Friday Stride: Chronodragon Nextage

With 24 clans (plus Cray Elementals and a crossover thing) to pick from, I've yet to hit the need to go back to the same clan for this column - choosing three weeks of Mermaids excepted - though attempting to avoid giving away hints on my deck choices for a major tournament did throw Altmile in my face this week. However, there is one other fairly obvious gap, a clan which has a strong G zone but I've yet to even talk about.

Gear Chronicle.

So in the interests of bringing them out of the dark, cold winter of clans not yet featured on this blog, let's have a look at Bushiroad's latest attempt to commit wallet genocide, Chronodragon Nextage. 

Like, say, a 'Next Age?' Eh? Eh?

Gears have managed to assemble quite a range of skills under the nebulous banner of 'time travel' - Guard restriction (of both the grade 0 and grade 1+ varieties), deck to field tool-boxing, control of the opponent's field, and even manipulation of the G zone (if only through one stand trigger no-one uses because it doesn't do enough) - but a re-standing vanguard has managed to evade them until now. Nextage isn't technically a re-rider, but rather it goes back to the G zone during the battle phase, and then stands the heart if it's a Chronojet Dragon. Whilst this gives most of the same offensive impact, triggers from the first attack can't be placed on the vanguard and used to buff up the second, but Nextage's exact setup does grant it the ability to conduct an extra drive check compared to restanding G units.

More specifically, Nextage's skill requires another copy flipping, a counterblast of one and to discard 3 cards from your hand at the end of his attack, provided you're at GB2. He then returns to the G zone, and if the heart was a Chronojet Dragon, the new vanguard stands up. Since you're at GB2, you're now standing up a Chronojet Dragon with his own guard restriction on-line, and the high base power of the stride means you can keep the booster for this attack. Compared to other restanding G units, he gains an extra drive check on the first attack in exchange for a weakened second attack and an inability to carry triggers. He requires a specific heart, but Bushiroad were kind enough to give us Steam Fighter, Balih, who when in the heart can be swapped out for Chronojet, allowing you to set up for Nextage even on the turn you stride into him.

Although just getting that extra vanguard attack is going to help, he'll perform best when the restood Chronojet is a threat himself. To do this he needs to have a 10k booster to make him 3 cards to 2-pass, which means either Steam Rider, Burnham or the use of Summit Crest Gear Wolf /Mist Geyser Dragon to power up after using Chronojet's stride skill. The latter can climb even higher if you can send more of their rear-guards back to the deck.

Chronojet is, in the end, the core of current Gear Chronicle, and Nextage give him an extra push. Whilst it doesn't cure the clan's biggest shortcoming - that is, that they can do very little before they stride - it does grant them an extra tool to break through the opponent once they do.