Now to cap off the FC2017 reveals lets look at what Gears got.

Gear chronicle the scourge of the meta-game, once again going into this set the new guards and stride hell even the heal trigger had a lot to live up to. Gear Chronicle already has an incredible suite of powerful finisher strides and defensive and utility G-guards so earning a spot in the G-zone is not an easy feat. So let’s see if any of the new units have earned a spot in the G-zone.

For this article I’m going to be looking purely at the effect these cards will have on time leap Chronojet builds. I understand that these cards have different implications in other gear chronicle builds but as time leap is the most relevant and also the one I have the most experience with I’m going to focus on that.

Heal and G-guard

Well once again Uluru makes a return this time as both a heal and a guard so how do these cards fit into the deck. Well first off the heal trigger actually has some competetion in the form of Chronotherapy Hamster not only is this little guy adorable he also has the benefit of being a Zodiac time beast, which is relevant for Jet G/Nexstage push turns and can be pitched to Altered Dragon in case you don’t have a way to stride normally. Now obviously as a heal trigger you mostly want to use it to G-guard but the racial implications of Hamster are worth mentioning, especially as despite being fringe situations they are somewhat important. So what does Uluru offer in exchange? When used to guard with New-luru she allows you to return a normal unit to the bottom of the deck. While not the most beneficial skill that gears could have gotten (countercharge would have been incredible) this defintely sweetens the deal. The old Uluru guard offered similar utility returning a trigger unit on top of the normal unit. On the whole the normal unit being returned is more often that not the more important part, but returning an Ur-watar that has found itself in the drop zone to the deck can be game changing so its still nothing to sneeze at. Old Uluru aside the new heal allows you to return important leap targets to the deck giving the new guard half the utility of the old one. To put it simple if you decide to run the new Uluru guard run this heal. And that of course leads us onto the guard iteself.

While this is certainly an impressive skill, with the potential to effectively be a perfect guard late game, space is tight. When guarding with New-luru by paying CB1 and flipping a guard it gains 5k shield for every face up G-unit. So undoubtedly this will be a large defense, but that wasn’t really a sore area for gears anyway. Because of the advantage gained thanks to Ur-watar gear chronicle will almost always have enough shield to block the larger attacks that most opponents can offer. This is even further magnified by the Cat–Round combo that allows you a 21k base on the opponents turn. Still using one card to guard a large attack vs using more is obviously better but now we come to the biggest hurdle for New-luru – that CB1 cost. Gears is a deck that can often go into turns with 1-2 CB relying on taking damage and Arlim to gain CB, this means that going 1 down can be the difference between attacking and drawing more cards.

So overall the new guard has potential offering similar utility to old Uluru and a near inpenetrable defense but is hamstrung by its semi-redundancy and cost. Regardless it can definitely slot into the G-zone if you find yourself in need of more raw guard power.

Generation Break 8

Beyond Order Dragon with a name like that this card better deliver and I’m really not sure if it does or does not.

This card is so hard to assess its ability is seems very obviously powerful but has so many conditions attached to it that I’m not quite sure how to aproach it. For 1SB, 1CB and 8 cards from the top of your deck, Beyond Order will restand and create and extra main and battle phase. Even looking at just the restand skill this card has some very obvious raw power having no disard cost and losing only 1 drive check and the implications of extra phases is certainly interesting. However just like Uluru we come back to the cost, CB1,SB1 is easily managed essentially you’re just substituting what you would pay for Nextage, but then we come to the bind 8 cards from the top of the deck. So theoretically this is a nebulous cost, you aren’t really losing any resources – these are not cards in your hand or cards from your field. Of course this is vanguard, deckout is a very real issue in a lot of games especially later on such as a GB8 turn. On top of this time leap is a deck already drawing a lot of cards and having important timeleap targets in the deck is essential to most attack patterns.

Gears obviously has ways to deal with this steep cost while retaining important targets but even then this card has such a huge dependance on the cards in your hand that it is a hard sell. So what value can we gain from going into Beyond Order over Nextage.

So lets imagine that going into my turn I have 2CB open (which is fairly common) and I have optimal set-up for each respective turn.

– Nexstage allows for 7 attacks

– Beyond Order allows for 10

So essentially whatever you call over the rested attackers from the first battle phase this is also best case scenario and isn’t likely to happen but it’s a good baseline for comparison.

Also worth noting is that the second attack from the Nexstage turn will be much higher power while the Beyond’s second swing could have criticals from drive checks.

This card is impressively complex to evaluate, it has so many moving parts and “ifs” that really it seems like it comes down to being about the games that go that long. I don’t think you should be passing up a Nexstage turn to use this card and from there you need enough cards in deck to use this card so it honestly feels like this card has such limited and situational use that is doesn’t earn its space.

However with that said those 2 extra attacks could very well decide some games. I will almost certainly release a follow up article when I can get my hands on this guy and get some proper testing done but for now I do not believe Beyond Order is an overly relevant stride to the deck.

Order up

At the very least this is an interesting set for gears and I look forward to getting my hands on these cards and trying them out for myself.

As for now more regular articles should start appearing on the site including a few I’m very excited to share with everyone, as for now-

Grazie per aver letto

