Friday Stride: Original Deletor, Egorg

Yep, Comic Booster time. It's nice that at least some of the Manga cards got put out into the game, and Deletors did need some help to deal with stride being a direct counter to half the benefits delete gave out. One of those cards was a stride of their own, complete with a delete skill of it's own - Original Deletor, Egorg

Well aren't you cheerful?

Egorg is, like most deletors, named with random sounds, because that's how you emphasis 'alien' - make it meaningless. Unlike any other deletor, however, he has a Generation Break skill which only makes him useful on the second stride or more. This does mean that you'll have to skip a turn's delete to stride into something else (unless you ride Mixed Deletor, Keios that turn), but once you do so Egorg give you one of, if not the most cost-efficient delete available.

Most of the Grade 3 deletors cost 4 cards to delete, either in counter-blasts or in discards/retires. Juxtapose Deletor, Zaele only costs three, but is a once-only skill on legion, as opposed to a reusable ACT skill, and lacks the bonus effects other deleting units gain when they delete. Egorg costs only counter-blast 1 and retire 1 for a total of two cards (three if you count the stride cost, which is recovered by triple drive), and on top of the delete and the stride power locks a back row rear-guard and forces the opponent to bind a card from their drop zone face-down, an effect termed Vanish Delete.

Already it's better than almost any other Deletor - the only ones to have a lower cost either require the soul blast of a specific grade 3 or require two grade 3's to delete only after the vanguard attacked (a setup even less appealing in stride format than a conventional delete). But wait, there's more. Once you've deleted, locked and bound the cards, if your opponent has four or more damage and 13 or more cards bound face-down, you instantly win. Instant wins aren't usually common in TCGs in general, and Vanguard has kept them very rare - though so far all of them are in Link Joker.

Four damage isn't going to be hard to get to - you'd have to do that to beat them the conventional way anyway, and although we're not in season 3 any more and few decks will need to go to four damage to even start most decks will eventually want either counterblasts or not to waste shield. It's the 13 vanish deletes that will need some effort, but even this shouldn't be too difficult. Almost every new Deletor in Vanguard and Deletor has, as part of it's skill a vanish delete or two, which can soon start to add up. If nothing else, Egorg humself will vanish delete each turn you stride him, which should be every turn from his GB2 going live, unless you can't stride or would be on the last one but can't get enough units bound to win for some reason. The threat of the Delete End victory condition is a very real one, and it's even harder to play around than World's End. Against that, the opponent can leave them on four and pressure with criticals at least. Here, you either have to push hard and fast, somehow keep the drop zone empty, or play the grade 2 game, and for some decks this may well be difficult.

Overall, whilst Egorg doesn't fix all the problems with Deletors, it at least minimises the advantage losses they face, allowing them to keep up despite a lack of significant card advantage. It gives them an ultimate finisher and something for decks which don't find the delete as draining something else to worry about.