Three Flavours of Gancelot: The Different Builds of Different Regions

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Today, we will be going over Gancelot builds from around the world, how do they differ, and what each build excels at, and some of the weaknesses of each build. Hopefully, this will give you new insight to your own gancelot deck, as well as help you learn something new about Gancelots for when you face off against the deck in your next VGCS or BCS!

I've been joining people on their streams to play this build on Vanguard EX and discuss some of the individual play recently, so if you would like to face off against these builds, or just want to learn more, be sure to tune into streams!

Lets look at the core card for all of the builds: Solitary Knight Gancelot.

Gancelot is a card that turns your RG Blaster Blades into Vanguards, giving them a drive check and potentially opening its critical. This gives you extra cards into your hand every turn, extra power from drive checks, as well as extra pressure on the opponent, as long as you can maintain blaster blade on the front row.

Knight of the Harp Tristan is a card that allows you to search out blaster blade at all times, giving you easy access the three or four drive checks a turn, and is played in all builds of Gancelot as a 4-of.

The first build we will be going over is the build that is most popular in Japan.

The hallmark of this build is Conjurer of Mythril, a unit that allows you to call a grade 2 from deck when placed from the hand.

While alone it may not seem like much, Mythril allows you to start up three attacks a turn very easily, from early on in the game, to start driving damage onto the opponent.

Against a Force clan, if going second, the opponent will be at 10k power, a line that would normally not be able to be hit with your Conjurer of Mythril, but this is where the grade 2 Barron comes in.

Baron allows you to give 5k power to a different column upon attack. This creates for the cost of one card in your hand on the grade 2 turn: 10k, 10k, 14k power lines, allowing all three attacks to hit.

The second hallmark of the deck is only 4 Grade Three. In regions of the world that frown upon lower grade 3 counts, this is the main point that puts them off from playing this build, as you need to draw into Gancelot and the rate of G-Assisting may feel higher.

This deck compensates for this by having not only a high rate of early game draw cards in Allen and Marron, but also by playing only 4 Gancelot, so that you can assist into them. G-Assist gives up one card of card advantage for searching up your next grade, but this isnt as painful if your whole deck draws cards extremely easily as well as gets extra drive checks at no additional cost!

This build will also play Knight of Truth Gordon in large numbers.

Against Accel or Protect Clans, the Barron play as described above is not as relevant as the opponent will be at 9k power. This allows you to search out Gordon to attack. Gordon being able to do its work from any location on the field is highly beneficial. If you gave your Gancelot on V Force 1, setting it at 23k power, placing Gordon behind Vanguard still increases your power of your blaster blades on the side columns. Additionally, if you called it out early to attack, you can still move it to the backrow later in the game to boost your Blaster blades with 10k boost.

This concept of your Grade 2s being able to do their work from a backrow is common in this build, as Blaster Blade has a high enough power line to apply pressure and get the opponent to guard, so the circle behind it is mostly for utility, circles where units such as Gordon, Barron, and Loading Angel will do their work well.

This build allows players to attack early, as well as draw into their parts they wish to, and use Counterblast very effectively and deploy field very fast,

However, some of its weaknesses are its lack of cost management, as well as lack of finisher. By not playing Soul Saver Dragon, you have no way of winning the game except by out grinding the opponent, as well as setting up early and using the early game momentum to win.

This lack of cost management means that while you are effective at building early game momentum, sometimes it will be difficult to maintain it, as there will be several turns where you just go straight to battle phase to triple or quad drive, instead of effectively using your cost to gain advantage.

This also places the deck at a weakness against decks with mass removal, such as Blademaster, Narukami, and HYU-GA, while maintaining a good matchup against decks that do not have ways to remove your Blaster Blade effectively, such as Bermuda Triangle, Gancelot, Tsukuyomi, and Gold Paladin.

While it may seem like a weak matchup, it actually does well against Messiah, since your speed forces the opponent to go to their Messiah turns without full capacity, where each counterblast and soulblast is precious, and on a turn like that to have to spend a counterblast and a specific superior call to use Blast Monk to remove Blaster Blade.

Our second build we are going to go over today is the Filled Feather build.

The hallmark for this deck is actually the three to four copies of Filled Feather Dragon. Filled Feather Dragon allows you to counterblast one, soul blast 3 to draw cards equal to the number of empty rear guard circles you have, then superior call that many, a maximum of FOUR cards of card advantage!



In exchange, this is a rear guard skill, which forces the play to want to draw into Gancelot, or draw into two copies of Filled Feather, in order to ride one, call to draw 4, then re-ride into Gancelot the following turn.

By superior calling multiple units at once, you can places cards such as Maron, Tristan, and Pluck Enchanter all on standby, counter blast 1 to draw with Maron, counter charge with Pluck Enchanter, and then counterblast that same CB with Tristan to get multiple uses out of your counterblast extremely well!

While I play Gordon in this build, as it is a unit that can do its job from both the front and backrows, some players would choose to play the Bedivere Kay combo, to draw extra cards early as well as get more consistent power numbers.

To play this deck, I would recommend trying to not to call out rear guards in the early game, ride to gancelot and call Filled Feather Dragon to instantly get access to many cards drawn and searched. This does put you at a disadvantage if you are going second against a deck that will readily try to attack you with three units every turn, but those decks are going down in popularity in the format.

While filled feather is extremely potent, most players will only get one use of draw 4 out of it, if the opponent does not retire.

However, this is not the case in the current meta, as there are popular decks such as Blademaster, Narukami, and HYU-GA that will readily wipe your board, allowing you to potentially get TWO uses out of Filled Feather throughout the game! 8 extra cards in hand is going to be tough to break through!

Against Narukami, what I like to do is place force 1 onto Gancelot to make it 23k power, and then call Filled Feather to the center column behind V. This means that even if Gauntlet Buster uses its countercost and hand to bomb your columns, they will have to use a Bolt Capture Dragon to bring Filled Feather out to the front row in order to remove it, deliberately spending precious shield in order to remove a card that is in a location it isn’t doing anything in!

The soul cost is easily provided back by Pluck Enchanter, Loading Angel and re-riding to get the next 3 soul for its effect.

One of the favorite aspects of this deck is how it is built with such flexibility in power and pressure requirements that it can play both Force I and Force II well.

This deck works well against slower to start up decks such as Palemoon, Mordred, HYU-GA, Blademaster, Messiah and Dark Irregulars, as well as decks that are focusing hard on a card advantage fight such as Gancelot, Tsukuyomi, Phantom Control, and other midrange styles such as Spike Brothers and Dimension Police.

In exchange, this slow to start up and aim to pull off the powerful card advantage gaining turn with Filled Feather leads the deck to be weaker to Gancelot, Beast Deity, Aquaforce, and other decks that want to rush to maximum speed as fast they can!

Our third build we will be going over today is one of the builds popular in America, the build that plays Soul Saver Dragon as its second grade 3.





The hallmark of this deck build is not only the Soul Saver Dragon, but also the inclusion of both Akane + Pongal as well as Bedivere + Kay.

While Gancelots skill is great, its not extremely impactful on the turn it takes place, and Gancelot and Tristan are both cards that dont work at full capacity in the early game.

To compensate for this, this build includes Akane and Bedivere/Kay to improve the early game play, as well as plays Soul Saver Dragon as the decks finisher to accompany Akane.

While this build is not as consistent at getting 3 attacks out by turn 2, this build does boast a high win rate off the backs of the early game consistent and high power lines to drive damage. Instead of putting in 3 low powered attacks to tempt the opponent to damage trigger, you instead have high powered attacks that push damage because the opponent cannot afford to guard in the early game.

Another aspect of this deck that sets it apart from the others is the Finisher of Soul Saver Dragon. Soul Saver as your finisher means that in the games where the opponent is starting to grind advantage, or is starting to throw many cards to guard, you can burst out and end the game that turn with Soul Saver, instead of having to grind out further from a position of somewhat advantage, potentially losing out that advantageous position to lucky triggers.

Soul Saver Dragon does double duty in the deck, as it also allows you to use SSD early to push damage, knocking the opponent to 4-5 damage as early as the grade 3 ride turn, forcing them to guard your consistent power lines for every single attack after that.

While the other builds would have higher potential numbers thanks to the inclusion of Gordon, as well as getting Gordon on the field without spending too much hand cards, this build would prefer to have Pongals and Kay's in the back row consistently, sacrificing potential power to having that power earlier and cheaper.



This build does show the tendancy to go Force II more than Force I, due to both Akane + Pongal power lines, Soul Saver Dragons inclusion, and Bedivere + Kay's power line.

A good early and mid game, this deck can do well against HYU-GA, Gancelot, Dimension Police, Palemoon, Mordred Phantom, Messiah, but due to smaller power lines and less consistency to get 3 attacks out from early game, can suffer against protect clans such as Tsukuyomi, Dark Irregulars, and Granblue.

While it may seem like it would be succeptible to board wipes such as Narukami and Blademaster, Akane and Kay being played in full 4-ofs gives this deck a lot of capacity for rebuilding field after the first board wipe, but will have some difficulty if you continue to clear their field turn after turn. Be sure to use the drop in defence they had to pay to clear your field to your advantage by pushing in for the win!



Be sure to check out WCC's video on this playstyle here.

www.youtube.com

Today, we went over some builds of Gancelot from different areas of the world, and some of their strengths and weaknesses. Hopefully you will now be a better Gancelot player, or perhaps be able to understand their weaknesses for your deck to poke into them more!

What is your Gancelot build and how does it differ from these? Which one will you try out?