Last post I have planned for Set 9. I know there’s still Gears, Spikes, and Angels in the set but I don’t play those clans and so my analysis would boil down to what other people have figured out.

Luard is the hot new G-archetype for Shadow Paladin. Shadow Paladins are currently is a weird spot in the meta. They still have very powerful strides but the current top tier decks are just so fast now that leaning on Spectral Blaster for pressure isn’t enough to outpace them. This combined with G-guardians making Phantom Blaster less frightening means that we have a deck that by all means is still very powerful but not good enough to crack the top. With Luard now there’s been a shift in focus towards being able to draw more cards and spam the field. The deck in my opinion is still a diamond in the rough. It has a very strong basis for a deck but at the moment we have limited call targets, and not enough resource generation to take efficient advantage of Spectral and Phantom Blaster.

I’ll be combining my analysis to cover both TD units and Set 9 units that I am interested in so I’ll be limiting my fancy image format to both Luards and Morfessa.

First the big man himself Dragheart Luard. God that hotstamp looks sexy, I want all the shinies for this bastard.

Skill:

[AUTO](VC) Ritual 3 (Active if there are three or more grade 1 cards in your drop zone):[Choose two normal units from your drop zone, and put them on the bottom of your deck in any order] At the beginning of your ride phase, you may pay the cost. If you do, until end of turn, you may Stride without paying the cost the next time you would Stride.

[AUTO](VC):[Counter Blast (1) & Choose one of your rear-guards, and retire it] During your turn, when your G unit Stride, you may pay the cost. If you do, search your deck for up to two grade 1 or less cards, call them to separate (RC), shuffle your deck.

Dat ritual skill doe. Stride nerfing is arguably the most powerful secondary skill a G3 boss can have. It’s definitely a toss up between defensive GB2s or stride nerfing. Striding at this point in the game is just a natural part of the game. It’s much harder to get an edge over your opponent when you’re stuck on G3 vs being able to stride. So a skill that more or less guarantees to let you stride without cost means you have an edge up over the vast majority of other decks who always have the potential to brick. Obviously this skill isn’t perfect, you are still reliant on Ritual 3, which means you’re highly unlikely to set this off by first stride. However usually by 2nd stride this skill should be active.another benefit of this skill is it allows you to bring back your G1 combo pieces. It might seem a bit contradictory to recycle G1s when you want them in drop for ritual but by late game you should have a good enough base of G1s that losing 2 shouldn’t hurt too much. You can also use his skill first and then ride over him if you need soul or play a Diablo hybrid and want to make the cheese turn.

His stride skill is very medium, for now anyways. It has the potential to get much more powerful as future supports give us more viable call targets but at the moment it’s likely you will use the skill to bring out kill fodders or to fill up your field if you went a little retire crazy last turn. Overall a really good boss card. His ritual skill should keep him competitive since it covers a major weakness all decks will eventually get plagued by, getting stride locked, and his on stride has high ceiling for improvement.

Next we have Luard’s future potential Dragdriver, Luard

skill: [AUTO](VC) Ritual 3 (Active if there are three or more grade 1 cards in your drop zone):[Soul Blast (1) & Choose a face down card from your G zone, and turn it face up] When this unit is placed on (VC), you may pay the cost. If you do, search your deck for up to the same number of grade 1 cards as the number of face up cards named “Dragdriver, Luard” in your G zone, call them to separate (RC), shuffle your deck, and those units get [Power]+1000 for each grade 1 card in your drop zone until end of turn.

This art is significantly less sexy compared to his base form IMO. It’s the face, looks a little awkward to me. However the actual skill is quite nice. He’s more or less Shadow Paladin’s Spearcross Dragon. Like Spearcross he can spam the field on stride but the major leg up that Dragdriver has is he also gives +1000 power to the called units for every G1 in drop. This stacks up pretty high by the endgame, my current record is 12 G1s in drop (counting Morfessa). The main downside to this card is he calls G1s equal to face up copies of himself, so it takes a level of devotion to make him work at full efficiency. I have found that the best way to play him, for a pure ritual deck at least, is to tempo your strides between him and something that mass retires. This way you can alternate between VG and RG pressure while building up your drop for the bonk columns. This does create another downside which is that this card is slow. Like Thunderstrike you want to build up higher Ritual numbers so that your bonk turns are scary so it’s very likely you won’t be bonking until 4th stride. It also eats all your soul, so using other soul blasting units like Spectral Blaster, Aurageyser, and Swordbreaker a little awkward. Spectral is probably the easiest cause you can use him as the transition unit between Luards and flip up another copy if necessary. This card is a solid foundation for a more rush oriented style of play but needs supplemental strides for resource management.

Dragwizard Morfessa

Oh hai Marisa when did you become a dragon?

Skill: [AUTO](RC) Generation Break 1 Ritual 3 (Active if there are three or more grade 1 cards in your drop zone):When this unit attacks a vanguard, until end of that battle, this unit gets [Power]+5000, and “[AUTO](RC):[Counter Blast (1)] When this unit’s attack hits, you may pay the cost. If you do, search your deck for up to one grade 1 card, call it to (RC), and shuffle your deck.”.

[CONT](Drop Zone) Generation Break 1:This card gets grade-1.

This card is a weird paradox where she is simultaneously completely disposable and completely essential to the deck. As a rear guard she’s very medium. She can stack decently sized columns and has an all right on hit, but it’s nothing essential. You aren’t likely to drop a bunch of guards making sure she’s safe from harm. The main thing she is really capable of is being a good baseline for your ritual skill. Because you will be filtering your combo pieces in and out of the deck Morfessa’s grade minus in the drop means you can just leave her there forever. She isn’t deck searchable since her grade minus is drop only, so there’s no real reason to recycle her. This means you can filter back your searchable combo pieces while leaving her in the drop zone so you will always have ritual 3 active even if you recycle G1s like crazy. She also counts towards your Dragdriver counts so having a couple copies of her in drop can fluff up your columns by a couple extra thousand. Morfessa’s a solid addition to the Ritual lineup. Her ability to serve as a safety net for ritual means she’ll be staple in all Luard decks, and probably any other SP deck that wants to splash some ritual stuff in.

Abyssal Owl

No more fancy images sorry owl bro.

Skill: [AUTO]:When this unit is placed on (RC) from your hand, look at seven cards from the top of your deck, search for up to one card with “Luard” in its card name, reveal it, put it into your hand, and shuffle your deck. If you put a card into your hand, choose one or more cards with the sum of their grades being 3 or greater from your hand, and discard them.

[AUTO] Ritual 3 (Active if there are three or more grade 1 cards in your drop zone):When this unit is retired from (RC) for the cost or effect of your card with “Luard” in its card name, Counter Charge (1). (This card is included for the number of ritual)

This card is our Luard searcher. I’m a little mixed on his search skill. On the one hand of course searching our main G3 is great, but on the other hand the conditions for it means he has a level of uncertainty to him. I don’t know if the standard stride fodder search skill would be preferable over this, since that requires you already have a G3 in hand, but I usually only do it when I have one anyways because the discard cost gets pretty heavy. The positive to him are that discarding a lot early sets up ritual faster. As of right now that’s now worth too much since I prefer Aurageyser Damned first stride anyways, but in the future it might becomes relevant.

His secondary skill Counter Charges when he is retired by Luard. This skill is decent, it helps me even out the costs for Damned and Phantom Blaster. The important thing to note is that he counts towards his own ritual cost. This is very interesting because it sets up a precedent for future supports that may have on retire ritual skills. Heck we already have a promo that does it too Knight of Red Flash, Pheldia. An interesting card, I find his CC more useful than his search personally, but I’d say its still useful at at least 2 until more stuff comes out.

Dragwizard, Knies

Skill: [AUTO] Ritual 3 (Active if there are three or more grade 1 cards in your drop zone):When this unit is placed on (RC) from your deck, this unit gets [Power]+2000 until end of turn.

[AUTO](RC) Generation Break 1 (Active if you have one or more face up G units in total on your (VC) or G zone):[Counter Blast (1) & Choose one of your other rear-guards in the same column as this unit, and retire it] At the end of the battle that this unit boosted, you may pay the cost. If you do, draw a card.

Moving on from main set units back to TD units I wanna spotlight we have this angry little elf mage. I quite like this card overall. His ability to become a 9k boost can come in handy during your tempo turns and he can retire the card in front of him to draw. This helps clear out any temporary attackers you made during Dragdriver turns, and once he serves his purpose he can become food for Phantom Blaster. Because Dragdriver overall needs a couple turns to set up, Knies is also a good way to maintain a defense while building up to your FINALU TUUN 3rd or 4th stride is a pretty long time for this meta. Knies is a good way to put up some decent pressure with his +2k and the draw skill helps you maintain a defense while you wait for the finale.

That’s all for the units I wanted to spotlight. There was of course more stuff that we got but I’ll be covering those in brief because I don’t have as much to say about them.

Enticing Mage, Ildona Our new ritual searcher. I have been using him as a backup to Luard since his skill lets me potentially search out Luard, or copies of himself if I really need to stride that turn. His GB1 lets him cull 2 to draw 2 and gain 3k. It’s a modest skill, but not one that will likely see use since our main man is still Luard. A fine card, but unremarkable as most searchers are.

Knight of Serial Blade, Diarmud He is a free Ritual Deathspray. Unfortunately being a 10k base combined with a skill that’s subpar on VG means he is easily the worst ride target. Splashable at 2 since the retire skill can help you make oozy cheesy goodness with Phantom Blaster, but otherwise unremarkable. The deck has better options to retire if you aren’t going for cheese.

Assist Owlner, Maanisa. I really like her art. Other than that she’s not as useful as I originally imagined. Brilliant Ocean Elly gave me good experiences with shield gaining units so I wanted to give her a spin, especially since she’s a 10k attacker. But overall being an especial intercept doesn’t come up often enough. Your ideal field setups will likely rely more on units like Grosne, Macha or Morfessas as far as G2s are concerned so there isn’t a lot of space for her. I might splash a couple copies because of art, but I do so with the admission that my deck is likely weaker for it.

Dragsaver, Esras She is our new Ritual G-PG. She is also amazing. Her skill allows you to recycle a copy of herself and cull one RG to bounce her from drop to hand. So you can just have a PG for the cost of culling a Rg and recycling herself. She’s just good insurance to have if your still building to FINALU TUUN.

Knight of Ironcluster, Craiftine This guy is just weird. His skill only works from hand, which means negging a 10k shield, then he has to be retired which won’t always happen, then he lets you check top 2 add 1 to hand 1 to drop. It may seem like its to set up ritual, except he needs ritual to function. He’s a soul charging option I guess but the deck doesn’t currently need stand triggers and Arsur is still better since he’s a 2 for 1 retire. Really weird card, can’t imagine using him ever.

Commanding Knight, Neesa She is cute, would run if the deck didn’t have soul issues. Giving units +4k can be helpful because wipe turns can make columns awkward. But soul issues means she’s on the back burner till we get some soul chargers.

Plotmaker Dragon The final card in this post. He’s a ritual 25k shield. It’s vanilla but infinitely better than Ludvik. Literally every Shadows deck will run him because its better than the nothing that is Ludvik.

I’m definitely on the hype train for Luard. I’ve already spent a good chunk of time testing and revising my deck profile in preparation for the release. It’s a little disheartening to see that a lot of topping JP decklists use Diablo hybrids (Hybrids in general are a pet peeve of mine I’ll cover it in a later post) since I think pure ritual can be just as strong, but hopefully Set 10 will give us some badass new cards (that crit trigger is already giving me good vibes).

Thanks for reading as always. Hope you enjoyed.