This Space
For Rent

Revengers Don’t Need to Diversify

Revengers aren’t broken. Also, your attempts to ‘fix’ it are laughable.

I haven’t actually faced too many Shadow Paladin decks since Worlds, but I saw a Youtube video using something similar to the decks at Worlds and so I saw it as a good time to churn this out. It also means I’m running out of general things to complain about so good for the rest of you. The bile in me may yet die out.

If I didn’t think that Narukami was going to be supported regularly during the Link Joker era (which would have been naïve and foolish of me) I wouldn’t object to a Revenger deck instead. Actually, I wouldn’t be too upset if I got one even now. I like Early and Mid-Game shenanigans. The problem I have, however, is the people (who probably subscribed to the Altmile/Thing Saver School of Moronic Behaviour) who try to hybridise the deck with G Support, badly, and often very clumsily.

It wasn’t hard to notice this after two fights against these decks where I ended up winning in pretty much the same way in both games. Here’s the first problem I have: Revengers work in today’s meta because they have eight different options to murder cards in the Early Game, which slows the momentum of the opponent as it approaches Mid Game. After a game of attrition, it should then work to utilise one of two choices of finisher (Phantom Blaster “Abyss” or “Diablo” if the game necessitates). At the very least, it should be able to reliably do the first option, which can’t happen if you’re going to flood the field with non-Revengers that Abyss cannot sack away.

Indeed, in the fights involving those choices, they quite often weren’t able to generate the field needed to be able to use Abyss at all, and as a result, they were forced to Stride constantly to maintain momentum. It is pretty much the only way the deck can comfortably use any choices such as Pitch-Black Sage Charon. But if you’re going to spend all game with Stride as your main gambit, then you would be better off with a Claret Sword deck instead, since that actually works to compliment that gambit. I would have thought that the whole point of running a Legion deck that revolves around Stride as a side option was that you could comfortably Swiss Army with both weapons.

Realistically, surely those people should have caught on that any non-Revengers run in the deck would exist for no other benefit other than the G-Units that could use them when Abyss could not. This was why I hated the Altmile/Thing Saver deck (while it was still a thing, anyway): the pure build was less likely to clog and had the same output as the hybrid on a good day. If you need hard plusses to compensate for the soft plusses from Charon or whatever, then something like Dark Bond Trumpeter (not Dark HEART, that’s fucking terrible here) exists and it can combo nicely with Dragruler Revenant.

When you’re deckbuilding, you need to remember that every card choice you make will inevitably come at the expense of another choice. In the case of something like triggers, I could not give two shits as to why you run what you run unless it’s 12+ Critical. If you did run that I would assume you actually understood the thought process behind it and congratulate you. It’s because arguing in favour of certain triggers in certain situations is inherently pointless, because there is absolutely no way to will anything to come to you as you want it, and you certainly can’t change the trigger lineup in the middle of the game. Therefore, the best way to approach it is to be as general as possible and try to forget about any short term benefit in favour of what is going to bring more to the table, and in how many ways: the number of useful situations Criticals have relevance in beat the rest of the triggers available to me, hence the heavy emphasis on them. They cover the COMMON situations, not the ones that are so negligible they simply aren’t worth worrying about.

It’s similar in the case of the non-Revengers in this hybrid deck: every one you run is one less target for Phantom Blaster “Abyss”. You are essentially forcing that deck down one narrow path of having to Stride to Phantom Blaster “Diablo” just to use any of them, which defeats the purpose of using Abyss at all. Considering that if most of your Grade 1s are going to be non-Revenger, if any of them are lost for reasons outside your control such as winding up in damage or they get ruined by Narukami or similar, then your only source of advantage would come from having to badly try and use your G Support to plus back and make using Abyss more difficult, or trying to pop as much as you can with both Blaster Darks, and the second option can be done in the pure Revenger build. So there’s really not much of an excuse not to go pure Revenger, because that can at least give you Abyss to use in the event you can’t Stride.

That, to me, is what the deck is all about: it’s giving up several long term benefits in favour of some obvious but unimpressive short term benefit. When it’s put up against any deck with a more extreme gambit than theirs, it falls on its face. And that’s something I find frustrating because reasonably pure Revengers, competently built Revengers, ARE a good deck. It can address problems of various flavours by being able to pop front and back-row cards which allow it to address problems early or just give the most massive middle finger to Odysseus if you still run that shit, which means it has momentum early on, and it has decently strong finishers to use. Despite this, it’s all being ruined by people trying to be too clever.

I’m not saying that the deck is inherently terrible. However, if most of your cards are going to wind up as non-Revenger, then all the deck is going to work out as is a regular Diablo deck that just happens to have some Early and Mid-Game options available to it. Because it certainly can’t fucking adapt if the cards won’t let it. Having said that, I haven’t actually had time to properly playtest a reasonably pure Revenger deck against mine, so it could be that I can still shit all over Revengers for depending on their rear-guards, or it could 50:50 it and be a pretty ballin’ deck. I don’t know. But I’m not going to find out if you fuckers insist on ruining your deck with crap like Dark Heart Trumpeter. Run the pure version and contribute to science!

Ask me where you’d find room for Black-winged Swordbreaker in light of this article at saikyocardfighter@outlook.com