Card of the Week: November 20th

Helldeity Seal Dragon, Crossorigin

[Stride]-Stride Step-[Choose one or more cards with the sum of their grades being 3 or greater from your hand, and discard them]Stride this card on your (VC) from face down.
[ACT](VC)[1/Turn]:[Counter Blast (1) & Choose a face down card from your G zone, and turn it face up] If you have a heart card with "Seal Dragon" in its card name, for each face up card named "Helldeity Seal Dragon, Crossorigin" in your G zone choose up to one of your opponent's rear-guards, and retire it. Your opponent reveals four cards from the top of his or her deck, and chooses a grade 2 card from among them for each unit put into the drop zone with this effect. Your opponent calls the chosen cards to separate open (RC), and shuffles his or her deck. If your opponent has two or more grade 2 rear-guards, this unit gets [Critical]+1 until end of turn.

Today's Card of the Week is the Stride unit from Fighter's Collection 2015 Winter, supporting the "Seal Dragon" deck. First off, I just want to state that I hate the name translation. The original translation, "Clothorigin," sounded a lot less try-hard, and kept with the Seal Dragon theme of being named after different types of fabrics. But aside from that, the skill isn't half bad.

Cost-wise, CB1 and a persona flip isn't hefty. Seal Dragons are a little on the CB-heavy side of things, but that could possibly change when their 2nd Fighter's Collection unit gets revealed, or maybe their playstyle will change up with the addition of this bad boy. Its also interesting to note that he doesn't necessarily require you to flip a copy of himself for his cost, but the rest of the skill essentially does.

For each copy of himself face-up in the G-zone, you retire 1 of the opponent's units. So, if he's your first stride, it would be in your best interest to flip a copy of himself, otherwise the skill just won't go off. You can end up using this guy twice, and flip a copy of himself both times for a total of 1 then 3 retires (4 in all), or use him 3 times and flip something else over the 2nd and 3rd time you stride him. That would give you 1 retire, 2 retires, then 3 retires for a total of 6 over the course of 3 turns. Generally, unless you're playing against a really grindy deck, you won't be striding that much, and it certainly won't be into this guy.

The kicker is that, after retiring these units, your opponent reveals the top 4 cards of their deck and calls Grade 2's to replace their now-empty field. The interesting thing about this skill is that, unlike the other Seal Dragon cards, his call is mandatory, so the opponent can't screw you over by not calling new Grade 2's.

But wait, "How would that screw you over?" you ask? Well, Seal Dragons have a few cards that work off of the number of Grade 2's on the opponent's side of the field. The 3rd part of this guy's skill is one such effect. Just like Georgette, if the number of Grade 2's the opponent has is 2 or more, he'll get a critical. That's scary. First off, extra criticals on first strides are incredible. If you went second, and thus were able to stride first, then you're attacking the opponent with a 2-crit monstrosity they more than likely won't be able to guard. Pushing them to 5 damage from your Vanguard attack alone is a very high possibility here. And if they do somehow manage to guard you? They've either wasted a Perfect Guard (and dropped a key combo piece or something else useful to pay its cost), or they've used up just about all the guard in their hand. Either way its a win-win for you, since you've forced a lot of cards out early, and that just gives them a really weak mid and late game.

Other skills that scale off of the opponent's Grade 2-count are Georgette or Inferno Blockade (in case you can't stride the following turn), Tarapaulin Dracokid, and Gaiserge. So Crossorigin screwing with their field scaling (I hear they like having G2 Vanguard boosters) on top of loading up the skills for the other units, makes him one Well-Rounded Randy.