This was originally going to be an article about the banlist in general but I was cutting out a lot of stuff for length so I decided to focus on Conroe specifically.

So in case you missed it Japan has a new banlist there are a several new restrictions but what interested me the most was the unrestricting of Lizard Soldier, Conroe.

Conroe was released way back in set 1 and was Kagero’s best choice of starter until he was eventually banned. The banning came as a result of Conroe making the Nouvelle Vague deck too consistent since it could fetch Nouvelleroman essentially negating what should have been the decks main issue. And so Kagero lost its best starter, even still he was often used in the maindeck as a means of searching for whatever unit was most needed.

Anyway enough history let’s talk about the now.

Conroe is back (at least in Japan) and there are some very important things to consider. So it’s completely viable to just stick with the current Overlord build and you’re just gonna get more consistency which is still awesome. But more importantly this changes the way that you can make the deck.

In my Overlord deck tech I mentioned that I feel very strongly that 4 General Conroe is madatory as you it’s such an important card but with Conroe coming back you can definitely shave of a copy.

Well that means straight off the bat we have another free grade 1 slot. That means we go from 2-3 slots to 3-4. This might not seem like much but actually it’s huge, 4 slots means you can run an entire playset of your chosen tech or you have 2 slots of 2.

But even 1 ofs are viable as Conroe can be used as soon as you have 1 damage this means you can build the deck far more aggressively. This opens up all kinds of possibilities, with cards I never would have considered before now are worth looking at most notably Cray elementals.

Cards like Twitterun can give you a push against grade 1 rush decks and who knows even Honoly could be worth looking at these cards offer more versatility to an already versatile deck.

And that’s just looking at grade 1s, there are a few interesting choices here but I want to bring special attention to Lizard Soldier, Veira. Searching this with Conroe means you could run it as a 1 of and search for it in matchups where the defensive boost would be handy without having to sabotage your trigger lineup to much for it.

So with all that said where do I think Kagero will land in the meta if we get this?

It’s hard to say giving Kagero access to a toolbox and the ability to run 1 ofs again is pretty massive for the deck itself but as much as it pains me to say this it’s hard to justify playing Kagero in a competetive event over Gear Chronicle…

Denial Griffin may actually retire the unit but Heteroround also has a lot going for him. What Heteroround lacks in hard advantage it makes up for in usefulness, not only can it stop a powered up attack it can do it before the attack even happens and for a much less restrictive cost. It’s also worth noting that he gets around Great nature units that can’t be retired giving it even more flexibility.

But that’s not all Gears also has control skills, multi-attack, draw power and a very potent restander. It sucks but sometimes one clan is just worse than another that does similar things.

Despite my negativity at the end there I’m hopeful we see the return of Conroe in the English format and eager to test out what I can do with it.

As always thanks for reading.