Welcome to The State of Premium, where we will be going over all the decks that have come into the game of Premium Standard, and how your clan has adapted, evolved, and improved!

Today, in part 2 of 5 of The State of Premium, we will be going over the updates to the clans featured in VBT01: Unite Team Q4: Royal Paladins, Kagero, Oracle Think Tank, and Nova Grapplers



For those who havent read part 1 where we go over Gear Chronicle, Luard, Ange, and Dark Irregulars, check out part 1/5 here

Royal Paladins.

Perhaps one of the most common decks in Premium at the moment, the current Blaster Royal Paladin deck evolved out of Blasters from G Era, taking advantage of the new Blaster Blade, new Alfred Early, and Force Markers.

The Game plan is very straightforwards and simple. Hit fast, hit hard, use Force Markers on Rear guard to power up a blaster blade, and restand it with Flogal, combined with higher powered triggers and many drive checks from the start of the game to the finish, this deck just tries to win off of big power.

Recently, the Tarna-Alfred build of the deck has been gaining traction amongst players, but it is not necessarily the best choice. While the dream of being able to get multiple Force Markers by re riding Alfred Early in the early game may be tempting, I do not believe this is efficient use of G2 Slots. The blaster engine already takes up 8 G2 slots, only giving you one or two more units to pick from for a maximum of 5-6 G2 slots, if you are willing to cut into G1 and G3 spots. Additionally, Tarna-Alfred requires you to ride Alfred name, be at G3, and have multiple Tarna in hand. This requiring certain cards in hand as well as having to skip your stride to pull off an additional 10k pump on an attack is often not worth the deck space. By not striding gancelot, you have to give up your threat of winning next turn as you have no resist on your Blaster Blades, it also denies you a CB you would otherwise get back from attacking with Gancelot. Tarna-Alfred may be a dream come true in the early game if you are going first, but often time if you are not, they often become dead slots in your deck once you hit the stride game.

Recently, I have been exploring playing Knight of Twin Sword, in order to superior call during the battle phase. Instead of relying on Tarna to get multiple gift markers and +10k to all columns, instead focus on using a single Force marker to its maximum ability multiple times in one turn. Try stacking all force markers into a single circle, and putting a Floral paladin Flogal or Blaster Friend Barcgal behind it, and call Knight of Twin sword with boost to the other column. Attack with any unit with Force on it, Twin Sword calls Llew, boost with Flogal/Barcgal+Force and use Llew's ability to call a Blaster Blade. Attack with Blaster Blade+Force and use Flogal to restand it once again. Even with this simple combo requiring only 2 specific parts, you can execute 4 attacks with the boost from Force, giving you +40k over 4 different attacks in a single turn, while not having to give up your stride

Royal paladin decks in premium are slated for TWO upcoming changes this year, however.



The first is Excalupate The Blaster. If it is a G3 with Force, it may very well replace King of Knights Alfred as the second G3 in the deck, for a simple reason of being a G3 Force with Blaster Name. It is quite common to see Blaster Blade Exceed being played soleley for the "Blaster" name, allowing Searching with Wingal Brave as well as CounterCharge via Blaster Friend Barcgal. A single counter blast in RP is incredibly valuable, as it is either one retire, one draw, one more card on your field, or an additional attack that benefits from Force. Even if Excalupate does not have any Premium relevant skills once the game hits the stride phase of the game, the searchability as well as CC Ability may very well make it the main G3 being played in Blaster Decks, allowing them to return to cutting G3 slots in favor of more flexibility and G2 slots.

The second upgrade to the deck is actually Blaster Dark. According to the rules of Clan Fight in Premium Standard, Royal paladin decks are allowed to run 4 copies of Blaster Dark.

Be reminded that according to the rules of Vanguard, your triggers will only activate if there is a unit with the same clan as the trigger unit on your field. While this ruling is 99% of the time Irrelevant, it is important to keep in mind when you have no other RG and have ride Blaster Dark, you will not be able to activate defensive triggers.



Blaster Dark is not only another G2 10kPower unit with Blaster in its name to call via Llew, but its retire ability allows you to snipe backrow units if the opponent is not careful. Additionally, if you dont expect it, the RP player might ride Blaster Dark at G2, retire your field, and hit you with Twin Drive while being boosted by Wingal Brave, threatening to search out their G3 with Force, something that is bound to hurt, especially if its just along the way to them setting up their field. 15k threatening a maximum of 35k power, on hit ability, and maximum of 3 damage is next to impossible to deal with, even if you have a null guard.

That being said, the blaster decks overreliance on counterblast and no real auto-win combo makes them have to overextend quite often, as well as puts them at a weakness to decks such as Machining-Zoa and Gyze builds, which are more than comfortable to hit RG all day.

One important trick you may want to consider is playing Flash Shield Iseult (Grade1), as by superior calling her via G-Guard Marron will allow you to beat decks such as Megacolony.

Kagero

The obvious build is Kagero Overlord. The deck plays a lot of G3 13k base defenses, and utilizes Dragonic Overlord as both a V and RG unit, using its soul blast 10k power to gain power. Force can be both placed on V as well as R, as the deck has a large number of restanding Vanguards, especially once you get to Striding.

Kagero is one example of a deck that readily plays its Draw Trigger Null guards, as they do not otherwise have a very powerful G1 null guard. The general trend in premium is decks that have powerful advantage gaining null guards will play them, otherwise they will play G1 null guards.

As you can see, by playing G0 Null guards, Kagero frees up space in order to play more G1, as well as readily plays its newer G1 with 10k shield. Kagero has traditionally not had good card draw and deploy, and thus relies on G1 to become guard fodder.

One interesting build of the deck is using Dragonic Waterfowl and Overlord, and OverDestiny as your G3. As OverPurge and OverAce do not actually require your G3 Hearts to be Dragonic Overlord, instead requiring only a G3 Dragonic Overlord card to be used as the cost for their effects. Couple this with Dragonic Waterfowl who requires a G3 to be soulblast for his effect, and you can easily set up a threatening offense by striding into Overpurge, putting in one damage, attacking and getting a critical with Triple Drive, and then threatening the opponent with Waterfowl, OverPurge, OverAce, and Zeigenburg all as finishers next turn, setting up a kill from as little as 1 damage.

The Kagero deck readily plays the new Flame of Hope Aermo, Berserk Dragon, Dragon Knight Nehalem, as well as the G2 10k shields, giving it a lot more defense while mounting a signficant offence via strides and powerful triggers.

However, it does remain as one of the lesser played and less popular decks of the format due to its inability to beat Ichikishima-Tom, both in speed and not being able to handle powerful combos.

Oracle Think Tank.

Oracle Think Tank is THE deck that people who do not play the format, think is the best. Its not. Its acutally suffering and struggling pretty badly in the format.

Ichikishima and Silent Tom combined create a two unblockable attacks, which are garunteed to finish off the opponent, as it is impossible to block said attacks. However, this win con does have several conditions attached to it to execute, conditions you must force the oracle player out of in order to win:

1) Oracle. Having 5 of more hand after drawing 2 off of Ichikishima may seem like too little a cost but this means that if the opponent has 3 or less hand at the start of their turn, they cannot afford to stride and get to 5 cards to activate her Oracle.

2) Having two Silent Tom. Plays in similarly to point 1, but to excute the combo the opponent must be at 5 damage with 1 silent tom, and 4 with 2 silent tom. By retiring silent toms early and forcing the opponent to play out their hand to keep up and thus put their silent toms in danger or cut back their offence, they will be further from their combo.

3) Being at GB3 (2, as they get one GB after using the draw 2). A lot of decks are both faster and harder hitting than Oracle Think Tank, and thus by either executing an OTK before the opponent can get to GB3, or by allowing the Oracle deck to stride first, you can stave off their combo for one more turn.

4) Opponent not having Protect Markers. This is the real downfall of decks that rely on guard restrict win conditions: they dont actually work against 1/3 of the meta.

A lot of Premium Oracle Think Tank decks look like this:

The main change to the standard build is they are playing Nanase to draw at g2, as well as playing the CC/SC Null Guard. The ability to dig up critical triggers with Imperial Daughter and Victorious Deer is very tempting, but keep in mind it requires multiple re-rides, which mean affording stride on top of that is more and more difficult.

One popular variant of the deck is Oracle Gyze, a deck that instead of focusing on winning via Ichikishima-Tom, by opening 5 triggers and surviving until you can Gyze. Imperial Daughter's synergy with stride allowing you to get a protect marker, draw, and set a trigger on top sets up your defense perfectly. Once you can ultimate stride Gyze, the 30k body is far too easy to defend with 15k triggers. Protect gift allows you to dodge many guard restrict or very high power based win-conditions, keeping you alive even better.

While Oracle Gyze may be a played choice now,but be wary as when more and more decks get higher powered triggers and attacking power, having that additional 5k on your triggers and 5k on your grade 1s to help defend may not be ideal anymore, but time will have to be the judge of that.

Nova Grappler

Nova Grappler at the moment is actually in a rather difficult spot, owing to the difficulty of the new mechanic to be integrated into a powerful deck.

Accel Gift works perfectly with Victor's style of multiple attacks, but the issue does not lie with the rear guard units level of power, it lies with the lack of card draw and cost management when not riding Zubat Battler Victor. Getting the accel gift requires you to ride Asura Kaiser, which forces you to always go into Favourite Champ Victor to access cards that restand RG, which will burn through your cost extremely quickly. If you stride the G4 Asura Kaiser, it requires you to get a g3 to get up to 7 attacks, but without the draw support of Zubat Battler, again the issue is either deck space to draw adequate attacker units, or being forced to overextend.





This inability to take advantage of their new cards together with the older cards makes Nova Grappler an unpopular build. Its harder and more challenging to build and pilot, leading to less players picking it as their deck of choice when going for an event.

One thing I would like to highlight is how amazing Accel Circles are in combination with Favourite Champ. Instead of restanding only 2 front row RG, you instead can restand 3-4 RG in front row, granting you 4+4+3 Attacks based off of RG alone, even if you only restand Favourite Champ ONCE.

That brings us to the conclusion of the State of Premium Part 2/5:

I hope this article has been of benefit to show you how myriad and vast premium is. Dont be afraid to jump in, because your clan is doing a lot better than you think!!





Join us again tomorrow when we go over a few decks that got changes in VEB01 and VEB02, and how they have come into the meta!

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