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Deck Critic Corner:
Noc Noc, Who’s There? 

Alright you pushy fuckers, Love Sniper Nociel is actually pretty good.

After at least one angry email mentioning how I severely undersold Love Sniper Nociel when I first reviewed it, I decided that as an act of penance I should at least watch how it plays first before I decide. Well I’m sorry, but after the hybrid Diablo deck and Altmile Thing Saver, can I not be forgiven for thinking that an overhyped deck can be reasonably judged to not blow goats but not be worth warranting building a little shrine and making burnt offerings to the Nurses of Cray?

To be fair I actually watched the first two in action, Diablo.failure especially, but hadn’t actually used or gone up against Nociel.spam (blame my real life and my retarded local scene), and after I learned that with such a borked shuffling on cheap sims, the best way to compensate is to basically just click the shuffle button only once to stop it sorting the more you shuffle and you’re golden, I finally reinstalled it and set to work. And thanks a lot by the way, now I have to keep the fucking thing just in case it turns out that weird-ass Blaster Thing hybrid turns out to not be shit as well. You pricks.

After stealing a list I found online I promptly set to work. I did however make a few changes based on my own deck-building rules for the sake of consistency if nothing else, for example, I used 4 Gavrail as the fail-con G3 (the list I found ran 2 Crimson Roar Metatron but that made no fucking sense to me as GB1 was the whole point of the deck, might as well compliment it as best I could). Before starting another thing I was sort of iffy about was the fact it ran 8 Stand Triggers. I knew why, as you needed a good number of Nociels for the sake of consistency and Refros was nuts, but I wasn’t entirely happy with the idea of low damage output in the event of failure. The fact that I had the capacity for columns and thus could make it even out was comforting I suppose. But I’m not here to make a consistent deck necessarily, I’m just here to find out what the hell the hype’s all about, so I charged in, figurative guns blazing to find randoms who weren’t possessing the same IQ as an aubergine.

First thing I noticed as soon as I had one or two games was that Nurse of Broken Heart is frankly bullshit. I am not shitting you here: one guard with Battle Cupid and G3 Nociel and I had an extra 4k to both units. “Oh, that’s a nice 18k column you have there. It would be a shame if I suddenly made my Vanguard 20k with guard, but I can’t. Aha, PSYCHE MOTHERFUCKER!” That’s not even counting getting Nociels to damage through regular damage check. And what made it all worse was that in between being able to grab spare Broken Hearts from damage swapping and Azrael if I needed it, Broken Heart actually wasn’t all that precious in the long run. Most games I just let her happily die if she got attacked and replaced her with Million Ray Pegasus to start the damage swapping shenanigans all over again during MY turn.

Second thing I noticed happened after I read Holy Seraph Nociel’s Cardfight Wiki page was a neat little clause I somehow overlooked first-time round: she can call face-down damage to rear-guard, effectively making the deck actually even MORE toolbox-ey than I initially realised, plus it made for some neat little shenanigans with Thousand Ray Pegasus and Nurse of Broken Heart. Unflipping all that delicious damage was good, at least when my overall counterblasted damage was actually not just loaded with Grade 0s, as the crap shuffler was want to arrange.

I was advised on the forum I stole the list from that one Stride was basically all you needed and after that you just sort of sat on Nociel for a bit. I can understand why now: in between Nociel spam you are going to go through quite a lot of deck, so unless you play an opponent who’s greedy on calling from the deck you don’t especially need to convert your spare Grade 3s and Stride fodder into better guard quality when swapping damage for high shield cards and Perfect Guards has that pretty much licked already. Otherwise you sort of deck out. Not that I didn’t Stride twice, several games I’ve needed at least one Raphael to gain the soft advantage needed to live, especially against decks that dealt in big columns themselves.

I read that this is a popular choice in Japan, which wasn’t ever an indicator of quality to me, but if this became the only Angel Feather deck that mattered, I’d be inclined to be secretly pleased. I don’t like G Angel Feather, especially not in a competitive environment. In between Raphael and other damage manipulating cards, it doesn’t even need to win, it just needs to not lose and simply let the timer do all the rest. It’s a deck that can easily take the scumbag root of simply just stalling the opponent to death unless you have the perfect anti-Christ to it, like Kagero, which can kill key pieces without needing to attack them. Sadly, in the event you must ride the backup Gavrail you can easily do that, just keep in mind the lack of Crits compared to serious Gavrail decks, but at least if Nociel has to be sat on, you can at least be reassured the deck won’t try and take the cheap route, even if the turns take fucking forever. Long turns on top of healing constantly is just a dick move, frankly.

So after a grand total of one singular day playing online and giving the middle finger to the as-of-yet unreleased Cardfight Online sim, how did I find the deck? Okay, I’ll admit it. It’s actually quite good. So far the only deck I actually struggled with was stuff that controlled my field, Link Joker especially. Against decks that ate rear-guards I didn’t mind AS MUCH since Nociel could grab the advantage back, but sealing attacks AND Nurse of Broken Heart repeatedly was pretty annoying. You also need to keep in mind I was still playing randoms, and quite a lot of the decklists I was fighting made kind of retarded choices and plays. But in the end I had fun with it and managed to win enough times to not frustrate myself playtesting that it gets a passing grade in my book.

I guess all that’s left is for me to post the list that gave me the best results, for all you people who want to be shot through the heart! And you are to blame:

G0:

x1 Black Candle, Azrael 

x4 Doctoroid, Refros 

x4 Happy Bell, Nociel 

x4 Critical Hit Angel 

x4 Sunny Smile Angel

G1:

x4 Black Record, Israfil 

x3 Battle Cupid, Nociel  

x3 Black Call, Nakir 

x4 Thousand Ray Pegasus 

G2: 

x4 Million Ray Pegasus 

x4 Nurse of Broken Heart 

x3 Love Machine Gun, Nociel

G3: 

x4 Love Sniper, Nociel 

x4 Black Shiva, Gavrail

G-Zone:

x4 Holy Seraph, Raphael 

x2 Holy Seraph, Nociel 

x1 Holy Seraph, Raziel 

x1 Snow Element, Blizza