. All the cards you're playing while going for lethal, outside of Roach, should be 0pp or 1pp

For each card that costs more than 1pp, you're losing 2 points of damage. What this means is that you do need to plan ahead and ensure you have enough 1pp cards to play on the turn. Also note that Lambert Cairn is on-rate, that is, if you play it for 2pp from hand and it gives you the 0pp spell, it is effectively 2x 1pp cards for 2pp.

4. Once you're committed to lethal, complete your sequencing quickly

If you've done the maths already and made sure that you're not board locked/have sufficient targets to trade in, the rest of your turn should be executed quickly. The reality is that once you're committed, there's no longer any room to deviate. The worst thing that can happen is that you time out and miss lethal.

Another addendum to this is that if it looks like you're dead next turn no matter what, and you haven't yet figured out if you have lethal, just go for the line anyway. When I was new to the deck, that is what I would do and sometimes it would end up being lethal (maybe you forgot to add Carbuncle super evo damage or one of the Lambert Cairn buffs).

Basic Gameplan

Your general checklist in every game:

• Establish Godwood Staff on the board (against non-aggro mus)

• Draw into Roach throughout the course of the game

• Survive

• Put your opponent into a position where they can be lethalled by Roach (accumulate 0pp cards to enable lethal and poke with excess Roach/bounce comboes)

The way you do this in every matchup may be a little different but you can typically follow this basic game plan and find success. The matchup sections will discuss this in more detail.

General Mulligan: Water Fairy, Fairy Tamer (if you run it), Fairy Fencer (if you run it), Godwood Staff, Glade, Bayle. Try to mulligan for a balance between early game board control and one source of card draw.

Concept: Roach Poking

This will come up in a number of matchups where the amount of healing from the opponent is limited or if they're capable of outing your board every single turn (key example being the mirror match). In these matchups, by poking them on a prior turn, you no longer have to aim for a perfect 20->0 OTK, it can be something much easier to achieve like 14->0.

You can often consider these types of plays when you have excess Roaches in hand, or bounces like Bug Alert/Carbuncle.

Concept: Invisible Pressure

The easiest way to explain this concept is how everyone plays against Swordcraft. 12 is the magic number that everyone knows they can't drop below against Sword. The moment you're below 12, think about how most decks are forced to play around turn 9. They have to start putting down wards above 3 HP, they have to heal themselves so they can get out of range, etc.

Naturally, this concept applies with Roach too. In fact, Roach might have the most "invisible pressure" in the game. After all, there's no way for your opponent to know how many 0pp Bayles are in your hand, but in most cases, they will assume you have at least one in the late game, irrespective of whether or not you have it. As a result, opponents are frequently incentivised to play around it every single turn instead of fully developing their own game plan. Even worse for the opponent, is that with each successive turn, you get an extra play point (effectively increasing lethal range by +2) and you also become more likely of drawing into the lethal or poking them down.

Matchups

Roach vs Sword (favoured)

With the addition of Ambush from Above, it's quite difficult for Sword to gain lasting and meaningful damage onto you. Even the Turn 6 Ambush Valse has become significantly harder to pull off, with up to 9 sources of non-target damage that the Forest player has access to, making it fairly risky for the Sword player to attempt. Odin's existence can be played around simply by going wide, try to put them in a position where if they have to Odin, they need to trade into your board regardless (then you can reestablish Godwood easily as they expended 7pp). And Yurius is just a meme. In most game states, it's easily answered by Lily, and they often need to expend an evo point in order to play it in the first place, which is bad news for them. In case it ever comes up, you can also bounce the soldiers and they are 0pp in hand.

Your general game plan is to avoid taking significant early game poke and fully out their board every turn (except on the turn you drop Godstaff). In Sword, they will eventually leak turns where you can push small amounts of face damage. It's worth noting that against Sword, it's a legitimate win condition to run them out of evo points, at which point they won't be able to properly threaten lethal and you gain full control over the board. For example, cards like Bayle can be very good at forcing responses from Sword, as they have limited outs to multiple well statted followers at the same time.

Mulligan

General Keeps: Water Fairy/Fairy Tamer/Fairy Fencer/Godwood Staff/Glade/Bayle/Elf Child May/Ambush from Above (don't overkeep early game unless you already have Glade/Godwood as a mulligan select)

Early Game:

Generally speaking, opening Water Fairy + Fairy Fencer will secure the first few turns for you against Sword. It's not very easy for them to ignore the board or play around it meaningfully. If they're going second, you want to prevent them from getting any value from their Zirconia evo, i.e. don't leave any cards on their field. Elf Child May is a bit of a cheat card here, if you play it on turn 3 with 2x Fairies, Sword is not doing anything to you for the next few turns.

I also like setting up Godwood Staff if the opponent has a relatively weak start and I have a meaningful way to recover the board. Examples include Glade/May/Lily. Taking 2 damage to set up Godwood is totally worth it, but you can't do this if they're about to evo Zirconia and buff existing board vs you.

There is also one specific line that is rather nightmarish for Sword to deal with, and that's going second, coin out Lily, then buff Lily with Lambert Cairn as a 2/4, which outs practically every board, forces out Valse/Dog as an out (both of which are inherently outted by the board state, Valse by the Fairy from Cairn). In addition, they still have to contend with the threat of a May/Ambush line. You won't see this one too often as you don't ever keep these in a mulligan.

Mid Game

Supposing you weren't able to set up Godwood earlier, turn 5 is often a great turn for this. You can play Godwood -> Fairy -> May, which clears a lot of boards. Again, if you're only letting them get a small amount of chip damage in, it's ok, just assess your hand and see how easy it is to fully out their board in upcoming turns.

Otherwise, Glade Evo is usually very strong vs Sword and outs everything early game. In addition, if it's 5/5, it limits their range of plays significantly, as practically nothing is a clean out. Even if they use Valse to save evo, they ultimately leave behind a 1 hp follower which is easily cleared by a fairy. In practice, it often forces out an evo point from the opponent, which is what you want to be seeing out of Sword.

In this part of the game, you really just want to clear the enemy board as efficiently as you can, while incentivising them to burn evos to prevent chip damage. If they take chip damage, you can look towards setting up two-turn lethals if you have Bayle/Carbuncle/Roach/Godwood setup.

Late Game

In general, you want to consider two distinct game plans. 1) Is to outlast Sword. If you can force them to run out of their evo points first, you will win. The amount of damage and the way they clear boards will be severely restricted, which will allow you to setup lethal much more freely. A common setup that can win the game against Sword is when they're on only 1 SEV point left, and you do something like Olivia, Bayle, Lily, SEV Olivia Lily full clear board. There's not that much Sword can do to clear that without drawing all their Ignominous Samurais or with a perfect Gildaria setup, so in most situations, you can expect that they will burn last SEV, not even full-clear board, then take damage from board the following turn. Once their SEVs are out, and they don't even have Albert, you will feel the pressure from Sword significantly diminish. Notably, this setup can be done with most of your strong SEV turns. Another example is where you go Carbuncle, Bayle, Roach swing face (keep roach on field). Sword has issues outing "Tall and Wide" boards at the same time in the turn 6-8 range. It's worth noting that at Turn 8, your main threat is likely the manual Gildaria Evo + Ignominous Samurai.

Game plan 2) is to simply look for imminent 2-turn lethals. One of Sword's major weaknesses is a lack of healing. Their two main forms of counterplay are to use wards (SEV Amelia + Luminous) or to threaten lethal. While a few points of chip damage are usually not issues against Sword, you must be careful not to let them drop you below 13 hp without having a lethal of your own. Their main way of doing this type of chip damage will be via Odin or Albert (5pp) chip face, but both are actually quite inefficient against Forest as you will rarely have boards that give full value to Odin, or, in the case of Albert, you should just be able to punish them severely on tempo. In practice, the Albert poke is rare, as they won't consider this unless they have 2 Albert in hand and they had no better board play.

With this in mind, you should look at the makeup of your hand and see if there's opportunities to do any Roach poking (see above section). Roach poking in this matchup can be important to restrict the Sword Player's ability to ignore your board and evo an Odin to face, setting up a turn 9 Albert SEV lethal. To play around this, if you manage to either keep your health high from the earlier stages of the game, even Forest's low healing from Olivia/Lambert can be sufficient to survive. However, the other way is by simply dropping the opponent's health down to something like 13-15. They won't have the courage to Super Evo Odin to face if they have to deal with the potential of you OTKing them the next turn, especially if you have a board on the field already.

Notably, one common game state you will see is that of the Amelia + Luminous Mage SEV. This is actually not that big of a deal. First of all, it is possible to OTK through this with the right hand components (Bayle/Carbuncle SEV/Ambush from above etc). However, if you have sufficient health, you can also board lock them and build a wide board, then go for a guaranteed OTK the following turn. If you run Lymaga, she is a one card-out that board locks them and ensures lethal.

Vs Mirror

Mulligan: Godwood Staff/1 early game fairy generator/Roach/Bayle/Lambert

While this type of mulligan is a little suspect for every other matchup, with the way this matchup degenerates, you are generally able to full clear every board after the first few turns. What's important is having the ability to OTK the opponent first, or, more specifically, being the first player to poke them with Roach and then lethalling the turn after with Double Roach.

As a result, I believe we only need one early game fairy generator to prevent the opponent from doing excessive chip damage, while the rest should be focused on our combo or the ablity to draw into it.

Early Game:

Focus on preventing chip damage from the opponent and, where possible, getting your own in. Godwood Staff is ideal to setup early, due to minimal punish and wanting to set up card draw and 0pp bounce for later.

Mid game:

You want to clear the opponent's board every turn: don't leave even a single follower alive. Likewise, if they leave a follower alive on your board, evo it to enemy face if possible (clear their board first, obviously).

Your other priority should be to generate combo pieces, whether it's discounting Bayle to 0pp or making 0pp tokens from Lambert Cairn.

Late game:

When going second, you might even consider dropping a Roach on turn 6 with Carbuncle Super Evo, depending on the makeup of your hand.

Going first, you'll typically look at a turn 7 poke. Keep in mind that you want your poke damage to actually be meaningful - that is, it actually does enough damage where the opponent can't heal out of lethal. You will need to bounce your Roach through Godwood/Carbuncle/Bug Alert depending on the composition of your hand if you do not have multiple in hand already. Prioritise saving Carbuncle if it's your only one, as you will get more damage from it when going for a 2x Roach lethal

Count your opponent's lethal range and see if you can play around it. In some cases, they may be board locked if your HP is high enough, even if they would otherwise have an OTK through multiple Bayles.

There is almost no need to conserve evo points in this matchup. Your first roach to face should use an evo point, and your last evo point (if you even get to that) should be to secure lethal.

It is no exaggeration to say that in this matchup, the first person to be in a position to poke with Roach will be the winner. And granted, sometimes a player may have Roach but not the means to play it, hence why I've specified "the first person to be in a position to do so".

Vs Spellboost (favoured)

Mulligan

General Keeps: Water Fairy/Fairy Tamer/Fairy Fencer/Godwood Staff/Bayle/Glade

*Note that we assume by default that this is the hybrid list with Norman, as regular Spellboost is effectively an effortless matchup.

This matchup is actually a lot harder than last set due to Norman's existence, as they can burst heal to 20 out of nowhere or put out two 3/3 wards with Barrier that can situationally be tough to break through. However, you are ultimately still favoured by piloting the matchup correctly.

There are three key phases in this matchup to be aware of:

The early game: Generally speaking, this is where the Spellboost player is weakest. At best, they may have 2/2s in the early game or single target removal. You can typically go wide with no threat of punishment and swing face with the expectation that they will be the ones to trade their 2/2s into your Fairies. This is because despite the fact that they have a lot of healing, their lethal reach is quite low until Turn 10 with Kuon Enhance. If they open with no 2/2, this will allow you to get in a very decent amount of poke damage, necessitating them to spend at least one source of "heal 4", which represents 3pp later on OR at least one of Norman's effects. When going second, I do not recommend using evo point aggressively to push 2 damage, as your board will be answered effortlessly the turn afterwards.

The mid game: Turn 5 is where you can generally expect your entire board to be cleared by Anne & Grea or Bergent Evo. This is why on turn 4, it's generally not worth overcommitting, instead, spending time to setup Godwood Staff is often a better strategy. You will generally want an answer to Anne & Grea set up before turn 5, usually in the form of Lily or Glade. Even though Rune has limited reach, they can quickly snowball an evolved Anne & Grea behind a second Anne & Grea or Norman evo for double Guardian Golem. Frankly, the mid-game is a repetition of these cards being seen on every turn, and both players will be trading evo points to take control of the board.

Late game: You are generally on a hard-timer against Spellboost at around turn 10, where they can look at Kuon/Cocytus OTK. From around Turn 7, you will want to start thinking about how you want to lethal them. Whether you have that extra turn or not depends on if who has the coin as well.

You need to put special effort into conserving Carbuncle Super Evolve in this matchup. Not only is it because this card maximises your OTK damage, but it's also crucial for pushing through the wards that the Rune player will definitely throw out leading up to turn 10. Anne and Grea will push out a 5/5 ward, whilst Norman will push out 3/3 barrier wards.

To be honest, these wards are not that difficult to deal with as long as you save your removal for them. For example, two 3/3 barrier wards are easily outted by cards like Bayle, May, Fairies etc. As such, if your hand is able to accumulate many 0pp cards, it can often be better to go for a clean 20 -> 0 OTK around turn 9 instead of risking them healing + warding out of lethal range.

It can be okay to soften them up with Roach poke before the turn you actually intend to go for lethal as this will limit their range of movements. However, make sure you don't do it in such a way that you can no longer OTK or out their board on the following turn.

An important concept to note is that for them, they usually won't know how many Bayle are in your hand, this means that they will always play around lethal within reason. For example, if you're going into an 8pp turn, they're going to try very hard to be outside of the 16 health range as you can potentially double Bayle, Carbuncle SEV, 3x 1pp > double Roach for 16 damage, which means you can assume their next turn will either involve Norman or Sagelight for healing.

If you are second, you will have access to 20 damage OTK with 9+1pp on turn 9 with Carbuncle SEV and 2 0pp cards in hand. You can work backwards from there to determine if you can kill them earlier or whether this is even achievable given your current hand. For example, if you're on turn 8 and you don't have Lambert Cairn anywhere to be seen, then you're obviously not going to generate any extra 0pp cards. In these situations, you will need to shift gears from "20->0" to "kill them over two turns" instead. The key issue with spreading lethal over two turns is the potential for the Rune player to evo Norman to heal 8, so you need to consider how you can kill them irrespective of their potential healing.

For this reason, it is better to decide on this gameplan earlier rather than later, that is, to look at determining your game plan from as early as Turn 6 and then executing on it from Turn 7. Poking them on turn 7 forces them to commit to Norman before their D-Climb is discounted sufficiently to afford them a large tempo boost. This will give you a lot more leeway to respond to their response. The reality is, if you chunk them sufficiently on any turn with Roach, they will play defensively and heal regardless of what your hand actually is. It will also make them play inefficiently, because at the end of the day, "them being alive" is better than "saving efficiency".

To summarise the late game:

• Determine at around turn 6-7 if you will be aiming for a 20->0 OTK or a two-turn OTK

• If two-turn OTK, pressure their life early to limit their range of movement before D-Climb is available

• Don't overcommit into a Norman that you cannot answer

• You need to finish the game before they get access to their 10pp play, you will usually lose if they resolve 10pp Kuon or Cocytus + Shift

Vs Aggro Abyss (unfavoured)

Mulligan

General Keeps: Water Fairy/Fairy Tamer/Fairy Fencer/Glade (if other early game cards already in hand)/Elf Child May/Ambush from Above (esp with Water Fairy going first)

The reason this matchup is unfavoured is because the healing you have available is very limited in this matchup. It's not hard for them to find close to 20 storm/effect damage to your face before you can OTK them with Roach, and if you fail to answer their early board you will be dead far before that point.

Nevertheless, with a build that runs Water Fairy/Fairy Fencer, this matchup improves significantly. In general, you want to minimise the "avoidable" damage as much as you can. Basically, you don't want to let any of their followers stick around on the board to hit your face if you can help it. Build up your board incrementally and chip their face until there is an opportunity to kill them with Roach. Because of how their deck self-damages themselves, you can randomly find opportunities to kill them with SEVO Carbuncle into Roach around turn 7.

In the early game, you will often run into situations like: They play a 1/1, you have Water Fairy and Ambush from Above. You should play Water Fairy rather than Ambush From Above, even if you take 1 damage as a result. The key concepts to understand are as follows:

• Sometimes, even if you remove the damage this turn, you may end up taking more damage later on

• Gaining control over the board will put the Abyss player in an uncomfortable position

The first is simple. If you play Water Fairy, you can kill their 1/1 next turn, and even if they played a 2/2, you can then shoot it with Ambush from Above. However, if you do it the other way around, that is, if you used Ambush to clear the 1/1, then on turn 2, you won't have it available to clear the 2/2, so by saving 1 hp, you actually ended up losing 2. In addition, Water Fairy sets up the Combo (3) effects of Ambush from Above and May, which will allow you to clear their entire board in a following turn while establishing your own, thereby saving you more hp in the long run.

As for why gaining control over the board puts the Abyss player in an uncomfortable position - Abyss wants to clear your board but they also want to hit your face. This means that anything you stick on the board will be able to pressure their life/board. They don't have that many clean outs apart from Turn 3 Vuella/Turn 5 Aragavy. This means that if you manage to stick a board, you may be able to threaten lethal ahead of schedule and force them to play defensively (which is the same as you winning the game).

Turn 2 is actually interesting for certain reasons as well - the fact that they can drop a 3/3 on you. It's a nightmare to out when you go first and they coin it out. In many cases, you're just going to have to accept that you're taking 3 damage. The only real out to this is Water Fairy/Fairy Convocation turn 1 and then using ambush from above, which ultimately depends on your mulligan and initial draw.

As for turn 3 (or turn 2 with coin), this is where you will be able to squeeze the most advantage with cards like Elf Child May or Ambush from Above to full clear their board.

To be honest, after the early game, the amount of interesting decisions decrease significantly. Notable cards to play around include Aragavy from turn 5 onwards, but I don't think it's worth playing around him more than "I can out it if he has it." Your gameplan in the mid-late game should be focused on outting every board while building a small board that can force chip damage if they decide to go evo + face. It will ultimately reach a point around turn 7 where they'll be looking for lethal and Super Evoing Odin to face. You should be aiming to clap back with Roach for lethal, if all goes well. The only thing I'd be wary of is playing too deep into an Olivia tempo play and having no outs to clear the board, but this shouldn't come up too often.

Artifact Portal (evenish)

Mulligan: Water Fairy/Glade/Bayle/Godwood Staff

Glade is a very important mulligan target so that Artifact can't bully you with Alouette tempo, though drawing Lily in time will also be sufficient.

In general, this is a matchup where the onus is heavily on the Artifact Player to pilot their deck correctly. If they don't do this, you're favoured. You should generally track which Artifacts they've put into hand over the course of the game. In particular, you need to pay attention to the number of wards they have in hand. Their key strategy in the late game will be to create an endless wall of wards with cards like Ralmia, and trying to force you into overcommitting your resources, with you losing the ability to OTK in the process.

By understanding their game plan, and how their deck operates, you will be able to determine weaknesses in their various setups. For example, Artifact doesn't have much burst damage from hand. Their best forms of burst are Orchis, Artifact Beta, and Omega (turn 10 only). As such, you will sometimes need to identify whether or not, in the late game, you actually need to clear their board immediately or if you can wait until the next turn to kill them instead.

Early game

Artifact's early game is not particularly strong. It's basically 2/2s on turn 2, Miriam on turn 3, and no real turn 4 play. Therefore, it's good to take the opportunity to clear their board early and setup Godwood Staff.

Mid game

You want to save Glade/Lily for their Alouette play. It's their single strongest tempo swing card prior to turn 8, and this is the only turn where you'll have any real issues with outing it. Therefore, you should mull/play around this turn in particular. Aside from that, you will force the Artifact player into a difficult position by always leaving low-committal Fairies on board, forcing them to expend evo point or slamming down a gamma (which they don't want to do)

Late game

The real late game technically starts around turn 8 when Ralmia starts coming down. Before that point, it's not infrequent to see the Forest player find some chip damage and take relatively little damage themselves. As discussed earlier, this is around about when the Artifact player will start slamming down wards (if they don't, that's cool, you just pilot as if this is vs any other deck and kill them turn 9 before they can slam gundam). To be honest, the first Ralmia is fairly difficult to out if you can't outright OTK them as a response. If they're dropping gamma/beta/alphas, you just need to clear them ASAP and build board. If they're dropping all Fortifier (1/5 wards), then you need to decide how urgent it is to clear these cards in the first place. Even if Ralmia Super Evos and buffs them to 2/6s, that isn't actually a real threat, so you can take your time to lower their health and go for an OTK on turn 9 instead.

I don't personally find this to be a very challenging matchup, as Artifact has limited lethal threat (and if they do go for beta line, they leave themselves vulnerable to, well, dying). I think the main thing is to be prepared for their defensive line of play (it's Roach players that get caught off guard that lose to this type of strategy IMO).

Vs Midrange/Control Abyss (favoured)

Mulligan: Water Fairy/Glade/Bayle/Godwood Staff/Fairy Fencer/Fairy Tamer

Despite the name of the deck, it has a surprisingly large amount of direct damage from hand, particularly in the late game. As a result, you do not want to take any unnecessary damage in the early game or you will be paying the price later on.

Indeed, this deck's best out to you is literally by trying to kill you. Obviously, it does have some healing through cards like Olivia or Cerberus, and some survivability/burst ward via Ginsetsu, but all of these can be dealt with fairly easily when actually going for lethal.

Early Game: Frankly, it's often somewhat difficult to determine what deck they're on because sometimes they even run the 2pp 3/3. In addition, because you can't afford to take damage from Aggro OR Midrange Abyss, you should follow the same guidelines as the Aggro Abyss matchup. That said, you will often see them play Ghostly Soiree, which will create a 2/2 with last words, summon a 2/2. This will usually need to be cleared as you see it pop up, but there will be situations where you can take two damage to set up a godwood and then utilise an Elf Child May play the following turn to retake the board.

Mid game: One of the issues is that Midrange Abyss will continually slam boards that are difficult to fully out. Cards like Charon and Undead Soldier will go very wide and you will find it challenging to kill everything. This will inevitably chunk your health total in the mid game as a result

Late game: You will generally start to stabilise around this part of the game. However, this is also when they will start making powerplays like Olivia + Lesser Mummy or Cerberus Super Evo to chunk your HP. This is why it's important to prevent yourself from taking too much avoidable damage in the early and midgame. There is a significant difference in how the opponent will play if they are able to threaten lethal against you vs if they cannot. If you are healthy, consider bouncing Lily as this will out all of their major threats (Ginsetsu/olivia/cerb etc.) without the neccesity of burning evo points. At some point, you will find an opportunity to poke with Roach on one turn and then finish with Roach OTK the turn after.

With all this being said, my general advice in this matchup is to try and setup Godwood around the Turn 4 mark if possible, use Bayle if you are fortunate enough to get it early to clear boards that would otherwise be impossible to clear and then from there, establish a two turn lethal the moment the opponent gives you an opening. The amount of healing and wards in the deck is quite limited and you are generally at the advantage in the late game because having more play points typically means you can threaten higher-range lethals which your opponent will be forced to respect, limiting their range of plays.

Vs Ward Haven (extremely unfavoured)

Pray they don't have Aether -> Jeanne on curve.

I don't really think there's much point writing about this matchup, it's terrible for Roach and relies on them bricking to win.

Vs Puppet/Ramp Dragon/Misc Favoured Decks

These matchups are all too free. They don't do enough to threaten Roach's health and have no way to realistically defend against the common Roach OTK setups.

Against Puppet: Just clear their board every turn, then they will literally not have enough storm damage to kill you. Their only ward before Liam is Orchis, which you easily punch through and lethal them.

Against Ramp Dragon: Don't let them Fennie for free (go wide). If they don't have a discounted deck, they can't win vs you.

Against Control Haven: Don't overcommit, hard mull for Godwood for infinite resources, go for two-turn lethal setups as the deck has limited healing (ironically)

Against Storm Haven: Protect your health total and take zero unnecessary damage. Force them to swing face and take damage from your pre-existing board, and search for Roach lethal around turn 7/8. This matchup is probably around 50-50.

Against Face Dragon: Intimidate doesn't work against Roach now that the deck got even more removal in the form of Ambush from Above (which is also tempo efficient removal). In essence, this is actually just Aggro Abyss matchup but more manageable. They also have a gap between turn 4-5 which is quite weak which you can abuse to build a big board. On turn 6 onwards, build a board so that if they want to Forte your face, they risk taking your board's worth in damage and having Forte outted, at which point they are basically dead.

Final Thoughts

Roach remains one of the strongest decks in the current metagame owing to its overall strong matchup spread and limited hard counters. While Ward Haven is a terrible matchup, the impact is minimised due to Ward Haven's otherwise poor position in the overall metagame.

For ladder and tournament players alike, I certainly recommend Roach Haven as a deck to pick up and master. It is a deck that will reward you increasingly more with the amount of time you put into it and other decks will not feel the same once you've tasted its forbidden power. I wish everyone the best of luck in set 2. Skreech on!

The written guide will be on Roach Forest + brief SVO advice

I've decided to write a guide on Roach Forest but as it is still under construction, I will share the list that I recommend and a few ideas for SVO.

This is the Roach list that I recommend the most for SVO. It is the easiest version to pilot in my opinion, and doubly so with my guide (which will come, hopefully, in the next 1-2 days).

I think Roach only has two bad matchups currently, Aggro Abyss and Ward Haven. Ward Haven is not only expensive, but it's also not very good, so you're unlikely to see it much in SVO. Aggro Abyss, however, is definitely one of the top decks and needs to be considered as a threat.

I would recommend these two lineups for people playing SVO:

Puppet Portal + Roach/Spellboost: Puppet covers a lot of Roach/Spellboost's weaknesses. Although Spellboost already demolishes Ward Haven, the same cannot be said for Roach. Puppet gives you an easy out to Ward Haven lineups. The key reason to consider Puppet is to hedge against Aggro Abyss, as the matchup is heavily Puppet favoured. This lineup means that the worst situation you can run into is a 50-50.

Aggro Abyss + Roach/Spellboost. This one follows a similar principle to the above, except Aggro Abyss is obviously 50-50 against itself. You only really want to run this if you're fine with playing the Aggro Abyss mirror.

While you can get away with any deck you want, given it's a bo1 format, when I consider the overall matchup spread, these are the only two lineups that seem safe to me. You can also take more risky lineups, but the only reason you would do that is if you were unwilling to play one of the decks above imo.

Quick update 20/07

Just won Sydney Fusion World Regionals - back on the grind for Worlds Beyond this week.

SVO is this weekend, will try to put together one guide for a deck before the event. If there is any preference let me know, otherwise it's probably going to be Sword. Meta's still developing so I will make a judgment call based on what I feel is strong to bring for SVO meta.

Short update this time around.

General Update and Raffle Results

Finally had some time to put together a quick recap and do the raffle results for the month.

Was at Smash! Convention over the weekend, helped out a friend with their stall (with that being said, I know almost nothing about Kpop) but it'd been the first time in years I'd been to an anime convention, so that was cool. Funny thing is, I had previously been out of contact with my friend for years, but ran into them in the most random location a few months ago and reconnected with them, eventually ending up in me helping out at the convention. Fate is kinda crazy like that. I also had, surprisingly, some people ask me at the convention if I was the guy that "ran that YouTube channel" and I was like "yep that's me!"

Probably a good segway to talk about how over the past few weeks, I've been focusing a lot on building up the YouTube channel. Been learning a lot around video and editing and I feel like the quality of the content being put out has improved quite a bit. Notably, I'm very happy that we finally hit the threshold for monetisation on the channel - not so much because it makes money - but moreso because it's a milestone. I set small goals for myself like "I want to reach this many subscribers" or "I want to reach this many view hours" and constantly kept increasing that goal, so it made me quite happy to see things improve. I still have a long way to go but we all have to start from somewhere.

In terms of the Patreon, I'd say there's obviously a few growing pains right now. The transition from SVE to Worlds Beyond, as well as the general work required to keep everything running (and of course, shoutout to both Boron and Dean) has been rather time-consuming, if nothing else. At some point, I want to think about what the best platform is for creating high-quality content for people that want to support us. Patreon was great for SVE but now that it's Worlds Beyond, I recognise that there's a need for me to rebuild a stable user base and to provide them with content they actually want... Problem is, I seem to be overextending myself quite a lot. I still work a full time job, and I play like 5 different card games, have to make YT content, Patreon content and help develop the business itself.

Nevertheless, I want to put together some materials once the next set drops. SVO is coming up and I'll look to put together at least one detailed guide on a deck that I'll be playing once set 2 drops, so you guys can reap the benefits of my learnings and use it for SVO/weekend lobby tournaments/ladder/grand prix. I will take suggestions on deck choices, but realistically, it'll end up being a competitive deck that can actually win the tournament, so stay tuned for that.

Notably, I do want to thank the SVE Patrons who are still here despite the shift to SV:WB!

Aside from that, here are the raffle results for this month:

Winners: Richard and Mohsin

As always, can contact me via Discord to redeem a coaching session.

SVE Master Handover to Seiryo Tennan

Hello all,

As mentioned previously, Dean, also known as SeiryoTennan will be taking over the SVE side of Shadowverse Master (www.svemaster.com). He will be running a Patreon for SVE, so for those of you who followed my Patreon for SVE content, please consider supporting him as he will be updating the content on the SVE site moving forward.

For the foreseeable future, there will be no SVE content on this Patreon. All new content will relate to Worlds Beyond. I am hoping that some of the long-term Patrons stick around as I will be producing high-level content for Worlds Beyond, but completely understandable either way. I highly appreciate all the support over the past months.

As mentioned previously, those who won coaching from me can still redeem it from me by sending a DM.

Announcement Article: https://sve.ccgmaster.com/en/articles/seiryo-tennan

Dean's Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@seiryotennan
Dean's X: https://x.com/SeiryoTennan
Dean's Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/SVEMaster

Control Haven Guide

The first of what I hope are many guides, Control Haven is one of the best control decks in the game. Although it has polarised matchups across the board, it is particularly excellent against decks that lack "inevitable win conditions", that is, cards that win the late game by default such as Prince of Cocytus.

In particular, it is recommended for people that enjoy starving the opponent out of resources and invoking despair. Esperanza has, bar none, the most BM emote in the game, which is "もう勝てないよ. わかってるよね?" Loosely translated, it means "You can't win anymore... You know that, right?"

Which is something you can obviously use when Lapis is about to spawn for lethal or the opponent just literally has no win condition left in the deck.

Matchup Spread:

• Sword - Favoured

• Artifact Portal - Favoured vs average players, unfavoured vs good players (explained later)

• Forest - Unfavoured

• Face Dragon - Favoured

• Ramp Dragon - Depends on how many Cocytus they run. If they never resolve a Cocytus, you are heavily favoured

• Mirror - Even

• Storm Haven - Favoured

• Puppet Portal - Favoured unless they resolve Cocytus

• Rune - Unfavoured, possibly worst matchup

• Abyss - Favoured

Decklist

The decklist below is my current Haven list, which I played in Diamond Tier.

Serene Sanctuary

Your main source of card draw. One of the key cards to mulligan for to ensure you don't run out of resources in the mid game. Helps you dig towards your key removal pieces so you don't need to inefficiently remove cards later.

Winged Statue

Originally I considered this an essential keep, but as I played more of the deck, I realised that the turn 1 tempo is ultimately insignificant against most matchups in the game and this card is much more important in the late game to contribute to Jeanne tempo reversals.

Bellringer Angel

Used to cycle through deck. If low on cards can evo to keep hand size healthy. Very useful in the late game with Jeanne to turn into a 2/6 ward.

Phildau, Lionheart Ward

Super efficient removal with evo. Good to tempo out on turn 2 as well, saves you a lot of health vs aggro decks.

Pact of the Beast Princess

Arguably the best card in the deck early game. It stabilises your first 4 turns singlehandedly, giving you significant freedom to develop your board and reduces the burden of needing to heal in the mid and late game. Can be used to set up tempo reversal turns. For example, n the early game, you can

Apollo, Heaven's Envoy

Necessary to stifle aggression from aggro dragon, sword and forest. Turn 3 stops most of these decks in their tracks, whilst against sword, his evo can clear practically every early game board.

Angelic Prism Priestess

Used primarily as a consistency tool that keeps your hand healthy. The reason we play this card is not generally for its evo effect, though occasionally, it can come in handy.

Dose of Holiness

Can be used instantly to remove a threat and heal up, or alternatively held on the board until it's needed later - in other words, to bank up removal/mana.

Originally ran three copies but felt it was not needed as we had a fairly large volume of turns where this card was awkward to play, especially with the addition of Angelic Prism Priestess which typically takes priority on turn 3 over Dose of Holiness

Divine Thunder

A way of removing major threats without needing to commit evo points. Useful in late game as it can be played alongside a follower on the 9/10 pp turn. Very useful when paired with Soulcure Sister on 10pp, for instance.

Salefa, Guardian of Water

One of the best cards of the deck. Every non Alouette mid game board dies to this card singlehandedly. It also heals for 3, which is useful at all points of the game. Also can combo on turn 10 with Olivia Super evo.

Soulcure Sister

This card won't save you from a bad early start, but supposing a relatively back and forth game, this will put you outside of burst lethal ranges, making its value immeasurable in those types of game states. The three main windows to play this are when your opponent lets you evo with it, you have Unholy Vessel prepared beforehand or on 10pp with Divine Thunder

Unholy Vessel

Arguably the best card of the deck. Can be used instantly to wipe the board but also to setup future turns, allowing for low tempo plays like Soulcure Sister, Maeve, or Lapis.

Olivia

Draws 2 cards and heals you, what's not to like. In addition, the Super Evo effect pairs well with the plethora of 2-costs in our deck, as well as the 10 turn combo with Salefa to heal for 5 while clearing enemy board and putting up a 6/6 ward

Maeve, Guardian of Earth

We've manipulated our amulet ratios specifically for this card, including the addition of Prism Priestess. This card is built specifically for Unholy Vessel. Almost no decks have access to banish, which means that it's almost guaranteed to get back Unholy Vessel. It's also not exactly easy for the opponent to clear through a 5/7 ward in the first place, forcing the opponent into a level of commitment they'll never be too happy with.

Lapis

Your win condition. In games where you get to play this for free (that is, your opponent fails to pressure you properly), you want to slam this. 7 damage every two turns is absurd, and the card can even be used to trade. Simply surviving will ensure victory if this card manages to reach the board safely without you dying first.

Jeanne

Clear a majority of boards in the game. Especially strong when paired on the same turn as breaking Pact of the Beast Princess or Winged Statue. In the late game, it is even stronger if paired with cards like Bellringer Angel to create a wall of 6 health followers.

Concepts to understand

Neutral game state: This refers to a position in the game where your opponent has no followers, or almost no followers on the field. This gives you what we will call "priority", that is, you have the opportunity to force the opponent to respond to your next move.

Neutral game states are pretty rare in SVWB because of how the evolve system works. Most of the time, the last player to evolve has priority over the other player - that is, that the opponent is forced to clear their board. Control Haven is one of the few decks that can, from a neutral game state, force another neutral game state on the following turn due to Unholy Vessel.

Early game chip damage: For most decks, early game chip damage is effectively there to stay. However, Haven has access to a large amount of healing, such as from Salefa. Therefore, Haven does not necessarily need to stay at 20 hp at all times, they can easily drop to 17 hp and expect to recover that via incidental chip healing. This leads to the final concept to consider:

Trading health to save evo points or gain future board advantages: A simple example is as follows: Suppose your opponent has a 1/1 on the board. Do you feel like you have to evo to clear it? Well, to answer that question, what tends to happen if you don't clear a 1/1 is that you take 1 face damage the next turn. In addition, you may not be able to remove it the following turn too, meaning you will take an extra 1 face damage for each turn it survives. This would potentially put you from 20-> 18 hp. However, because you're playing Salefa, you know that taking 2 damage doesn't mean anything, you will clear the 1/1 anyway at a later point while also healing back up to 20. Therefore, not using evolve point earlier carries no real downsides.

General Game Plan

In general, Control Haven is not an aggro deck, it is a late game deck that focuses on controlling the board early. So under a majority of circumstances, do not consider evolving to go face in the early game, and don't overextend your resources into an "all-in" that is effectively impossible.

For your first turn, play a 1pp Amulet if you have one, prioritising Serene Sanctuary. Even against aggressive decks, you'll often find that you won't have time to play Serene Sanctuary on subsequent turns, so this is the best time to get your inevitable 2-card draw in.

Your best two-cost play is almost always Pact of the Beast Princess. This card will singlehandedly keep you at close to 20 hp for the first 3-4 turns of the game. Alternatively, Phildau is the second best play, as it can be used to trade off against their 2-cost, thus preserving your health.

I would not typically advise using coin on turn 1 except in situations where I have Pact + Pact/Phildau as a curve, as it is often better to keep the coin for a potential Selena tempo reversal turn.

Turn 3 depends on the level of pressure the opponent is putting on the board. If there is minimal pressure, then develop with Angelic Prism Priestess. If there is a lot of pressure, then popping Pact is often ideal, especially when paired with a 2-cost 2/2 or Bellringer. Apollo depends on how many 1 health followers they have on board. Dose of holiness is an acceptable play for removing threats or banking mana (I note that Angelic Prism Priestess is much better when the opponent has no board).

Turn 4 going first is one of your weakest turns, as you need to consider what the opponent is likely to do on their evo turn and how you react the following turn. Developing cards like Dose/Angelic or your 1pp amulets is also quite acceptable here on the basis of having a suitable tempo reversal the following turn (for example Apollo/Salefa the following turn).

Going second, cards like Apollo and Phildau will often clear the opponent's entire board. If you have the coin still, you can also utilise Salefa here, especially against decks that have few way to remove a 5/5 from board without trading.

Important note: From Turn 4 onwards, a Winged Statue will pop on Turn 8, which is the first practical turn your Jeanne can come down. Engaging your Winged Statue will make you miss this window (which could be fine, btw, just be conscious that you're doing it).

On turn 5, you will, in most matchups, be forced to clear the opponent's board. From this point on, you should be looking for opportunities to clear board without using evo points IF possible. Otherwise, it's fine to use evo point.

From turn 6, you will have the option to use Unholy Vessel to full clear board on any given turn. You should consider if there are any opportunities to play Unholy Vessel without popping it on turn 6, allowing you to carry it over to a following turn. This is especially strong when paired with cards like Maeve - if you take 4-5 damage by not popping the Vessel on turn 6, you can pop it at the start of turn 7 and then play Maeve, effectively buying you turn 7 and starting turn 8 from a neutral position.

When deciding whether to use Unholy Vessel or a different form of removal, it is best to consider the opponent's deck. For example, if they're likely to drop followers above 6 health in the later stages of the game, it is better to save Vessel and look for different methods of removal (for example, Orchis is too big for Jeanne to clear without evo).

Note that going second, you can also go Vessel on 6 -> then coin out Lapis on Turn 7, then use Vessel to clear board.

On turn 7, you should again consider how to best remove the opponent's board. However, this time, you should be cognizant of a few things:

1) Am I able to Lapis the next turn? Most opponents will try to go wide so you can't get a free evo Lapis in. However, if you are healthy at around 20 health, their deck may not be able to 2-turn lethal pattern you.

In addition, if you are somehow in a neutral game state, you can set up cards like Dose of Holiness or Unholy Vessel to reduce the opponent's ability to lock you out of Lapis.

2) Am I looking to Jeanne next turn to clear their board? If so, you should consider playing Pact this turn and engaging it, thus ensuring it comes out at the same time as Jeanne. The same goes for Winged Statue. For example, if you have both of these cards out, then next turn, you can play Jeanne and create a board of 6/6 ward, 4/6 storm, 6/8 rush, which is obviously very strong against any deck that has no easy access to Bane or mass-removal.

3) What type of lethal ranges is my opponent considering? Around this point of the game is where you need to be very careful of 2-turn lethal setups where they chunk your health while forcing you to respond.

The biggest weakness of Control Haven is when you are unable to clear and heal at the same time, something which decks like Artifact can take heavy advantage of.

On turn 8, this is where you should aim for a Lapis evo if safe to do so without dying. Otherwise, you're locked into the "clear board, heal, build small board and pray opponent gives you a relatively neutral state later in the game."

On turn 9, you should start looking at setting up Pact for Jeanne. From turn 10 onwards, you're able to play a 2-cost from hand then Jeanne. This means that you should time your amulets popping to coincide with Jeanne being played, allowing you to AOE their board and create an unanswerable wall of 6 health followers. Around this time, both you and your opponent will be close to, or already out of evo points.

Turn 10 also enables the ability to use Soulcure Sister with Divine Thunder, or Olivia into Salefa (for healing, tempo, and clear).

Your game plan from here on out should revolve around a huge swing turn with Jeanne, as this is unanswerable by most opponents. This is a much harder game state to play than the one where Lapis was able to be dropped safely, which essentially plays itself (free 7/6 storm every two turns will result in the game being over in one direction sooner rather than later).

Matchups:

Face Dragon

Essentially unlosable matchup as long as you take minimal early chip damage and answer their board as it arises. Their deck doesn't function when you can clear their intimidate followers and heal past their natural burst range. In other words, mulligan for your 2pp tempo tools, Salefa and Serene Sanctuary.

Ramp Dragon: Serene Sanctuary and Pact are the most important keeps in this matchup. Since you won't know their deck on ladder, you can't safely keep Lapis. Going second with double pact opener is very effective against Ramp Dragon, giving you priority for multiple turns to set up Unholy Grail and, hopefully, Lapis. If the game goes too long, you can and will lose to Cocytus, but hopefully it won't get to that. You can play around Cocytus to an extent by going super wide with cards like Jeanne, but it often requires them to not his ramp + Cocytus on curve.

Sword: Apollo, Serene Sanctuary, Salefa and Pact are your most important keeps in this matchup. Phildau is acceptable as a baseline 2pp 2/2. Double Pact is probably the strongest opener, but the rest of these cards are all great. Don't waste Apollo when going first, if you don't have another one or Salefa. This is because you want to have an answer to the opponent evolving Zirconia, who creates a bunch of 2/2s that can be easily answered by Salefa/Apollo.

If the Sword Player lets you, Lapis is often a game ender by herself, but don't count on it against a good Sword Player. Instead, your goal should be to set up a large Jeanne turn. Ideally, you want two amulets popping just prior to your Jeanne coming down, thus giving you a board of at least three 6 health followers. Sword's outs to this are limited in nature and will force out their evo points. Once their ability to Albert evo is gone, their threat levels will be very low.

Nevertheless, it is still important to win via Jeanne or Lapis. Simply clearing alone will not lead to a victory, as you will not be able to find opportunities to swing their face if they draw their Amelias.

Overall, the win rate is exceptional against weaker Sword players, but those that do not overextend while forcing you to respond can find opportunities to outgrind you in the late game.

Artifact Portal

To be clear, this matchup is terrible if they know what they're doing. In general, those that are skilled with this deck will only create the 3-damage Artifact and build it via Alouette/Ralmia at every opportunity. It is impossible to out these cards on curve and heal at the same time, resulting in a very unfavourable matchup.

However, those that aim to build the 10-cost Robot will have a rough time vs Haven. Since the Robot costs 10, they can't really play anything else on the same turn, meaning any 6-health ward will result in you not dying. In addition, by being above 10 health + 2/3 depending on if they have Super Evo/Evo Point remaining, they also can't safely play the card. If they do, Divine Lightning + Soulcure will end the game right then and there.

Thus, it is important to be cognizant of the following key turns which will cause you issues:

5pp Turn: Alouette evo + 4/4 Artifact.

8pp Turn: Super Evo Orchis (8 damage to face) or Ralmia (9 damage to face)

9pp: Same as above

10pp: Same as above.

Now keep in mind, without the Ralmia dealing 9 damage to face, this matchup is perfectly winnable, if not rather favoured.

In addition, if you are ever able to safely drop a Lapis, this will also allow you to race (and often win the game). Once their super evos are out, Jeanne's buffs become almost unstoppable, regardless of how much health your leader has.

Forest

Generally unfavoured if they open with the 3c Amulet which draws them a card every turn. The problem is that even if you clear their board every turn, they just never run out of gas. The longer the game goes, the more likely they'll get chip damage in, and the stronger their roaches become.

The most reliable method to win is therefore via Lapis, as it puts a hard timer down on when they need to kill you.

The key turn you need to be wary of is on turn 3 going first and turn 4 going second. This is where they will look to drop two fairies into Fay Twinkletoes. You can either shut this down early with apollo or wait until after they're buffed to clear them with an evo point.

Not taking too much chip damage gives you a small window to Lapis, the only card in your deck that can realistically pressure their life total. Once Lapis is down, you can focus on defending your life and removing their board while chipping with the 7 damage storm until you have lethal.

Mirror

This mirror almost always comes down to Lapis. Hard mulligan for her and card draw only, forget everything else.

If you're going first in this matchup, you want to play as aggressively/wide as possible, especially around turn 7 to prevent them from being able to get a free Lapis down with their extra coin.

The first person to get Lapis down is at a major advantage, all else being equal. Once Lapis is down, focus on healing and setting up the storm bird amulet and Jeanne to buff everything at once and go for game.

Puppet Portal

Nothing to worry about except for Double Orchis -> Liam/one copy of Cocytus. Once they're out of gas, they don't really do anything, not to mention they have minimal pressure in the mid game. Just don't take chip damage for no reason in mid-game so you don't die to their double Orchis -> Liam game plan and it should be a pretty straightforward win.

Rune

Pray your Rune opponent is bad (actually very likely up until around Sapphire/Diamond btw).

Mulligan: Unholy Grail/Lapis/Serene Sanctuary/

If they tempo out their dudes, it's fairly straightforward to clear with any of your removal pieces. Unholy Grail is important to have in the mid-game, as it's your only super wide removal that deals with their Kuon/Flame Destroyers prior to Jeanne. Once Jeanne is live, you can focus on removing everything quite easily.

Despite the existence of AOE clear in the late game, your win pattern is dependent on you establishing either Lapis or a Jeanne board with 3 followers to prevent their Cocytus win condition. Ultimately, if the Rune player plays towards their win condition of Cocytus/Double Kuon, it's really hard to win. But the sad thing is that many Rune players don't understand their own win con, so it's not that bad to face rune on ladder, especially below Sapphire/Diamond.

Abyss

Lol.

Example VODs

https://youtu.be/9HzvnbnCQpk Bma vs Surre (Vs Artifact)

https://youtu.be/CIJMyWe7NX0 Vs Sword

Final thoughts

Haven is a deck that depends heavily on the metagame and has a rather polarising matchup spread. Personally, I find it a lot of fun to play, but the amount of unfavourable matchups may get on some players nerves(though to be fair, we have a bunch of super favoured matchups too). It's certainly not a tier 1 deck this expansion, but I think many of the concepts covered in this guide will be relevant again in the future!

Quick update: Haven one trick checking in

Despite buying 10x of the 10 pack bundle, I still somehow only own enough cards for Havencraft (lol).

I feel very comfortable with my current iteration of the list and feel like I have an advanced understanding of how to navigate even the deck's poorest matchups. Originally I often played for best tempo, but now that I understand the win con of all the relevant matchups, I switch around the game plan based on what I need to do to actually win (it sounds so easy!)

Had a 9-win streak earlier and the current win streak is ongoing but planning on writing an update and then getting ready for bed. Hit Diamond Group today too ~_~

The more I play the deck, the more I appreciate how powerful Jeanne is as a card. Actively aiming towards buffing the board is a win con in and of itself as not every deck has as much board wipe as Haven does!

I'm thinking I will soon upload a guide on how to play this deck, as the playstyle is adjusted based on the matchup!

Worlds Beyond Day 1 Grind: Control Haven

For some reason, I kept pulling Haven cards so I guess I'm just a Haven player now?

Overall, this deck feels exceptionally strong vs most of the Day 1 meta. Only Runecraft is challenging, due to their ability to OTK you from 20 fairly easily. Win rate is quite high, multiple win streaks and climbing ladder smoothly.

There are two main ways to play the early game. Either you highroll the Tiger curve in which case you just control the board permanently and drop Lapis. Most decks have no outs to her, which means she's a recurring 7 damage storm. If they're behind, they can't even punish you for losing tempo.

However, if you fall behind early game, you will have to play catch-up for the rest of the game. You won't be able to drop Lapis easily, and in many cases, should abandon that game plan altogether. The deck has board clear, healing, and draw for days, so you can start aiming for ways to prevent the opponent from winning as opposed to "winning the game." In other words, just stall them til they have no cards left.

I really like the Worlds Beyond iteration of Control Haven. Dose of Holiness and Unholy Vessel can be activated on demand after they're placed on the field, allowing you to carry pp over to future turns. This can help pave the way for high-committal turns involving Lapis or Soulcure Sister.

Make sure to properly consider your future turns and how you intend to remove popular threats like Orchis on the turns you expect them to appear. Saving evos can be important in some matchups, especially when they're needed to clear the enemy board.

Mulligan should prioritise the early game cards. Pretty much all the 1pp amulets are good, with Tiger being powerful too. Against Abyss and Sword, you'll want to keep Apollo and Salefa, as these will clear basically every early game board.

Against Rune, you can typically mulligan more aggressively for draw and stats, while tossing away your removal options.

This isn't really intended to be a full guide, but just my thoughts on a day 1 deck which I think is pretty good. It's not even at full power yet, I'm missing legendaries!

Important News regarding SVE Master and the future of this Patreon

It's not bad news, I think, but read until the end. Although this will later become public news, my Patreon subscribers will be the first to hear about this.

Since some people probably won't read until the end (though I hope you will), the tl;dr is that this Patreon will be supporting Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond instead of Shadowverse: Evolve moving forward.

From July onwards, I will no longer be playing Shadowverse Evolve. This comes from a multitude of reasons. As some of you may know, my commitments these days are quite different from what they were two years ago, when I first started playing the game. These days, I spend a large amount of time playing games like One Piece, Dragonball Fusion World, and Lorcana. In addition, I expect to take up Riftbound, Gundam TCG and, perhaps most relevantly, Shadowverse Worlds Beyond.

The recent announcement of the accelerated release schedule is also a significant problem for me. It was manageable when I had to learn a new meta once every two to three months, but with the new release schedule, I have to learn the game three to four times faster to continue providing you with quality advice, and this is something I cannot commit to at this time.

In addition, Boron and I have been hard at work developing the next stage of Shadowverse Master. Soon, we will be creating the brand "CCG Master". What this means is that we will cover a broader range of TCGs (the previously mentioned ones and potentially more). This will impact the amount of free time I have available, which is ultimately why I have made the difficult decision to drop SVE from my repertoire.

What does this mean for SVE Master?

Before making this decision, I wanted to ensure that those in the SVE Community will be left in good hands. On the development side, there will be no changes. Boron will continue to support the website and build out new features.

On the content production side, I would like to announce that Seiryo Tennan (Dean), formerly of Burn One, will be representing Shadowverse Evolve Master moving forward. This information is not yet public, so please do not share it until we make a formal announcement to the public.

Dean is one of the largest content creators in SVE, and he is a highly competitive player, making him a good fit for SVE Master. He will have a significant degree of freedom in the content he produces.

Dean will be making his own Patreon soon. I will announce this at a later date, but I hope you can support him moving forward.

What does this mean for the current Patreon?

Moving forward, this Patreon will be producing content for Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond.

As some of you may know, I am one of the best SEAO Shadowverse Players of all time, with only Sadfeeder from Team TK on a comparable level. The following will provide an outline of my achievements.

That is to say, those who remain subscribed will receive insight from one of the best Shadowverse players on Worlds Beyond instead of Shadowverse: Evolve.

Patreon content for Worlds Beyond will go live from this month, so don't miss it!

In addition, regardless of whether you are here for Shadowverse Evolve or Shadowverse Worlds Beyond, subbing to me goes directly back into the company, which helps pay for the development/server costs for all our websites, including Shadowverse: Evolve.

What happens to those who have won coaching and not yet redeemed it?

All those who are entitled to coaching will still be able to redeem it in via DMs. For those who would like SVE coaching, please DM me as soon as possible. While my fundamentals for SVE are very strong, the longer you wait, the less attuned I will be to the meta (Set 9 is fine, but going beyond that will lead to some challenges).

You can also redeem coaching across any of the following games, all of which I play at a high level:

• One Piece

• Dragon Ball Fusion World (I recently won a regionals tournament for this!)

• Disney Lorcana

• Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond

• (When released) Gundam TCG and Riftbound

The list above is not exhaustive and is subject to change over time.

Final thoughts

Once again, I'd like to thank everyone who has supported me over the past year; many of the achievements we have accomplished would not have been possible without you.

For those of you who will be joining me on the journey to Shadowverse: Worlds Beyond, I will ensure that I continue to produce high-quality content, allowing us to rise to the top together. If you have any concerns I have not yet addressed, please feel free to send me a DM.

May Raffle Results

YC Tier: Richard
SVM Tier: Dr Her0
Supporter Tier: Framework

As always, winners may contact me on Discord to organise a session. Please also view the important announcement in the separate post.

Card Game Fundamentals: How badly do you want to win?

Everybody wants to win.

It's more fun. You win better prizes. People respect you more. What's not to like?

But at the end of the day, there can only be one winner and one loser. It's a zero-sum game.

If life were fair, everyone would win and lose equally. But in reality, there's a clear and visible difference between the people who win a lot and those who don't. The question is, which one are you?

This article explores the primary distinction between the two.

Yeah, didn't expect a Blue Lock meme, did you? Unironically, though, there's a certain wisdom in this statement. If you had to put your life on the line for anything, how much harder would you try to make sure you succeed?

There's a big difference between a loss where you don't care about winning or losing... And one where your life depends on it.

This applies to every facet of life. Perhaps it refers to exams. Maybe that job interview for your dream company? Winning against Yoichi Isagi in soccer?

Regardless of which key life event you thought of, think about how much harder you worked to achieve it. If it's something you want, then it's something you should work hard for.

If you don't work very hard for it, why do you deserve to have it?

Natural Talent vs Hard Work

Natural talent does exist. But so does the value of hard work.

My view is that natural talent reduces the amount of work you need to put in to achieve the same outcome as someone who has less natural talent.

This means that lazy geniuses will always lose in the long run, and fortunately, most of these people with natural talent have poor work ethic! So, it doesn't matter how much natural talent you have, as long as you're willing to work hard.

That said, if a person with natural talent puts in a lot of hard work, then damn. Fortunately, in card games, you can always win against someone better than you with superior luck!

The availability and usage of resources

Two of the key resources that most people have limited amounts of are time and money.

Life is a lot about making choices. In reality, someone choosing not to spend time and money on improving their skills at card games is not due to laziness; it's due to how they've prioritised different aspects of their life, whether they consciously do so or not.

For example, certain aspects of your life are challenging to deprioritise: Earning a living. Eating. Sleeping. Depending on your circumstances, there may be other aspects of your life that you are unwilling to compromise on, such as your relationships with friends and family.

There are no wrong choices, as it were. However, you should be able to justify the choices that you've made, and, more specifically, the consequences of those choices.

The previous points mostly related to time. Let's discuss the second key resource: money.

Once again, money is a limited resource, and one that motivates almost the entirety of the human race to varying degrees. In card games, money ensures that you can buy the cards you need when you want them. It allows you to travel to events domestically and abroad. It also allows you to purchase coaching, access paywalled content (like this Patreon, hehe), and subsidise your time.

For example, if I grind a specific deck for 30 hours, I'm going to know the ins and outs of that deck. But what if I don't have 30 hours to grind? I could pay a highly skilled player around $ 50-100 for a few hours of coaching. Within those few hours, they will be able to provide me with the key insights that I would have otherwise needed to spend 30 hours gathering. The same applies to deck guides and similar resources.

But at the same time, money is a limited resource. You can use it to get better at card games, or you can use it for other key priorities within your life. The choice is yours.

Tying it back to the Blue Lock meme.

One of the main things you'll have noticed throughout this article is that I refer to everything as a choice.

• Whether you spend money on getting better at TCGs, or if you spend it on other things that are more important to you.

• Whether you spend your time getting better at TCGs, or if you spend it on other things that are more important to you.

I don't criticise people, regardless of the choice they make. You have to make decisions that are authentic to yourself. What I do is not what you should do, or vice versa.

However, if your life truly were on the line. If winning a specific tournament was more important to you than almost everything else in your life, then there are no choices. The only correct option in such a scenario is to spend all your spare time on getting better at the game. It would be strictly wrong to save your money and avoid coaching just to save some money.

I've played numerous card games over the years, and I've heard it all. People tell me all the time how badly they want to win specific tournaments, be they regionals, nationals, or even the world championships. But at the end of the day, how badly you want to win something is not dependent on what you say; it's about what you do. And let me tell you, so many people say one thing, but their actions don't reflect their words.

So the next time you think about how badly you want to win something, circle back to the concepts discussed in this article. What steps are you taking to accomplishing the goals you've set for yourself?

Final thoughts

The reality is that most top card game players make numerous sacrifices to achieve the results they do. A lot of time, effort, and/or money is expended for them to stay at the top. It's the key difference that separates players with multiple achievements from those who do not.

Once again, I'm not criticising anyone for deciding their time and resources are better spent elsewhere. However, if you're someone who truly desires better results in TCGs, then it's definitely worthwhile to consider how many resources you're willing to invest to achieve them.

VOD Review/Coaching Bat Abyss

This time, we went through VOD replays of 4 games of Bat Abyss.

It's good to have this type of session where the person on the other side already has a solid understanding of the game and deck, and is really just looking for second pair of eyes to provide another perspective.

Fortunately, we did pick up on better lines and plays for all 4 games. I think game 1 was a little awkward cause I'd somehow gotten mind controlled into thinking Old Blood King was a 2/4 post-evo so that entire turn 5 discussion was kinda cringe, but yeah, obviously we got to the right answer eventually in that we play Vania on turn 5 as Old Blood King is a 1-card out to Ladica.

I think these are the types of games where even though he won all 4, these small mistakes can just randomly cost you 1 game of swiss in a big tournament, so it's still important to polish your play so you don't randomly throw games you're supposed to win.

Update + Raffle Results (Apr/Mar)

First of all, congrats to winners of the raffles for last two months (batched together)

YC Tier Winner: Richard x2

SV Master Tier: Dr Her0 x2

Supporter Tier Winner: Framework

Contact me on Discord to organise a session.

It reached a point where I had forgotten to do the raffle in March, so I decided to just bundle them together.

General thoughts and summary

I just came back from a trip to Perth for One Piece Regionals, finished 26th, which was okay. All trips to Perth are always worth it, regardless of how I do at these tournaments, since I'm there to see friends and family as well. But I guess it's nice when the trip is paid off by the prizing.

That said, I'm finding that somehow I always seem to get sick whenever I go to Perth. This time around, I caught a cold towards the end and even had to cancel some plans as a result. One of them is a doctor and works at a hospital, and this is actually the second time I've had to cancel on him because if he gets sick, he has to cancel his shifts.

So in any case, while recovering and travelling, I played a bunch of Hundred Defense Line, which is an insanely good new VN/RPG that just came out. But I think I'll be shelving it once I've recovered and saving the rest for when I go travelling for various events.

Worlds just concluded for SVE. Very proud that 3/8 of the top 8 were from Australia, including Jason and Chappers, who are both friends of mine. I am rather surprised Chappers made 3rd, he's probably one of the best SVE players in Sydney, but I was... sceptical of his deck choice tbh. I also had a convo around Jason's Sword list, but I conceded that it was a good pick to worlds because it smashes Bats and, based on testing, it was shown that a not-so-bad dirt matchup vs most decks (as Dirt was not teching adequately for it).

In April, I put out an article on how to play Dirt Rune. To be honest, this took a huge amount of effort, as I may have mentioned in the article. The deck is not easy to play, and I took quite a lot of time to learn the intricacies of the deck before I was able to put out a guide for it. The other thing I didn't mention is that I lost all my work on that guide once as well (which was exceptionally tilting).

In May, I'm planning to put out another article on fundamentals, this one will probably be centred around the concept of "what it means to want to win." It's a topic that isn't talked about too much but is critically important to success.

In addition, we're currently building a bunch of stuff for a future release:

Looks kinda nice, right? Well, when it's ready, it'll get shipped!

Quick thoughts: SVE Worlds Deck Diversity

I remember a few weeks back saying that people don't play the objectively best decks, even in the biggest (closed-invite) tournaments of the year.

It was a prediction I made before the event even happened, but let's take a look at the deck breakdown at Worlds:

• Dirt 25

• Bats 19

• BW Sword 9

• Puppet 8

• Draconic Duelist 3

• Lishenna 3

• Nat Dragon 2

• Ramp Dragon 1

• Control Abyss 1

• Hunter Forest 1

• Fairy Forest 1

• Nat Forest 1

• 2 Cost Abyss 1

• Amulet Haven 1

• Kuon 1

• Ward Haven 1

• Thief Sword 1

Top 8 Breakdown (Fun fact, three Australian players made top 8)

• 1 bats

• 1 bw sword

• 1 fairy forest

• 1 kuon

• 4 dirt

If this truly is a competition of the "best players in the world," then this type of deck diversity shouldn't be possible. Yeah, sometimes there's "hidden-OP" decks, but most of the time, those people brought the wrong deck. My friend came third with Kuon this worlds, he's a skilled player, and admittedly, Kuon probably is one of those "good for this format" type of decks. But the others? It's like the Simpsons scene where someone suggests they'll vote third party, and the aliens laugh and say "Go ahead! Throw away your vote!"

As for why people don't always pick the best deck, let's evaluate ine of the most commonly uttered phrases across all card games: "The mirror sucks!"

But how often is this actually true? Does the mirror actually suck? Or is it actually the player saying it that sucks? Take a reality where there's actually a large skill component to the mirror. In this reality, a player that says the mirror sucks is obviously just unaware of their own shortcomings. Now, to be fair, if the player has actually tried their best and can't make it work, then they should not play the deck where they expect to lose the mirror. They should focus on what gives them the highest chances of winning. So sure, I understand why they might not play the best deck in format in such a case. But again, it implies that we are not really at the pinnacle of skill level, because it's my belief that most top-tier card game players should be able to play multiple top tier decks. Especially when it's the title of World Champion on the line.

Other people have superstitious reasons for choosing a specific deck. Sometimes it's cause they like a specific character or because they think there's some supernatural element at play that will favour them if they choose it. In reality, though, unless the deck is actually better than another choice, that's actively sabotaging your own chances of winning. There's far more untold tales of failure than the few cases where someone brings their pet deck and does well with it.

The other important thing to note is that sometimes, even the person bringing the secret best deck may not do well on the day. After all, by virtue of it being a secret deck, it'll usually just be a few people on it.

When we play card games, the crucial concept is to critically evaluate a given situation and to not use "results-based analaysis." A deck isn't good just because it made top 8. The same way that a deck isn't necessarily bad just because it failed to do so.

But one pattern is clear; in this worlds, and at many such competitions in the past, many players are simply making the wrong decision when they bring their specific decks. And perhaps this is to be expected. In America, you sometimes get 200 player events for SVE. In various other parts of the world, maybe you're getting like 30 players? Then on top of that, add the concept of bo1 to these small tournaments, and it begins to add up that not every player at the World Championships are a top tier player.

Notably, Dirt Rune had the highest popularity and also the highest representation in the top cut. Despite losing to Bats, I think it's fairly clear that Bats were not the best deck of the format. Wibbs is obviously a skilled player, but I'd argue he benefited from a bo1 format. But, to be fair, the format of Bushiroad World Championships is not to find the best player - it's to find the World Champion. It's an important, yet somewhat sad distinction.

BP09 Dirt Rune Guide

Dirt Rune, also known as Earth Rite Rune, is one of the strongest decks in BP09, and remains a dominant force that even necessitated restrictions to Gingerbread House in Japan. With the World Championship on the horizon, expect the format's top two most popular decks to be Dirt Rune and Bat Abyss respectively.

To summarise, Dirt Rune is a midrange combo deck with explosively high value cards in Ceridwen and Faust, respectively. The game plan revolves around setting up Earth Sigils in the early and mid-game that can be converted into constant chip damage. In the late game, you can aim for a 2-turn lethal setup with Riley/Ancient Alchemist, respectively.

In the long term, it will get hit by the ban list, but until then, it's a very powerful deck that is well worth the investment if you are going to Worlds and intend to grind Showdowns.

Deck list

Teachings of Creation

Pretty generic Earth Sigil. It draws you a card for 1pp. Good in the opening turns and can fill in any later curves. Remember that you want to play this card first to see your draw before committing to a larger play (you may draw into a better answer).

Gingerbread House

Broken card. Heals 3 for 1pp while also providing you with an Earth Sigil. Notably, it can be searched as part of Faust's Ceridwen Loop with Mirror of Truth.

Witch's Cauldron

Consistency tool. It's possible to whiff on the search but overall, helps you get closer towards Faust, Ceridwen, and Riley. Even if you have to bottom deck a combo piece, you can always shuffle your deck later with Faust/Sweet-Tooth Medusa.

Beast-faced Mage

Powerful and versatile card. You can play this as a goblin in some matchups to get poke damage (for example, in the mirror, you can guarantee 2 damage on opponent if it's played on turn 1). Or you can use this as part of the three 1-pp opener (Earth Sigil turn 1, then turn 2 second Earth Sigil into Beast-faced to clear their turn 1 follower).

How you use this will depend on your hand's composition and the matchup. Has much higher priority against decks like Sword. Be wary that using his effect too early without having 2 sigils setup can allow your opponent to "starve" you and leave him alive to prevent Ceridwen/Alchemist Earth Rite on fanfare.

This card can also act as a deterrent for opponents aiming to leave highly statted followers standing, as this contributes 2 extra damage to any removal.

Angelic Barrage

The Bat Abyss tax. Earth Rite doesn't have efficient ways to clear wide boards in the early game, as a majority of your removal is reliant on Ceridwen evo which can only clear two followers. Can be searched by Sweet-Tooth Medusa, and also combos very well with her.

Red-hot Ritual

Generic 2pp removal with a Earth Sigil attached to it. 3 damage is very good for clearing early-game threats. In addition, it can be searched in the mid game with Faust, often pairing with Summoning Drills.

Rabbit Mage

Despite the weak 2/1 stats, it can still be curved out on turn 2 going first. In this format, there's not many efficient ways to clear him (usually neutral tempo trade), and he also gives you a Sigil on Fanfare. If he's not cleared, you can evo him the next turn, swing face and dig for your tools. Works very well on turn 3 with Red-Hot Ritual to clear their turn 2 play.

Summoning Drills

One of the ideal turn 2 plays going first. 2/3 ward is fairly solid and it also builds your Earth Sigil count. Typically, the discard effect is used to toss Riley/Ceridwen/Ancient Alchemist, as these cards can all be recurred later via various effects. The Strikeform Golem can be used later to get an extra 3 burst damage via Ancient Alchemist in the late game.

The other use case is searching it with Faust alongside either Gingerbread House/Red-Hot Ritual/Witch's Cauldron. Typically, this is only done when you have no access to Ceridwen (and open pp/evo point)/Alchemist.

Ancient Alchemist

The obvious use case is in the late game. Can deal 6 damage to enemy leader after evo (9 with summoning drills), and can be recurred via Mirror of Truth and Eternal Potion (only costs 2pp).

The less obvious use cases you should learn to master are when to use the Ancient Alchemist for tempo. For example, not many decks in the game can easily clear her when she's curved out on turn 3. The other time you can curve her out is on Turn 5 via Faust! If she's in the cemetery already due to a card like Summoning Drills, you can search Gingerbread House + Mirror of Truth to bring her out. You then buff her to a 3/6 with Faust, making her very hard to clear via conventional outs. If she isn't cleared, you evolve her then slam 3 golems down the next turn.

Price of Magic

A tech card that is quite strong against the mirror match as Faust can search it. By banishing their Ceridwen, it becomes difficult for them to loop her via the Mirror of Truth recursion from the cemetery via Faust.

It also has its use cases against Bat Abyss, as it can prevent the opponent from reaching their 5-vampire-card breakpoint for Vania.

Mirror of Truth

This is the reason why you can send Ceridwen and Ancient Alchemist to the cemetery with no repercussions. It can bring them back for the same pp cost as what they would cost in your hand. In addition, this card can be searched via Faust to cheat Alcehmist/Ceridwen out. This is often seen when going second as Dirt Rune, as they can Faust, bring back Ceridwen, evo Ceridwen, then burn the enemy leader for 4 while clearing the board.

Riley

One of the strongest cards in the deck. Can be cast directly from hand to draw 2 cards or clear a problematic enemy follower. Once in the cemetery, you can use her 6pp effect to send 6 to the enemy leader while clearing board and replenishing hand.

This card also has multiple style plays with Eternal Potion from Ceridwen. When she's brought back from Eternal Potion, you also get to draw 2 cards, ping a standing follower for 5, and slam a 6-atk follower into an engaged follower. For this reason, she also has some interesting combo applications with Sweet-Tooth Medusa.

Ceridwen

One of the two broken legendary cards released in this set.

Ceridwen ties everything in the deck together. She is a strong tempo evo, and will singlehandedly deal 6 chip damage to the enemy leader over the course of the game due to Instant Potion. Her Eternal Potion can be used to bring herself back or, more commonly, Riley/Ancient Alchemist for only 2pp. Riley being a 2pp pot of greed that clears the enemy board is sort of ridiculous!

She is also able to be brought back by Mirror of Truth, which is where the infamous Faust -> Mirror of Truth -> Ceridwen Evo combo results in 4 chip damage to enemy leader within a single turn.

Faust

What a broken card, lol. For starters, keep in mind that this is one of the only two cards in your deck that allows you to shuffle your deck (in case critical combo pieces were mulliganed away or sent to bottom of deck via Cauldron).

Also, at the end of the turn, you can send an Earth Sigil to grave to ping enemy leader for 2 and buff a follower on your field by +1/1. When determining what card to buff, consider how to make it as awkward as possible for your opponent to remove the board.

Now, the important part: This card allows you to search your deck for 2 Earth Sigils up to 4pp in total. I will detail the various options below:

• When you have Ceridwen in grave and have evo point or 1pp open after: Mirror of Truth + Gingerbread House/Witch's Cauldron. Bring back Ceridwen, clear their board, ping them for 4.

• When you have Ancient Alchemist in grave: Mirror of Truth + Gingerbread House/Witch's Cauldron. buff Ancient Alchemist in the end phase. This is best done when your opponent has minimal cards on the board and will find it hard to clear and push an advantage.

• When you have no access to Cerdiwen Evo and need to clear their follower: Red-hot Ritual + Summoning Drills/Cauldron depending on game state

• When your opponent has a 4/4 Ceridwen on board: Price of Magic + Gingerbread House/Witch's Cauldron

Note: You take Witch's Cauldron when you need to draw into a critical combo piece such as Ceridwen/Alchemist/Riley. Otherwise, Gingerbread House to heal 3.

The above are your primary use cases, though with more pp available, you may be able to get a bit more creative.

Sweet-Tooth Medusa

Your only other shuffler apart from Faust. Notably, you will typically search for one of these three cards: Witch's Cauldron (if you are critically missing combo pieces), Red-Hot Ritual (for when you need it to clear the board), or Angelic Barrage (often vs Bat Abyss).

Despite the temptation you might have, it is often incorrect to leave your Serpents on the board. You can and will get board locked by your opponent!

This card is super interesting and can lead to some extended combos, especially when clearing a very wide board.

Going first or second

I've thought about it for a while, and you always want to go first with this deck.

There are too many decks in the current meta where you will find it very difficult to control their board if you don't go first. You'll take a lot of unavoidable chip damage from their turn 1 play, especially if they go wide against you. Conversely, you can push a bunch of chip damage into them if you go first, which means you can threaten 2-turn lethal setups more easily.

Cards like Faust are mostly PP gated (aside from Ceridwen evo on turn 5), you want access to more play points earlier than your opponent. Evo points don't give you a particularly significant advantage compared to other decks either.

Mulligan Strategy

General Mulligan

You want to focus on playable opening curves. The ideal opener is one where you have a solid turn 1/2 game plan and your combo pieces of Ceridwen/Riley/Faust. Most of the time, you don't want to get blown out early by passing early turns, and based on how the deck works, your only real shortage of Earth Sigils is in the early game.

Having a good opener means you have a much more flexible turn 3/4, you take less chip damage (and inflict more to opponent), making it easier for you to play the game in the latter stages.

Going First mulligan

Going first, you shouldn't be too concerned with which 1pp cards you get. Of course, the ideal 1pp card is Beastfaced Mage, but I wouldn't greed for it except vs maybe Sword.

When going first, almost all the 2pp cards are playable, whether it's Rabbit Mage, Summoning Drills, or 2 1-pp cards. Most of your 3pp cards can also curve on turn 3, even if they can't be evolved immediately.

The main thing is not to get too greedy going first if the hand has a playable curve. Missing turn 1/2 can be rather disastrous and it's often not worth the risk.

Going second mulligan

There's a higher priority to be able to contest the board going second. Between turn 1 and turn 2, at least one of your plays should be able to properly interact with the enemy board, whether that's Beastfaced Mage or Red-Hot-Ritual.

Cards like Summoning Drills can be a liability going second, as it doesn't impact the board fast enough and can provide a target for cards like Last Daylight (which can effectively lose you the game immediately).

Ceridwen is a much higher priority keep going second as she is your primary way of fighting for the board back on turn 3.

Keep in mind the specific mulligan strat for Dirt Rune mirror going second below.

Key Matchups

Mirror Match

Going first

You should try and capitalise on the advantages that going first can provide you AND avoid the common pitfalls

• Beastfaced Mage on turn 1 can't be cleared by the opponent on turn 1, thus guaranteeing 2 face damage. Their best out to this is via their own Beastfaced Mage on turn 2, though this can then be answered in a multitude of different ways by the turn 1 player regardless. Every other play is tempo-neutral, minus the fact that they lost 2 health

• Be very careful on turn 3. If you curved something like Summoning Drills on turn 2, let's say, then you should usually not swing with it. This is because they are highly likely to have turn 3 Ceridwen evo, which will clear both your followers. Unless you specifically want to deal with a 4/2 Ceridwen, it's generally better to let them have a 4/4 Ceridwen. That way, you could hypothetically answer it with Riley/Ceridwen evo the next turn, leave them standing, then go Faust on turn 5, making it practically impossible to full clear your board.

• In addition, if you force them to use Ceridwen to clear your board on turn 4, but leave nothing for them to trade into you, Faust can search for Price of Magic and banish Ceridwen. When you then proceed to buff Faust to 5/5, this makes Riley/Medusa their only efficient out to Faust.

• Due to the above, it also gives you priority to Faust again on turn 6, except this time, you can evo Ceridwen, and this is very difficult to out.

• On turn 5, you should seek the opportunity to Mirror of Truth to bring back Ancient Alchemist, buffing it to a 3/6. This is very hard to out and can lead to a huge swing turn on turn 6. Even if you take some face damage, you'll be returning it and more in the following turn.

Going second

Here's a list of the relevant benefits of going second:

• Ability to turn 3 Ceridwen Evo

• Ability to evolve Ceridwen off Faust on turn 5

• Ability to Medusa evo on turn 5

• Ability to evolve Ancient Alchemist for 1 less pp

Let's also discuss one of the key dynamics of the Dirt Rune mirror. If you have no board on turn 4, and your opponent proceeds to Faust, how do you intend to answer them if they do any of the following:

• Faust + Ancient Alchemist, buff Alchemist to 3/6

• Faust + Red Hot Ritual (clearing your Riley or something), bring out Summoning Drills, buff Faust to 5/5

• Faust + 3/3 Ceridwen, buff Faust

I think it's pretty obvious that in the first case, you basically lost the game.

In the second case, you're locked out from playing your own Faust (unless you're keen on taking 7 to the face), but at least you can still clear their Faust, while probably leaving their 3/3 Guardform alive. The third case is mostly the same.

What is the takeaway here? Do not have an empty board going into turn 5.

This leads into the next point around being careful on evolving Ceridwen on turn 3. If you evolve it turn 3 and they fire back with their own Ceridwen, how do you intend to clear it on turn 4? Eternal Potion will lose you the game. Your only real outs are effectively Riley (which is weak to Faust -> Red Hot Ritual + Summoning Drills), 2nd Ceridwen or Mirror of Truth to bring back Ceridwen.

Now, supposing you do drop Ceridwen on turn 4 to clear theirs, what if they then go Faust + Price of Magic? You still have to deal with their 5/5 Faust, the issue being that you no longer have Ceridwen in the Cemetery for your own Faust. At least in this situation, you can still reset the board to a degree with Riley or Sweet Tooth Medusa, but it does put the ball squarely in their court, potentially for a 6pp Riley play to swing face.

In essence, this is the stark contrast between going first and second, and your goal going second should be to mitigate this disadvantage as much as possible. There is one way to avoid this nightmare scenario (outside of hoping they fail to draw the combo), and that is by hard mulliganing for Riley + Ceridwen).

You can out any Faust board if Riley is in the grave and you can play Ceridwen for 3pp, evo point, free cast instant potion on their Ceridwen, then Eternal Potion for Riley to clear the remaining 5/5. This still doesn't out the Alchemist + Faust, line, but you can't win them all.

With this in mind, if you lose the dice roll, I recommend you hard mulligan towards Ceridwen + Riley. A strong candidate to keep would include one of Riley/Ceridwen, and Rabbit Mage/Cauldron to help dig for the remaining combo piece.

General Tips

• Be on the lookout for when you can set up 2-turn lethals. Ideally, until this point, you should be aiming to clear opponent's board while chipping their leader.

• When going for a 2-turn lethal play, make sure you don't leave yourself too vulnerable to the burst healing from Gingerbread House.

• Keep an eye out for Riley in the grave. If Riley is not in the grave, then for the most part, it is possible and also a win condition to build large boards that the opponent cannot clear.

• Keep an eye out for obvious weaknesses in the opponent's hand. It is often obvious if they lack cards like Riley and Ceridwen, so take advantage of this when you see it.

• Assess the danger of your opponent switching to a lethal game plan and protect your life accordingly.

Bat Abyss

Whether this matchup is unfavoured or roughly even depends on how much of the Angelic Barrage tax you're paying. Going first or second doesn't fundamentally change the game plan compared to the mirror. However, going first is generally better because you take a lot less chip damage and you're less vulnerable to Last Daylight tempo plays.

Going first

• Beastfaced Mage can't be outted turn 1 by Bat Abyss. The Beastfaced Mage -> Rabbit Mage on turn 2 curve is particularly strong.

• Their tempo can be stifled by the fact that they often need to use 2pp to properly clear your board. Playing followers on every early turn mitigates their ability to aggressively go wide and hit face.

• Be wary that when you evolve Ceridwen on turn 4, they are quite likely to answer with either Old Blood King evo or go wide with bats + Last Daylight. Assess carefully if you are still able to Faust against these conditions.

• You are generally a lot healthier when going first. This means you can be more greedy with your health to get a better position later (you can semi board lock Bats sometimes).

Going Second

• You are going to be working with a much smaller health pool going second. It is impossible to fully control their board early game without Angelic Barrage. Cards like Beastfaced Mage, Angelic Barrage, and Red-Hot Ritual (and tbh, even this is a feelsbadman) are significantly higher priority than usual.

• Unlike when going first, curving out a 2-cost follower can be very dangerous if the opponent curves out 3 1-cost followers on the first two turns. If they then follow up with another 1/1 and Last Daylight, you lose if you don't have Angelic Barrage in hand.

• Turn 5 represents an opportunity to reverse the tempo with Faust + Mirror of Truth -> Ceridwen evo. This is not easy to clear without access to Blood Queen Vampy.

General Tips

• Precious Bloodfangs is one of their only ways to buff their bats outside of the Angelic Barrage range

• Don't overcommit your board when they have 5 vampire cards on the field. Most boards can be easily cleared by Blood Queen Vampy

• Unless you have a two-turn lethal setup, always ensure you have an answer to Blood Queen Vampy

• Once Crimson Rose Queen is active, don't get caught off guard by the healing/aoe board clear. Don't overcommit and find yourself unable to clear the 6/6

• Note that when considering if your health total is enough to survive two turns of burst damage, that both Blood Queen Vampy and Crimson Rose Queen are fairly likely to leave behind a bunch of 1/1 bats as well.

• In some cases, it may be correct to search Price of Magic off Faust to prevent them from reaching 5 vampire cards in grave for Blood Queen Vampy/Gift for Bloodkin

• The deck has a fairly absurd amount of chip healing, so be prepared for many games where you are 1-2 damage off a lethal threshold

• Despite their aggressive potential, their actual burst from empty board is fairly low and caps out with Crimson Rose Queen/Blood Queen Vampy. Use this knowledge to your advantage when planning out lethal

Additional content:

Commit the following removal breakpoints to memory as well, so you have a better understanding of how Bats can interact with your board at each threshold:

2pp removal options

• 2pp Raven + existing bat = deal 4 damage to any follower.

• Last Daylight

• Whispers of a Dream

• 2pp + 1*X = 2pp Vampy + 3 damage per bat on field and extra play point

4pp removal options

• 4pp + evo point/5pp = Old Blood King Evo - Minimum 2x 2 attack assail bats, 3/5 main body rush

• 2pp Raven + Last Daylight

• 2pp Raven + Whispers of a Dream

• Double 2pp Raven (unlikely)

• 2pp Vampy + 2pp = 6 split damage

5pp/6pp removal options

• 5pp + evo point/6pp = Blood Queen Vampy - 3 damage to follower + an additional 3 damage to a follower per extra bat played

• 5pp Old Blood King + Any 1pp bat option + Any existing Bats on field + Gift for Bloodkin

• Any combination of the 2pp removals

7pp and above

• Crimson Rose Queen

• Blood Queen Vampy

• Note that if they have 5 Vampire Cards in grave, their Gift for Bloodkin is free (2 bats for 0pp/Crimson Rose Queen proc)

There's two things to take away from the above:

1) Once they have 5 Vampire cards in the grave and 5pp + evo point/6pp, it is trivial for them to remove practically any board using Blood Queen Vampy if they have Gift for Bloodkin in hand.

2) There are certain thresholds that are difficult for Bat Abyss to clear in the early-mid game

What do these two takeaways actually mean?

For point 1

• If they do not have 5 Vampire cards in the grave, they cannot use Blood Queen Vampy on their 6pp/5pp+evo turn unless their last vampire card is on the field and is able to trade in

• If your opponent literally cannot reach 5 Vampire cards, then they cannot use Blood Queen Vampy. No access to Blood Queen Vampy means they can't full-clear your board and deal 6 to your face.

• This also means that if they have 4 in grave and one on field, they can crash into your cards to reach 5. Therefore, you should not leave them targets to trade with, thus sealing Blood Queen Vampy.

• Suppose, instead, that they DO have 5 vampire cards in grave. Then, firstly, you know that the Vampire Queen will be able to ping at least 1 card for 3, but more if they have Gift For Bloodkin or bats in EX area. In other words, your play should always consider that they could full clear your board and end with an engaged 6/6 storm and potentially 3-4 1/1s. This also means that any play you make prior to his Blood Queen Vampy coming down - you should save a play for the following turn that lets you efficiently clear it.

For Point 2

• Based on the above breakdown of their removal options at each PP threshold, you can determine their best/only out to any given board state. As an example, going first, at 2pp, if their board is empty, then they cannot clear two followers at once (beast faced mage + summoning drill opener, for instance). Similarly, at 3pp, the only out to a curved alchemist is if they tech Whispers of a Dream. At 4pp onwards, it's usually impossible to guarantee the survival of your board, but it is worth noting that it is not that easy for them to clear your board without Raven, and it constricts them heavily if they do not have a bat on the field going into turn 4 (as they will need to spend at least 1pp to play a bat and then Raven, thus ending their turn).

• The main takeaway is that by committing to memory their removal thresholds, you can recognise the specific game states where your followers simply cannot be removed easily by the opponent - securing you an easy Faust turn.

Other Matchups

To be honest, your deck is just so much better than a majority of the other decks in this format that it's not necessary to have a guide for these in the first place.

Sword

• Mulligan hard for early game interaction. Beastfaced Mage and Red-Hot Ritual shut down their early game. Once you get Ceridwen/Faust online, the game is basically over

• Sword has almost no healing. Once you identify an opportunity for a 2-turn lethal, calculate the maximum amount of damage they can do, and if it's not enough to kill you, just ignore their board and go for game

Lishenna

• Should be a difficult matchup, but all my previous advice for beating this deck is still relevant today. Don't let them play Lishenna for free, build as large of a board as you can and force them to pay life to drop Lishenna

• Be cautious of Paradise Vanguard evo on your Ceridwen. Unfortunately, a lot of the time, you just have to accept the risk

• Carefully study Lishenna decklists and commit to memory what removal they have at each pp breakpoint, and play around it to the best of your ability

• It's not that easy for them to clear wide boards. It may be worthwhile to assess when to leave followers standing for a turn so that on the following turn, you can attack with 3-4 bodies

• Don't get board locked.

Puppet Forest

• The only new card they received is Substitution. Just be aware that it exists and play around it. For example, if you're going 2nd, it's fine to play Ceridwen Turn 3 and evo, but you might want to consider how to get it in grave if you want to do Faust Turn 5. For example, if your hand is Ceridwen, Red-Hot, Summoning Drills, you should probably play Red-Hot and Summoning Drills, discard Ceridwen, then recur it with Faust and force a difficult clear from the Puppet player

• If they have the perfect turn 5 highroll it is what it is. You win when they don't have it.

VODs

You can view the JCS worlds VODs here:

Top 8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8BbMH9ysjg

Final Thoughts

If there's one thing I've learned about high-level events, it's that people rarely play the "best deck of the format." It's not simply a price thing, we're probably going to see a bunch of people play Sword/Puppet at Worlds even though they are clearly not within the top 2 decks of the format.

I think you can't really go wrong with playing Dirt Rune. It doesn't have truly bad matchups, and I think you can outskill the mirror (despite first being an advantage). It's also strong in future formats as well, so your skill will carry over until Gingerbread House gets hit by the ban list.

First look at new set, discussion on Worlds

Hello, today's video will be our first look at worlds format and then covering over the new cards that are relevant to the BP09 format. For the most part, this will be obviously the top 2 decks of Bats + Dirt Rune, and the secondary decks of Sword/Puppets.

Also... My opinion on the sleeper deck that might be worth considering over Bats/Dirt!

Worlds Beyond Initial Thoughts

Mahjong gone? Game is dead on arrival (jk).

For the most part, I just want to share my initial impressions on what I saw:

• Minigames disappearing doesn't seem great to me. Mahjong was unironically a great idea, and I think it was probably the one minigame that should have stayed at all costs (fishing/dungeons are whatever). The longer you keep people on your ecosystem, the more opportunities to acquire player engagement and convert to sales/long-term commitment. The whole meta lobby thing is totally worthless now

• SVE Collab - makes sense, definitely something they should do. This is also the second last chance for them to inject players into SVE (Vanguard collab being the other). Good decision, but if it doesn't succeed, then there's no other real avenue in such a competitive TCG market upcoming

• Worlds Prize Pool - Pretty funny that they felt the need to remove the SVE prize card when they're upping the prizing 10x. Worth noting that the prizing is extremely top heavy (see Capcom cup or prev WGPs), so like, if you come 2nd, I think you're only making like 130k USD as opposed to the nearly 700k USD. It's a good change, but as advice from one of the best players in Western Digital SV1, let me tell you, it's not easy to win this AND the prizing structure is too top heavy.

• Release Date in June - Good, looks like we can play it soon!

• Set release - 1.5 month releases for first 4 sets... This is actually really fucked! I think if you want to play competitively in 2025, you are actually going to be forced to spend money. It's fine later on if you play every day, but you won't be winning tournaments easily as F2P.

• Game balance - Seems too fast and may be imbalanced as a result. I expected a slower format where "first person to super evo loses the game." This might still be the case, but when I saw cards like Garyu I realised that the games will probably end turn 9 since these super evos can essentially just go face.

• Game balance - This system reminds me of late-stage SV1, where the power creep was essentially so large that boards almost never stick and I'd have liked to have seen a start where vanillas like Chillwind Yeti are playable.

• Mulligan rework - Can mull up to 4 cards - very good change, this is another aspect where player skill will be tested, as you will need to know exactly what to mulligan. Increased player choice is generally a good thing

• First vs Second: Second gets on-demand pp twice a match now. I found it was often pointless to worry about going 1st vs 2nd in SV because you never had the choice in an actual match anyways. What I'm more excited about is that there is more skill expression when you have to take into account the extra 1pp opponent can get TWICE a match now, and this applies whether you are going first and have to play around it, or if you are second and are playing with the pp boost.

• Worlds qualification - Since it seems to be a 2025 thing, I suspect that the qualification structure will be pretty high-variance (i.e. I don't think the best players will necessarily be the ones to qualify to worlds). I wouldn't be surprised if they did a really scuffed format like 4 tournaments (one each set), have to get top 2 to qualify to a 8-person double elim.

Overall, news was good. Game balance thoughts are preliminary and depends heavily on what the early game cards look like. I suspect that the reason they had to delay the game so much was related to the game balance being off, so, most likely, they fixed it during the delay.

Let's see how it goes.

Feb Raffle Results

YC Tier: Avaltus
Master Tier: Rize
Supporter Tier: Hung

As always, winners can contact me via Discord to organise a session.

Summary of past month

Last month, we released a guide on 2-cost Abyss and continued our article series on card game fundamentals. Personally, I really enjoyed writing the Card Game Fundamentals article on building relationships, as it's a concept that is rarely discussed yet exceptionally important for players of all skill levels and for all card games.

In just a few more days, we'll get the announcements regarding Shadowverse Worlds Beyond. It's quite exciting, and the team here will be covering the game (provided it's not delayed again!)

The next guide will be on Earth Rite Rune for Set 9. I expect that Earth Rite rune will be very popular at worlds, and it's likely the best deck for the meta considering the BO1 format. Unsure if that guide will be this month or next, but should be out before Worlds, since I know there's definitely at least one person subbed to me that's going, haha.

If you guys have enjoyed the Card Game Fundamentals content, rest assured, there is plenty more to come ~

Card Game Fundamentals: Building Relationships

One of the topics that I rarely see discussed is the importance of building relationships in card game tournaments.

I've been traveling across Australia for the past year for a bunch of tournaments, between Bushiroad events, Bandai Events, and even Disney's Lorcana. Especially in a country like Australia, you'll start to see the same faces across multiple games and events, and the value of building relationships will become abundantly clear over time.

What are the benefits of building relationships?

- Making friends

- Sharing information

- Borrowing cards

- Opportunities to test vs strong players

- Splitting prizing (ironically, not applicable to SVE)

- Opportunities outside the game

This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but I'll go through some of these benefits.

Making friends (and conversely, not making enemies)

Probably the most self-explanatory. You might have many other objectives and other priorities when you go to a tournament, but at the end of the day, having friends there is much better than having enemies. Friends make the tournament more enjoyable, and there are other benefits which I will explain a little later. On the other hand, making enemies is often a mistake. Don't get me wrong, I've gone down this path before, and to be honest, it's not really worth it. You could be totally in the right, but that won't stop them from spreading rumours, trying to sabotage you, and finding ways to undermine you. In addition, as silly as it is, sometimes an entire group will hate on you simply because their friend does. I've seen both sides of this, and I try not to engage in it, even when I hate the other side. A common example is when people falsely claim that "X Player is bad at the game" when nobody actually believes this, but they say it anyway, cause they don't like the person. People close to me will know that I don't call people bad unless I actually think they are bad, but this type of reasonable logic is frequently missing in society, as you are socially pressured into agreeing with such sentiments.

I'm not saying you can't make enemies - sometimes you will have a good reason for doing so, but if you don't have one and you have the choice, best to avoid it.

Sharing Information

Ever showed up to a tournament and a bunch of players are running some kind of innovation that gives them the edge over everyone else? Most of the time, they're part of the same circle and have shared the information amongst themselves. If you build good relationships with these players, they might admit you into their circle, and all of a sudden, you also have the edge over the competition!

But more loosely, I am in the position where if I ever need help with learning a certain card game, deck, or require some coaching, I can just ask one of my many friends to spare a few hours and help me out. This is, essentially, access to information that would otherwise be difficult to come by. Sometimes, you couldn't even purchase the information off anyone, because the coaching is simply not available or kept secret.

But sharing information is not just about being friends with the other person. If you're really close to them, sure, they might not ask anything in return. But in many cases, try to develop "your own value". People like sharing information with me because I reciprocate and also provide detailed insights they can't get anywhere else.

An example in SVE, is that recently, in the BP08 format, there were no major Japanese events. As a result, the most refined decklists for the format were not available, but if you had a friend in Japan who had a fully refined list - they might share it with you! In fact, this is what my friend did, he was able to offer the value proposition that he came 3rd place at SVE English Worlds the previous year, which demonstrated value to the pro SVE players in Japan!

Borrowing cards

Card game players are pretty chill about lending cards in general, but the bigger your network, the more easily you can secure cards from people before the tournament, oftentimes, entire decks, if need be. You don't need to be on great terms with people for this, but you do need to have a -decent reputation- or have mutuals that can vouch for you. As such, the more you build your relationships, the better your options.

Opportunities to test vs strong players

In some games, it's easy to get games vs strong players - just get a high MMR in the sim and then you'll pair vs the best players by default. But for smaller games without matchmaking, such as with SVE, your practice is only as good as the people you can play with. When you play vs weaker players, you pick up bad habits, you don't get punished for misplays, your opponent doesn't do the lines that you need to be careful of at higher levels of play, etc.

So yeah, everyone wants to play vs good players, but the reality is not so kind. It's not a problem for someone like me. If I ask a top player for practice, they acknowledge me as an equal and can see the mutual value in playtesting, so they'll usually say yes.

But if you're not a top player, it's harder. In truth, I'm just a nice guy so I'll play vs weaker players even if it's a waste of my time (worded extremely blunt, but in an article like this, trying to share the "real perspective.") But at the same time, I'm not going to play more than a few games vs them unless they're a friend or something. Which is my point, really. To playtest vs better opponents, you either have to 1) get better 2) pay them (coaching etc) 3) be friends with them 4) offer some other kind of value (for example, you are a plumber and you both live in the same neighbourhood or w/e).

*A caveat is that sometimes, it can be good to deliberately play against weaker players (Ladder is often looked down upon in high-level testing groups, obviously because your average ladder player isn't going to be better practice than a top 10 player in the server). You might think, huh? But yeah, sometimes, a deck might be totally garbage vs a top 10 player in the world, but good vs everyone else. In that case, it could be a good bring to a tournament with 200 average players. So keep an open mind, is what I'm saying.

Splitting prizing

If I recall, this isn't actually legal in Bushiroad games, so don't try this in their events lols. Ironically though, because of the lower value of prizing in Bushiroad events, the incentive to split isn't really there either. But since this is a "card game fundamental", I'll use Bandai games as an example.

So, in One Piece, they usually cut to the Top 16 in Australia. The top 8 get serial cards, which are worth a few thousand dollars. People don't like gambling for that kind of money in a single BO3, so in most cases, players will split 50-50 in the Top 16 but play out the match to see who goes through. It's completely legal and normal here.

As with any card game, matchup spreads exist, and you might think, hang on Bma, won't a 50-50 split often be unfair to at least one of the players? The answer is obviously "Yes." And yet, 50-50 is the most common split arrangement. Why?

The explanation is that people believe in reciprocity. If I, as a top player, regularly make the top 16, I am not always going to have the inferior or superior matchup. The next time I meet the same person, or one of their friends, I will extend the same courtesy back. As such, it often evens out either way, but that doesn't mean there's no value to doing so over the long-run.

While some people believe splits are only possible when you already hold a good relationship with the other party, in practice, splits can often be directly responsible for building good relationships. It's also good for your reputation. If you've done splits with multiple other players, this cements you as a "trustworthy player". This essentially snowballs upon itself (And remember what we said about the benefits of making friends in the previous section? Yep, easier access to info, testing partners, etc.)

So in essence, splitting prizing is not just about the EV of the prizing itself, but also the added bonus of building strong relationships.

Opportunities outside the game

I've met a lot of people playing card games. Lawyers, project managers, developers, LGS workers, business owners... the list goes on. You might never need their help, but hey, maybe you will. It could be as simple as their advice, discounts, or just that they're chill to hang out with and talk to. Sometimes, it's literally as innocuous as everyone going in the same car together to go from one LGS to another LGS....

The possibilities are essentially endless, but negative relationships typically strip you of those very possibilities!

General Conduct

So now that we've covered the benefits of building relationships, now it's time to talk about some very common things that can and will come up, and my opinion on if you should do it or not.

Should you ruleshark someone?

Depending on the card game, it can be considered unsportsmanlike conduct, but the purpose of this section isn't to discuss its legality, but the social ramifications of doing so.

In the long run, rulesharking damages your reputation and ruins your relationships with others.

An example of this is in One Piece, where the entire BY Luffy leader operates off cards that provide the leader with +2k. However, because it says "up to 1 of your leaders gains 2k", it is technically possible to miss this effect, even though there is zero reason for a player to skip it. It is completely legal for the opponent to tell you that you missed the declaration and call a judge.

Technically, they are correct to do so, but will you grab a drink with that guy after the tournament? Probably not. In truth, the moment you commit to this decision, you'll have damaged that relationship permanently. To be honest, in most card games, you should be able to win without rulesharking, so I don't recommend it. In addition, I tend to find that it's the shit players that rule shark more often, though your mileage will vary.

However, if you really want to do it, what I would suggest is that the -first time- your opponent does it, you warn them and tell them if they do it again, you won't let it go the next time. This way, it sets expectations, the opponent acknowledges they have to play more clean, and they will not blame you if you call them out the second time.

Should you let someone take back a move?

This is similar to the above but different. Unlike with rule sharking, it is commonly accepted that at high-level tournaments, players should not expect to get a take-back on any move. Conversely, at locals, just let them take back the move - you have to see these guys every week and having a good relationship is far more important than any individual prize.

In the case of higher-level tournaments, I think it should be on a case-by-case basis, and contextual. If you are friends with the other person, I recommend letting them take back one move, and then expressing that you will only let them take back that one move. But I think this should only be allowed when you didn't give any info (i.e, using cards in hand, your opponent drawing additional cards etc). Also, it's fine to let lower-level players take back one move as well, in general. If they make one mistake, they'll probably make another one later anyway. And then you've set the expectations with them, and they won't ask to take back a move again. This has happened several times in tournaments, where my opponent will obviously start a sentence to ask for a take-back, but then stop half-way because they realise it's unreasonable after the first time.

In addition, it also means you'll get a take-back as well laughs.

This type of approach tends to build good relationships and reduces the odds of bad vibes. That said, if you're on the bubble or playing for thousands of dollars then just do what feels right for you. End of the day, you shouldn't be too nice to people to your own detriment either.

Should you get salty after games?

The short answer is "no."

It might feel good in the moment to let your opponent know how shit they are and how you only lost cause he topped X or you bricked like crazy - but what does it really accomplish? It's fine to discuss the game, but try not to let your negative emotions show - and definitely don't direct it towards your opponent.

It's just a typical case of impulse control. You feel better in the moment but you never know how it might come back to bite you later.

Should I let my opponents complain after a game?

This one's hilarious. I'll often win against an opponent where they make a bunch of misplays or whatever, then say stuff that's blatantly wrong. They'll say stuff like "man I got SO unlucky, I would have won if X, Y, or Z. Or sometimes they'll mutter under their breath, or tell a friend after the game "man I got sacked so hard", and in reality, it's not even remotely true.

In these cases?

I just agree with them, even if it's not true. You got the win already, so who cares what they need to do to vent? No need to take it personally! To be frank, most of the time, even the other person knows they're being unreasonable, so you being chill puts the relationship in a better spot. I actually have a specific example where someone did this to me cause they thought I was a random. We're actually good friends now, I totally forgot it even happened until my friend (who was watching the match back at the time) reminded me of it.

Buying and selling cards

This is probably another topic altogether. When buying and selling cards, as long as you can justify what you've done, I think it's fine. Obviously, if you egregiously rip someone off, they'll probably hold it against you, but in today's day and age, it's pretty hard to rip people off anyway - since everyone checks TCG Player.

I think an important thing with buying/selling is to never lie. Lies lead to more lies, and most of the time, they'll get uncovered eventually. People don't really like dealing with liars, and it'll hit your reputation eventually.

Sometimes you can do really small things to make people feel better after a sale. For example, throwing in bulk for free, giving a small discount if they buy multiple cards etc. I also recommend, whether you are buying or selling, to test the waters a little bit. For example, if I'm willing to buy a card for $40 each, I'll offer them $35 and see what they say. They might say yes, cool. Or sometimes I'll ask them to cover shipping and, surprisingly, it's quite frequent they say yes.

There's a LOT of cases where people know what the value of a card is, but because they understand that cards are never 100% liquid, they're willing to let it go for lower. Other common tactics include "TCG 85?" or "it goes for X on FB (never lie on this!)" or "this card will probably go up/down because of X or Y." You can also ask for mate's rates or slight discount due to being a repeat customer. Pick your battles though and don't take the piss with unreasonable offers!

One of my main tips here is that what you don't ask for, you won't get. I think it's a pretty important concept to understand when it comes to saving money over the long-term. The other one is to create deals where both parties feel happy afterwards. if you master both concepts, you'll be just fine here.

Final thoughts

Obviously, the article's purpose isn't for you to use cold-hearted analysis to manipulate people to your benefit. Although many of the concepts I've written about here come naturally to many, it's still worthwhile sometimes to have it written out like this cause it's not a topic that comes up in regular conversation. If nothing else, you can get an insight into my perspective on the card game community in Australia.

Notably, some people follow a totally different set of principles than this, and I think that's fine too. End of the day, remember that everyone has a choice, even if you personally disagree with their decision or find it illogical. The correct way to digest articles like this is not to take my word as gospel but to understand my points and then critically evaluate if they make sense and if you agree with them, then change your decision-making frameworks accordingly.

2-Cost Abyss Guide

One of the newest tier 1 decks for Alterchaotica, 2-Cost abyss is a deck carried by the particularly strong new cards Crimson Rose Queen and Alterplane Arbiter.

True to its name, a vast majority of the deck feature 2-cost spells and followers, utilising Alterplane Arbiter to clear the enemy board, replenish your hand, and bridge you to that all-powerful Crimson Rose Queen to either heal to insurmountable amounts, or simply burn the enemy to death.

For most decks, they must kill the 2-cost Abyss player before they can successfully reach the Crimson Rose Queen turn, which provides you with a clear and consistent game plan.

Decklist

This time, we have two variants of the decklist. The first is from my good friend Justin Mao, and the other is from William, the Second-Place BCS Sydney Finisher. Both lists are good; you can use whichever one you prefer. I will explain the differences between the two.

The one from Justin has a focus on a consistent late game. Maisha is both a well-statted 2-drop in general that must be answered on curve, but it also provides us with a very strong late game finisher against decks which attempt to grind us out. Personally, I am not a large fan of Tart Man in the deck, but it does guarantee us Crimson Rose Queen/Arbiter. I tend to prefer the second Hell's Unleasher as you can recur it with Arbiter and that lets you access your entire toolbox on demand.

William's list has a heavier focus on the Sanguine package, utilising even the Idolmaster 2-cost that is an exceptional tempo tool that comboes well with the rest of the deck. I also like the inclusion of Hellblaze Demon, it snowballs very heavily if you are lucky and can put your followers outside of common removal ranges.

General Card Explanations:

Obviously, the deck must run 3 copies of Crimson Rose Queen and Alterplane Arbiter, which are the most powerful cards in the deck. You would run more of both if you could. Crimson Rose Queen should only be played when it is impactful to the game state. Usually, it will be, as long as you used Arbiter to refill your hand.

As for Arbiter - it is usually better to hold it until you can evolve it. If your opponent forces it out, fine, drop it for the tempo clear. But don't forget that you actually do need this card to win the game with Rose Queen. Incidentally, this is why I like the inclusion of two Hell's Unleasher in William's deck, cause then you can play this on turn 5, then use turn 6 to recur it (while opponent is recoiling from the clearing your 5/5).

For Rose Queen, some decks have no real answers to it (like Puppet), so it's fine to slam. But against other decks, you want to be more careful about how it leads you directly into victory (i.e, two turn lethal setups, or clearing problematic boards/healing out of lethal range)

Most 2-cost lists also opt for the Ruleneye Package. This card fits in very well into the deck, due to its strong stats, disruptive potential, and scaling into late game after Necrocharge 10. In addition, the deck sometimes runs the new 2-cost spell that can recur him.

I won't go too much into depth on the various 2-cost removals. These are mainly here to bridge you to Alterplane -> Rose Quen.

Most of the 2-cost followers can be described as tempo tools. Use them to value trade whenever possible and protect your life total so that you can safely reach late game. Some of them also have pseudo-ward, like Vuella, where your opponent is forced to remove them no matter what the cost.

Kiss of Lust is self explanatory, it draws cards and heals you. It is not an early game card unless you have literally nothing else in hand or must hit Arbiter/Rose Queen or lose. It's also not something I'd play without the Sanguine effect.

Maisha/Valnareik are your OTK tools, but you can play them on curve when it makes sense to do so.

Game Plan

Early game: Focus on efficient trading with the opponent and protecting your life in the early game. Your turn 2 usually plays itself tbh (play follower before any spell in most circumstances). Ruleneye on turn 3 if you have Evo Point, otherwise turn 4 is usually fine too.

Mid game: Note that most of your opponents are going to try to force you to Alterplane early, try to avoid this, but considering your opponent is trying to make you do it - some games you'll have no choice. Often, this will be somewhat telegraphed, or you can tell that you simply cannot deal with their board otherwise. In these situations, I'd consider trading a bit of life and leaving my followers standing (depending on the opponent's deck).

Basically, imagine your opponent has a 3/3 and you evolve a Ruleneye on Turn 4. Instead of trading, you take 4-7 damage and then slam Arbiter next turn swing 4 to face. This can put your opponent into a situation where they have to clear full HP Ruleneye AND Full HP Arbiter, which can be very hard to do. That said, whether you can do this is dependent on the matchup and your personal judgement. Obviously, don't do this if taking the extra 3-damage means they can just straight up race and kill you.

Late game: This is where you start overwhelming your opponent with your overstatted Arbiter/Rose Queen. The classic combo is obviously Alterplane -> evolve -> next turn Rose Queen evolve.

Rose Queen can set up some ridiculous lethals. For example, if you have 6 play points after Rose Queen evo, a combo of Valnareik, Razory, Crimson Thorn Bust does 15 damage even without the bonus +2/2 damage from Valnareik. But it's also worth noting that Rose Queen can just straight up grind out the opponent via AOE removal and free HP heal as well. Just assess the game state and see what makes sense.

First or second? 

I prefer to go first in general. While evo-points are nice, what tends to happen is that you have to use your evo points to keep up early, and you're usually going to run out prior to your Alterplane/Rose Queen turns, which means you are unable to get the "earlier combo turn", regardless.

Going first can be a bit rougher in the early game but once you get past the early game, hitting the crucial turn 7/8 before the opponent makes a very large difference.

Ultimately, don't worry too much about losing dice roll, it's playable on both sides.

Mulligan

Since a majority of your deck are 2-costs, you don't need to aggressively mulligan for a curve. Instead, I'd recommend mulling for Alterplane Arbiter (and if possible, Rose Queen), as this card is so egregiously overpowered that the other cards don't really matter comparatively. After all, most of your 2-cost cards ultimately do the same thing. In some matchups, esp going second, it's fine to just keep a decent 2-cost and Ruleneye (Decks like D-shift and Lishenna come to mind).

Matchups

Puppet Matchup 

I think this matchup is favoured. If you don't die before your Crimson Rose Queen turn, you pretty much win. As a result, they're aiming to kill you early. In some games, you can't do much, they get everything, and you can't clear/whiff on Alterplane. But in most games, they're not highrolling you; aim to clear their board and protect HP until Rose Queen turns.

On the Rose Queen turn, remember to hold at least one quick spell, such as Surefire or Razory Claw. Rose Queen's effect triggers on the opponent's turn, so the ways they can clear a 6/6 is severely limited and relies excessively on Roach. Even if you have neither in hand, it's often correct to bluff it anyway, as the range of plays they can take is severely limited if they need to play around 2 open play points. For example, if you have 0pp open, they just Orchis lol. Otherwise, they'll probably opt for Roach to clear the Rose Queen, which is fine if you have another one for next turn to seal the game.

Natura Sword 

Pretty even m/u imo, mainly due to Mistolina being a good card.

Against Natura Sword, your Rose Queen/Arbiter is never living more than a single turn on the board due to Princess Strike. Assume your opponent will be chaining Mistolina and adjust your heal/damage strategy accordingly. What this means is that if you cannot reasonably kill them within two turns (remember that Misto heals two), then you need to calculate whether you will die within their two turns. This will change how you utilise your Rose Queen.

Natura Sword is not necessarily aggressive in the early game, but they snowball heavily if you miss on your removal for Bayleon in particular. Aim to remove their followers via trading where possible (obviously, i would never advocate for using a 2-pp spell to clear a 1/2 but everything else is fair game). Watch out for Lupine Axeman and don't play your followers into it for no reason (assess their tree count).

This is a matchup where you can attempt the "trade HP for bigger Alterplane swing turn", but you can only do this if you feel you can race them through Mistolina chain (obviously impossible if you see certain EX-area setups). It's also possible to go for the mass HP heal route with Rose Queen if all else fails. Healing 3 times nullifies most of Mistolina's damage and gives you a chance to stat-check them (i.e, maybe they don't have the next Mistolina and it gives you time to set up). Dynamic matchup dependent on both player's skill.

Mirror match 

In the mirror match, it's ultimately a battle of who can extract the most value out of their opponent. Ruleneye is exceptional in this matchup as it forces the opponent to spend 3 mana to clear (surefire costing 1 more), and gives you the chance to rip Rose Queen or Arbiter from their hand.

Make sure to always consider their next turn and ensure you have an answer for it. I.e. before making your play - ask yourself how you deal with their arbiter/Rose Queen next turn. If you find that your intended play is bad against their best play, try to find a different one.

One of the major aspects of this matchup is controlling the turn before they Arbiter. For example, if you have the board lead and they are effectively forced to play it next turn anyway, you should prepare an out on your turn. Suppose you have no clean out - then you end up taking Arbiter to the face and a free evo. You can avoid this by setting up something like a surefire, for instance, to reduce the hp of the Arbiter to make it easier to clear the following turn.

While it's usually better to use Rose Queen for its aoe clear and hp effect, in tournaments with time limits, it's worth keeping an eye on how much time you have left and forcefully accelerate game state if needed (double game loss is quite possible).

This is also one of those matchups where you can consider trading hp for card advantage (for example, taking a bit of damage in exchange for a bigger Arbiter clear).

Other matchups

Disdain Dragon: Easy, don't take any unnecessary poke damage and clear their board repeatedly. They will fold the moment you drop Rose Queen and pick "heal" as the option.

Lishenna: Can be difficult if you whiff early and don't play carefully/don't draw multiple of your high-end cards. You want to curve out as heavily as you can early, where they are weak and are looking for an opportunity to play Lishenna. Do not let them play it for free without taking 4+ damage minimum!  Ruleneye is also a very strong card in this matchup, as their deck relies on spells and you can rip out crucial pieces within their hand (imagine ripping Lishenna XD). In the late game, don't do meaningless turns. You want to be putting together boards where your opponent cannot clear everything at once. For example, on your Rose Queen turn, you want to play as many of your 2-cost followers at once. If you are having trouble with this m/u look at the various popular Lishenna lists and memorise their range of plays for their pp to assess what your best plays are on a probability perspective.

Mono: Clear their board as much as you can, don't let them get an early Mono evo off. Your opponent is ultimately aiming to win before you can get to Rose Queen, because obviously, you win if you ever get to Alterplane -> Rose Queen curve. They can't do shit if you AOE 6 heal 6. Can consider going 2nd in this m/u so they don't get their evo curve on you.

Final thoughts:

It's actually pretty funny that this deck exists at all. They just printed two ridiculously overstatted cards (Alterplane/Rose Queen) and forcibly made the 2-cost archetype a thing.

In any case, I think this deck is heavily underperforming in recent BCS' compared to how strong I think it actually is. Not sure if it's because Puppets are a more attractive/easier deck to pilot or what, but certainly think this deck is stronger than it would appear based on results alone.

Hit me up if you have any questions about the deck but I think you can follow the general principles in this guide and do pretty well.

Jan 2025 Raffle Results and Update

Hello all,

We've just finished updating the website for BP08 - Alterchaotica and uploaded the tier list video. In general, it's a heavy power-creep set. Puppet Forest and 2-cost Abyss will definitely see a large amount of success at the BCS and those are the two decks I recommend the most.

On a personal front, it's been a busy couple of weeks and I've had a ridiculous streak of major tournaments. I made top 32 playoffs at OCE One Piece Nationals, made top 64 playoffs at Disney Lorcana Championship Melbourne, and top 8 in the OCE Treasure Cup (literally today). Running very hot recently, which is always a great feeling!

For those that have won coaching sessions via the raffle, feel free to redeem them for coaching on card games outside of SVE (atm, DBFW/One Piece/SVE/Lorcana are available).

We also kicked off a new article series around Card Game Fundamentals. The aim is to provide you with a useful framework for evaluating card games - and in some ways, could be considered the tricks of the trade that allow me to be competitive in every card game I've touched (and that could be you, too!). Was it helpful for you? If so, I plan to write the continuation of it this month!

Jan 2025 Raffle

Young Cat Tier Winner: Avaltus

Shadowverse Master Tier Winner: RIZE

Feel free to contact me over Discord to organise a session. Next month will include the Supporter Tier as well!

Card Game Fundamentals: Card Advantage

When I consider the past twelve months, not only was I able to top numerous BCS/BSF events, but I also came 3rd at Dragonball Fusion World Nationals and recently made the Top 32 playoffs for One Piece Nats. This disregards my other tops (numerous store champs across all games), my other interests, and the fact that I work a 9-5 job.

Is it supposed to be possible to play numerous card games and do well in all of them?

The answer is Yes.

And not just that - it should be possible for anyone. This is because all card games follow similar fundamental principles with multiple transferrable skills. That is if you're the type of player who understands the why of what they're doing in card games.

In today's article, I'll be covering the concept of card advantage. It delves into my thoughts on how card games operate, and I hope it provides you with a unique perspective and insight into SVE and any other card games you might play.

I note that I could have gone for a super cookie-cutter explanation, but I figured, what's the point? You can just look that up online. Instead, I wanted to explain it in my own words, in a way that's authentic to the way I look at card games, so you can get a viewpoint that you won't see anywhere else.

What is card advantage?

At its core, card advantage is simply the act of having more cards than your opponent. You can view it as easily as:

•  "If I have 7 cards in hand and the opponent has 4, who has the advantage?"

• "If we both have 5 cards in hand, but I have 3 followers on the field, who has the advantage?"

Of course, nothing is in a vacuum in a real game, but this is the most basic form of understanding card advantage. The person with more cards has more options than the opponent, and this means on average, the player with more options will be able to make favourable trades over and over and over again until it becomes an insurmountable lead that can be transferred into a win. 

Let's understand how "options" are relevant in this context.

Example 1: Opponent has an engaged 7/3 evolved Forte with Aura, and I have 5/5 follower on the field.

In scenario 1, I have 5 cards in hand, but none of them directly out Forte. Therefore, I am forced to trade my 5/5 into their 7/3 Forte, presumably after the Forte has already swung 7 to my leader. This sucks.

In scenario 2, I have 6 cards in hand. The 6th card happens to be a 2/2 follower that can evolve into a 3/3 follower with Rush. Now I can trade the 3/3 evolve into Forte, then swing my 5/5 to the enemy leader, dealing 5 damage, and keeping my 5/5.

You can see how Scenario 2 is considerably superior due to having the available option of swinging a 3/3 to the Forte, freeing up my 5/5 to swing face (and thereby, requiring an answer from my opponent the following turn).

Example 2: Opponent has an engaged 5/5 follower on the field, we have a 3/3 active follower on the field. Both players have 5 cards in hand.

In scenario 1, I have Execution in hand. Therefore, I can use it to clear their 5/5 follower, swing 3 to enemy leader, then pass turn. I use up one card (execution) to clear their 5/5 follower (one card). This is a pretty decent trade.

In scenario 2, I have a follower in hand that can evolve into a 4/4. In order to clear the enemy follower, I would have to trade the 3/3 and the 4/4 into the 5/5. This means that I would end the turn with two less cards, while my opponent only loses one card, the 5/5.

Again, you can see that in situations where you have less (or rather, worse options), it snowballs the amount of bad situations you will find you find yourself in. Therefore, maintaining card advantage is one of the main ways to avoid such situations.

In example 2, you will notice that you had to trade both a 3/3 and a 4/4 into the 5/5. This leads us to another key concept. Specific combinations of cards can be useful at later stages of the game. If you are forced to take a suboptimal trade like the above, then you will no longer have the 3/3 or the 4/4 for future turns, where they had the possibility of being the best option.

The role of tempo

I think this is probably an article in and of itself, but no article on card advantage is complete without an explanation of tempo.

While there is a more textbook example of tempo out there, the way I view it is any situation where your individual cards are worth more than your opponent's.

Say, for example, you have 7 cards in hand compared to 1 card in the opponent's hand. Naturally, this is an overwhelming advantage. However, what if you are on 1 life and they are at full health?

Depending on the opponent's deck, you may be far behind the opponent. A light breeze will kill you, and having a 6-card advantage is effectively worthless.

Even supposing a less extreme example, imagine you are at 7 health vs 19 health against a Dragon player and have a 5-card advantage over them. A single Forte will kill you, so this changes the way you have to play the game. A rational player will almost always play wards to avoid dying to Forte. The fact that you have to play a ward may be contrary to progressing your own game plan, yet you have no choice but to reduce the value of your own cards/plays due to the game state forcing you to do so.

But even outside of Forte, it changes how you play the game. Needless to say, if the opponent plays a 7-attack follower, you have to answer it or literally die the next turn. This means that regardless of what other plays you had in mind, you must go with the play that allows you to clear it.

However, what if they have a 4 attack follower on the field? Ordinarily, if you had 20 health, you might ignore it and push towards your win con to gain an advantage over the opponent. However, at 7 health, can you risk letting it live?

This is the fundamental concept behind tempo. While card advantage provides options, it's pointless if it cannot be converted to a tangible win condition or prevent the opponent from winning.

Summarising Card Advantage

1) Card advantage gives you more options

2) In theory, having more options than your opponent means that, on average, you can either put yourself in a more winning position or prevent your opponent from doing so (two sides of the same coin)

3) Aiming for card advantage is a fundamental principle, but it is also important to put yourself in positions where the card advantage can be transferred into tempo and eventually win the game.

Other SVE examples would be decks like DShift. Does it really matter how many cards you have in hand if they can kill you with 3 cards in hand (Dshift Kuon Merlin?). 

In other words, you would be happy to be on even a -5 in card advantage vs. this deck if you can put their life to 0 before this happens! One thing to note is that the more complex card games become, the more obfuscated card advantage calculations become. To use Spellchain or Necrocharge decks as an example, the cemetary is an additional resource, as it makes your other cards worth more as a result.

In other decks, some cards cost a considerable amount of play points, but give you ridiculous card advantage in exchange. An interesting example is something like Leonidas. For 6 pp + 1pp for evo, you can potentially clear two enemy followers and then gain an amulet that gives all your subsequent sword followers rush and +3/3. At a minimum, this is a 3 for 1, which is effectively a +2. In many card games, there exist powerful late game threats that give players huge card advantage over an opponent.

In the above example, skilled players have historically attempted to mitigate Leonidas' impact due to the ridiculous card advantage it can gain. To do this, they may choose to leave play points open for banish effects. Perhaps they leave their followers standing. Or they could save their amulet removal to remove the permanent advantage of Leonidas' Resolve. And maybe they do some combination of the above! The main reason a player would do any of these is to prevent the opponent from gaining card advantage over them! While Leo's Resolve is, in and of itself, only a single card, it makes you expend more resources to clear the buffed followers, while your opponent spends less to get more.

If you got nothing else from the above paragraph: It's that you should play differently to prevent your opponent from getting card advantage over you. And, of course, vice versa, you should play in such a way that maximises your own card advantage.

Although Card Games have different rules, cards and evolving metas, all of the ones I've played can ultimately be viewed and explained via card advantage. Even in the games where a lot of bullshit goes on each turn, it can actually be simplified into card advantage. Look at a BY Luffy mirror in One Piece, for example. With how many actions and cards fly around when Moria, Sabo Rocket Luffy Combo is played, you might not realise that, in actual fact, the combo is essentially a -1 to your hand size per turn. Each successive Moria is able to take 1 additional card off the opponent each turn. It is no exaggeration to say that the BY Mirror is purely a card advantage matchup.

Conclusion

This article was a lot of fun to write - trying to articulate the way I view card games into a format that is (hopefully) easy to understand for players of all skill levels. Sure, I think some of you probably already understand Card Advantage in your own way, subconsciously or otherwise. But perhaps the way you think about the game is different from mine - and I think understanding different perspectives and ways of thinking allow you to enhance your own way of thinking about all topics. 

Card Advantage is one of the concepts that is essential for all card games. If there's anything within this article that you'd like more clarity on, feel free to ask me about it. For those who have not consciously considered such concepts in the past, please try to implement them into your play until they become a part of your subconscious - a framework you use to assess how you make decisions.

BP08 Card Review/Breakdown

First vid of the year~

Figured we are so deep into the BP07 season that it'd be more useful to give you guys the leg up for BP08 with an initial review of the cards for each class.

Yes, we do go through each of the cards in the set (some more than others), but I try to  highlight the cards that I think are relevant to the meta, specifically Puppet, Disdain, and Two-Cost Abyss.

If you haven't started your prep into BP08 or if you just want a second opinion, make sure to give this a watch.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

The winners of the coaching raffle for this month are as follows:

Ruxter, Avaltus, and RIZE. As always, they can contact me on discord to organise a session.

Closing thoughts for 2024

Thank you to everyone for your support over the past year; your contributions to the Patreon have helped us keep the site running and updated! Funnily enough, we recently found a bug where our scraper was not working, so recent tournament results haven't been going to the website. We'll fix that later, haha (and by we, I mean Boron ^_^)

This year, I've spent much time traveling, meeting new people, experiencing different cultures, and updating my perspective on the world and life. It was a nice feeling to travel to SVE tournaments and have people reach out to me about enjoying the content we've produced over the past year and a half. But also, I found it crazy earlier in the month when I attended a One Piece tournament in Melbourne, and it was kinda shocking to me how many people in that community said hi over that weekend.

It's weird because I don't produce any content for it, unlike with SVE. I'm not necessarily a top player there by any means, just above average, a couple of tops, serial splits etc, as one would expect for the level of time and effort I put into the game. But I guess I traveled to a lot more Bandai tournaments than I'd realized, and over time, those connections and interactions you make interweave with each other in ways you wouldn't necessarily expect.

And sometimes it's as tiny as just talking to your opponent and chatting with them for a bit. Or sometimes it's cause you're not an asshole that sharks the opponent on not declaring +2k on their BY Luffy leader. I think it's a concept that applies to all TCGs, don't be a dick, and you'll make a lot of friends.

Next year, especially in January, my personal focus will be largely on the One Piece Nationals and the Disney Lorcana Championship the week after that. My confidence isn't the greatest for these, but the level of competition will be high and enjoyable, with prizing that is impossible to ignore.

Next month, there will be a bunch of articles as per usual, I might start a new series where I share some of my TCG wisdom and the fundamentals that allow me to pick up various games and bring myself to a high level of gameplay at each of them. I also want to continue some of my various philosophical thoughts around card game economy and their various implications.

Finally, it's a reasonably early announcement since it's all a work in progress, but we also have a significant project in the works for 2025. While it doesn't relate to SVE, it's still likely to be exciting to those of you on the Patreon! I hope to see you guys around, and once again, happy new year!

Winning with the BDIF - Natura Sword

At this point in time, it's very clear that the best deck in the format is Natura Sword, and to be frank, I suspect the only reason it isn't more dominant is an issue of supply/price of the deck.

At the Grand Showdown, Top 32 consisted of 13 Sword players, a ridiculous 40% representation, with the grand finals being a Natura Sword affair.

What makes Natura Sword so powerful?

Natura Sword has a great matchup spread, owing to high levels of consistency and a toolbox of cards that can dismantle enemy plans while forcing the opponent to avoid letting the Natura Sword player take control of the board.

Natura decks have the specific advantage of being able to expend trees to cycle cards in the deck, discarding cards that are irrelevant to the current game-plan, while accelerating your progression towards your win condition. It is not uncommon to cycle through the majority of your deck in any given game.

With the exception of the 1-cost slot, where Natura Sword has no 2/2s, most of its curve are very generously statted, with the 2-costs generally having a 2/3 statline, and followers which are heavily mana efficient. Bayleon, a 4/4 ward on evolve, also has the added feature of being Alice, Wonderland Explorer for Natura cards.

It is exceptionally difficult for the opponent to snowball any type of aggressive lead on you, due to access to cards like Lupine Axeman, Princess Strike, and in particular, King's Might. It is no exaggeration to say that King's Might is the card that truly breaks the deck, as the two-tree condition is trivial to meet, and Bayleon makes the card cost 0 for a 4-damage ping. In the early game, it's very rare for any follower to survive a 4-damage removal option, making sure that you are able to control the board.

Healing is also abundant with this deck, cards like Colorful Cook, Viridia Magna, and Mistolina provide chip healing, which is stronger than people give it credit for. In a game like SVE, being on high health can create situations where the opponent is forced to trade into you rather than going face. This is the type of situation Natura Sword loves being in, as Mistolina can hit enemy face for 7, shoot one of the enemy's major followers and then demand an answer from the opponent.

In addition, Natura Sword has quite a few tech slots open, and it can tech specific cards to improve particular matchups. For example, we often see cards like Maisha, Barbarossa, Outrunning the Encroaching Heat, Leod, and more as potential techs. This means that Sword is a generally very safe pick into any local metagame, suffering from only one particularly bad matchup in Kuon

Decklist

I've chosen to feature Justin Mao's list from BCS Melbourne. Justin's a great friend of mine and came third at last year's Worlds.

I will briefly explain the use case of the cards within this list:

Colorful Cook: Great on Turn 1, heals you, gives you a tree, and is a cheap and effective cycle. Opponent can't easily trade into this without leaving something vulnerable to Lupine or Bayleon Evo. Poking for 1 damage will eventually add up as well. Do note that you need to consider how you play this card in the late game, as it is not easily self-removable if opponent has no engaged followers, and semi-board locks do occur in some matchups.

Princess Strike: In the early game, it's just your typical 1-mana, 2 damage ping quick. Worth mulliganing for this against decks which are likely to drop 1-mana 2/2s on turn 1, but to be fair, there's not many of those in the current meta. Obviously in the late game, it comboes with Mistolina for 6 damage (basically kills everything), which is insane.

Aether: Better than Colorful Cook the later the game goes. Worth noting that when Octrice's discount effect is active, all the trees in the EX Zone cost 0pp, allowing for some degenerate comboes if the opponent leaves any of your key cards up.

Pathfinder: If you have no other 2-drops to play on turn 2, just slam it. Obviously, if you have King's Might and you are looking to Bayleon the next turn, you'll also play this to get the trees setup. Don't greed too much for the scry 3 effect, a 2/3 requires answers, especially because Bayleon can buff it.

Leod: Extremely annoying for board based decks to deal with. In particular, Mono has a very tough time vs Leod. You just leave him standing and he pings off the enemy board, potentially allowing you to develop instead of spending mana on clearing their followers.

Lupine: Broken 2-cost follower. Does everything - gives you a tree, has good stats, can clear enemy followers on the turn it comes down etc.

Octrice: Very strong in the mid-late game where EX cards are discounted. It's common to fill the EX Zone via Bayleon, then using Octrice on a future turn to play everything for cheap and flood the opponent. Is especially good vs the mirror, as you can take away the opponent's key combo pieces (Princess Strike is always a good one, stealing/milling their Mistolinas, etc).

Trail of Light: Self-explanatory, discard with tree, free +1

Bayleon: So yeah, obviously this card is Alice and is a +2 for no reason at all. It also has good stats, ward (why lol), synergy with King's Might (0pp 4 damage removal!?), and you can even cycle your trees to draw 2/discard 2 and buff a follower. In matchups where opponent has no easy ways to clear it outside of battle, leaving this card standing represents a huge amount of pressure.

Gemstaff Commander: The reasoning for this card over Maid Leader (which is also a good card), is that it doesn't take up evo deck space, can be used to search itself vs grindier matchups, can search Mistolina, and can search Octrice then evo the Octrice on the same turn (Maid Leader cannot do this). Maid Leader's advantage is that it can be played on turn 1, can, evo on turn 2 with evo point, and trade on the same turn it's played. It's personal preference. Worth noting that Gemstaff and Maid Leader both force deck shuffles, which can sometimes be bad if you are counting your cards via Bayleon/Mulligan etc.

Swift Tigress: Good pressure card, especially from a neutral game state. Forces your opponent to make a move afterwards, does 4 damage, etc. Generically strong.

King's Might: Imbalanced. Obviously play this with trees active, preferably with Bayleon evo turn.

Viridia Magna: Basically reads: Kill anything on the field, then summon a 4/4 and heal 2. Although the evo comes out engaged, it represents a threat that has to be cleared. For example, against the mirror, the opponent can hardly ignore the 4/4 next turn if it comes down with a Mistolina for 11 damage. Also, because it only costs 4 mana, it's not difficult to pair it with another follower. In other cases, you may also decide to clear their only follower with Viridia, leave it at like 1 health, but the opponent will be put in a very tough spot because they have to clear it (or it kills their follower for free), while also needing to clear a 4/4.

Mistolina: Your main win condition. Against most decks, if the opponent leaves only a single follower on board, you just slam this and hit them for 7. After that, the opponent has to spend their entire turn dealing with it, and if you chain this card, you win. It's a little different in the mirror match and vs decks like Control Haven, but for the main part, this card wins you the game.

Tech cards:

Depending on your meta and preferences, there's a bunch of cards that you can go for instead of the above decklist:

Maisha: If you're bricking, playing this on turn 2 is not bad as the statline meets the base tempo requirement. It opens you up for late game OTKs with Purgation Blade - and obviously synergises with the constant cycling with Trees (putting Purgation Blade into Grave). Purgation Blade itself can be very useful due to being a 3pp hard removal. It's worth noting that Maisha can definitely be played around, and the moment they see you discarding any combo piece for it, they'll know to either leave empty board (purgation blade cannot buff Maisha without a target), or leave a ward in your way (Maisha's effect can't kill the ward and go leader at the same time). It has some niche comboes where you can go turn 2 Maisha, turn 3 crack a tree, discard Trail of Light/Purgation, swing face, cast spell for free ~_~. Takes up evo space as well, keep that in mind.

Barbarossa/Cyclone Blade combo: It takes up a pretty large amount of deck space but the upside is that you can toss Cyclone Blade in matchups where it's bad, and Barbarossa is searchable via Maid Leader/Gemstaff. Barbarossa having assail and massive stats is also pretty good. Takes up evo space, but this usually replaces Leod.

Outrunning the Encroaching Heat: Good in neutral game states, and also puts in work vs slow decks (basically, you force out their removal then you surprise them with this). If you drop your opponent below certain life thresholds, they have to play way more defensively.

Nagi Hisakawa: Another great card from neutral game states. Extremely undercosted for what it does, but conditional on drawing/discarding your cooks/aethers.

Mulligan:

I think generally, any hand with Bayleon + 2-cost tree generator is enough, especially going second. When going first, Gemstaff/Maid Leader can both be considered Bayleon (as your evo is on turn 4), when going second, only Maid Leader can be considered a Bayleon.

Versus matchups where you need the early board control, then you want a 1-cost tree generator + Lupine Axeman, as this will save you a huge amount of hp in the long run. I think it's less important to hold Bayleon hands in this type of matchup, especially if you are going first.

Generally speaking, any playable hand is good enough, because you end up drawing/cycling so much anyways, esp with Sword's access to direct tutors (like Gemstaff/Maid Leader).

Game plan: 

The typical game plan consists of tempoing out your followers and controlling the board as best you can. You want to have at least one tree generator on turn 1, followed by a 2-cost tree generator on turn 2.

When going second, this sets you up for a Bayleon evolve into King's Might combo to clear the enemy board. For this reason, you typically want to leave your Colorful Cook from turn 1 standing, this way, you can Evo Bayleon, use King's Might, engage both trees, clear a follower, then gives your Cook +2 attack and swing for 3. Alternatively, if it is actually your Pathfinder or Lupin that survived, then buff them instead, as 4 attack is a very good number.

When going first, your Bayleon turn happens on turn 4 instead, with a similar approach to when going second. Keep in mind that yes, you do typically want to use your Bayleon effect to cycle cards, even if you don't get to chip in the attack damage instantly. Cycling is important to ensure you can secure your Mistolina Combo, and, ideally, multiple Mistolinas. It also helps set up later stage Octrice setups.

Your mid game should be focused around controlling the board. Against decks that cannot easily clear your standing followers, you want to leave your followers standing where possible, such that a Bayleon swing turn (+2 attack on the standing follower) will create backbreaking tempo damage to enemy leader.

Against most decks, you are aiming for the fastest Mistolina to the enemy leader, ideally on turn 6. Of course, you don't just slam her into the enemy if they have control of the board, but if they have 1-2 followers only, you can just slam it and hit them for 7. It's hard for them to ignore Mistolina, because the actual swing in life is 9 (due to 2 healing). They also have to consider the possibility of you chaining Mistolina the following turn again.

Keep in mind that while you can aggressively expend your trees for cards like Bayleon and Viridia Magna, always ensure that you are able to reach two trees for your Mistolina turn. Depending on how you do this, you may also telegraph your hand to your opponent, and it can make their range of movements a lot easier.

Say, for example, you are on turn 5 with 1 tree left. You end the turn. Your opponent now knows that they don't have to worry about a turn 6 Mistolina, as it is impossible for you to reach 2 trees and play Mistolina at the same time. In other words, your opponent will not play around Mistolina, which is bad for you. Granted, there are some situations where you will be forced to expend the tree. Perhaps you do not even have Mistolina in hand, so you feel you do not need two trees. This, in itself, is fine, but just be aware that sometimes, you can bluff it even if you do not have it!

Of course, this is only really relevant on turn 6. On turn 7, it is easy to use 1pp to regenerate a tree, but it's something worth considering nevertheless.

In a majority of matchups, you will find opportunities to get non Mistolina poke damage in. As such, you probably only really need two to close the game. But it does work out great that 3 Mistolina = 21 damage, and once your opponent has taken 1 Mistolina + chip, they will start playing defensively (which is generally inefficient). This is where the true power of the deck shines through.

Matchup Spread

Mirror: 50-50
Natura Forest: Favoured
Fairy Forest: Favoured
Natura Dragon: Favoured
Cool: Favoured
Machina Abyss: Even/slghtly favoured (if you don't run Leod or Cyclone, you are unfavoured though)
Kuon: Unfavoured - nothing you can do about it

I will briefly explain the dynamics of each matchup.

Sword Mirror

This is probably one of the higher skill matchups in the game, but I will touch on the key points:

1) Unlike in other matchups, where playing Mistolina ASAP is generally advantageous, it is very risky to play the first Mistolina. The only exception, imo, is when you are going first, you have 6pp, and opponent doesn't have Princess Strike in cemetery. This is because the most efficient out to Mistolina is, unsurprisingly, Mistolina herself. If they don't have Princess Strike, then they have to use a different way to clear your Mistolina, which means you will cash that 9 life swing for free.

2) The other risk with playing Mistolina early is that it gives your opponent the opportunity to recur it using Octrice. It's rather disgusting that Octrice can steal Mistolina and play it for 4pp, this is an insane tempo swing and also forces you to simultaneously clear Octrice and the Mistolina.

3) Octrice is exceptional in this matchup. Depending on the setup, you can cheat a ridiculous amount of play points, especially if you take their Mistolina, clear their board and push 7 to face. If your opponent doesn't have their own Octrice counterplay, or a tech option like Cyclone Blade, they can lose to the overwhelming playpoint advantage. In addition, consider stealing parts of their Mistolina combo, like Princess Strike if they don't have more than 1 in cemetary

4) With the above dynamics in mind, playing for resources and committing smaller threats early is a good way to approach the matchup. This is why cards like Swift Tigress are very strong. For example, you can go Pathfinder, add a card to hand, Tigress, swing 4 to leader. This is good, because it keeps your handsize up, pushes 4 hp in tempo, forces opponent to respond, and doesn't get punished by much.

5) Viridia Magna is essential for the resource war. As mentioned in a previous section, Viridia Magna is uniquely high value due to the way the resource game plays out. For example, if your opponent plays smaller followers, like Pathfinder, Viridia trading into Pathfinder leaves your Viridia Magna alive. This means your Viridia will either soak removal during the next turn, or you can use it to further control the board on the following turn. The 4/4 is not ignorable and represents a large threat. Alternatively, it's always fine to just trade it into bigger guys. For example, you can always trade it into their Mistolina, then evo a Bayleon or something like this. If they opt to Mistolina again, it leaves them open to you firing back with a Mistolina, pushing 11 and having a ward up. This is actually quite relevant, because they must choose between Princess Striking Misto or your ward, but if they do not shoot Misto and you have 1pp open for Princess Strike, you can clear theirs instantly. This grants you strong levels of protection against the Misto chain (outside of them just having double princess strike).

6) Look for opportunities to setup 2-3 turn lethals if they present themselves to you. If your opponent has a particularly weak answer to one of your setups, it can telegraph an opportunity to go for big pushes (often with Octrice), but sometimes even Bayleon can be a great punish (buffing your follower repeatedly when they have no playpoints open to respond).

Overall, the idea is to push and prod until one of the players loses their patience and goes for the first Mistolina, and also to look for opportunities to go for major swings which the opponent is unlikely to have answers to. This matchup is one of practice, if you play more, you will identify more of the patterns where opportunities arise.

Natura Forest

Natura Forest tends to live and die by its own draws. Yes, it can be a little tough if they get on curve Ladica + Send Em Packin and then chains them into Primal Giants, but if they don't hit, they just fall over and die.

Even if they do get the combos off, using cards like Viridia Magna can buy you some reprieve. Even if they do get 2 7/7s on board, you don't die immediately, especially because sword has a lot of chip damage. If they get the upper hand, just try to survive and outgrind them. If they lowroll/average roll, you are just going to win.

Fairy Forest

Lol, you can't really lose vs this deck outside of you lowrolling/them highrolling. You control the board so well regardless of if their guys are standing or not, and it's very hard for them to clear Mistolinas once you get going. Just clear their board/play normally and you will win.

Natura Dragon 

Unless they ramp twice early, you're pretty favoured in this matchup. Their best hope is that somehow their followers stick, but since you're Natura Sword, that's simply not going to happen. If you don't miss Mistolina + Princess Strike, you are pretty favoured. They can't stop you from slamming Mistolina and hitting their face, so if they don't have at least 2 followers on board that can threaten you, they will just fall over and die to the first good Mistolina turn you have.

The only thing to be worried about is their lethal range, so just calculate if you're in range of Forte/Oguri Cap (and sometimes, consider this two turns in advance so you can decide whether or not ignoring their board to send it with Misto just wins you the game insta). Keep in mind that most of the time, it's going to cost them at least half their playpoints to clear Mistolina, so their range of options afterwards is going to be fairly low. If they can't punish the first Mistolina, they definitely cannot punish the second/third, so you just straight win.

Hilariously, you can even steal Shadow's Corrosion (or forte hehe) via Octrice, and also get the burn damage on the enemy leader.

Cool

Just like with Fairy Forest, they can't win unless they highroll or you lowroll. In fact, I think that their highroll gets beaten by your midroll. Ultimately, the amount of removal that Sword has access to is way too much, and Mistolina, if ever safely dropped, is total doom for Cool.

Frankly, I've seen games where the cool player just folds to Bayleon (the buff effect is actually kinda crazy in this m/u).

Machina Abyss

So this matchup really just depends on how much tech you have for it. With none, yeah, you're unfavoured. With Leod, I think you are typically favoured. Also, it may just be bias from me, but good players are not typically on machina abyss, so you generally just have the skill advantage too.

If you win the dice roll, take second. While I typically don't care whether I go first or second with Natura Sword, in this matchup, taking second makes a difference due to how many strong tempo evolves they have access to with evo point. Also, they can sometimes run out of cards, and going second gives them the extra draw.

The key to this matchup is to deny them early Mono evolves. If you look at the Natura Sword deck, you are totally doomed if they cheat mono out extremely early. However, conversely, once you get enough play points online, answering the Mono board is difficult, but totally possible. In other words, you want to count how many play points they have, and whether it's possible for them to get an effective Mono turn. Then, you have your answer on how many cards you need to clear from their board. Keep in mind, that if they have no Mono/Alpha Drive in grave, this can also add to the necessary PP they require to combo off, so your leeway to answer their board or not differs via game state (you can also steal Alpha Drive off Octrice, depending on the situation).

This is why cards like Leod are very strong in this matchup. Because it cannot be answered by the opponent, and he's basically guaranteed to clear at least one card from their field every single turn, making it possible for you to develop your board while clearing theirs, without expending future play points.

If you can safely drop Mistolina in this matchup, it's a massive advantage for you. Because on the turn they want to Mono, they will have to trade two of their guys into her, meaning you only have to deal with 3 followers the next turn, and you also got 2 healing + they're 7 life down.

Ginsetsu is a card that improves the matchup for the Abyss side, but there's a few things to consider here. Unless the Abyss player has soul conversion in hand, they can't swing face with Ginsetsu and also Mono combo you on the same turn. In addition, they frequently have to trade some of their foxes in, which leaves them vulnerable to multi removal clears into face.

Essentially, Ginsetsu is a card where its threat is only really felt if they're ahead of you in life and can threaten lethal, if not, and you have the life lead, it's actually pretty awkward for them, and the card can be ignored in many instances. That said, if you suspect that GInsetsu is coming, you can always preserve some of your removal spells to answer her. But don't do it in such a way that it's detrimental to you, because like I said, sometimes, the card is more annoying than it is an actual threat.

Kuon

So basically, this matchup is bad for Sword, there's no real way around it. Kuon isn't popular enough to tech for, and even if it were, you'd be better off just playing a deck other than Sword.

This matchup is not so bad if the pilot is bad, but if they're good at Kuon, good luck, hope they brick. The onus is not on how well you draw - you could draw literally perfectly, but still lose. It's about how they draw.

One of the largest issues with this matchup is that Sword has no real early aggression (you don't even have 2/2s), and although the 2/3 stat line of the 2-costs are good, it's nowhere near enough to snowball a win.

What will typically happen is that they will take a certain amount of chip damage from you, they'll keep playpoints open to rimewind your Mistolina at least once, then maybe take one Mistolina to the face (they typically only run 1 Rimewind). Most games will end with them being only a few health away from death, but unironically, it's calculated.

The turbo build will just go for a double shift OTK on turn 8/9, and it's just gg, unfortunately. If they run Demoncallers, it's more likely to be a slower game, so you have more of an opportunity, but you also get less chip damage in because Demoncaller is very effective at outing early boards.

Ultimately, you do just play normally, and you have to hope the Kuon player bricks on critical turns. For example, perhaps they somehow just can't out your Bayleon, or they're missing combo or whatever. For this reason, it's unfavoured, but it's not unwinnable. I think Kuon is probably around 75-25 in their favour, so just pray you don't face it.

Final thoughts

Overall, I think Natura Sword is the best deck of the format. It has a very good matchup spread, and its bad matchups lose to other popular decks of the meta. It is highly consistent, and you want decks like this when playing bo1 tournaments like BCS. Unlike other card games, supply is an actual consideration when it comes to deck popularity, which means that it's not even correct for people to run counter decks to Sword, because there simply isn't enough Sword for that to make sense.

As a result, in a majority of tournaments this format, I think Sword will have an overwhelming advantage, especially in the early rounds where you are more likely to face the tier 2/3/4 decks.

12/05 Coaching Session - Natura Sword (2 hours), the story of how Avaltus 2-0'd the (previously) undefeated 8-0 Framework Mono Blood

Today we did two games of Natura Sword against Mono Blood. Unfortunately, due to a bug with the Sim, there's an issue where if a single player gets desynced, it is impossible to recover the connection. So as you can see in that video, game 1 was very awkward to play.

On reflection for the video, I should have increased volume of the other two people in the call, and I'm not super satisfied with the way I approached this session in the sense that I would have liked to have asked for Avaltus' opinion on how he would play first, instead of telling him what to do in the first instance. I think my teaching today could have been better (though to be fair, game 1 was a total mess due to the desync).

Despite the banter in the title, a big thank you to Framework for volunteering to be Avaltus' opponent! Even though he lowrolled, I think we got some pretty interesting games in (game 1 in particular, game 2 was simply unfortunate).