[ECG] Deck Check: Blessed Reincarnation - Musketeer!

[ECG] Deck Check: Blessed Reincarnation - Musketeer!

  Sunday, February 02, 2014    byak

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Hey cardfighters, today we're going to start our Deck Check requests with an article on Musketeers! Read on for the full decklist for the ECG..

Now, the original request was for the best Neo Nectar deck in the English game currently, which would be either Sephirot or Musketeers. I've always recognized Sephirot as a powerful deck, because if you can go through the whole ride chain it comes with you'll be in a very powerful position. However, judging from how the metagame looks right now, there's probably too much retiring to consider it a viable strategy. Arboros Dragon, Sephirot primarily relies on sustaining three back row rear-guards with the same name, and with decks like Eradicators and Kagero running rampant, I would not have a good chance of winning versus those decks.

Now Musketeers are a bit of an unusual deck. They operate by turbo-ing through themselves in order to benefit from White Lily Musketeer, Cecilia's skill to generate more advantage. Most of them come with weak numbers, but when you compensate that with easy card advantage and consistent columns, it ends up working out for you most of the time. Here's my list:

Blessed Reincarnation - Musketeer!
17 / 14 / 11 / 8

1 Broccolini Musketeer, Kirah
4 Hibiscus Musketeer, Hanah [Heal]
4 Night Queen Musketeer, Daniel [Critical]
4 Chestnut Bullet [Critical]
2 Dancing Sunflower [Draw]
2 Four Leaf Fairy [Draw]

4 Maiden of Blossom Rain
4 Water Lily Musketeer, Ruth
3 Tulip Musketeer, Mina
3 Lily of the Valley Musketeer, Rebecca

4 Cherry Blossom Musketeer, Augusto
4 Tulip Musketeer, Almira
3 Lily of the Valley Musketeer, Kaivant

4 Black Lily Musketeer, Hermann
4 White Lily Musketeer, Cecilia

Now when I said that most of these cards come with weak numbers, I wasn't kidding. Your boss unit, Cecilia, only comes with 10000 base power. Mina and Almira come with 6000 and 8000 power respectively as well, which can prove to be troublesome at times. But all of these units come with a reason.

Let's start by looking at White Lily Musketeer, Cecilia. Cecilia has a once per turn skill that retires a Musketeer unit to check the top five cards of your deck, and then you choose a Musketeer from those and call it. This is part of the turbo feature this deck comes with, and the other part is built onto Rebecca and Kaivant. Unfortunately for Kaivant and Rebecca, they come with counterblast costs, so they're not exactly ideal to spam. Cecilia's Limit Break is what gives this deck something to aim for however. At the cost of a counterblast, you can return any five Musketeer normal units to the deck to call two more Cecilias to the field. Unfortunately you cannot return Hannah and Daniel because they're triggers, but this skill is very easy to utilize. It also gives you two free units that you can retire for Cecilia's other skill, so you can turn them into something useful.

And this skill is also partially why I'm playing Tulip Musketeer, Almira and Tulip Musketeer, Mina. Both of these units cause you to flip a damage to give yourself a new fresh damage, and at the end of the turn you can return any damage to the deck. Not only are they Musketeers, but they can help enable your Limit Break very early on. While Cecilia doesn't come with a super flashy Break Ride, she doesn't have to rely on one either, making the Tulip Musketeers practical to use. Also, to compensate for the low power, you can always kill them off with Cecilia's other skill to create a better column. To simply put it, being able to Limit Break on the turn you ride Cecilia can be fantastic.

That's sort of the reason why Lily of the Valley Musketeer, Kaivant and Lily of the Valley Musketeer, Rebecca are used. Like Cecilia, they can retire a Musketeer for another, but only when they're called. They aim to accomplish two things. One is to set up a consistent field, either before you have Cecilia or after you've used Cecilia's once per turn skill. The other use is to help dump five Musketeers into the drop zone as fast as possible, in order to make your Limit Break work. They also come with decent numbers, and you're not obligated to always use their skills either. I don't always use them, but there are always neat combos to use with them.

Usually when you're using your Lily of the Valley Musketeers or Cecilia yourself, you usually aim to pull out your power attackers. Not much to say about these, but they can solve your problems of having weak columns easily. Augusto and Hermann can reach 12000 and Ruth can reach 10000 as an attacker, making cards like Mina less of a liability.

Obviously Black Lily Musketeer, Hermann is nowhere near as good as a vanguard as Cecilia is, so one of the weaknesses of this deck is that it really needs to ride Cecilia every game. Broccolini Musketeer, Kirah helps, but there are still a lot of games where you won't open Cecilia, which can be troublesome. However, you should be riding Cecilia most of the time.

One strategy I've been sticking to with this deck is taking as much advantage of the intercept skill as I can. For example, if you return five with Cecilia, call two Cecilias, then trade Cecilia for an Augusto, I want to try to intercept with that Augusto because it was free card advantage. Free card advantage translates to free shields, and this method also fuels later Cecilias. I also want to get rid of that second Cecilia next turn or even the same turn with a Lily of the Valley Musketeer, because you can't intercept with it. Of course it's not bad to keep Cecilia on the field as long as it makes a good column, but having a free intercept unit is even better. To put it simply, your field doesn't carry that much value and as such is dispensable.

Overall, building this deck for the English card game isn't a bad idea. Neo Nectar don't have a Break Ride at the moment, but they're set to get one soon which could boost this deck's power. There is also, of course, a large amount of more Musketeers on the way in the form of promos and in Booster Set 14. I won't go over all of them, but I know I'd use a large majority of those cards in a future deck when they get released over here:

Blue Rose Musketeer, Ernest
Dandelion Musketeer, Mirkka
Red Rose Musketeer, Antonio
Pansy Musketeer, Sylvia
White Rose Musketeer, Alberto

That's it for now, though. Hopefully you found this Deck Check useful, and we're still waiting for the next Monthly Bushiroad! Continue to request more Deck Checks in the comments below, as long as questions if you have them, and thanks for reading.