Article by: One Who Gets Crits, Commander Jaime

One Who Surpasses the Storm, Thavas is the first G Era break stride (stride bearer) for Aqua Force. In the anime, the character Jaime Alcarez is the one who plays Thavas in his Aqua Force deck. He is also what you could consider as my avatar ha!

This article is going to go over how it all started with the Thavas AqF deck. We’ll also be going into detail on units that were/are relevant to the deck as AqF cards were released. I will mention the deck’s competitive relevance during those times.

Also, I’ll mention any plays or strategies that were possible at the time of the cards being released. For example: Magnum Assault can be used for a powerful combo when re-stood with Lambros’ power up, but I won’t mention the combo in the G Trial Deck section because only Magnum existed at that time of its release. I will cover the combo when I touch on Lambros, however.

Our main G3 for the deck, the one and only: One Who Surpasses the Storm, Thavas! He was first introduced in this trial deck. His stride skill gave AqF a consistent way of retiring the opponent’s RGs when achieving the 4th battle. Before this trial deck, Blue Storm Dragon, Maelstrom and Blue Storm Karma Dragon, Maelstrom “Яeverse” were the main G3s used that had the ability to retire an opponent’s RG. However, they were dependent on their attack hitting a VG (or not hitting in the case of Maelstrom “Яeverse”). With Thavas we are guaranteed to retire when you hit the 4th battle. This is useful because we are usually focusing all of our attacks on the opponent’s VG to deal damage or make them use more cards from their hand. With Thavas’ on-stride skill we are also weakening our opponent’s field setup. Important to note is, that his skill is affected by the “do as much as you can” rule, meaning that we can force our opponent to retire a unit even if they have less than 3 targets.

Thavas’ GB2 skill is not bad but we don’t really use it. He desperately needs a booster and/or Battle Siren, Mallika‘s ability to make him hit a higher power number for him to be a threat at hitting. Therefore we generally always want to stride, because our stride skills are MUCH more deadlier.

During this time and even today, he was and still is our main G3, so he’s played at 4 copies per deck. Even other AqF decks may “tech” a copy of him into their build, since he’s the better option to ride in some matchups.

So, reaching 4 battles is important to make use of Thavas’ powerful on-stride ability, but how do we do that?

In this trial deck we also got a really useful and generic G2 called Magnum Assault. He’s our generic restander aside from Tidal Assault. The difference between the two is, that Magnum is GB1 restricted and costs 1CB, while having to be boosted. The basic play is to boost him with a 7k power booster, to make his first attack a 16k one. Then you pay the cost to restand it and it gains 2k power, making him an 11k attacker. From here you can attack the VG once more or attack a RG. We can also take advantage of our forerunner to boost him so that we don’t have to call another unit to RC from hand just to get his skill, which saves us a card in hand.

He’s normally used to help us reach the 4th battle of the turn, but he can also be used as a bigger restanding beatstick. What I mean by that is, that we want attack with him and use his skill after our VG attacked to stack all of the triggers from our drive check onto him. This means that we use all of the power and abilities such as additional criticals twice, due to him restanding.

I’ve done plays where I only have my VG and him as a column on my field. I attacked with my VG to the opponent’s VG first and put all triggers’ effects onto Mangum, to get double the benefit. A few times I drove checked 2 critical triggers and gave all effects to Magnum. Since the VG attack usually hits, it would put my opponent to 3-4 damage. But now Magnum was able to attack twice with +10k power from the triggers and his critical is at 3, which meant that if he hits, he can put the opponent to 6 damage, winning the match. My opponent either dropped a massive amount of cards from hand to stop two attacks or they lost.

Pretty insane to be honest. I think his flavor text is an understatement.

During this time he was played at 4 copies, alongside with 4 Tidal Assaults, which had a similar use. Having a unit that can restand and hit a VG is still very useful. Today he is normally played in Thavas decks from anywhere between 0 and 4 copies. It comes down to player preference, because we have more options available to us today.

So besides Tidal Assault and Magnum Assault, do we have more methods to help us achieve 4 battles? Yes we did.

We have Officer Cadet, Andrey and Officer Cadet, Alekbors. I’ll focus on Andrey first. Andrey can make any unit into a restander. Which is great! He essentially makes any G2 into a Magnum Assault. This way, you can do the basic 16k then 11k attack pattern or the beatstick one with any RG unit.

Keep in mind his skill is 1/Turn, meaning that once the unit chosen with Andrey’s ability attacks a VG it activates only that time. Some people were wondering whether it’s possible to use Andrey’s ability on Magnum Assault, to restand him twice in a turn! But there’s a timing issue, where both skills activate at the same time, meaning that they resolve at the same time, only one of them standing Magnum while the other one is wasted. It can’t be chosen to activate later, because of the 1/Turn clause on both skills. It would be crazy, especially if you did a beatstick pattern that turn, so any triggers given to Magnum would be benefited from 3 times.

Anyway, who’s Alekbors? Well the thing is, he was usually not used… Poor fellow. Since AqF has restanders, position swappers, etc. we don’t need stand triggers. Critical Triggers are more powerful, while draw triggers were needed as well, so there’s no room for stand triggers, unless the deck really needed that stand trigger’s ability. What he does is that he basically enables the 4th battle of the turn. Sometimes I felt like I needed his skill, so I’ve made a build where I had a “rainbow trigger” lineup (4 of each trigger). He was cool but I definitely appreciated having more Critical triggers, so I stopped using him. I wished he could have at least drawn me a card when he left the field but he didn’t, so it’s an inherent -1 card to get to the 4th battle. Still, the guy had something going for him.

During this time, Andrey was played as a forerunner, the other alternative being Bubble Edge Dracokid. I personally used Bubble Edge Dracokid to help drawing more cards that helped with hand advantage. And sadly Alekbors wasn’t used. Poor fellow. Today Andrey might see some play but not as much in the Thavas decks anymore and poor Alekbors is still left forgotten.

So, we know our stride skill and we have ways to get to the 4th battle, but what does the trial deck stride do for us?

Well, let’s talk about Marine General of the Heavenly Scales, Tidal Bore Dragon. It has an on-hit skill which can activate on the 3rd battle or more of that turn. On-hit skills are usually meh. But its skill is nice, since it lets you draw a card and potentially call something to attack with or be a useful booster. Now, let’s not forget, this is AqF, meaning we usually can perform 4 battles. So that must mean we use a card like Magnum to get there more efficiently. The pattern could be 16k, 11k, then attack with our VG and after that another RG attack. Your opponent still has to drop a few cards to not let the Magnum attacks hit or even take the 1st one and hope for a trigger, then follow a PG for the VG attack. There are times where Tidal Bore Dragon actually has a good chance of hitting, because of our barrage of attacks. Additional draws are always welcomed in AqF but of course, we have to achieve the 3rd battle at least. Keeping that in mind is important.

During this time Tidal Bore Dragon was used as our main stride so he was played at 4 copies. In the next set however, we got a much better stride.

Current state of Thavas decks:

So this was the trial deck that introduced to us the Thavas variant, so of course later on we’ve gotten more support to increase the power of this deck. At that point, however, it was just a trial deck. So generally the flow for this deck so far was to get to the 4th battle to activate Thavas’ on-stride skill, Tidal Bore’s attack to potentially hit, and of course do as many attacks as possible.

We still used older cards from previous sets to help with the deck’s consistency and power. Tidal Assault, Supersonic Sailor, Storm Rider, Diamantes, etc.

For myself, I picked those cards up and used them. I also used cards like Blue Storm Supreme Dragon, Glory Maelstrom; Blue Storm Karma Dragon, Maelstrom “Яeverse”; and Blue Wave Dragon, Tetra-drive Dragon. They were used primarily as backup G3s, in case I couldn’t ride Thavas. This was my first AqF deck so I was getting my feet wet for the first time into the clan. I played to learn the playstyle, pros and cons, etc. It wasn’t until G Booster Set 2: Soaring Ascent of Gale & Blossom, that I started playing this deck at local tournaments.

As far as the competitive scene is concerned, the deck wasn’t at full power yet, as we still had to wait a while to see it consistently reach top places in tournaments once G-BT02 hit.

Minor editing and proofreading by Ocean Dragon Lord