Get it because it’s pronounced like Trouble it’s like the joke of the series. I’m funny sometimes, I swear 😦

So the metaphorical elephant in the room this years Regional and National season is To Love Ru, similar to how last years was Nisekoi. The deck is a relative monster, having a costless, high power level 1 combo that searches on reverse and other strong costless level 1 options, hand-encore assists, a monster of a level 3 game-ender (Think 5 instances of spark, for no additional cost), and its own anti-damage and anti-salvage options. Yikes!

That said, Goliath is not without its own weak spots, which will be touched in this article. I am picking the second place deck at Sugarland, Texas and not the first because this deck plays the more standard options at all levels, while the first place deck plays some cards that don’t see normal play (And is missing a few cards people consider core). That said, I will be addressing additional options in this article, so you’ll get more than just this one decklist.

In addition, I will be discussing counters and tech choices in greater detail in this article because this is the definitive ‘meta’ set of this era (Like how last year was Nisekoi), so more detail is warranted. Thus, the ‘How to play against’ section will be larger than the ‘How to play this deck’ section. As usual, all links lead to HeartOfTheCards.com and all translations are pulled from there.

Level 0:

Characters

1x “Taiyaki of Memories” Yami

2x “Sitting” Mea

3x “Sitting” Yami

3x “Sitting” Mikan

4x “Cute Pajama” Mikan

2x Puchi Mikan

Level 1s:

2x “Ribbon-Wrapped” Mea

4x “Sleepy Time” Mikan

4x “Organizing Clothes” Mikan

3x “Memory Connecting the Future” Yami

2x Calming Warmth

Level 2s:

1x “Preparing Breakfast” Mikan

1x “Good at Cooking” Mikan

Level 3s:

4x Golden Darkness

3x Mikan Yuuki

3x Darkness Plan

Climaxes

4x Kind Time (Bounce Trigger)

4x Taiyaki-Shaped Keyholder (Gold Bar trigger)

Okay so that’s a lot of girls, if you noticed. Lets go through them level by level.

At Level 0, we have a mixed toolbox of cards that get cards, cards that beat cards, and brainstorm and utility. You will practically NEVER see To Love Ru win a fight on their turn, because the biggest they get on their opponents turn is 2500 power.“Sitting” Yami gets +1k whenever a Transformation or Housework character is played, and it resonates (Which means reveal it from hand but you don’t have to discard or anything, it’s an awesome ability) with Golden Darkness when it reverses a character to let you rest a character and move it to the back row, which you use to rest a character that already attacked and got reversed and save it. Using one of your natural back-row choices, like “Sitting” Mikan (Which is an assist +500 that lets you mill 3 cards from the top of your library to waiting room on play, and it also has -3 Soul Anti-salvage, which I’ll get to later) or “Cute Pajama” Mikan (which lets you discard a card to take a Transformation or Housework character from clock, put it to hand, and then put the top card of your deck to clock, and also lets you brainstorm to search for Transformation or Housework characters) and attack with them, then reverse something, resonate, and retreat them to the back row for safety. The downside is that To Love Ru really wants to get to Level 1 first, and it wants to leave its opponent plenty of characters on the field, so this reversal isn’t always good.

The other Level 0s played in this deck are Puchi Mikan, which gives a character +1.5k on play, and “Taiyaki of Memories” Yami, which let you pay 1 and discard a card on play to search for a Transformation or Housework character,and also gets +1.5k the turn it comes into play. So To Love Ru level 0 all has ways to reverse things on their turn, but are frequently best leaving a Level 0 or two hanging to consume at Level 1.

Onto “Sitting” Mikan‘s anti-salvage: The ability reads “When either player takes a character from their own waiting room and adds it to hand during their Attack Step, all their characters get -3 soul until end of turn”. This means Gate triggers, on-attack salvage effects, anything that happens during your Attack Step. If your ability is to salvage on Opponents Reverse, however, and that character attacks last, you reverse them after all your instances of damage are done, so there -3 soul does nothing. Likewise, if you can salvage during your main play, or even on Climax play, you can dodge anti-salvage that way too. To quote Scar from Lion King, “Be Prepared!”

Onto Level 1!

There are two really important cards at level 1, and they both Climax Combo with the same card (Takiyaki Keychain, the Gold-Bar which also has another version printed as a Yellow New-Stock Soul, but everyone plays Gold Bar for consistency). “Organizing Clothes” Mikan is a 1/0 4.5k that gets +1k if all your characters are Transformation and Housework (Which they all are), and when she reverse something with the Gold-Bar Climax in play, you may search for a Transformation or Housework character. This means she’s attacking at 6.5k to 7k automatically, which nets you a lot of easy reverses. This gets better (Or worse, depending on which side of the table you’re sitting) when combined with “Memory Connecting the Future” Yami, who is a 1/1 character that gives +500 and Hand Encore to characters in front, and gives +2k to one of your Transformation or Housework characters when the same Gold-Bar climax is played. This is why we want to leave one of the opponents Level 0 characters hanging: Two of the Mikan climax combo + one of the Yami in the back is a 7k and a 9k attacking, meaning we can reverse a decently large Level 1 without too much issue, and we also can eat their Level 0s or small Level 1s to search. To make it worse, you can then ditch your Level 0s to hand encore them back on the opponents turn when they’re beaten (If they’re beaten), and then keep playing more of the same Climax every turn, since it’s Gold-bar you’ll have plenty of them.

The other, less important Level 1s in this deck are “Ribbon-Wrapped” Mea, which is a 1/0 2k backup when used on Transformation/Housework characters, and “Sleepy Time” Mikan, which is a 1/0 4.5k that gains +500 for each other Transformation/Housework character, so she’s a 6.5k if you have a full field. There’s also the Calming Warmth event, which lets you search for a Green character and a Yellow character, add both to hand, and then discard a card. Since you get lots of search anyway it’s not always necessary,but it sets up your hand nicely and it lets you discard climaxes.

Many To Love Ru decks play no level 2 cards, but this one does. “Good at Cooking” Mikan is an anti-early-play choice, being a 2/1 7k that gains +1k whenever another Transformation/Housework character attacks (making it 9k), and it gains +3k crossturn when it attacks if the battle opponent is level 3 or higher (making it 12k on attack, and 10k on defense after), which is pretty great for a 2/1 character against a 3/2, probably with a Climax in play anyway .“Preparing Breakfast” Mikan is a Level assist to characters in front, and also is a Climax-phase change with a cost of discarding 2 Transformation/Housework cards to change into the 3/2 Mikan Yuuki card.

Lastly, the scary part: Level 3. Mikan Yuuki is about as generic a healer as you get, being a 3/2 9.5k that heals when it comes into play, and it also gains +500 power for each other Transformation/Housework character, making it an 11.5k most of the time. Having a token healer is great, and a lot of people swear by having a field of 2 Golden Darkness and 1 other thing, but I’ll address why this isn’t anywhere near as strong as triple Golden Darkness in a moment. Speaking of, Golden Darkness is a 3/2 8.5k with 3 abilities. Firstly, if all your characters are Transformation or Housework, she gains +1.5k and can’t be chosen as the target of opponents effects. Secondly, she lets you draw up to 2 cards and discard 1 on play. Lastly, when she attacks with the Bounce CX in play, she gives herself and one other character ‘Spark’ (When damage dealt by this is cancelled, deal 1 damage). Lastly, and equally importantly, is Darkness Plan, which is a 3/3 counter event that gives one of your character +1.5k power, and gives one of your opponents battling characters the ability ‘This cannot deal damage to players this turn’.

Lets touch on why this Level 3 is monsterous now, because a description of the cards doesn’t do it justice. Firstly, you draw 6 cards by playing 3 Golden Darknesses, which means you have infinite opportunities to draw into her Climax and the Darkness Plan event. Secondly, because she can’t be chosen as the target of effect, you can’t use events that do something to opponents characters (Like To Love Rus own Darkness Plan, or any event that stops characters from dealing damage, or rests opponents characters). They also can’t be bounced, which is decently amazing itself. Lastly, (And why having 3x Golden Darkness and not 2x Golden Delicious and 1x something else), if you can get your opponent to at least 3/1, then Golden Darkness is about a guaranteed finish. When you attack 3 times, you give your Spark to the last Golden Darkness each time, so you have 1 spark, 1 spark, 3 spark (Which means if they cancel, you deal 1 damage 3 times, each one cancelling individually). This means that one of the first two attacks cancel, the other sticks (meaning 4 damage), and then the last one deals 3 from it sticking, or 3 instances of spark.Now, obviously the Spark can cancel too, but that’s infinitely less likely. Furthermore, because To Love Ru can stop your characters from even dealing damage, they can easily hold you back from winning the game on their turn by playing a Darknss Plan or two, and then burning you in a barrage of Sparks again next turn. Worse, even if you back up and kill a Yami on their turn, they just hand-encore it back to make sure they have 3 people who they can play Darkness Plan to defend.

So to reiterate, To Love Ru has free high-powered level 1 characters that search on reverse with CX in play, plays bounce to ruin your plans and Gold Bar for a large flow of Climaxes into hand, hand-encore to 2/3rds of their field at all times (Which is even worse combined with easy search CX combo, draw 2 pitch 1 from Golden Darkness, and a search brainstorm) and has a Level 3 game that both stops you from dealing damage and also deals just about a minimum of 4 damage if you cancel all front attacks as well as one of the spark abilities. How can you deal with this? To be honest, it’s most powerful because of the combination of all of them. If you can reliably stop any part of that chain, you take away a huge chunk of To Love Rus power.

Firstly, level 1 walls can really ruin the deck. They can reverse you with their 1/0 6.5k, plus climax plus power boost putting them to 10k or so, but they really want to reverse you with their 1/0 Mikan combo, which one of can get to 9/9.5k while the other sits at 7/7.5k. If your field is a mix of open slot and high power characters (8ks help), plus backups, you can shut down To Love Ru early and drain them of possible card advantage. This is especially true if people are playing “Calm and Cool”, Yami, which is a 1/0 that has the ability ‘Pay 1, send a Climax from hand to clock, send this to clock, play a Golden Darkness from your hand to the stage’. This means you can field Golden Darkness at level 1, but it involves having 3 cards in hand (Darkness, 1/0 Yami, Climax) and clocking yourself twice. But, you now have a 10k untargetable (Which means you can’t anti-change it), and you probably have an encore assist in the back! Except this still doesn’t really help, because you’re still needing to reverse things with your 1/0 Mikans to gain advantage on your opponent. Most people I speak to and play with feel the Yami change is entirely unnecessary and the space is better served elsewhere, and this is one of the reasons why. So trick 1: High power characters (2+ 8ks, 1 10k, backups allowed to hit this number) at Level 1 can wall them out. ‘Time Machine’ characters that go to memory on reverse and come back during your draw step (Project Diva, Haruhi, Madoka Magica all have this) also leave them without reverse targets, which can do the same thing, but you’ll be eating more damage from direct attacks, so it’s not always recommended.

Secondly, if you can disable encore or kick cards to top or bottom of deck, you can stop them from looping their search combo. Part of its strength is in how easy it is to keep doing; It’s not THAT big on the opponents turn, so your opponent will still have characters out, and they get a lot of power on Climax play, letting you reverse them again. This lets you filter low-power or unnecessary characters into encore fodder while searching for your backups and Yamis to get ready to win. Shutting off encore can totally ruin this plan and leave To Love Ru players fielding random level 0s to attack with and losing their advantage. Furthermore, if the To Love Ru player hits to to low level 3 with their first barrage of Yamis, if you can stop them from being encored, you can remove the ability for them to hit you with a SECOND barrage of Yamis, which can again pull the game away from them. So, shut down encore and take away their important characters.

Thirdly, turning off Events will stop To Love Ru from stopping you from winning. There isn’t too much that does this (Prisma Illya and Haruhi spring immediately to mind), but a lot of games you will hit To Love Ru to mid-level 3 (3/2 or so) and they’ll know they can shut down your attacks at least once to win. Taking that away from them will make it a lot harder for them to meet their win condition.

Lastly, stopping the CX combo or the Burn from happening also ruins their gameplan. Anti-Burn exists in 3 sets starting Friday; Shana (At level 2), Log Horizon (At level 3), and Charlotte (All game). Removing sparks from Yami removes basically everything from the card and makes them effectively untargetable vanillas. Log Horizon has the hardest time doing this, because it requires getting to Level 3 first, however they have a large amount of Clock Encore cards that they can use to make them take a lot of self-inflicted damage to hit 3 first, then using the Level 3 Shiroe to turn off burn and also greatly reduce damage dealt by giving characters -2 soul.

Stopping the CX is an entirely different story, done best by Fate/Zero and Haruhi. Fate/Zero has a Level 3 Archer that lets you discard his Climax (a 2k1 soul draw) to take your opponents Climax and send it to waiting room (And he also gets +5.5k power), while Haruhi has a 2/0 Blue event that takes a Climax from your opponents Climax zone and sends it to Waiting Room. Thus turns the Yami-Wall from being 5 instances of Spark to 2, which is nothing special.

What do I recommend against To Love Ru? Haruhi. No, seriously. If you look at the list that I have above, Haruhi has access to 3/4s of the list of ‘To Love Ru counter-tech-choices’, between the SOS Brigade 1/0 Haruhi (Which jumps to memory when it reverses something and comes back at the draw step of your next turn), the 0/0 Mikuru that takes itself and something else and sends them both to memory to come back next turn, the 2/0 anti-Climax event, as well as the 2/1 Mikuru Climax Combo that turns off all events for your opponent. It also has Dress Up Nagato, which lets you ruin your opponents field and move things around however you want, and the infamous Trouble Girl Haruhi (which heals when it’s played to the stage and burns for 1 when it attacks with its Gate CX in play), as well as the stellar 1/1 “I am not interested in Normal Humans” event (Search 2 SOS Brigade characters, discard a card). I know of one person locally who plays it and it cleans up noawadays due to how many decks are ‘Big CX combo finishers’ + ‘Anti-Damage events’ and both then get neutered and turned on their head, while it still has normal gameplan options against most decks. Heck, Haruhi topped at another regional here in the US and it was pretty much mono-red without Mikuro or the 2/0 event at all.

Personally, I have been having success with Blue Lv1 Pants build of Shining Resonance, with Shining Dragon as the finisher of choice and a climax spread of 4/2/2 Pants/2Soul/2k1, because the finishers wall up even against Yami, the pants combo draws off of my opponents level 0s if I get to 1 first, or bottom-deck their threats if they get there first (and then you hand encore them back and do the opposite next turn). Im@s also does well with many level 1 wall builds (Blue M@sterpiece, Gentle and Positive + backups to death). Rider.Dek does well if you play a set of 1/0 Backups so you can defend against the one 1/0 Mikan that will be big enough to reverse one of your Riders (One of them hits 9.5k, the others only 7.5k). Red-Focused Project Diva decks also do well between 7k level 1s, strong backups (Either because of Magician + White Dress giving power on startup, or by playing World Is Mine 2k counter event), and a top-decking level 3 game in Meiko Original, as well as having Erase Or Zero for field-rearrangement and bottom-decking. Terra Formars with an Alex/Marcos field also does well due to the high-power nature and the ability to snipe costless characters (Which To Love Ru has in spades) with their brainstormer. Vividred Operation also does incredibly well due to having 9k+ level 2s out at level 1, a 1/1 3k backup to make anything decently huge, and a 1/0 combo that bottom-decks (Plus encore-lock on your 2/0 Operation Cocoon Break event if you have a Yellow character out, and +3k to a character if you have a Green character out can lead to a bad time for early-played Yamis really fast)

Is this list exhaustive? Absolutely not. Is To Love Ru an overbearing set? Yes. The fact that I’ve written some 3 thousand words on how to deal with it is proof of that; It’s definitely powerful and it will ruin your day if you go in blind. It’s not invincible, though, and there are plenty of small options that can be taken to deal with it, as demonstrated in the paragraphs above. It only has the advantage if you are not considering the set at all when you are building your deck.That alone isn’t itself an issue; A game where you don’t need to think about what your opponent might be playing when building your deck lacks any reward for foresight. To Love Ru definitely requires consideration and playing around, but if you can do it, you’ll win consistently. It’s very telling that some areas the top decks are literally all To Love Ru (like IDEA in Texas), which means that the playerbase is somewhat unprepared for the set or all actually play the set, while other areas are entirely without To Love Ru (Like Honolulu HI, Miramar FL, or Crystal MN), where the players planned against the set.

As usual, this is a somewhat living document. Questions, comments, feedback, input are all accepted! I have had a very busy few weeks so I haven’t been updating as much as I’d like to be, however I should have more content coming down the pipe over earl next week, so stay tuned!

-McSmashy