by /u/YoggOfTheGame, aka Shino









The Tournament Meta

The Deck

Click to enlarge.

The Future





In case you didn’t watch the second week of NGE, 6 players from Team Disastra ended up in top 8, which is probably the single biggest display of dominance in competitive Shadowverse for now. Their secret? Midrange Sword.Around 2 weeks into Starforged Legends, the metagame is pretty rigid, with PDK Dragon and Aggro Sword ruling the ladder, and being present in nearly every tournament lineup. During the first week of NGE, the ban strategies were divided, but in the upper brackets, and during week 2, PDK was pretty much the universal ban in every match, due to the deck getting more and more refined, and much harder to play against. The 3rd decks in lineups were varied, but they were generally some flavor of an aggressive deck, like Burn Rune, Aggro Forest, or even Atomy Shadow, which all aim to kill you as fast as possible.That is what we call a Level 0 metagame, the “standard” one most people end up playing in tournaments, or on ladder. But knowing that, and that control decks aren’t close to popular (some people did play Aegis Haven or Control Blood, but they were few far and between), Team Disastra looked ahead and developed a Midrange Sword list, to counter the most popular lineups, playing on a Level 1 metagame, a level further than the standard. As per Team Disastra themselves:As stated before, being ahead of everyone else’s game, they managed to take 7 of their players to top 8 of the tournament, with 6 of the players playing their Midrange Sword list. But even despite it being agreed on with them as a great deck, the lists still differed from each other noticeably. Let’s take a look.As we can see, among the 6 lists, we had 3 different ones. While the general core was very similar, with 32 cards being shared among the decks, the various tech options varied, but it was mostly in numbers of the core cards. The only cards that didn’t appear in every single deck wereandCuriously enough, it seems thatwas one of the bigger points of contention in Team Disastra, with only Eplicas deciding to run it (who, by the way, has the bigger number of unique cards in their deck, while also being the winner.)Whether Eplica’s decision to ultimately run it was correct, or he managed to win in spite of, not thanks to it, remains to be seen.So what’s the general plan of the deck? To survive against aggro and get to its powerful lategame cards ofand, which this deck will play for its Enhance effect much more often than Aggro Sword does it, and more often than not, will have an evolution orb saved up for it due to the high amount of Rush followers allowing you to keep control of the board without having to waste your precious evolutions.The biggest additions to the deck from the new set are definitelyand. Mars is pretty much a 3PPfor Sword, making your board much more resilient, making it harder to trade into or remove, while also allowing your followers to trade better. Suddenlyis a 1PP cheaperwith Mars on the field, andis a 2/2, easily taking care of Aggro Sword’s 1/2s, Forest’s Fairies, and other pesky little followers.What’s the other Commander you want to grab with. A card that before has seen play mostly only in the very niche Control Sword decks, now, thanks to Mars, puts up a very formidable wall that’s pretty much impossible for most decks to go through. After you evolve her while Mars is on the field, if your opponent has at least 3 followers on their field, you will summon essentially 3, who will also all protect Mars from being easily killed, allowing you to gain further value from her. Do note that sadly,does not guarantee both followers to be different, which gets more complicated with the fact that different lists run different splits of Mars/Paladin, 3/3, or 2/3, with the 2/3 split being the almost universal one, with again Eplicas breaking out by running 3 Mars and 2 Paladinsinstead.The final addition from Starforged Legends is, who is pretty much a strictly improved version of, an old mainstay of Swordcraft decks. Drawing either Marsor Albertearly on, with the possibility of also drawing aif Enhanced,Luxis all around a great addition for the deck, allowing it to keep its card flow going, while not being as fragile as, while also being able to later provide card advantage, not just flow, which might prove useful in some slightly grindier matches.Despite their deck being an amazing meta call, Team Disastra’s read on the metagame wasn’t perfect. They expected more OTK Forest to appear, going as far as to includingwith specifically that in mind, not just as a way to stabilize vs Aggro. While it’s a minor point, it’s worth noting that even the greatest might make mistakes, but they don’t necessarily have to be a downfall of your plan. As per their own words:So, where does the deck go from there? As we can see by the differences in their own lists, the deck isn’t refined hard enough yet. Team Disastra brought up that they consideredin the list, and that it might be a good choice for this deck if you want to take it on ladder because it provides you direct removal forand, which are currently very popular decks in ranked.So there’s certainly more room to experiment. As for the deck’s future in the metagame sense, let’s go back to Levels we brought up before. As we said, Disastra bringing Midrange Sword to stop the Aggro menace was the next Level above the standard metagame (which, interestingly enough, would not be possible without bans being available in NGE, since PDK Dragon is a horrendous matchup for the deck. Which also kinda explains why the deck diversity is much lower in JCG. Maybe it’s time for them to adapt a 3 deck/1 ban system as well?). So what’s the Level above that? Most likely Control decks, with Aegis Haven and Control Blood having, at least on paper, a decently easy time against this deck. Midrange Sword is much slower and can put down much less pressure than the Aggro decks, so it’s easier to keep in check. Will what happen? We’ll see the following weeks.While we’re at that, please do yourself a favor, and don’t try to ladder with this deck, at least not yet. With PDK Dragon being the most common deck on the ladder, with a little under 40% usage rate, a big part of your matchups will be really bad. Maybe in following weeks, if Cygames’s nerfhammer does put Dragon down a few notches, it might become the next big thing. But for now, if you’re results-oriented, try to avoid it probably. But if you just want to have fun since Midrange Sword is a thing again, go wild.Thank you for joining us today for a deeper look at Team Disastra’s and their deck’s dominant performance! Until next time!__________________________________________________________