Friday Stride: Marine General of Heavenly Silk, Sokrates

Welcome to Friday Stride, or "Megacolony Guy didn't want to just do a normal card of the week." So, every Friday I can I'll look at a G unit, and give my assessment of it. I'm aiming to be somewhat holistic here, and look at the card in the context of everything around it, because that might be useful to those of you who don't play the clan.

Anyway, for the very first entry, I'm going to go with something that's out and I've used, rather than something with a bunch of still unseen support, so, let's have a look at our card, Aqua Force's Marine General of Heavenly Silk, Sokrates.

Builds upon war with power. Then more power.

Sokrates comes to us from the 2015 Fighter's Collection, and comes with a fairly simple skill. To summarise, for every attack you make against the opponent's vanguard after the second, you can Counterblast 1 to give the attacking unit an extra 5000 power, or one shield stage. Although he doesn't activate on a specific attack in the way a lot of his fellow Aqua Force vanguard do, the rearguard power-up is similar to several GB1 skills units found in G BT02, such as High Tide Sniper, so it's not out of theme.

OK, so he gives your third attack a bit of extra power, but then what? Well, if you ask that you probably don't play Aqua Force, because if you did you'd be aware that the clan has quite a lot of ways to generate four or more attacks, which means that he can power up multiple successive attacks. Using the skill a lot will eat into your counter blasts, but even one well-timed boost can allow a Tidal Assault to make two useful attacks even without a trigger, or push it's second attack over that trigger your opponent unhelpfully damage checked.

It's also important to note that the G Aqua Force build doesn't Counterblast all that much, so even if you use an older Perfect Guard rather than the unflipper you can often have the damage open to fire off the skill multiple times in a single turn as a finishing blow.

Now I've said that, everyone who's played against Aqua Force in the last three months will be saying: "But Megacolony Guy, why not just use Lambros? He's a Marine General of Heavenly Silk as well, and he's OP." Well, hypothetical person, there are a couple of reasons. The first is budget - despite being in a set in seemingly short supply, it's a lot easier to get this guy than Lambros, and since he isn't a Persona Flip, you don't need as many.

The second reason is because you can easily use both. Lambros is your main push, but Sokrates will back him up, either coming in first against an opponent trying to rush against you to soften them up or following up the big push to sweep up what remains of the opponent's hand and close out the game. Lambros doesn't need your damage zone, and during his turns you'll generally only use 1 Counterblast, 2 if you're pushing hard, so Sokrates still has the fuel he needs to batter the foe.

So, overall Sokrates is a very nice support card for Aqua Force decks. It's not going to win games alone, but turning spare counterblasts to extra power gives the deck just one more way to make sure the opponent can't stand up to the might of Cray's naval forces.