Standard Shadow Paladin: Swift Execution! Claret Sword Dragon!

[Blog: 15 minute read]

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Today we will be going over Claret Sword Dragon, the new Shadow Paladin play style to be introduced with VEB12 Team Dragons Vanity.

When Claret Sword Dragon was first revealed, the cost of requiring seven grade 1 units to use the Restand skill was deemed too costly and prohibitive, leading to many players deeming Claret Sword Dragon to be prohibitive in ability.

However, following the release of the deck, the abilities and speed of the Claret Sword Dragon deck have proven to be synergistic, as well as coming in a position set to counter some of the Accel decks of the meta game such as Vanquisher, Luqier, and Hyuga, slotting the deck alongside Dragonic Vanquisher as some of the higher rated decks of the metagame. Similarly to how Dragonic Vanquisher was underrated upon release, Claret Sword Dragon is similarly poised to take on the other prominent decks of the metagame, not due to individual card power, but thanks to the synergy and flow of the deck as a whole.

Playstyle

The Claret Sword Dragon deck revolves around early and powerful aggression, as well as using the Claret Sword Dragon Restand skill to threaten ending the game. Claret Sword’s ability to gain power from its first skill allows you to choose freely between Force 1 and Force 2, giving the deck a unique advantage over other restanding units by being able to go Force 2 and boast large power combined with an extra critical.

This extra critical allows you to swing against the opponents vanguard when they are at 3 damage, and the opponent needing to guard against it twice or risk being swiftly executed. Alternatively, if they have guarded very hard early and are at 2 damage, they will still have to guard against one of the two vanguard attacks with high power and drive checks, often before the opponent can access their decks full potential and build up enough shield to guard effectively.

With Claret Sword’s Restand ability, it is often said that even if the opponent survives the first strike, if you are able to pull off the skill twice, you can close out the game.

Claret Sword Dragon decks play unlike decks of previous eras, instead opting to play a very grade 1 heavy ratio, upwards of 20 to 21 grade 1 units, cutting the grade 2 and Grade 3 slots to make up for it. This is seemingly offset balance is accounted for by playing both Branwen as well as Blue Espada Dragon, both of which help search out your Grade 2 and Grade 3 units.

In exchange, not only does the deck have very high power grade 1 units to attack early in the game, but easily and readily fills up the board from turn one.

While filling your drop zone with your first seven grade 1s is surprisingly easy, the next seven required for a second restand if you were unable to finish off the opponent is where playing of the deck comes into the spotlight. How you are able to fill up the drop zone and step over existing units, or utilize your units abilities will be the determining factor on how fast you get your second seven grade 1s into the drop zone.

With good handling and good deck balance of the deck, getting fourteen grade 1 cards into the drop zone by your second grade 3 turn is very much possible, and is almost guaranteed to close out the game.

The Grade 2 slots of the deck are taken up by Morion Spear Dragon and Darkpride Dragon, both of which gain power, further assisting your beatdown strategy. As in the early game, neither player has much resources, often times Darkpride becoming 15k power, along with a boost, is enough to drive damage. Morion Spear Dragon filters your deck, draws you into more parts and gains power along the way, also forming very efficient power lines, allowing you to push the opponent to more damage. Additionally, Darkpride can frequently draw you extra cards, being one of the few cards to fill your field without using much hand.





Of note, Darkpride Dragon’s self mill skill is optional, while gaining power is costless when placed. Be ready to choose to mill your deck or not, as well as choosing to draw or not for the cost of counter blast.

These myriad skills played together allow for the deck to start their offense very fast, pushing the opponent to 3 damage within the first two turns, setting up Claret Sword Dragon to be within kill range, forcing the opponent to guard very hard and dropping their hand. Utilize a combination of filtering, easy deploying, high power in the early game to drive the opponent to high damage, and finish them off with Claret Sword Dragon.

Force 2







While as mentioned above, if the opponent is at 3 damage or less, often times it would be very important to go for the Force 2 on Vanguard when you ride, as Claret Sword’s ability to gain even more power allows you to close out games or bring the tempo towards your win very easily. However, if the opponent is at 4 damage, or even better if you are confident your rear guard attacks can drive the opponent to 4 damage, do consider playing Force 1, as at 4 damage is enough range to threaten to kill with Claret Sword.

While taking the risk of a critical to win is indeed the correct play when facing against Claret Sword, you will find most players not be willing to do so on the first G3 turn, as most players would rather guard hard and try to fight back on the following turn than leave the entire game up to critical trigger chance.

Deck Build

While you can find many winning builds for Claret Sword online, we will be using the example deck list from Ryan Kai of Wirab Cardfight Consulting, given its balance between offense and defense, as well grade balance, as well as several anti meta card choices.

As you can see, the grade balance is 5:8:20, with the Grade 2s being Morion Spear and Darkpride Dragon to push in the early game, as well as attempt to find Claret Sword.

The Grade 1 slots do play the Nemain Swordbreaker engine, mostly for superior calling additional grade 1s from the deck. However, often times you will be calling units onto those circles to load up on Grade 1s in the drop zone.

As you can see, this build plays one Knight of Insight Bathaden, a new card from VEB12 Team Dragon’s Vanity. Bathaden is a card that allows you to retire two of your rear guards to superior call one from the drop zone with less than or equal grade to the total of the units retired, followed by giving itself and the unit called +10k power. Most commonly it will be used to retire two grade 1s to superior call a Grade a grade 2, but this alone will allow you to create a 23k attacker and 25k-30k attacker on both your rear guard columns.

Another potential play to take with Bathaden is to superior call units such as Blue Espada Dragon in order to give your Claret Sword Dragon a huge boost in power, on turns that you were unable to use Claret Sword Dragon’s on ride ability to gain a power boost.

In the grade 1 slot for the deck we can see two common cards in VEB12 Team Dragon’s Vanity that often do not get consideration: Knight of Maneuvers Abagurd and Defeatbau. Both of which are primarily played not as cards to further the decks own strategy, but rather as parts that allow better matchups against prominent popular decks of the format.

Defeatbau is the Grade 1 without boost, but with Intercept instead. This is played as additional cards that allow you to deploy without using up hand. While Defeatbau is not directly replacing cards in your hand, being used as a 10k intercept the next turn is effectively using it up instead of a card in your hand. Defeatbau not only allows earlier aggression by coming into the front, this early aggression allows you to be aggressive against clans such as bermuda triangle, narukami, tachikaze, agravain, silverthorn, Revonn or any other deck that wants to be keeping specific pieces in hand, as they become partially forced into dropping key pieces early to defend and keep their damage at 2 if they plan to no guard even one Claret Sword attack. As your deck is at no loss for boosting units, having Defeatbau to be a front row attacker and another option for your field when you don’t have enough Morion Spear and Darkpride Dragon is often times valuable.

The second card that is played to counter meta decks is Knight of Maneuvers Abagurd. Abagurd has a skill that upon attack or boost, by retiring another rear guard, you can gain 5k power. This in itself is a seemingly terrible skill, one that seems like hard advantage loss every time you use it, but its primary purpose is not to gain power, it is instead to retire your own front row units during the battle phase.

This is done as a counter to one of the two most prominent decks of the format: Narukami Vanquisher. Vanquisher requires 3 cards to be bound that turn to gain the 10k boost to the whole front row, often enabling this via its own ability, Jaggy Shot Dragoon, and Voltaic Shred Dragon. Most commonly on the first Grade 3 turn, this is done by using Dragonic Vanquisher itself to bind a front row, then using Jaggy Shot to bind one card from their own hand to bind the other front row unit. This makes exactly three cards bind that turn, enabling the +10k power increase to the whole front row.



However, if you only had one unit in the front row to be bind, Vanquisher itself can only bind one card, and Jaggy shot can only bind one card from the hand if there is no front row unit to bind. This means that at maximum, they can bind one or two cards if they ride Vanquisher and only get one enabler (Jaggy Shot/Voltic Shred).



Thus, in order to gain the +10k boost, the required components to do the combo on first G3 turn go from:

Dragonic Vanquisher + Jaggy Shot +1cb = Power Boost

Dragonic Vanquisher + Voltaic Shred x2 +1cb = Power Boost

to:

Vanquisher + Chou-Ou + Voltaic Shred+ 2cb = Power boost

Vanquisher + Chou-Ou + Jaggy Shot + 1cb = Power boost

Vanquisher + Jaggyshot/Voltic Shred + Jaggyshot/Volticshred + 1cb = Power Boost

As you can see, by retiring one of your own frontrow, not only will the first attack almost always not have the +10k power boost, limiting the Vanquisher deck’s attack patterns and requiring them to have more individual parts on that turn. In addition any combination involving Chou-Ou may require the opponent to spend a single counter blast just for pulling a rear guard up to the front row to be bound, an extremely wasteful use of counter blast, only made worse by having to face a force clan that is happy to go Force 2, as your counter blast will be even more constrained. If the Vanquisher was going second, this would mean they had to have three individual parts all ready to go in their hand, and after having to survive a Claret Sword 2 Critical Restand attack!



Additionally, if you have two Abagurd on your field, you can retire both of your own front row (attack with RG, other column retire front row of first column, then boosting V retire the other front row leaving you with no front row RG), making the difficulty to achieve the +10k front row pump the Vanquisher relies on to win that much harder to achieve. The icing on the cake is that the Vanquisher deck is then unable to bind those Grade 1 units, also ensuring that they end up in the drop zone.

While its main use is an anti-meta choice, it can also serve purposes such as retiring another grade 1 unit during the battle phase to make exactly seven G1 units in drop zone, or using the extra 5k power to push for further damage.

Cards for Consideration

One of the cards that would be for consideration in this deck would be Dead Armor Dragon, a 5k unit that allows you to retire itself to give an attacking unit guard restrict requiring two cards to be called to guard the attack. Not only can it be easily accessed from Nemain, it can retire itself during the battle phase, becoming the final grade 1 for the Restand ability, the guard restrict forcing two cards to guard can be an effective countermeasure against null guards of Protect clans, as well as make up for the low power of Claret Sword Dragon itself if you were unable to gain power from its on ride skill.

Another card for consideration played in several decks is Arianrhod, whom can soul blast one and rest herself to give another unit +10k power. You can use her to give Claret Sword power before calling a unit over her to make her one of the required seven to restand.

Yet another card that is played is Cursed Lancer, often as the 9th or 10th Grade 2. Not only will it theoretically reduce your G-Assist chances, stepping over grade 1 units to send them to the drop zone while being a counter play to damage control by way of countercharging and opening the path for Claret Sword’s restand can be beneficial to the deck if you find yourself unable to break out of damage control.

Another potential card to play is Darkness Maiden Macha. Macha can draw you additional cards while gaining power, similar to Morion Spear, at the cost of Counterblast, as often times you would be stepping over units in order to load up the drop zone with Grade 1 cards.

Some players choose to play Conoll as well, to move grade 1s from your field to guardian circle to be used as guard, increasing the number of Grade 1s in your drop zone while functioning as a 20k shield. However, clashing cost with morion spear dragon does make the numbers you can play limited.

Yet another direction to take with the deck is increasing the number of critical in the deck from 8 to 12, instead replacing the perfect guard slot with Grade 1 perfect guards, allowing your null guards to also become fodder for your claret sword dragon.

These are some of the cards you may consider to play in your deck.

Position Against Other Decks

The Claret Sword Dragon deck holds its position fairly high in the current meta game due to its speed, consistency, and utilization of Force 2, thus making it a powerful opponent against the previously popular steady Accel decks such as HYUGA, Silverthorn, as well as the recent addition to that category: Vanquisher and Revonn. The more aggressive Accel decks such as Angerblader and Agravain need to consider their resources and balance their offense and defense, as a single Claret Sword Dragon restand may be enough to end them should they overextend.

Against Riviere, the current Top Idol of the format, Claret Sword is a card that allows you to kill with only one card. Vanquisher, Revonn, Agravain or Anger Blade, all of which are powerful Accel deck main Vanguards require more parts than just itself to be able to kill, especially on first G3 ride. Although less likely to, Claret Sword is able to deliver two attacks all on its own, potentially ending the game depending on how the opponent is able to guard the attack. Accel decks are unable top win without rear guards, and therefore cannot spend up the key pieces needed to move when defending against a Riviere onslaught.

Mordred Phantom is the same clan as Claret Sword, and players do feel more comfortable playing Mordred Phantom as not only do they have more experience with the deck, Mordred Phantom is not a weak deck in the format by any means. However, given Mordred Phantoms poor matchup against Vanquisher and Riviere, the two prominent decks of the format, Shadow Paladin players will move to Claret Sword, leading to the deck potentially seeing a rise in popularity to combat the popular decks of the format.

Utilizing Order Cards

Of note, Claret Sword Dragon does not specify requiring seven Grade 1 units to restand, it requires Seven Grade 1 Cards. While the effects of orders are currently not well known, having G1 Normal Orders and G1 Blitz Orders in your deck can not only play into accelerating and stabilizing your strategy, but can also be used as ammunition for Claret Sword’s skill.

Be sure to keep an eye out for the effects and grades of Orders in future sets, as they may be the key to the decks future development!

Conclusion:





While initially deemed too weak to consider, Claret Sword Dragon has proven to be an extremely powerful deck, overwhelming most players expectation and solidifying itself as one of the potential tournament decks for competitive players. While its popularity is still low, its position to counter the meta decks marks it as a deck to continue watching, or a deck to pick up before the price rises for players interested in the deck. The addition of Order cards to the game may suit the Claret Sword Dragon deck perfectly, as Grade 1 orders can be used to further your game plan while setting up the kill with Claret Sword.

While not as dominant as Riviere, the ability for the deck to push the opponent to kill range incredibly quickly and keep them there with the threat level of Claret Sword and its restand make prove too much for most of your opponents.

Thats all for today folks. I hope you have enjoyed reading about Claret Sword Dragon, potential cards to play in the deck, as well as its position in the current and future formats. Claret Sword is a solid deck that will surpass most players expectations. Be sure to pick up your set when it releases!

If you are looking for our ongoing series on some of the basic gameplay concepts to master to improve at Vanguard, click here