[ECG] Deck Check: Dauntless' Dominating Drive!

[ECG] Deck Check: Dauntless' Dominating Drive!

  Thursday, August 14, 2014    byak

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You didn't think we were done with Booster Set 14 deck checks, were you? Today we'll be doing another Kagero Deck Check, but this time, for Dauntless Drive Dragon's Reverse form!

Kagero had recently been brought back to the limelight with the induction of Transcendence Dragon, Dragonic Nouvelle Vague, the almighty grade 4 who has been terrorizing the competitive scene for as long as he can remember, but that didn't necessarily mark the end of their support. Link Joker's spread of Reverse has shown no sign of stopping, and it has finally reached the legendary Flame Dragons!

You might've thought that Dragonic Overlord was the first victim of the invaders, but instead, Dauntless Drive Dragon has fallen to their influence first (Don't worry though, because your reverse Dragonic Overlord is on the way)! Like most Reverse units, the all new Dauntless Dominate Dragon "Reverse" is a Cross Ride of his former self, which also makes him a Cross Break Ride, giving you more incentive to use the two units together. By counterblasting one and locking a Kagero, you can give him an ability that kicks in during his attack. Whenever you drive check a grade 1 or higher Kagero with Dauntless Dominate's drive check, you can retire one of your opponent's grade 1 or less rear-guards and give Dauntless Dominate +3000 power for the rest of the turn.

Instead of coming with a flashy skill that turns the tide of the battle immediately, Dauntless Dominate comes with a skill that mitigates the downsides of revealing any non-trigger in your drive check and turning it into advantage, as well as power. Most of the time you'll be picking off the back row with this skill, making it harder for your opponent to hit your 13000 defensive vanguard.

Guarding Dauntless Dominate's strikes is quite different than most other popular vanguards, since no matter what it's going to be gaining power from each trigger check. In the worst case, you're drive checking two non-triggers, meaning your Dauntless gains +6000 additional power. In the best case, you're getting two triggers, so Dauntless gains +10000 power. In the middle you have both a trigger and a non-trigger, resulting in a +8000 boost. If your Dauntless Dominate is going into the trigger check with 20000 power from its Cross Ride defense and a 7000 booster, this means that your minimum power is 26000 and your maximum power is 30000. As a result, any 11000 base needs to drop 20000 in shield to block the attack, no matter the result.

The interesting bit here is that against the average 11000 grade 3, Dauntless Dominate forces out a lot of shield just by paying its small cost every turn. There's no variance, since the required shield is fixed if you have the golden 7000 booster, but that's a reasonable drawback. The lack of variance also helps you play out the rest of your battle phase with more knowledge, letting you distribute triggers to your other columns without risking putting the power on your vanguard and attempting to win the battle with the second trigger.

What makes Dauntless Dominate so much better is its synergy with his former self, Dauntless Drive Dragon. While decks in the past attempted to use Dauntless Drive to make it easier to resolve on-hit skills, Dauntless Dominate converts the extra attack into the pure value, since you have four drive checks in a single turn, giving you the potential to retire up to four grade 1's. In this case, you're either ripping a LOT of triggers to slingshot you ahead in the game, or you're just retiring off your opponent's back row, so it's a win-win situation almost all of the time.

Dauntless' Dominating Drive!

17 / 14 / 11 / 8

1 Red Pulse Dracokid

3 Lizard Soldier, Goraha [Critical]

3 Seal Dragon, Biella [Critical]

3 Seal Dragon, Artpique [Draw]

3 Gattling Claw Dragon [Draw]

4 Dragon Dancer, Barbara [Heal]

4 Dragon Dancer, Maria

4 Diable Drive Dragon

3 Dragon Monk Gojo

3 Calamity Tower Wyvern

4 Dominate Drive Dragon

4 Bellicosity Dragon

3 Berserk Dragon

4 Dauntless Drive Dragon

4 Dauntless Dominate Dragon "Reverse"

Mitigating the Lock

As with most Reverse decks, it's important to figure out how to make proper columns while dealing with the cost of locking up your board. Dauntless Dominate only has to lock one, which is a relief, but he usually needs to lock a rear-guard booster in order to retain his strong center column power. Thankfully, Booster Set 14 also gave Dauntless a pair of power attackers, Diable Drive Dragon and Dominate Drive Dragon. Dominate Drive Dragon holds more value over the usual power attacker since he has the ability to hit 11000 power vanguards while having his booster locked for a turn, making maxing him out more than necessary.

This also makes it important to conserve your extra grade 3's, since those also make good candidates for un-boosted attacks. However, when you don't have access to either, Diable Drive Dragon shines by being able to throw a punch at just about any front row rear-guard. Even if he can't go after their vanguard, you can attempt to further reduce your opponent's resources and make it hard to actually build proper columns. Diable Drive Dragon is also an ideal vanguard booster with his default 7000 power.

Dragon Monk Gojo also fits in as an interesting unit to lock away for Dauntless Dominate's skill. The idea is that you want to rest Gojo for his skill to exchange a card in your hand for an extra draw, and since he's rested, you can just lock him up because he offers no value for the rest of the turn. It's nothing game breaking, but it's a quality interaction that helps Gojo fit in with the deck.

Gojo also fills a role where you need a unit like him to dig into your deck to put together your two grade 3's for the late game. Drawing cards is really important for a deck like this, because if you sit on a Dauntless Drive Dragon for too long, your opponent can take advantage and commit more towards the game, pushing you behind to make it hard to come back when you finally draw Dauntless Dominate.

What puts Gojo above a lot of other draw power units is his ability to be used more than once per turn. Sure, he might not be able to boost during this time, but putting together both of your Dauntless Dragons is more important than ever. There are also cases where you don't have to use Gojo's skill, making him a perfectly valid 7000 booster. It is because of this duality that he's so key to the deck.

All Along the Calamity Tower

In addition to all of the direct support for Dauntless, one new unit for Kagero stuck out far more than the rest. It took fourteen sets for Kagero to get a Luck Bird clone, but they finally did in the form of Calamity Tower Wyvern. It may not seem very significant, but for a deck like Kagero the opposite is true. Being a field control deck, Kagero has always heavily focused on getting rid of your opponent's resources, but has had trouble in gaining their own. Gaining a Luck Bird clone for the deck makes it so much better for that very reason, especially since you don't use the soul for anything else. Calamity Tower Wyvern is basically a pseudo free booster, since it gives you an extra card draw for calling. It helps dig into your combo, it helps you build your field, and it even becomes a good target to lock away.

You may think that it's difficult to resolve multiple Wyverns, as Kagero don't focus heavily on soul, but the truth it that Kagero's trigger line-up has been able to sustain soul for a decent amount of time.

The prime example is Gattling Claw Dragon, Kagero's second draw trigger from Booster Set 2. By counterblasting one, you can add Gattling Claw to the soul to retire a grade 0, which is usually a starting vanguard that tends to stick around. It's a simple one-for-one exchange that helps you resolve more Wyverns, so you can consider it to be more than a one-for-one in the long run. If you go first it becomes really easy to use Gattling Claw Dragon, since there are little to no starting vanguards that leave the field before your opponent's grade 2 ride. Depending on the match-up, using Gattling Claw can severely shut down your opponent's strategy, or at least slow them down.

The other example is Seal Dragon, Artpique, who can simply add himself to the soul to give any Kagero +3000 power. There are some cases where you can use Artpique to ramp a column over 21000 or enable Dauntless Dominate to force out even more cards, so while it's not as good as Gattling Claw Dragon, it still fits in niche situations that can put you ahead.

It's also very easy to make Calamity Tower live on the second turn, thanks to Red Pulse Dracokid. Grade 3 searchers like Dracokid have always had synergy with units like Calamity Tower, and it's no exception in this deck, especially since you need Dracokid to put together your combo.

Ideally, on your grade 2 turn, you want to ride Bellicosity Dragon, use Dracokid to search for a grade 3, then use Calamity Tower to draw a card. Then, if you pair Bellicosity with a 7000 booster, you'll set up Dauntless Dominate Dragon while also attempting to free up the damage you spent for Dracokid. Usually this attack will land since it's early in the game and Bellicosity has a total power of 16000, which makes the setup so good.

Berserk and Bellicosity

I've noticed that Berserk Dragon and Bellicosity Dragon have probably been the most common grade 2 engine in Kagero. The engine is good in just about any Kagero deck, since most bosses don't eat up all of your damage and also give you room to un-flip it. I'd say that my favorite deck to use Bellicosity in is Dauntless Dominate though, because of how simple the exchange is. You're using up a minimum of one damage per turn to use your Limit Break, and if you manage to hit with Bellicosity, you're getting that invested damage back, making it essentially free (outside of the locking cost).

Bellicosity also helps you make room for some of the other counterblasts in the deck, like Red Pulse Dracokid and Berserk Dragon, for example, and there's no downside to using him. There aren't any other grade 2 9000 units that come with as much value as him for the deck and he still carries an average amount of power to be a good standalone grade 2.

It is for those two reasons that Berserk Dragon tends to work in almost every Kagero deck as well. While Berserk Dragon's cost is quite high, it is not always necessary to put into play. However, it's still very good to have access to, since it's your only access to retiring before you Break Ride. Berserk Dragon comes into play by keeping early game decks at bay, giving you more time to safely set up.

If you don't use him, once again, he's still a solid 9000 power grade 2 who makes solid columns with the 7000 power boosters that your deck comes with. He's still pretty situational when actually creating value, but again, Kagero don't have that many better options at the moment.

If you really don't want to include Berserk Dragon in your deck, I'd recommend playing 10000 grade 2's like Dragon Knight Nehalem, but they're not much of an improvement. There's no 6000 boosters that need 10000 attackers to be relevant, and you usually want to ride a Bellicosity Dragon anyway to work with your Red Pulse Dracokid.

General Strategy

Together as a deck, Dauntless Dominate plays fairly a pretty straight forward play style. You want to keep yourself relevant in the early game by equalizing the board if you're waiting for your Limit Break. Your grade 2 ride almost every game should be Bellicosity Dragon to create instant pressure with Red Pulse Dracokid. Most of the time you want your 7000 boosters behind your vanguard to create the perfect numbers with your Limit Break, while your Calamity Tower Wyverns should go to the sides. Wyvern being on the side is easy to work with since it can easily be locked away or used with your 11000+ attackers to create relevant columns.

Dauntless Dominate Dragon succeeds in a long, drawn out game due to the low cost of his Limit Break. Since you can use his skill almost every turn, you want to keep the game going on as long as possible, as in most match-ups you'll eventually crawl ahead. If you play versus a burst strategy, surviving the initial burst should make the rest of the game extremely easy to play out, since Dauntless Dominate can grind out and crawl back to a winning position.

When playing against Link Joker and Star-vader, Chaos Breaker Dragon, you need to be very careful when using your Limit Break, as is the case with most Reverse decks. Chaos Breaker Dragon's Limit Break can pick off the units that you lock yourself, and your opponent draws more cards for doing so, making it hard to gain value off of Dauntless Dominate's skill.

In this case, you want to chain your original Dauntless Drive Dragons as often as possible, as this helps you create an offensive versus Link Joker's control and also gives you a strategy that doesn't involve you locking your field for your opponent to benefit off of. Regardless, it's a difficult match-up to win because it's hard to take advantage of what your deck naturally does. However, if you can abuse your Break Ride skill and 13000 defense successfully, it's still a winnable match-up.

Standing up to the Transcendence Dragon

The final question to ask ourselves is: why play this deck over Nouvelle Vague? While they both feature 13000 defenses, Nouvelle Vague has a lot more strong support while donning very terrifying continuous skills. Fortunately, one factor helps balance the disparity between the two decks, which is the recent restriction of Lizard Soldier Conroe. Conroe basically guaranteed you a Nouvelleroman Dragon that would turn any Nouvelle Vagues you drew into the grade 3 that you needed first. Without Conroe, Nouvelle Vague also has to rely on Red Pulse Dracokid and drawing into its consistency cards.

I wouldn't say that this makes Dauntless Dominate the better deck, but it makes Dauntless Dominate a more valid pick than before. One thing that Dauntless Dominate offers is that it's a much safer deck to pilot, since it doesn't have to ride four times to win. While it's really good to find both of the grade 3's you need, you don't automatically lose when you find Dauntless Dominate before Dauntless Drive, which can be the case in Nouvelle Vague if you don't see Nouvelleroman Dragon.

In the end, it should always be up to the individual player to decide which deck is stronger. Nouvelle Vague's attacks can hit extremely hard, but Dauntless Dominate turns your drive checks into massive advantage swings. Both decks have their pros and cons, but it's up to you to decide what you play!

Thanks for reading this edition of Deck Check. It's a bit late due to Booster Set 14 coming out last month, but it's still a good deck to look over, especially since it has potential to do well in the metagame. As always, comments and questions go below, and once again, thanks for reading.