THIS POST IS IN-PROGRESS AND WILL UPDATE WHEN I FEEL UP TO IT.

(For convenience, I stickied this article so you don’t have to dig through the archives every time you want to keep up with new hotness. Aren’t I nice?)

I just don’t have time anymore. You probably don’t have all that much time either, and while those 10k+ word posts are cool if you have a spare hour and a bunch of interest, you probably aren’t the person who has both a spare hour and a bunch of interest. They’ll go up every now and then, but they’ll be sidelined for now.

So, what’s important for people to know about? Well, the game is actually in an incredibly desirable state right now. We have more than 10 unique sets capable of topping tourneys without being laughed at, some of those sets having multiple decks easily capable of doing so. It’s important to know the top decks in the meta, what they can do, their gimmicks, and why you should consider playing those decks for your next tournament. That’s precisely what this post will be about. It should more rightly be called The Meta Decklist Post, but I’ll get to that.

Table of Contents

To Love-Ru Darkness 2nd

Nisekoi

Monogatari Series

Sword Art Online

Toaru Majutsu no Index/Toaru Kagaku no Railgun

The iDOLM@STER

The iDOLM@STER Cinderella Girls

Tantei Opera Milky Holmes

Puyo Puyo

Little Busters!

Rewrite

Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Fate/Stay Night

Fate/Kaleid Prisma Ilya

GIrlfriend Beta

Attack on Titan

Charlotte

Guilty Crown

Schoolgirl Strikers

Log Horizon

CLANNAD

Kantai Collection

Senki Zesshou Symphogear

Love Live!

Dog Days

GochiUsa (Is the Order a Rabbit)

Da Capo

Accel World

Kiznaiver

Kill la Kill

Haruhi

Persona

Re:Zero

Chain Chronicle

KonoSuba

Star Wars

Vivid Strike

Kemono Friends

Bang Dream

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

Saekano

This is going to be a very bare bones look at all the current competitive decks, and it will include decklists. This is a resource I find the community lacking. Even though wsdecks.com is doing its absolute best, there is a dearth of good lists, and a lot of the event-winning lists in Japan are kind of laughable for many reasons, as I have probably mentioned several times. For that reason, I’m presenting a centralised list of skeleton decklists that are competitive and customisable. I am willing to take requests for competitively viable decks too, though the first person to ask me about an Alchemist decklist will be publicly scorned. Decklists are my first priority, since they are in demand and the quality of a googled list is hard to guarantee. If you have ever thought I or my co-writers have ever had any idea what we’re on about, then feel free to steal these lists.

That being said, this isn’t just a post collecting high tier decklists. It’s going to (eventually) be a very basic and objective look at decks you can expect to see at or near the top tables at your next JP regionals. It will touch on the cards you expect to see played in them, why the decks are well-positioned, and the most important points: the deck’s weaknesses.

All statements are opinionated. All builds are at least serviceable, but will hardly be optimised for your meta (or any meta, for that matter).

Some of the decks will be a lot more tuned than others, based on how the people I’ve discussed this post with build these decks (and of course how I build these decks).

THIS POST IS IN-PROGRESS AND WILL UPDATE WHEN I FEEL UP TO IT.

Ready? Let’s party.

To Love-Ru Darkness 2nd

YG ‘Yamikan’ <Transformation>/<Housework>

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A powerful deck boasting strong machine-gun endgame and an antidamage counter. While at one point it was the unrivalled juggernaut of the scene, the game has caught up to it, and while it’s still extremely powerful in the endgame and is more than serviceable in the midgame, a lack of efficient free-mill and handfix options can make the deck a lot more linear and reliant on its brainstorms. Still boasts very high offensive numbers at Level 1, and still potent enough to surprise unwary players who think this deck is past its time.

+ Strong endgame with self-sustaining finisher, multiple burns and antidamage

+ Reasonably strong midgame – still the gold standard for ‘Shimakaze’ clones

+ Antisalvage to frustrate some of the fairer decks out there

GB <Animal>

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Solidly above-average deck with a plethora of deck manipulation options. While it is very capable at sculpting hand and managing mishaps, the deck falls short on a number of other fronts, including raw finishing power. While it is still a very solid deck that can be played in many different and effective ways, it lacks the raw oomph we’ve come to expect from meta decks in general.

+ Extremely good deck management

– Lacks selection on a lot of its advantage

– Mediocre endgame and middling Level 0 utilities

Nisekoi

YRB ‘Metakoi’ <Key>

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Previously one of the most terrifying decks to ever grace the tournament scene, Nisekoi is now far less oppressive, having been defanged by that magical thing we call the banlist. It’s still fairly playable, with a solid Level 1 core, a plussing brainstorm, and a (solitary) powerful finisher, but most other decks can now do what Nisekoi used to with impunity. The game has also sped up considerably, and durdling at 1 to use multiple pendants simply isn’t as reliable a tactic anymore. Nonetheless, the deck is capable and can easily steal wins from unprepared opponents.

+ Marika is still Marika, Onodera is still Onodera

– Somewhat average at pretty much everything else

– Being tied to the Pendant event makes the whole deck clunky and inefficient





Monogatari Series

YR ‘Gatorade’ Meta (and YGR Shinobu-centric builds)



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There’s a trend here. Monogatari is another one of those decks that took Japanese top tier status, to the point where it was hit with not one, not two, but three bannings. The deck morphed from being a value machine to a threatening machinegun deck, and has since sort of vanished from the map, having lost its top end, one of its major value engines, and its free 2-soul beater. Now it kind of sits there with a bunch of kinda-good cards, and honestly – I’m not convinced it’s a top tier threat anymore. Still, it runs the value train and has a bunch of good utilities, so it’s very serviceable.



+ Strong utility suite, still one of the only decks with both a Riki and Azusa clone

– Has been banned to the point where it can’t really function as anything special





Sword Art Online

yGB ‘SAOP’ Goodstuffs

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A solidly above-average deck with solid utilities. SAO boasts the strongest ‘same-refresh compression’ engine, with a non-interactive Yuuki Level 1 combo that pulls not one, but two cards out of the deck with each use. This gives the deck a marginal advantage at a point where you’re expected to be uncompressed, and as such can ride the Yuuki train until it has enough resources to go nuts with a rather rude endgame. That being said, it’s not particularly special in any other way, with rather average Level 0 and 1 utilies and a rather average endgame, though that may change with the new Ordinal Scale booster.

+ Powerful same-refresh compression engine that sets up your endgame very well

+ Counters interactivity with Machine of Ice, possibly the best TD card ever printed

– While it has utilities, it usually has a gimped version of every generic utility

– Somewhat unimpressive top-end that has to hail mary sometimes

Toaru Majutsu no Index/Toaru Kagaku no Railgun



YB Headcrabs

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The poster child for comeback campaign success, Index was a fantastically quirky deck with a powerful heal-based lategame. While it has since fallen off, it had a very unique Level 1 game featuring a costless sac counter, and a strong sustain-based endgame that had not only typical heals, but a 1-cost cantripping freefresh, and a heal-2 event, an effect that has previously been so powerful that it was banned. While it’s certainly not overwhelmingly powerful, it still has the ability to heal until the cows come home, which is certainly worth giving a try.

+ Probably STILL the most heals you can really cram into a deck and feel okay with

+ Unique Level 1 game with reasonable advantage engines and a costless sac counter

– Kind of lost in the lategame, especially if you didn’t get to farm up stock

– Poor finishing power overall, regardless of what techs you play

Make Railgun GReat again

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Railgun has a particularly cumbersome history to live up to. As the first booster set to ever receive a focused neo-standard-centric second booster, it got all the goodies at that point in time, and immediately became the most dominant deck in all of WS history. As a result, it has been banned to oblivion and back, and prior to the comeback pack, sat firmly in a position of mediocrity. The power-up pack gave it some excellent new tools, including the only true field destruction in WS, various angles of attack at Level 3, and ways to patch up the holes the old, tired series had. The result is a solid if unspectacular deck, with several ways to go about construction and gameplay.

+ High amounts of midgame power and handfix for no real reason

+ The only true removal combo in WS, which punishes greedy play very well

– Kind of middling at pretty much every point in the game otherwise

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The iDOLM@STER

GRb ‘Metam@s’ Goodstuffs

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The IDOLM@STER had some incredible success in the earlier days of WS, boasting some extremely simple yet powerful cards that dominated the metagame for most of 2011. It was the first deck to really showcase the power of an advance summon, and its solid midgame crushed a lot of the opposition, all the way until the series was unceremoniously restricted. Now that the metagame has moved on, IM@S was unrestricted and allowed to run free, because its previously oppressive midgame was now merely passable, and its advance summon was now, ironically, extremely mediocre. The deck was not dead, but it was fighting in 2016 with 2012’s weapons. That is, until it got a hugely powerful set of 16 comeback cards. The deck is back at the top, and it’s there to stay.o all that and more, with your brand new revamped iDOLM@STER deck.

+ Excellent utility cards at all levels, including the original Azusa card

+ Extremely consistent and powerful Level 1 field that wins every side attack war ever

+ One of the best burn-based endgames the game is ever likely to print

– Very, very bad against antiburn, such as Kemono Friends or Charlotte

– Needs to sculpt a hand, and as such can be vulnerable to rushes and bad draws

– Very all-in with its finishers – if you don’t win, you probably lose





The iDOLM@STER Cinderella Girls

Mono-Blue Triad Primus

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A once-solid deck that was slammed by the banhammer several times, Triad Primus started as a straight field-based value deck with a finisher that always went off. It was absurdly consistent and generally slammed a climax every single turn. Following a ban, it was kept alive by the cult of consistency, and played to the point where it was banned – again. At this point I’m keeping it on here as a historical curiosity, but even with the banlist, the deck can function as a reasonable imitation of what it once was.





+ Still really consistent at doing… not that much

– Triad Primus Rin is no longer the behemoth it once was

– Has to sacrifice either powerful Level 0 utility or some degree of top end

Tantei Opera Milky Holmes

Detectives

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Another traditionally powerful deck that has seen ups and downs, Milky Holmes has recently risen to become one of the most powerful snowball decks in the game. With an extremely potent mid-game combo, impressive deck control on both turns, and a plethora of good lategame options, it is a deck that requires skill and patience to play, regardless of how easy it seems when it is facerolling the opponent. And believe you me, that is not a rare situation for Milky to find itself in. As long as it draws its climax for the 1/0 bar Elly, your deck opens up and you will be able to choose exactly how you play out the game. Challenging and extremely rewarding deck that uses some otherwise unexplored mechanics. Not for those looking for an easy-to-play deck.

+ Extremely powerful and non-interactive Level 1 advantage game that also compresses

+ Access to customisable deck milling on both your turn and the opponent’s turn

+ Variety of potent standalone finishers that can be easily toolboxed

– Very dependent on the gold bar combo to get the game going at all

Puyo Puyo

YRB Maguro-focus

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Another deck well-covered by that obscenely Australian blog, Puyo Puyo may well be the most explosively powerful deck in the game, with snowball potential and burst power rivalled only by a couple of decks. It is the single strongest solitaire deck in the game (with the possible exception of Ilya Kaleidoscope) in that you can completely ignore the opponent, and even make it so they can’t interact with your lategame. If that wasn’t enough, the deck’s lategame is powerful enough to raise eyebrows. If we evaluate the effects in a vacuum, the deck’s main Level 3 actually one-ups Yami in most relevant circumstances, and is an absolute force to be reckoned with.

+ Plays extremely well when ahead, and often can’t be stopped once it lands some hits

+ Not really any way to interact favourably with their gameplay

– Very reliant on having its climaxes, and often falls apart if it whiffs them

– Mediocre crisis management – vulnerable to being rushed





Little Busters!

YGB LB

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Little Busters is a deck that has always flitted around the top tier, but never really got there because it is both exceedingly rare to find, and fairly expensive when you do find it. The addition of a solid plussing brainstorm has made several of its weaknesses float away, and as such it is now the premier aggressive non-interactive deck. Its Level 1 combo was quite honestly a mistake, and its Level 2 stockcharge combo isn’t much fairer. The combination of antiheal and incremental finishers crushes decks that rely on compression and healing down, and antidamage is a tasty cherry on top of the cake.

+ Obscenely powerful rush combo that can get free wins on the back of +2 soul

+ Antiheal and antidamage are extremely potent against most everything

– Has issues when the opponent cancels a heap

– Flounders even more than Puyo when you don’t draw those climaxes

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Rewrite

Guardian

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Possibly the strongest compression deck in the game right now, Guardian is a deck that not only compresses, but does other really obnoxious stuff as well. It excels at Level 0, excels at Level 2, and excels at Level 3. With the low-key strongest advance summon in the game (and Kotori too) and really, really scary Level 3s to follow her up with, very few decks can hope to compete against Guardian, assuming it draws its climaxes. It compresses, it heals, it murders pretty much every advance summon – it’s an all-round powerful deck with great tools and solid customisation options.

+ Extremely strong compression engine, but can play for field very effectively too

+ Arguably the best Level 0, Level 2 and Level 3 gameplans in all of WS

+ Surprisingly customisable for whichever metagame you play in

– Reliant on drawing its climax, or it’s kinda whatever





Puella Magi Madoka Magica

GrB Goodstuffs

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Ah, ol’ faithful. Madoka was one of the premier field-based compression decks of olde, boasting ‘costless’ 7500 fields and Sayaka’s Wish, a groan-inducing heal counter. The second booster, Rebellion, brought it some much-needed supplemental power, though the core of the deck remained largely intact. It still fields costless dudes, it still plays Wish to groans aplenty, and now it also has some finishing oomph. While it isn’t necessarily the most threatening of decks, it is certainly competitive.



+ Unexciting but still very efficient



– Unfortunately rather outdated, with nothing special at Level 1, 2 or 3, really

Fate/Stay Night

YRB Master

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Fate has a strange position in the metagame as a deck that combines the extremely modern and the extremely old. Some of its best cards come from an era of experimentation, and another lot of its best cards are shoe-in utilities from the modern era of fast and furious Weiss. The result is a surprisingly powerful mishmash of arguably overpowered cards that only kind-of work with one another. Still, the raw power of some of these cards carries the deck pretty well.

+ Has some great aggressive presence at all levels, to the point you could call it a rush deck

+ Particularly good at early aggression

+ Decent finishing game

– Often doesn’t work well with itself, lacking the fluidity of modern decks

– Somewhat inefficient selection on its cards

Rider.dec

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While there has been a slow trend towards wall-based midgames as of late, no deck can really match up to Rider.dec when it comes to midgame walls. With a support that both provides obscene amounts of power and prevents bombs from breaking through, it is likely to sit on the same few cards throughout most of its mid- to lategame turns. That being said, linearity is as much a weakness as a strength, and while it can totally dominate the board, it doesn’t really have much flexibility to go with it. As a result, it is an extremely powerful deck that can snowball quite rapidly, which is a trait not to be underestimated.

+ Extremely powerful walling game from Level 1 onwards

+ Not climax reliant, unlike most decks in the game

– Rather inflexible when it comes to… well, everything but walling

– Average finishing power

– Very, very reliant on its backrow supports – if it doesn’t find them, good luck

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Fate/Kaleid Prisma Ilya

Kaleidoscope

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Possibly the most single-minded deck in the game, Kaleidoscope is about doing a bunch of damage, getting to Level 3, then blasting your opponent with a veritable storm of 1-damage pings. The deck can occasionally deal 9 or 10 damage to an opponent without much issue, and sometimes even more, if luck falls your way. The rest of the deck is purely a vehicle to get you to this endgame. It’s picked up some upgrades with each new booster, but the core concept remains the same: build your machinegun, load your machinegun, fire your machinegun.



+ Extremely powerful top-end that wins equally viciously from ahead or behind

– Merely serviceable at all other points of the game

– Is truly a do-or-die deck



Girlfriend Beta

yrB forever alone



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At this point, GFB is more historical curiosity than meta contender, but it still has some chops. It made waves for being the first successful costless searching Level 1 combo on a stock soul, which really spoke to the value fiends who play the game. Coupled with a nigh-unkillable Level 3 and a reasonable finisher, the deck put up respectable finishes in Asian countries for quite some time. Ultimately, power creep caught up with it, and the weaknesses of the Level 1 and Level 3 games were revealed for all to see, and now the deck is somewhat underpowered compared to the juggernauts of today. Still, it’s a viable deck with pretty great art.s

+ Solid snowball potential on a series of efficient characters

– Largely outclassed by many modern decks

– Saya is no longer the unkillable behemoth she once was, rendering her rather mediocre

– Pumpkin was never actually a good finisher







Attack on Titan

YR Corps

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Attack on Titan always made more waves in the English metagame than the Japanese one, but with a new booster out, the deck has surged up to become an extremely potent force. Opponents that rely on reversing opponents will basically never get to do that, which stifles a lot of advantage engines, including some that define the metagame. With reasonable plays at every level of the game and a particularly explosive finisher, AoT’s new cards will make it a very solid contender for years to come.

+ Solid card advantage and field control at all points of the game

+ Powerful fieldswap game sets up its powerful finisher game very well

– Reliant on its climaxes to work its magic

– Has a less favourable gameplan against non-interactive decks and… itself

Charlotte

YRB Yusa/Misa focus

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Charlotte is a deck that always hovered on the cusp of playability. With an extremely powerful antiburn card and a defensive top-end, it could really frustrate players whose gameplan was to burn until nothing remained. However, it was and still is a pretty momentum-based deck. If the engine got going, it really got going, and it would often snowball to an unassailable compression lead. However, if that engine stalled or was otherwise sabotaged, it would struggle to do anything, really. A high potential deck with a particularly difficult struggle against decks that preventing it from farming.

+ Antiburn is extremely strong, period

+ Great defensive snowball potential

– Reliant on a LOT going right to really get its engine started

– No explosive lategame whatsoever

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Guilty Crown

YR Funeral Parlor with splash

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+ Excellent Level 0 utilities allowed it to set up Level 1 and 3 consistently and efficiently

– Doesn’t really… do anything special

– Has a very difficult time if it’s forced to attack into walls

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ugh vanillas





Schoolgirl Strikers

Mono-Yellow

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Mono-Red

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Log Horizon

RB Database

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It seems to be a trend, antiburn decks being just shy of playable. The original Log Horizon Extra Booster had some extremely significant midgame flaws, and while these issues have been smoothed out by the Power-Up Pack, the deck remains somewhat mediocre at every level except 3. Still, if it builds up enough momentum, it can completely shut down many decks with its one-sided antiburn. A somewhat plain deck with a somewhat interesting endgame.

+ Builds to an extremely solid lategame with one-sided antiburn and huge walls

– Somewhat mediocre at every other point in the game

– Lacks explosive finishing ability

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CLANNAD

Mono-Yellow

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As much as I like the source material, CLANNAD in WS has always been little but a particularly interesting trial deck. The Power-Up Pack has somehow managed to preserve this faithfully, resulting in CLANNAD being a supremely vanilla deck with supremely vanilla cards at every single level. There is merit to being supremely vanilla, as its Level 1 line is large by most standards, and its finishers certainly can do the job, but it does end up feeling a little lackluster, all things considered.

+ Consistently poops out fat Level 1 lines to set up for its easy advance summon

+ Reasonably strong utility, including a Cost 0 bomb

– Doesn’t really do much else of note at the top end, bar playing heals over and over

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Kantai Collection

YGR Hibiki-choice

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YGR New-Age British Botes

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Senki Zesshou Symphogear

RB Tsubasa-main

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Love Live

GB Goodstuffs

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Love Live Sunshine



Top-Heavy Goodstuffs

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Dog Days

YG Goodstuffs

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GochiUsa (Is the Order a Rabbit?)

R/B Rabbit House

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YG Sharo/Chiya

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Monoblue Prison (ChiMaMe)

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Da Capo/Dal Segno



Student Council (Seitokai)

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hazuki a best

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Accel World

YR Goodstuffs (Masochism)

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Kiznaiver

Pain

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Kill la Kill



YRB Goodstuffs

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Haruhi

GRB monstrosity

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Persona



P5 YB Goodstuffss

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Re:Zero

YB Goodstuffs

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Chain Chronicle



Mono-Yellow

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KonoSuba



Magic

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Star Wars



Empire Strikes Red

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Yellow Rebellion

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Vivid Strike!



GB

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Kemono Friends



YB Goodstuffs

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YG Owls

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Bang Dream!



Placeholder

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Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann



SPACE FACE

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Saekano



YGR

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