Yes, this site is still dead.

Today I’m going to talk at you about how the new (read: almost a year old) Project Diva deck works, what its weaknesses and strengths are, and how to play against it.

All because I don’t want too many people winning with it and getting its ass banned.

No, you don’t actually get whale cards for killing it, that was bait. (should I have titled the article Miku Slayer? would that have been a cute seasonal joke? idk shut up)

Although the cards have been out since December of 2017, this deck’s build and playstyle wasn’t solved until about June of 2018, going by various Twittter posts, which was a big reason as to why this deck went untouched in August, along with underrepresentation. Miku just isn’t popular anymore when you can hop on all these new Bushiroad music franchises instead.

Let’s cut to the chase. This article will go over some of the commonly played cards in this deck, rather than outright giving you a decklist right off the bat. However, there are a number of cards in this deck that must be played in a playset; these will be indicated as such.

Keep in mind the following while reading through these cards, as this may better your understanding of the deck: Project Diva is a primarily Green/Blue deck which plays an 8 bar climax lineup and 8 events that, after a certain point in the game, can get to refresh from a full deck and gain card advantage for little to no cast, and with zero interaction with the opponent. It wins by using optimal compression to get somewhat expected cancels for two to three turns to catch up in damage, then killing the opponent from 3/0 or above fairly consistently and at a low resource cost.



CARDS

Level 0:

Hatsune Miku “Layered Envy” is always played at a playset. There are several reasons why this card is played at 4:

It fixes blue. The deck usually plays 8 other blue cards, all 8 of which you want out of the level slot and floating around the deck or waiting room.

The next two points explain why one would play it as a main Level 0 attacker over, say, KAITO “Holiday”.

It’s a runner. This may be a deck with 16 misses (so almost it’ll miss run almost a third of the time on average), but the deck badly needs ways to dodge on reverse effects, as the rest of the deck is extremely poor in doing so.

It mills a card from your deck for no cost. This deck severely lacks ways to get to its first refresh before hitting level 2, so every card counts. This mill also lends its hand to a fairly common play where you cancel on a compressed deck, keep this card in the back, flush the rest of your deck out with 4 cards remaining, attack three times then mill the last card out for a refresh without giving your opponent empty damage to toss in your clock.

Hatsune Miku “Silent Voice” is another Level 0 the deck plays at 4 without question. It’s fairly obvious why and I won’t waste your time or insult your intelligence explaining it. It does remove 2 cards from the deck, which is worth nothing.

Hatsune Miku “Ultimate Miku” is the only other Level 0 the deck plays at a high count, though not necessarily at 4. This card is the main way the deck accesses the Waiting Room; almost all other filters go through the deck instead. “Endless Singing” Hatsune Miku is an excellent secondary Brainstorm effect that is extremely valuable along with the filter effect, as the deck has few ways to get Climaxes and Events into the hand during the Main Phase. Situations where you have way too many Characters in your hand but no Climaxes to play for Stock and Soul damage or no way to get Events out of your deck are not uncommon if the deck is running hot, and these are situations which can turn the tide of the game against Project Diva’s favour. It’s weird how a card that was once considered unusable tripe can now be a pivotal card in winning games.

MEIKO “Ivy Grimoire” is the deck’s only other way to pick cards out of the Waiting Room, and honestly isn’t as useful as it looks given that your other 2 Climax discard outs, which are your 1/0 attacker and simply playing Climaxes down for damage, are extremely good. However, although your brainstorm is extremely favoured to hit after one or two refresh cycles, it can get you out of situations where you *need* to salvage a critical card. It can also serve as a way to filter without moving your deck into your Clock, which can be important as your Clock is the deadest zone for your Climaxes to go to while playing this deck.

“Streaming Heart” Hatsune Miku is a card without a single unwatermarked and sizable scan on the internet, and fits a couple good corner case uses. The first effect removes cards from your deck for free (again, as mentioned before, every milled card counts in this deck) and the bomb effect is useful for dealing with troublesome Level 0s your opponent may need to trigger effects when they get Reversed.

Hatsune Miku “Engage”, Hatsune Miku “Lollipop”, and Hatsune Miku “Raspberryism” are all cards used at the player’s discretion to suit expected power thresholds and playstyles. None of these cards are must-plays.

Level 1

All Level 1 cards are fixed at a playset of 4 in the deck each. There is absolutely no leeway on this.

“Secret of X” Hatsune Miku is the main reason this deck can play 8 bars and get away with it. It gives two things the deck needs badly in a single Stage slot: a way to filter out Climaxes (and other cards if necessary) and a way to beat over opposing Characters for almost no commitment. The filter effect also has the upside of removing a card from your deck. Say it with me, kids: “Every card counts”. This effect has singlehandedly dug me out of situations where I had a single playable Character and into a board swinging for 11k, 8.5k, and 5.5k. The clockswap also accesses a zone which no other card in the deck can, leaving only the Stock inaccessible for selective pickings.

Hatsune Miku “Sea Lily” is the one of the reasons this deck can play the next card and not be crippled. Again, it fills two very strong roles: a card advantage engine and a way to get over the opponent’s board. Coupled with the above card and a Climax, it becomes very easy for this deck to just demolish its opponent’s board whenever it wants or needs to, making it difficult for the opposing player to just commit Characters attached to a resource cost and hope they don’t die. The cost on the salvage effect, again, removes a card from the deck, making it the 7th (!) and last unique card that manipulates/shrinks the deck in some way before Level 2. We’ll cry about the card it salvages later.

Sharing the World. When first shown on Card of the Day, I scoffed at the idea of losing cards just to get Stock you’re probably not gonna be able to use. Aside from that, it seems quite useful in a deck playing 8 bars, since every Climax you trigger will be a Stockboost that just flies into your hand, and also doesn’t screw up your damage swings on trigger like traditional Stockboost Climaxes do with their +2 Soul triggers. How would you offset the cost of taking an entire card in your hand and throwing it into the abyss though? It’s not like the clock cost salvage will recuperate your hand sufficientl

Level 2+

wait what hte Actual Fuck is THAT

A little history lesson. This card was first shown in the product press release released to distributors and stores (you can find it here) in plain text format, before any images of the cards in this product were shown. I didn’t believe for a second this card would be printed as-is. You could’ve bet any amount of money on this card being printed this way and I would have gleefully taken the bet. HoriP is a dumb dork who likes Miku, sure, but he doesn’t like Miku enough to print this thing.

haha

This card is what makes the deck work at all. It offers the following:

Free card advantage (albeit limited to Characters), letting you be extremely reckless with how you commit cards to the board. Before playing Sharing Your World in the deck, I often found myself with too many cards to deal with – something the hard minus from the green event actually solved.

High degree of control over your decksize. See those people playing 2 stock refresh costs? Laugh at them. Cancelled unoptimally on the first damage every swing the last turn? Just dump the rest of the deck into the bin.

Selective card advantage, which can sometimes translate into “pick pretty much any Character you want out of your deck”, given that your deck is small enough.

Don’t forget that you can just pick this card straight out of the Waiting Room, letting you use it multiple times without ever needing to draw into it.

The high degree of deck manipulation this card offers gives Miku players the ability to never be caught in a shitty position regarding their deck and compression ratio. They might have to take a few instances of clock damage here and there to do so, but if they’re playing an average game they should be cancelling 2 times or more every turn at this point, so it’s well worth it. The speed at which this card dumps the whole deck into the Waiting Room also makes the 1/1 event much more effective, as the stock you’re accumulating is immediately having an effect on your compression, while most decks would need to sit around for a turn or two waiting for their deck to run out.

don’t ban your baby HoriP

Hatsune Miku “High Fever” is played based on the player’s meta read. It’s used only when early plays that snowball and may lead to problems where the opponent is too compressed during the kill turn (Rem, Fuuka, and 合体 keyword marker cards like Gurren Lagann come to mind), or if an early play has an ability that will heavily impact the game (like this thing). If its just a fat heal that doesnt do anything though? Who cares lol just run your infinite respawning robots in

These are early plays I won’t even bother linking because decent players aren’t going to play these, for several reasons. The deck has no way to properly protect them, they offer nothing to very little to your main gameplan at the Level 2 stage of the game, and take up valuable boardspace where you could be playing your costless onplay abilities instead.

Hatsune Miku “Original” and Hatsune Miku “DE:MONSTAR” are the deck’s most usable costed power buffs. These help out mostly on the kill turn, and aren’t useful at any point before then, really. I’ll go into detail about why this deck cares about power later.

A few Level 2 Backups with additional effects you may want to be aware of. Most decks won’t be able to fit these in, but knowing that these effects may go off when you Front Attack doesn’t hurt.

“New World” Hatsune Miku and Hatsune Miku “Stubborn Factory Chief” are the deck’s topend cards. They’re pretty boring in the context of this deck and there’s really not that much to say about them that isn’t in the card text, though it should be noted that the extra Climax play during the Encore Step counts as a Climax play for the 1/1 Event (this usually doesn’t matter). There is also the possibility of the Miku player being a huge sack and triggering Hand in Hand during the attack phase without it already being in hand, and dropping it for the combo during Encore Step. When that happens, feel free to just smack their hand away when they go for the handshake tbh

The kill turn where the Miku player drops these Level 3 Characters and uses their combos makes them lose an incredible amount of steam. Each Level 3 they play down decompresses the next deck by 6 cards, and playing 2 bars in addition to the 3 Level 3s and dropping a card for each healer is also extremely taxing for the hand. If this turn fails it is very likely that the Miku player will just lose.

Climaxes

8 bars as mentioned. Since these Climaxes will never end up in the Stock unless placed there by the blindstock effect of another bar Climax, it is safe to assume that a Miku player’s big fat pile of Stock is always clean. Also, never miss a chance to call out a Miku player using the foil a art of Hand in Hand on their shit taste.

here’s a bunch of decks to look at, and here’s a degenerate 40 minute video of a miku mirror where both players misplay a few times and still cancel out the ass (seriously, what the fuck)

and thats the tea, sis

WEAKNESSES

The first one is the most basic. This deck gets completely fucked if it opens poorly in terms of card quality or Climax flooding. If you see a Miku player struggling to get rid of their deck early on, don’t be too shy to just commit to the board and swing in as much damage as possible, or you might not have the opportunity to deal big chunks of damage later. Taking too much damage before the deck is ready to do so leads to poor compression, since the Miku player has not had the time to properly accumulate clean stock or control how many cards are in their other compression areas. This also leaves the Miku player with less breathing room to punch themselves with to salvage the 2/0 event for card advantage, which can lead to a huge blowout. If a Miku player hits Level 3 long before you enter the kill range of Level 2 with high damage you will have an easy coast from then on, as the deck’s Level 3s are not meant to extend the game for very long.

This next point is something a few of you may have thought up of while reading this article (which is none of you, cardgamers don’t read). If your series has a stock bomb, especially a searchable one, you have a leg up without actually needing to do anything besides putting it in your deck. Since a Miku player’s Stock is almost always clean, there is really no point where this type of card wouldn’t be deadly. A Miku player’s only real counterplay to this is playing fewer 1/1 Events and 3-cost Encoring their Characters since the deck has hardly any Stock outlets, which is just shit for the deck’s gameplan.

Next is a type of card that’s a bit more obscure: cards that pick out Climaxes from their opponent’s deck, which Miku’s heavy compression further enables. These two are the most playable ones at the time of writing, though there are also some effective ones decks that aren’t quite as good.

Here’s another more common annoyance for Miku: -2 Soul effects at Level 2 often completely null swings from Miku, as the deck packs a very low count of Soul Triggers (usually around 8, some of which should be in the player’s hand). This fatty is extremely annoying, and I can’t think of another meta relevant -2 Soul Character right now whoops

Miku is goddamn awful at power on the defense and leaves a bunch of warm bodies on the board, so abuse your on-reverse abilities. Being able to get close to your opponent’s compression through abusing Level 1 Climax combos or getting good reverses off is an easy task. Even if the Miku player leaves a runner out to duck you, there is a good chance the runner will just whiff on the mill and be a vanilla.

The last point is something that was going to become obvious once the deck got a bit more exposure: Miku’s Level 3 gameplan is completely ruined by cards that remove “New World” Hatsune Miku from the board before the Encore Step, as the card must be on the Stage at that time to use its burn effect. Here’s an example. Why not have another one? In fact, take this, this, and this too. Miku players have recently started playing some dumbass TD level 3 that would be a complete shit card in any other deck to deal with this issue, which just goes to show how much of a problem this can be. In order to use this card effectively, however, they would need 8 Stock at the beginning of their turn, plus more Stock to stack additional Power where necessary. If you can force damage though fast enough, a Miku player will not have the Stock to deal with power differences when it’s relevant.

There’s also the usual tap counters and antidamage counters that you can use against any deck, antidamage counters being more effective given that it also nulls the extra burn 3.

i’m still looking for a copy of the TD level 3 in foil btw, hmu if you’re cool and want to donate one to me

CONCLUSION:

i dont know how to end this bye i’m gonna go back to rerolling re:live