By: SirAlcain and Sanjitps

With Zoo coming to a close, next month is Star Gate season. Nova Grapplers and D-Police, will be showing up every weeknight and we will cast our initial judgments; good or bad? But, for those who don’t play said clans, How do we know what’s good or bad? Well, we thought it would be a good idea to share our thoughts on what each of the two main clans in the set needed to become a good, competitively viable(not necessarily tier 1) clan. (NOTE: We do not see ourselves as professionals or experts in said clans. These are decks we feel passionate about and felt we understood them enough to find their faults and know how to address them.)

Dimension Police:

Dimension Police has been very….average, for most of its life. Never really having a great time to shine outside of a couple sets, almost everything in the clan has been power crept out. Here is what I believe should be addressed for Dimension Police.

Better Early Game: The clan as a whole has 0 early game (outside of metalborgs). Burst’s rears are all GB locked sans revolver, but +4k doesn’t do anything in the early. There’s the grandlady platinum ace play, but that’s not much either. DRobos don’t have much either except for throw hand down and swing, then get first stride. The clan needs good rear guards with good pre-GB skills to start to do something worth while and put pressure on before strides.

Laurel: Commander Laurel is a card that has had…a history. Bushiroad banned it once before, but even after it’s unban, DP isn’t any better off. Why? Because when they released the chain off Laurel, they printed it’s next wave of support…all cards that played around laurel. Mainly through main phase resting. This hampered Laurel’s effectiveness by not having enough RGs standing for Laurel to activate. But this hampered the effectiveness of the clan as a whole, because with main phase resting RGs and no way to stand them, there is overall a lack of offensive presence. This can be remedied in a couple ways; making support that has skills that activate when they are rested, make support that has skills that can activate while in a resting position so they can do something with the main phase resting, or re-ban the card and print normal support. Either way, Bushi needs to stop dancing around this card and either embrace it’s existence or get rid of it. They pulled it with Tahro and the latest revelation support, but they tried it with the latest DP support and it failed. They cannot do it again.

Better Strides: X-Lead and…X-Lead and…Daiking and…X-Lead. Those are the clans good strides. On both sides of the clan in DRobos and Cosmics, every stride is outdated and at this point basically pay huge cost do very little, if anything. X-Gallop is the perfect example of this, being the first quad drive stride in the game, and has been so power crept it’s sole existence is a meme. DP needs better strides. Lower costs, better, more proactive skills. Skills that can build advantage. In Cosmics especially, because just building up VG power isn’t enough to be threatening when your opponent can just drop a PG. Basically, Bushi should treat hitting Burst levels as a condition, not a bonus. Doing that will allow them to create better effects for said strides and maybe even lower their requirements. They specifically need either a restander or a guard restrict. Something to make a big VG threatening. On top of that, they need crit pressure. Daimax has that for DRobos but Cosmics have X-Tiger. Yeah we don’t have much going for us. Both sides also need a VG that can put on pressure without RGs involved. With cards like denial griffin and lock everywhere in the higher tiers, having no RGs will be a common occurrence. They need a VG that can power itself up without the help of RGs. Without it, they’re doomed to fail in the same place as they were before in the same matchups.

Advantage Engine: DRobos have no real advantage engine. Theirs is swinging with Daileon and hoping it hits so they can use laurel. Cosmics don’t have one either. Theirs is a bunch of stand triggers that draw cards. These are not what make an advantage engine. These decks need a real way to consistently get cards to hand, plus, and get cards to field without minusing. Currently, only way to get cards to field is to drop them from hand. Where’s the viability in that when they’re not replacing themselves? Not much to this section, just…give ‘em one bushi.

Resource Management: Zero. Zero ways to reliably counter charge in the clan. And the

deck is VERY counter blast heavy. DRobo’s first stride is a CB2 alone. Cosmics use at least 2 CB a turn from various effects across the field. And the best resource management the deck has is an on hit. Pathetic. Soul is less of an issue, but because Enigman Calm is a

greedy fucker, soul could definitely be addressed. The clan needs a way to regain any kind of resources from CB to soul to hand to make sure it can do what it needs to do without worrying about how much it will cost.

Ways to combat control: Lock, lock, retire, lock, delete, lock, stun, retire. Oh welcome to the current Vanguard meta. The previous are your options to beat to get to a decent tier. What would you like to face? None. Retire and lock defeat everything the clan tries to do. With no RG slots available to call to, you cant gain power or use laurel. With units retired, you have to replace them from hand. Both of them are a bi

g no no and ultimately end up decimating the clan. Grandvolver is a start, but not enough to keep the decks living through other means like circle retire and non-selective lock. An unlocker or more resist units could very much so help them with this issue.

Nova Grapplers:

Novas, unlike DPolice, had their time to shine. They had Cat Raizer, they had Victor when Sever-Temper and Favorite Champ was released. But now? They don’t even see the light of day. Once champions of the ring, now washed up wondering what went wrong. Well, here’s what we believe went wrong.

Better first stride: Currently victor’s best first stride is Meteokaiser , Bustered. Seeing how the deck only uses it as a first stride, it can be summed up as “[g-persona flip, cb1]: When this unit attacks, pay the cost. If you do, choose one of your rear-guards and stand it.”. Now while this card does net you an extra attack, at the current game’s power level, this isn’t enough. G-guards gain a large amount of shield for almost nothing and most good decks tend to have large hands after first stride which means that if we fail to kill/leave a serious dent after first stride, the game is more or less over already. What I’m hoping for is a first stride that still allows us to possibly kill by first stride but also gives us some sort of draw so that we aren’t left for dead if our first stride turn isn’t optimal.

Draw power/tutoring power: I’m sure many victor players have wanted this for a while. Currently the average victor deck runs around 6 draw triggers (sometimes more if you’re running a favorite champ build). Even then, the deck tends to have a not so big hand due to the fact that we have no real way of drawing cards outside of triggers. Due to this, it is hard for victor to have effective turns since the deck wants to have specific rearguards on the field during stride turns.

A way to interact with interruption and/or lock: As stated before, interruption gguards are the bane of victor’s existence. A properly timed impede dragon or denial griffin can shut down the victor player’s entire turn. Lock is also a giant pain for victor to deal with. The interruption issue is fairly easy to deal with. The simplest way is to slap resist on a g2 and we’re good to go. However, I feel like that’s boring so I’m hoping bushi gets a bit more creative when it comes to addressing victor’s issue with interruption gguards. I’m personally hoping we get a g1 that gains +4k and back row attack when it restands or a card that gains resist when it restands. To deal with lock, bushiroad can print something similar to the cards we saw in gbt-13 and awakening zoo. Something like phantom blue Ahsha would be fantastic.

Something to do pre-gb(offensive): Victor is an aggro combo deck. The deck wants to deal damage early so our multi-attack first stride turn is more likely to kill. Which is why it makes no sense that all of our cards are gb locked. Victor’s early game basically sums up to slapping down vanilla cards and hoping they stick for your first stride. This is fairly easy to fix, just print cards that do things pre-gb.

Better gguards: It’s no secret that nova grappler gguards lack any sort consistent shield

gaining. Our biggest gguard is Unior, which gains +5k if you have no face up damage and +5k if you have no soul. I think out of the many many games I’ve played with victor since gbt10 came out, I’ve gotten +10k shield probably 10 times out of the 300-ish games I’ve played. Now that every other clan has a somewhat consistent +10k gguard, it feels only fair that nova grapplers get a +10k gguard as well.

These are just some ways we think the clans can be fixed. Some can be accomplished in one or two cards, some may need a complete overhaul. At this point, it’s up to bushi how to approach these clans. And we personally hope they realize some of the same faults we have found.

Join in the discussion at our discord server: https://discord.gg/R8GF47r

Dpolice: SirAlcain

Nova Grappler: Sanjitps