Friday Stride: Flying Mermaid, Frederica

So it's that time of year again, when that one clan which hasn't been seen in a main set since before about half the clans had even been introduced gets their booster and keeps the fanboys happy for another 12 months. OK, so this year the fanboys don't seem to be as happy, because a lot of the cards seem to be rather...well, lacklustre, for want of a better word, but they got waifu cards (literally - they're mermaids in wedding dresses), so Bushiroad will still sell boatloads of this set, and with any luck most of the normal holos will be easy to get hold of at reasonable prices. So let's get into Mermaid Season once again for 2016, and check out the easiest to pull of the G units in this year's booster.

Flying Mermaid, Frederica

~I believe I can fly, I believe I can touch the sky~

Frederica is oddly similar to another G unit in her clan, and even more suspiciously she's not the only G unit we'll be looking at over the next few weeks with an effect we've seen before. If she hits, you can flip another card in the G zone face up to bounce one rear-guard in harmony, call one unit from the hand, and give one rear-guard a 5000 power boost for that turn whilst it's in harmony. She also has the harmony ability herself, allowing her enter harmony with a unit called behind her that turn - especially useful for Bermuda Triangle, where you're likely to want to pick that unit up at some point.

It should be clear that Frederica is very similar to Fluffy Ribbon, Somni and Legendary PR♥ISM-Duo, Nectaria, in that both have on-hit skills to allow extra attacks. The differences between them may seem minor, but they have a big impact in where these two cards fit. Somni and Nectaria function identically aside from the latter's heart restriction and greater power boost, so I'll only look at Nectaria where she differs from Somni. I'll also ignore the Duo heart skill, as it's not relevant to today's card.

First up is Frederica's harmony skill, which makes it very clear that she's designed for the harmony deck over anything else. Being able to turn on the harmony skills of anything called behind her allows for much more flexibility in how you play cards which rely on being in harmony. Somni lacks this, only able to enter harmony if a unit with the ability is behind the vanguard when you stride and remains there throughout the turn, whilst no Prism cards use harmony, making it unnecessary for Nectaria.

Moving on to the main skill, and Frederica's G unit flip cost makes her nominally more costly than Somni's costless effect. However, turning a G unit face up isn't that great a cost, and in fact is likely to give more benefits than drawbacks. The harmony build doesn't have a huge range of G units it needs to use, and with their newest ace also flipping up anything (and gaining more benefits from more face-up units) there's plenty of room for tech choices. Being able to get to GB2 at the end of your first stride turn is also very nice for the GB2 grade 3's the harmony build has access to. Miracle Voice, Lauris can gain 5000 power defensively if you can call during the opponent's turn turn, and Secret Smile, Puumo and Magical Charge, Vita both give options to enable this. The new Great Ascent, Liddy gives a continuous 2000 power for everything in harmony, as well as having a built in option to both call and bounce whilst she's under attack in order to activate harmony skills. Frederica needs to hit for this, however, which prevents her ensuring that GB2 - ironically she'd be better if she paid her cost up front rather than when she hit.

Somni can bounce anything, but she has to return something if she can. Frederica can only return units in harmony, but she can elect not to bounce if you don't want to, even if everything is in harmony. Given the greater set-up Frederica needs, you're less likely to want everything to stay on the field - needing a front row and a back row unit for harmony to be active means triggers can be passed to one and the other bounced - but should the need arise, or should you just want to keep your current setup and call a drive checked card to an empty circle, you have the option.

Frederica's power boost is larger, and can be given to anything - allowing a new call to snipe out rear-guards whilst a trigger buffed column is made bigger still - but relies on the unit being in Harmony for the boost. By contrast, the others power up the incoming unit, which helps ensure they can attack but might not be what you would rather do. Under ideal conditions this is a trivial concern, but if you lack rear-guards and are bouncing her own booster to call a card from your drive checks you may not be able to get it into Harmony. Somni's power boost gets any grade 2 or greater Bermuda Triangle card called

Overall, Frederica is designed specifically for harmony builds, and here she's stronger than Somni under most circumstances. The older card isn't entirely useless, being able to function better when you lack usable rear-guards, but she's much better for builds without access to enough harmony cards with the exception of Prism, who also have their own version of this effect in Nectaria.

Next week, the return of an old favourite.

Friday Stride: Meteokaiser, Bustered

So next week sees the release of Clan Booster 3: More Mermaids, so before pop singers with fish tails take over this series for a few weeks let's go plug a gap and cover a clan that hasn't made it here. Thanks to me just dropping this blog for a few months, Nova Grappler's release in set 6 got completely bypassed. But rather than go look at that, let's go to our old standby for when a clan isn't in the newest pack to hit the streets and check out the latest Fighter's Collection instead. Checking in for the wrestling robots in this round of 'everyone gets one' we have more restanding - because that's what Nova Grapplers do, stand things up.

Introducing Meteokaiser, Bustered

He said he'd been to the year 3000...

Bustered comes from the more recent school of G units, which are permitted to flip up any card, but have effects which scale to the number of copies already face up. In comparison to those which demand a copy of themselves to be flipped for the cost, the newer ones are rather more flexible - four copies can be played over three turns, and can use tech G units you otherwise wouldn't need as the cost. For Bustered, on attack he can stand a unit for each copy of himself on the rear guard, at the cost of a counterblast and that flip. Then, if you have two copies of himself face-up and a full field, he can restand himself at the end of the battle, for a further counter blast and two discards, as well as a penalty of dropping to a single drive check.

So, he becomes a restanding vanguard - not exactly a rare thing for Nova Grapplers, who have no fewer than five grade 3's capable of restanding as vanguard, as well as ways for rear-guards to enable restands. They even have another restanding G unit in Meteokaiser, Victoplasma, which creates a problem for Bustered. Victoplasma has the same overall cost as a restanding vanguard - counter blast 2, discard 2, and a total of 4 drive checks - but requires no setup and doesn't care about the rear-guards, so why even bother with this new guy?

Well, first off, he stands rear-guards, which is most what Nova Grappler decks are aiming for. Although restanding as a vanguard is harder to pull off, he does actually give an extra rear-guard attack or two as well. With most Nova decks well placed to take advantage of those stands, he can facilitate a lot of damage, and even before his self-restand is active he's the only G unit that most Nova Decks can use with a restand not reliant on hitting.

Second is his interaction with the last Nova Fighter's Collection card.Ultimate Beast Deity, Ethics Buster Catastrophe functions in the same way as Bustered, flipping up anything for a skill, with an extra bonus for two copies of itself. With a Beast Deity heart, Ethics gains the ability to stand a rear-guard if a grade 1 or greater beast deity is revealed in a drive check. However the other copies G zone only give a flat 3000 power boost for two or more - nice to have, but not essential to rush for. Flip up a Bustered on an first stride Ethics, however, and your G zone is now primed to take advantage of whichever one you want next - simply flip up a copy of the same card for it's skill, and you have the two copies for the full effect, no matter which one you went with. This interaction gives Bustered a firm place in the G zone line up of Beast Deity decks, and with the potential of future G units to share this trait, it's possible more subclans will get to join in this party.

Finally, there's an interesting aspect to the skill's activation condition - it doesn't care what you attack, meaning even if you swing at a rear-guard you still get the effect. Firstly, this prevents the restand from being shut down by redirection into a rear guard (although since that's a Link Joker skill, Bustered still has problems here), but also gives an interesting manipulation of Exxtreme Battler Victor's stride skill.

Exxtreme Battler, Victor's on-stride skill gives the vanguard the ability to stand a rear-guard on attack, but due to the wording of once per turn abilities this has to be done on the first attack, or it's lost and can't be used at all. However, as that skill is the first attack against a vanguard, if Bustered attacks a rear-guard it won't trigger, allowing your vanguard to restand, attack a vanguard and then use Victor's skill. This doesn't seem like much, but a rear-guard could swing between those two vanguard attacks and this be restood by both skills. I can't advocate this as a good idea - your threatening triple drive attack is against a rear-guard and thus can't kill your opponent - but if you really want to stand Sazandara even more, or there's a rear-guard which just has to die right now it might just catch your opponent off guard.

Overall, a fun card - more of what Novas already do, but with just enough variety to be worth a look. Next week, we move on to another part of the entertainment industry, as we investigate a card which looks suspiciously similar to something I covered already.

Friday Stride: Sunrise Ray Radiant Sword, Gurguit

If I were to go through the clans from Glorious Bravery of Radiant Sword that I play, we'd be looking at a Dark Irregulars stride here. However, since they held Scharhrot Vampir's G unit form for set 8, all we got is a single rare. It's not a bad card, but it's clearly not a headline card for the set. So for this week, let's just get right on with the cover card of the set, which conveniently happens to be in the one clan which I haven't yet covered in a Friday Stride post.

Sunrise Ray Radiant Sword, Gurguit

The sun may well be what finally ends the world

Gurguit's grade 4 form comes immediately following Bushiroad's commitment to avoid GR rarity cards requiring multiple copies to work, and whilst some upcoming cards may go back to flipping up cards in the G zone without caring what those cards are, Gurguit cut out all interaction with the G zone entirely, beyond requiring generation break two to activate. As the ace of the new unite mechanic, he also has this as an activation requirement, which means two units have to be called to the rear-guard during that turn. This isn't as difficult as it sounds, and if you've even seen a gold paladin deck ever it won't sound remotely difficult. It means you'll probably have to think a turn or two ahead of when you want to drop him to maximise your efficiency, but if you can't get the unite off then you're either about to lose anyway or should be using something else right now.

The actual cost is interesting though - counter blast 1 and soul blast 2. Sunrise Ray Knight, Gurguit was one of the first GB2 units to use the soul as cost for it's effect, and expectation was that his grade 4 form would leave well alone to allow for the defensive GB2. However with no limit to how often the grade 4 can use his GB2 in a turn, the soul blast was clearly intended to provide another limit to this.

For all this cost, you get quite a bit. All of your rear-guards gain 5000 power for the turn, which those familiar with Platina Ezel may recognise, but on top of that Gurguit himself gains 5000 for each rear-guard. On top of his own power, a full field will allow him to cap out at 51000 power - or it would if you couldn't then use the skill again. Breaking 100,000 power on the vanguard lane is not impossible, and if the stars align and you get to use the GB2 five times you're looking at 150,000 power before boosting, which is very much "Perfect Guard or die" territory. You won't pull this much power very often, if ever, but a 75-100,000 power vanguard lane is still a big problem, especially when backed up by rear-guards with an extra 10-15,000 power each.

Gurguit's clearly a finisher then, and a potent one. No restands, no guard restrict, no criticals, just buckets of power to everyone and a whole barrel for himself, and steamroller over any hand without enough perfect guards for everything. However, that soul is an issue. We can excuse Gurguit's main deck form using it to a degree - he's consuming counter blasts as well, and if the grade 4 can take the game you don't need soul to defend yourself - but if you're going to spam that g unit's GB2, or even stride gurguit multiple times, you'll need to build up soul.

Knight of Far Arrows, Saphir is a card Gurguit decks have liked for some time. When called from the deck, it counter charges and soul charges 1, funding the entire cost of using the grade 3 GB2. Whilst Saphir can't quite match that with the grade 4, he still helps build soul. The low power isn't ideal, but between both Gurguits and Scourge Point Dragon giving power, and the deck's ability to easily grab a booster for him it's not a huge issue. G Set 7 followed up on this design by giving us Knight of the Faint Sun, Marcia, a card with a similar impact, and also an 8000 power grade 2. Unlike Saphir, Marcia puts herself into the soul, costing a card in exchange for that counter charge. However, she has a few benefits over her older counterpart. First off, she activates at the end of a turn, as long unite is active, not caring where she came from. In short, she isn't dead in hand like Saphire. Also, that applies to the opponent's turn as well, so if she lives through the turn, and you called at least two cards to guard that turn, she can jump in on their end phase to flip damage and load soul for your turn. Finally, she has resist, which can be key in some matchups, especially against Link Joker Chaos builds.

Further counter charge from moving to soul comes from Player of the Holy Pipe, Gerrie, who functions slightly differently. In exchange for a 3000 power bonus whilst unite is active, he must move to soul after he attacks or boosts. He needs a little care to work with - it's not a good idea to spam him if you have no damage face-down, but he makes himself a full 7000 booster, and stands work well with the big Gurguit, since you have beefy rear-guards to stand. Gerrie isn't the only trigger to put himself in the soul however - Scarface Lion is Gurguit's RR critical trigger, moving to soul for a draw and another 5000 power to an attacking Gurguit vanguard. Besides pumping the grade 4 even higher, he also helps build hand, which gold paladins tend not to directly do, usually relying on deck thinning and not using hand to build up their defences. There's also Flame of Victory, a very old critical able to give any Gold Paladin 3000 power for the turn. Since it's now easy to obtain, it's worth running, but don't rely on it for building soul - it's better guarded with, to save Gerrie and Scarface for soul building.

There are several starters which move themselves into the soul, but I won't discuss them here. The final card we will look at, however, is Sunshine Knight, Jeffrey. Much like Scarface Lion, he moves himself to soul for a draw. He is, however, a unite card, doing so after boosting if the conditions are met. Unlike Gerrie, Jeffrey is optional, allowing him to stick around should you want to minimise calls or utilise defensive cards which require you to have rear-guards. However, the ability to be called, boost, and then retreat into the soul with no net loss of card advantage is a nice bonus against control decks.

There's another advantage to all these cards flinging themselves into the soul - you now have open circles to call new units. All of them give you either an extra open damage for a call skill, or a new card which could be called (or be used as shield over another unit which can be called), which makes it much easier to bring unite on line without losing cards from calling over them,

With these guys around, the soul isn't really an issue, and as a bonus neither is counter blasts, allowing perfect guards which work from the deck to be used. Thus Gurguit managed to pick himself up from being one of the less effective G decks to being a rather good one.

Friday Stride: Black Seraph, Gavrail

So after splitting a case of G-BT07 with a teammate, an abundance of Angel Feather foils left me with half a rescue deck despite that not being a clan in my half of the split. Then a couple of weeks later, I obtain the rest of what I'd need for a Gavrail-Rescue build from my other teammate, to go with all the stuff sat in my binder waiting for me to get rid of it. OK, it's not a 'complete' build - no Raphael, Sunny Smile Angel or Harut, and don't even ask about Nociel - but it's fun and demonstrates what rescue decks can pull off. So for this week, let's look at G Angel Feather's new centrepiece in Black Seraph, Gavrail.

She is a Waifu, and a Persona Stride

Gavrail's grade 4 form, like most of the recent evolutuions for the stride bearer grade 3's, works with her clan's new keyword rescue. Rescue is of the type which prefixes skills with a certain effect, in this case being an effect involving healing damage before inflicting the same amount of damage back to yourself. Unlike conventional Angel Feather damage swaps, this does activate trigger effects, giving the potential to gain additional pseudo-drive checks in the form of damage checks in your turn, as well as additional damage checks when defending.

Gavrail herself has two skills, which need to be activated by a counter-blast and turning up a copy of herself. Once she does, she can give two units 2000 power each for the turn every time a card enters the damage zone in the battle phase - which will happen with every rescue going off during said battle phase. The second skill ensure the first is meaningful, with the only current rescue 2 ability. After she attacks, she heals two damage, and then takes two damage, complete with trigger checks. This gives more chances for heals, extra crits, more stands, and if you really wanted more draws - but the rescue ability takes a card from the deck every time you heal, making the deck too fast for draws to be safe. Since you can heal face-down damage, it also gives an effective counter charge 2, more than recovering the counter blast cost to activate the effect.

Gavrail thus has 5 drive checks and 4 lots of 2000 power to distribute for persona flip and counter blast 1 which becomes a net counter charge by the end of the turn. The amount of digging for triggers she can do means she plays very nicely with both criticals and stands. The former rack up damage quickly, and can ensure an opponent has to guard everything far sooner due to extra criticals floating around. Five checks make stands more reliable, and allows you to attack with everything in the reasonable confidence you'll restand it. With 8 stand triggers able to return themselves to the deck, it's also quite easy to compress the deck to the point where a stand is more or less certain to show.

However, like most good medical professionals, Gavrail works best as a team. The usual power gainers - Thousand Ray Pegasus, Million Ray Pegasus, and Nurse of Broken Heart - gain power with rescue just like everything else, and can also take advantage of Doctoroid Refros to gain power. Whilst the Black Seraph herself can't hand out boosts from the fridge's own damage swaps, returning damage checked triggers back to the deck (along with Refros itself) and pulling out non-triggers instead increases the trigger density of what remains to up your odds of hitting triggers. This process is somewhat luck-based (refros can also put triggers into the damage zone, in which case they won't activate), but get the deck small enough and you can do at least a small loop even without the damage swapping of the Nociel engine.

A standout of the new rescue units is Black Bomber, Maalik, who if called from the damage zone triggers a rescue every time she attacks or boosts against the vanguard. She's especially potent with stands, since hitting them allows her to immediately re-stand for another attack and another rescue. Black Seraph's power boost helps Maalik become even harder to stop, get over annoying defensive triggers, or build power elsewhere whilst hitting even after whatever boosted the first swing is resting. The 5 trigger checks on the vanguard swing also helps dig through to another stand to allow Maalik to swing even more.

It's not just the stands which can generate more attacks - Laser Clutcher, Ke'el and Drill Motor Nurse both call themselves when sent to the drop zone from the damage zone, and if they were sent by rescue they gain 3000 power as well. Bringing them in over resting units allows further attacks, and with effects ordered correctly they can gain power from Gavrail's other skill as well - just one boost allows Drill Motor to solo 11000 vanguards without a boost, whilst the two from Gavrail's rescue 2 would put a Ke'el to 16000. If there's something else you want called, there's also Black Report, Ridwan - when you move a damage to the drop, she move to soul to give up to one rear-guard 4000 power, as well as call the card from the drop zone if it was healed by a rescue. The ability to trigger on-call skills mid battle is never a bad thing, allowing for potentially more damage swaps, more attacks, and more rescue.

In summary, Black Seraph, Gavrail provides a much more offensive G zone option for Angel Feather, and in particular for Gavrail builds, which previously only made offensive pushes through mass damage swaps to power up. Coupled with the clan's naturally strong defences, Gavrail provides a more balanced deck better able to apply pressure to the opponent.

Friday Stride: Interdimensional Dragon, Bind Time Dragon

After a long pause, the Friday Stride is back, and fittingly enough our first subject is from the time clan. Gear Chronicle have finally shifted away from focussing entirely on Chronojet Dragon, with Chronofang Tiger providing the core for a different battle plan, centred around using your own bind zone. Whilst there's obvious similarities to time leap, much of the new support binds the cards permanently to gain other effects. Chronofang himself is the key card for this, with his GB2 skill guaranteeing a stride every turn provided you have something to use.

Not having Chronojet means no Nextage, so the deck has a new ace, which interacts with the cards bound by these skills to provide a strong push at most points in the game.

Interdimensional Dragon, Bind Time Dragon

Time's stopped? Oh, wait, no, that's just my watch.

Bind Time has two functions, either as a mid-game power play to swing momentum in it's favour, or as a late-game finisher. It's GB2 costs two counter blasts, a soul blast and flipping a copy of itself, and that's just the up-front cost. The very first part of the effect also binds at least one of your rear-guards unless you don't have any at all, so the overall cost is quite hefty, but it gives a lot for that. Straight up, Bind Time gains 10000 power and a critical, and then for each card in your bind zone, regardless of how it went there, your opponent sends one of their rear-guards back to the deck. Finally, if there is a Gear Beast heart card, you can counter charge 2 and soul charge 2, refunding much of the cost and giving one extra soul. There's a lot here, so it's worth breaking it down.

The power and critical isn't a huge deal by itself - without guard restrictions it's liable to be met by a perfect guard, and with G guardians providing a further boost to defences there's a good chance your opponent can halt it. However, even G guardians will likely require further shield, and without any defensive cards the critical makes the attack threatening enough to drain the opponent's hand. Ultimately, however, this is a bonus which makes Bind Time useful against decks which clear their own field, and not what you run it for.

What really sells Bind Time is it's ability to remove the opponent's field. Whilst your opponent chooses which unit they send back, it's not overly difficult to put enough cards in the bind zone to clear the field, especially if they have anything that removes itself or they attempt to not over-commit to the rear-guard. Chronofang will bind at least 1 from it's on-ride skill, and one more if you put it to GB2 before you stride. Bind Time can bind more than one card, and with a few rear-guards able to call themselves from the bind zone with more power sending rested units out to recall them with more power next turn may be a viable play. Steam Scalar, Emellanna and Quiet Sleep-calling Gear Tapir both allow you to bind cards from the drop zone, nominally as a cost for their effects, whilst Steam Knight, Mudar binds himself as a cost for this own effect. Finally, there's time leap skills. Anything you send to the bind zone for a time leap on that turn will still be there when Bind Time attacks, and anything which got trapped in the bind zone due to the mechanics of time leap will also count. As a result, the deck as a whole works very well with the time leap support, both due to this and the fact that the cards which activate when bound from the rear-guard activate from both time leap skills and Bind Time Dragon.

Finally, the resource replenishment. Bind Time having a net 0 counter blast and soul charge 1 means the deck can do more than just swing with Bind Tine twice. Whilst some early planning may be needed to ensure the damage is open for Bind Time to activate, the deck can afford to actually use cards with counter blast costs. This does, however, rely on you having a Gear Beast grade 3, of which there are only two: Chronofang Tiger and Reform-calling Gear Eagle. Chronofang is a given - Bind Time is clearly the ace of his build, and it's Chronofang's continuous binding which helps make Bind Time the massive removal it can be. Gear Eagle is a nice back-up, given it's interaction with the Chronosocommand Dragon and Chronoscommand Revolution, who give a way to shift stubborn resist units that Bind Time can't get rid of. Interestingly, both of these cards are good backups to Chronojet Dragon, allowing those builds access to another G zone option.

There's another aspect to the resource replenishment, outside of his own skill - recovery of the bound units. Whilst most units bound are gone for the rest of the game, choosing units you no longer need can mitigate the impact. Even better are Steam Knight, Mudar mentioned above, and Parallel Barrel Dragon, both of whom can call themselves from the bind zone, and gain power boosts in the process - not only does binding one (or both) of these allow you to recover the minus next turn, but do so with more power. 

I won't go into the full time leap engine here, because it deserves it's own discussion, but in the context of mitigating the loss of your own units to Bind Time there's one card which really should be discussed - Steam Battler, Ur-Watar. If you've ever faced Gear Chronicle within the last 6 months you probably recognise this little thing. When bound from the rear-guard, this stand trigger returns itself to the deck to let you draw two and put a card from your hand back into the deck. Previously it was used with Steam Maiden, Melem - time leaping Ur-Watar into Melem allowed the latter to use her own skill to return her to the deck for another grade 0 without trapping the card bound to call her in the bind zone, and it's a similar interaction with Bind Time that makes Ur-Watar so useful. If bound through Bind Time Dragon's GB2, Ur-Watar is present whilst the skill resolves, adding to the count of cards to be sent back to your opponent's deck. Immediately afterwards, however, Ur-Watar's own skill gets it out of the bind zone in exchange for a net +1 to your hand, mitigating the -1 from binding it.

In conclusion, Bind Time Dragon does a lot, providing in one card both a momentum-shifting midgame card and a finisher for a clan to finally step away from Chronojet. Being the ace of the current main antagonist of the anime, you can be sure this won't be the last we see of this deck.