So….Bushiroad’s World Champion ship finals aired a couple days ago, it was a complete shit show and completely embarrassing for everyone to watch. I could go on a long tirade about everything that’s happened but frankly I don’t know what to else to add. I’ll just quickly sum my feelings cause otherwise I would take up this entire post and frankly I don’t want to.

So very quickly: G1 rush is very stupid and exploitative. There’s a lot we could debate about (and maybe I’ll do an in depth post some other week) but in the end no matter what the reason is (rebelliousness or competitiveness) it’s a problem and Bushi needs to deal with it if they want to keep pushing Stride as the way of the future. Their overall incompetence with running tournaments is unforgivable and we should demand better of them. At this point I could probably grab a bunch of random bozos from my college and run a better tournament then Bushi could ever dream of. Their judges need to fucking read the comprehensive rules. Fuck, everyone needs to read the comprehensive rules. I had to make 3 different posts explaining the rules because people keep finding new ways to not know how to play this game.

Anyways onto OTT. So we got a bunch of shiny new toys in the Trinity Dragon Character Booster. I already talked about some of them so I’m just gonna sum up the big cards and then move onto what I think of this support as a whole.

State Affair Subjugation Deity, Kamususanoo

I’m using the SGR art because…look at it it’s sexy as fuck.

Skills:

[CONT](VC) Generation Break 2 Oracle (This ability is active when you have five or more cards in your hand):This unit gets [Power]+5000/[Critical]+1.

[AUTO] Generation Break 2:[Counter Blast (2)] When this unit is placed on (VC), if the number of cards in your hand is four or less, you may pay the cost. If you do, draw a number of cards until there are five cards in your hand.

So this card is CB2 to make your keyword work. And also gain 5k and a crit I guess. This wasn’t exactly what we were all hoping for but it’s definitely something we needed. Let’s face it Oracle sucks. Mechanically it’s the worst keyword in the game. I’ll get into this more later when I sum this all up overall but in brief Oracle asks us to always be ahead in hand advantage and that’s just unrealistic. We needed some way to just be in Oracle and get our shit to work. Now this has some flaws. The timing of it means we can’t strategically set up a field beforehand and then use his skill. Being able to set up a field before drawing a million cards sounds broken until you realize that is pretty much what Great Nature does. OTT is really lacking in power so any strategic advantage would have helped. The 5k and a crit is incredibly underwhelming to me. In a meta where strides will always be either PG’d or guarded for high numbers it needed more. 31k is laughable with G-guards now, and putting power into the center means there’s not much in our incredibly weak side lanes. Yeah, sometimes luck will favor us and our opponent can’t guard easily, but I think taking pressure away from our already weak rear guards is undesirable. I would have taken 5k to the front row over 5k/1 crit. Or hell at least give us 10k so we can have a substantial beater unit that takes at least some effort to guard for actual numbers. Hell really with most clans having 25k shields and G-guards only getting bigger we might need 20k/1 crit like that new metalborg stride.

This isn’t a terrible card by any means. It adds some marginal amount of Vanguard pressure in a deck that is sorely lacking it, but I don’t know if that’s enough considering how lacking this deck is overall. A decent effort but I don’t get why they’re so afraid of pushing the deck further.

(from here on out I’m just putting a link to the card in the name instead of fancy image treatment for the sake of space)

Deity Dynasty Defense Official, Amatsu-hikone: This card is complete garbage. I have so many questions. Why does it cost a CB? Why does it bind a card for its recycle cost? Why does it bind AFTER bouncing itself? Was just binding another copy in drop too hard? Or how about CB1 discard 1 even if CBs are a little hard to spare. What are they afraid of by making an easy recycling PG. Esras and Arka already exist and they’re easy as fuck to abuse. OTT doesn’t even have a recycle engine to abuse a recycling PG. While the support overall was underwhelming I don’t find them to be especially garbage except this fucker. This is awful and baffling in every conceivable way. The fact that you can accidentally bind THIS CARD YOU JUST RECYCLED makes the already ludicrous cost even worse. The mind game aspect of your opponent not being able to see what you bound barely makes a difference. It’s not like your opponent will suddenly not attack with their Vanguard because they think you have a PG. Even if they switch gears thinking you have a PG, as soon as they attack with their Vanguard it becomes irrelevant anyways. If you needed the PG to guard and it had gotten bound then you’re fucked anyways. If they pull out a guard restrict then you end up having to G-guard it either way, and if they pull out a restander in response that’s arguably even worse that whatever plan A was because now you have 2 attacks you can’t block. This is hot garbage and the only reason to run it is because it’ll be a 50 cent RR, and it has the Oracle keyword for searching purposes.

Deity Spirit Loyalist, Ame-no-oshiho: Switching gears from that godawful PG we have some actual god tier support, by OTT standards anyways. We have a completely straightforward card that lets you search for an oracle unit to draw out, and gains power in a deck that desperately needs anything it can get. This is seriously amazing and frankly should set the standard for what Oracle support looks like in the future. It can search out a good variety of cards like PGs, other copies of himself, G3s for stride fodders, or other combo pieces. The 3k being tied to the draw isn’t ideal but I’ll take what I can get. My friend calculated that we need around 16 Oracle cards to give him 90% accuracy on his search. This is fine, Oracle support is starting to get a little stronger now and it gives Oshiho a high ceiling since it allows him to mesh with any future Oracle units.

Now I do want to address something about some people’s reactions to this card, which is that many were disappointed that Oshiho shuffles the deck instead of stacking. Hell some people declared this card straight up garbage because it did so. Frankly, and this is gonna be an unpopular opinion, I think the Tsukuyomi stack is outdated and clinging to it in it’s current form isn’t gonna help the clan any. Let’s face it strides have sped up the game so much now that many games will end within 2nd stride. With the addition of g-guardians the bottom stack just can’t easily compete anymore. I’d rather shuffle my stack away using Oshiho to try and recirculate triggers right now, than try and wait for a double crit that will come 2 turns later. I know Tsukuyomi is still a very popular deck, but we need faster ways of manipulating out deck now. Things like being able to move stuff from the bottom to the top, or just directly manipulating the top Vanargandr style. In the end I want OTT to prosper and I think the stack isn’t the way to go about it without serious retooling.

Of course you can all just git gud and play a real deck like Magus :3.

Sun of Eternity, Amaterasu: Hey look Ama is a g-guard now cool. She’s also pretty damn useful all things considered. Moderately easy 25k shield, lets you soul charge which we need more of now, and you can top dek desirable cards. I don’t think she’s an auto 4 of since she does fall short in desperate situations and the mandatory soul charge hurts sometimes. But overall a strong addition to the G-zone lineup.

Excite Battle Sister, Miroir: And now our last spotlight card before I just move into the overall thoughts. Battle Sisters was the other archetype to get support in this set alongside Susanoo. Miroir, I think is a really powerful card and frankly should be generic for how good she is. She generates a good amount of on hit pressure, since she gives you easy draw options. Combined with the stride skill of Madeleine you can leverage early draw power, and retain resources on non-hits later on. The Oracle skill actually lets Battle Sisters leverage hand advantage into actual power, something I think the clan needs overall needs if we’re sticking to drawing as our only gimmick. Really awesome stride, wish everyone else could use it but hey any OTT archetype prospering is good enough for me.

Anyways that is all I have for the cards I personally wanted to spotlight. There are more things of course but I think overall this support was pretty deece. Comparing to other clans of course we’re lacking but comparing ourselves to other clans isn’t gonna fix any problems. While we definitely still need work to truly prosper, my main takeaway when we look at this new wave of supports is that Bushiroad knows the clan has problems and are working to fix it. A lot of this new stuff is meant to make Oracle easier for us. We have a lot of cards that help us maintain our resources so that we can keep up with the drain of drawing cards. There is a flaw here of course, if all the Oracle effects is just zeroing out draw costs then all we have is a self feedback loop. While their intentions are in the right place Bushiroad needs to stop being so afraid of giving OTT power and give us substantial Oracle effects that actually do things to win. I think Miroir is a good step in that direction but the clan overall needs more of her kind. Like I said when I talked about the new Susanoo, Brave is the best example of them taking a bad keyword and making it good. Brave has a few advantages over Oracle of course, it’s easier to catch up than to stay ahead, but the general idea is there. Battle Sisters look to be taking on a more Paladin-esque playstyle if Berry Mousse is an indication of the future. I think the rest of OTT can benefit from more power gains, and efficient deck manipulation to try and get up to par. Magus is a decent example of this where declaring the top card can give many Rears power. If Bushiroad can advance that idea of stacking the top for favorable cards, while leveraging hand advantage into Rear Guard power OTT will be in a good place going foward. This current support is a step in the right direction (that fucking awful PG aside) but Bushiroad needs to stop being so afraid and push the clan in a more offensive direction.