Standard NeoNectar: Martina and Toure

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Today, we are going to be going over some of the upgrades to Neo Nectar from VEB10 The Mysterious Fortune, namely the musketeer deck.

Neo Nectar has always boasted itself on being easy to pilot, have great cost efficiency (both in game and out), and due to its ability to capitalize well on some of the most basic gameplay, albeit dropping in popularity, stayed somewhat in the scene for almost a year!

Many players around the world have purchased a NeoNectar standard deck, either for parts for the Premium Plants deck, or just to have a deck to play, and are looking to upgrade it this coming holiday season!

If youre not a Neo Nectar main, and dont want to be spending too much on purchasing a whole new deck just to play the Arboros deck with its upgraded plant tokens, perhaps the musketeer deck is the deck for you!







We have revealed to us a few new cards, of them the two RRRs for Neo Nectar from the set, Peony Musketeers Martina and Toure have been revealed as well. Lets go over how you can upgrade your standard Neo Nectar deck into adding these cards to your deck.

Fun Fact: in flower language, the Peony is the flower of wealth and prosperity, and honor to your family line through success.

The first card revealed is Peony Musketeer Martina.

Martina has two skills

Her first skill is her V ability, by soul blasting one and retiring one rear guard, look at the top 5 cards of your deck, and superior call one to R.

Not great, as it does not actually generate advantage, and its certainly not what you want to be stuck on without the ability to ride into Cecilia, but when paired with Neo Nectar's ability to create plant tokens, it fits in perfectly, as it turns your plant tokens into higher quality units.

Do be careful on overusing her ability though, as Musketeers have no way of soul charging, limiting your uses of Martina.

So, in this situation, you want to be using Martina's V skill as little as possible, only on the first ride in order to become the grade 3 in soul for Cecilia.

Martina's second skill is where she really shines. When called from the deck, she becomes an 18k 2 critical attacker for the turn!

A simple line of effect with many applicable impacts on gameplay.

For example, by placing Force 2 on Vanguard and calling a Martina, you can threaten 3 critical attacks over two columns from the first ride, meaning that if you open a critical trigger, your opponent has to fully guard two whole columns in order to not die if they are at 3 damage.





You can give Force 2 to Martina column itself, giving it 3 damage rear guard column, forcing guard early, as well as when the opponent is at 4 damage, transition to calling a Martina to the column without Force 2, giving you your 2 Critical pressure over all columns one turn earlier!

While these plays seem good with Force 2, they do work extremely well with Force 1 as well. In games you picked Force 1, not only can the deck compensate by balancing out all columns extremely well already due to the clan Strengths of Neo Nectar, reducing the weakness of Force 1 while capitalizing well on its strengths, but Martina gaining a critical on rear guard solves many of the decks existing issues when going Force 1.



In games with Force 1, while your deck will have power, good power scaling, very well constructed numbers combined with deadly cost effectiveness, the Neo Nectar player relies heavily on critical triggers to be able to apply pressure with attacks, forcing the opponent to guard early. In fact this lack of critical gain ability in the deck resulted in you previously only have one path to victory: the opponent no longer being able to guard your high powered attacks.

With an easy critical on rear guard, Martina solves this issue by gaining critical, and compensating for the lack of critical the deck had before.

By playing Martina, you are dropping either of the other two previously played grade 3s alongside Cecilia: Maiden of Trailing Rose, whom can create more plant tokens and power them up, or Exploding Tomato, whom can retire your own plant tokens in order to draw a card and gain 10k power.

With Maiden of Trailing Rose, She would be able to create 2 plant tokens, as well as power up the plant tokens on the board. While a staple in Premium, as well as played in certain builds of standard, she is 1) not a musketeer and 2) generates low quality card advantage. Playing her as a backup grade 3 alongside Cecilia is a valid option, and does not change the deck as it previously was. After all, Trailing Rose would still be the first ride before riding into Cecilia.

With Exploding Tomato, you can retire two plant tokens to draw a card and gain 10k power. Unlike Martina, when you ride Tomato, you can actually gain card advantage by drawing cards, as well as helping draw into Cecilia, what the deck still revolves around. However, if you were to play Exploding Tomato, you have to dedicate a certain amount of your deck to superior calling Plant tokens. Some of the cards commonly used to do this are Fruits Basket Elf and Sunlight Garden's Guide, both cards that are not musketeers and therefore would work against Toure.

While the decks shown below do use Martina, it’s important to not forget that she is one of the options, not the only option to your deck! Pick the one that you like best!

In conclusion for Martina, she is a backup grade 3 ride, but with a lot of flexibility when superior called from the deck, easily fitting into her required role for that turn, while also working well in almost all situations where you went either Force 1, or Force 2. In exchange her utility is decreased on the first G3 ride, but in a deck that just wants to ride Cecilia and win off of Cecilia.

Peony Musketeer Toure

Toure is our second RRR card to be featured, with a slightly different effect.

When placed, Toure can counterblast 1, retire 1 rear guard to look at the top 3 cards of your deck, and superior call up to 2 of them if they are musketeers, and 1 if they are not.

Toure, more so than cecilia and martina, determines more of how the deck must be built. In order to take full advantage of her ability, you want to be superior calling out musketeers two at a time. Great for converting your plant tokens into more powerful units, keeping in line with Cecilia's skill and the general theme of the deck.

To do this, almost every time you look at top 3, you want 2 of those to be musketeers.

However, for players with experience with Cecilia, you will know that no matter how you build your deck, sometimes some triggers will come up, or your non musketeer units will come up and you will not be able to convert them to powerful field.

In Neo Nectar, each counterblast can be worth either one card + some power via Irminsur, or +2 card and a lot of power via Cecilia. Given both have limited uses per turn, both are extremely powerful effects with a lot of advantage. Toure, at the cost of 1 rear guard and 1 counterblast, can get you either 1 rear guard (cb1 to gain no advantage), or 1 advantage (by calling 2).

This puts Toure in a rather bad light, as her cost effectiveness has not only a lot of extremely high quality cards to compete against, but also requires a bit of luck to actually gain card advantage.

On the other hand, because Neo Nectar generally does not use very much counterblast, you have plenty of counterblast to spare to use Toure's ability. You can use Toure as a means of thinning the deck even further and increasing your trigger chance!

Fun fact, when you call Toure, you can actually retire her to her own ability, which is great for chaining with Cecilia!

As you can see here, you can call Toure to the backrow, use excess counterblast and retire her to dig through your deck even further, thinning it faster with the excess counterblast! You may even be able to dig into those booster units you lack!





Do keep in mind that the frontrow+10k is part of Cecilia's skill, so any unit called off of Toure will not get the +10k power. It has to be in the front row at the end of Cecilia's superior call to give it +10k power, but that’s not stopping you from calling a Boosting unit off of Cecilia's skill, then swapping places later in your main phase.

In the early game, Toure can gain advantage if your deck is built entirely musketeer, and most importantly, call out Martina early to give that critical pressure. Without Toure in the early game to call out Martina, the value of the superior call does go down.

Also, while Toure can sometimes only call one unit, do keep in mind that this isnt necessarily a bad thing, as the Musketeer deck itself can play cards such as Sylvia and Mirkka to gain advantage right back by making another plant token to be a body on board!

When deciding whether or not to play Toure, you have to look at the concentration of Musketeer units in your deck. You want to maximize on Toure's utility, and thus you need to play almost entirely musketeer normal units in your deck.

One of the cards you will have to give up while playing Toure is Irminsur, the best groot of vanguard. Irminsur, while having a semi-difficult condition to fulfill, gets to early game high power lines to drive damage extremely well, all while drawing the all important card into your hand. While Irminsur does not increase the number of units on board, he does conserve hand while filling your board. While you may have to dedicate more cards to fulfilling Irminsur's conditions, calling an Irminsur from hand is a +/- 0 to your hand on the spot, while Toure is a +/- 0 to your hand delayed, because she saves you from calling later on in the turn or game.

However, the key point that differentiates the two is the word draw. Because Irminsur draws you a card, he can contribute much better to the deck's winning image of drawing into, and then riding Cecilia.

If you are not good at drawing Cecilia, be sure to consider playing Irminsur in a more plant focused build over Toure, but if you're confident in being able to ride Cecilia, Toure can speed up the game by calling Gastones, Sylvias, Mirkkas, and Martinas early game.

In Conclusion for Toure, while she may seem to be very poor in cost effectiveness, she provides faster deck thinning and card advantage on board, as well as potentially accelerating out Martina in the early turns. Unlike Martina, Toure does dictate your entire deck build to being all musketeers.

Deck Recipe:

Here are two example decks I have built featuring Martina and Toure.

The first build we see is the full musketeer build. This deck focuses equally on Martina and Toure, by capitalizing on Toure as your early game advantage engine by feeding her a constant stream of 2 musketeers in top 3 cards of deck, while using cards with Come Into Play abilities such as Mirkka, Rebecca, Gastone, Sylvia, Kaivant, Maritina, Toure (hey thats like, all the deck!) to gain lots of power and hit hard, hit fast, and hit face.



Here is my second build.

As you can see here, instead of using Toure as your early game advantage engine, I play Irminsur instead, as well as playing 2 Exploding Tomato alongside the 3 Martina in order to supplant the lack of drawing that Toure provides.

Another point that this deck differs from the first build is the inclusion of Maiden of Happy Fone, a grade 1 that when called to rear guard, can superior call one plant token. This increases the number of units that cna superior call plants in order to make the set up for Irminsur much easier. Note how I have chosen to drop Sunlight Garden's guide in order to capitalize more on the ease of calling plant tokens early with Kaivant, a unit that can capitalize on Tomato, Martina and Cecilia's skills.

Do keep in mind that these are preliminary decklists to form the deck's concept, and not necessarily how the final deck will be after the set drops and more playtesting is done against the new decks Great Nature, Gold Paladin, and beyond. Do follow me on Twitter, as I will be regularly updating the deck and sharing discoveries about it.

Conclusion

Thats all for today. I hope we have thought about Martina and Toure as cards to upgrade our existing Standard Neo Nectar decks. Will you stick by the Musketeers and Cecilia that brought you victory last year to bring you victory once again? Or will you join forces with the forest dragon Arboros and his band of lively friends? Be sure to pick up copies of the pair and give the deck a try when VEB10 The Mysterious Fortune releases this holiday season.

Join us back again soon on the CanYouSayBlog, where we learn how to be a better cardfighter.