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The One Where Chronofang and Jet Are Still The Only Ones That Matter: G Clan Booster 4

Tick tock tick tock, it's time to review the most recently oversupported clan's new toys.

I find myself in a rather odd situation. Usually whenever I review the various cards in a Clan Booster I would examine the individual merits of each type of deck getting supported and summarise how much of a waste of money everything is. However, with Gear Chronicle, such a thing is sort of hard given that there is nothing here that doesn't revolve around the assumption the opponent won't play anyone who isn't, well, me, tee-hee-hee. If the timing's the same, you might as well use whatever's the best supported and proven to be reliable. As such, by virtue of Chronojet and Chronofang decks being the best supported and balanced out despite this, I cannot in good faith recommend anyone really pick up the Chronoscommand stuff or the Legion support unless they are budget players or casuals. I guess the Chronoscommand deck isn't really bad, but like most hard-advantage decks that's basically all it does. If Hollow and similar decks show up to ruin its day then it might as well go stick its own dick inside a deep-fat fryer because when it comes to a decent backup plan they've got shit all else. Oh well, I guess if nothing else that shit's better supported than Blaze.

So what am I supposed to do instead? Well, there's really nothing else for it. I guess I just review what the Chronojet and Fang decks can do for us and examine what's not entirely horrible about their new toys. For the purposes of fairness I'll include the new Trial Deck Zodiac Time Beasts since it comes out on the same day as Gears of Fate and the new support sort of tries to take advantage of this. ZTB at the moment is not hype and even the recent spoilers online cannot make me hype. Might stop sucking eventually though. Don't care. Chronojet deck review first.

Chronojet.dek: So the current Chronojet deck is basically Melem/Metallica/History Maker, which is a solid-ass combo so whatever's here has got some shoes to fill. Obvious Chronojet support is Gear Groovy, Hetroround Dragon, Causality Dragon, and Delayed Blazer Dragon. Hetroround's fundamentally useless outside of extremely specific Tsukuyomi-esque plays or if you need a Silent Tom gone like now, so what about the others? I guess it helps that only History Maker is a mainstay here but over already established helpful shit like Upstream? Fair enough, Grade 1 lineup doesn't leave much to the imagination as it's PGs, Steam Breath, Melem and whatever the fuck so Upstream isn't a must, so if you want Delayed Blazer go ahead, but there isn't room for Causality to me. I'd want Timebreak Dragon from the last Trial deck so I can turn a Grade 0 into Melem to get the ball rolling because obviously anything that searches combo pieces helps. Gear Groovy is basically Nextage except slower and with potential to throw in something else like a Chronoscommand on-hit or Ragnaclock. So I guess what's good about it is that at least Delayed Blazer and Gear Groovy can be put in without losing the whole point of the deck, but aside from that, those are the only real toys worth having here. If nothing else as there are two variants of Nextage in this pack I guess if you have money to burn and a lot of boxes to open getting them should be easy enough. Or mooch off a friend with more money than sense. So in summary, until anything after G Booster 9 makes Zodiac Time Beasts actually good, equal to this certainly, I anticipate Chronojet STILL being the go-to Gear Chronicle deck. It does basically everything important: soft advantage options for Magia and Hollow matches, still has enough room in the G Zone for specific field wipe problems like Chronoscommand and his evolved form, and can gain good card advantage.

Chronofang.dek: I like using bad-guy decks as much as the next wannabe edgelord, but even though this pack has helped iron out some of its old flaws, I still don't really recommend this over Chronojet. The new Trial deck gave us another Chronofang so that name's still gold despite things going south, but as for the support in here...Steam Tamer Nani, Gear Tabby and Chronotiger Rebellion are what I'd be looking forward to the most here. My inherent problem with this deck is that because you bind so much, despite stuff to mitigate it such as Nani, older things like Parallel Barrel Dragon and all that jazz, it still isn't really superior in terms of multi-attacking options such as Melem and her ilk. You could run that here too but the Chronojet engine supports that the best. All this can do is try and imitate Chronojet except slightly worse. I mean, looking at Rebelliion, would you honestly class a -1 overall be worth this being met with a Perfect Guard and then breaking for lunch? Nextage at least gives you 5 checks for basically the same minus. That's what's currently wrong with Chronofang decks: it's basically like Blaze: it only really does hard advantage and what soft advantage it can gain sort of sucks so anything that can equal it in gambit but has more options will still have the advantage either way. So all I can say about Chronofang when one takes the new toys into account is that at least every use of these new bind cards shouldn't minus you as much, but it still doesn't solve the problem of how everything it tries to do is done better by something else.

Demiurge.dek: Oh yeah, there's also this. You won't be able to build this deck properly without the Trial Deck but you can count on this to give you the pieces needed. In terms of overall performance though? Slow as all hell and requires more effort than I'm prepared to give. Not only do you have to juggle between having to run stuff that binds (so it needs a Chronofang skeleton at the very least) but you also have to run 12 otherwise crap and vanilla cards (10 if you exclude the otherwise useful Critical and Heal trigger), and at several copies to have a decent chance of binding the 12 for Demiurge. Otherwise you're probably going to either win or lose before that can ever reasonably happen. But because this deck is basically Chronofang except with some crap cards and some somewhat vaguely connected shit thrown in, just take my review of the Chronofang deck and add on how I fucking hate the inconsistency of Demiurge and you've basically got my opinion on this. Let's hope that G-BT11 will give us reason not to run the original 12 ZTB. Or better yet, assume that it'll never get fully supported again and wean yourself off the hype for this before it's too late and it gets you by the neck RUN MAN RUN

I’m taking requests for articles if there’s something about Vanguard you need to gripe about. Email ideas at saikyocardfighter@outlook.com. Or drop a message on my Twitter account!