With WGP qualifiers going on all over the world there has been one common thing among them, Nisekoi. The problem child of Weiss Schwarz, Nisekoi, has been dominating everything lately and has been showing up in numbers at every tournament. And who could blame these people playing the deck, Nisekoi without a doubt has a lot of strong cards backed up with a strong end game and consistency like no other deck. When a deck like this comes along and changes the land scape of the game, we usually see it get hit when the next ban list comes out. The problem here is, the ban list was just recently released before the release of Nisekoi.

A lot of us are hoping for the set to get hit right before WGP otherwise we will likely see a crazy amount of Nisekoi in top cut. Currently the way that Nisekoi shifts the meta is horrible, you are either playing Nisekoi or playing a deck that has a good match up vs Nisekoi. This is very problematic as it’s still easy for Nisekoi to kill people who are sitting at level 2 due to it’s end game power even if you have a decent match up versus it. Lets take a look at what makes Nisekoi the monster that it is.

Marika, Maiden’s Heart. [A] RECOLLECTION When this attacks, if there are 2 or more “Pendant of Promise” in your Memory, you may deal 1 Damage to your Opponent. (Damage Cancel can occur)

[A] [(2) Discard 3 cards from your hand to the Waiting Room] This ability activates up to once per turn. When the Battle Opponent of this becomes Reversed, if you have 2 or more other ::Key:: Characters, you may pay cost. If so, Stand this.

This card is one of the most crazy aggressive game enders Bushiroad has ever printed to date. This card alone can put Nisekoi into Tier 1 and has been the bane for a lot of players not choosing to run Nisekoi in tournament. This level 3 Marika has the power to end games early for you and it’s common to see your opponent die from 2-3 to game. What makes this card so aggravating is that it has 2 aggressive game ending abilities on the same card that are easy to activate. First it has a burn effect on attack then it has a no risk double strike ability when it reverses it’s opponent. This card basically says “attack 4 times with this card”. What makes it even worse is that there is almost 0 set up needed to get this card going at level 3. The “hard part” is getting 2 pendents into memory to activate the burn ability, after that you’re set to kill your opponent. Hell, even not having the burn ability available to you the card is still an amazing double striker. When going into your attack phase if you have 0 stock, you are able to double strike 2 times with 2 different Marika level 3s. Older Double strike level 3s had a very steep cost to just use their ability once where as Marika here is the Queen of game enders.

Kosaki, Maiden’s Heart [C] RECOLLECTION If there are 2 or more “Pendant of Promise” in your Memory, this gets -1 Level while in your hand.

[C] If you have 2 or more other ::Key:: Characters, this gains +1000 Power.

[A] When this is placed from hand to Stage, search your Library for up to 1 ::Key:: Character, reveal it, put it in your hand, and shuffle your Library.

Consistency, Consistency, Consistency that’s the name of the game. When we look at decks or even build decks we are looking at how well the deck can consistently resolve its game plan and set up for its end game or whatever the decks game plan is. “Kosaki, Maiden’s Heart” at first glance looks like a normal level 3 that’s a little over stated and searches out a character for you on play. We see effects like this all the time in Trial Decks that sometime see play in competitive builds, but what makes this card silly is it’s first ability, the -1 level in hand. This is an early level 3 that you can play at 2 that gives you + 1 hand. If you’re able to play this at level 2 (and lets not kid ourselves here, this will happen more times than not) You can effectively have a full field by playing 1 card from hand and all of them are 2 soul beaters. What’s so great about it being played at level 2 instead of level 3 like normal searchers of this type is that it lets you set up your hand for the kill before you hit level 3. Kind of like how silly the 2/2 Chihaya from rewrite can be, but now you have a better end game and don’t have to worry about getting a Climax combo off to set up. this card also lets you preserve hand size so you can easily pull off your Marika level 3 game too.

Kosaki, Angel in White Clothing [A] When this is placed from hand to the Stage, if there are 5 or fewer cards in your Library, return all cards in your Waiting Room to your Library. If so, shuffle your Library, and draw up to 1 card.

[S] [Rest 2 of your ::Key:: Characters] Choose 1 of your Characters, and that Character gains +2000 Power for the turn.

Alright, the last card we are looking at is “Kosaki, Angel in White clothing”. This card alone isn’t causing as much of a problem as the other cards, but it does help enable your level 3 game by effectively being a heal and a pumper in the same card. Is your level 3 Marika going to have trouble reversing something? No problem, take this +2000 power bandage I have here to get you over that counter range. Are you about to refresh and don’t want to clock for cards? No problem, let me use this bandage to reshuffle your deck and while we are at it lets draw our refresh damage! no problems here! This card is just generally a strong card and I expect it to be on some kind of restriction list with the other 2 mentioned cards above.

Well now that we got that out of the way, I’ll be putting together another part to this where we will look at good match ups and what kind of weaknesses this deck might have and how we can abuse those to beat out our opponent. If you haven’t already checked out my Burn One Youtube Channel you should get on that. This is where I mostly put up deck techs or talk about some strategies and maybe if I can find the right group to start up our pod cast again I’ll get on it.