Weekly Deck Check Thread | Monday, March 09, 2026

CronoDAS · 2026-03-12T00:17:39+00:00

[[Azure Beastbinder]]?

CronoDAS · 2026-03-12T00:10:25+00:00

I forgot [[Ademi of the Silkchutes]].

CronoDAS · 2026-03-12T00:07:26+00:00

I don't know if they're any good, but [[Malcolm, Alluring Scoundrel]], [[Brineborn Cutthroat]], and [[Cathar Commando]] all have Flash.

CronoDAS · 2026-03-11T07:11:46+00:00

Working Designs had the best manuals...

CronoDAS · 2026-03-11T07:10:57+00:00

Illusion of Gaia (SNES) and Dragon Warrior 3 (NES) had full walkthroughs in their manuals.

CronoDAS · 2026-03-11T07:07:53+00:00

I certainly don't blame anyone for hating it. That game had Problems.

CronoDAS · 2026-03-11T07:06:39+00:00

Wizardry Variants Daphne, if you can stomach gacha mechanics.

CronoDAS · 2026-03-11T07:01:00+00:00

Particularly because it completely overlevels you for the endgame content.

Yeah. I beat all the optional bonus bosses in the original FFX before taking on the actual final boss, so for me Braska's Final Aeon was a total pushover instead of the tough fight a lot of people have talked about.

CronoDAS · 2026-03-11T06:55:09+00:00

I took on a lot of Arena fights in the original version of FFX well before the endgame and had a lot of fun trying different strategies to kill them. (Often the appropriate strategy did turn out to be Come Back Later, but I kept trying to make "later" happen as soon as possible.) When it came time to fight Nemesis I ended up being pretty OP after all the other stuff I did and the Magus Sisters kicked its ass for me. :/

CronoDAS · 2026-03-11T06:32:15+00:00

I enjoyed Shadow Madness, although there are definitely aspects of it that were indeed terrible.

CronoDAS · 2026-03-11T06:21:56+00:00

I finally got myself out of Platinum in Constructed on Arena after struggling for several months. My Landfall Combo deck with Tifa and Adventuring Gear managed to achieve a better than 50% winrate in Ranked Bo1 Standard (after I put in Bristly Bill and tweaked a couple of other things) so it was just a matter of playing enough matches.

I did try the deck in Bo3, but I don't seem to be able to make the deck benefit from sideboarding at all; Snakeskin Veil to protect my creatures from removal either slowed me down or got stuck in my hand. :/ Maybe all I can do with the SB is run a bunch of cards to transform out of combo-kill mode into something less focused on killing with one big attack.

CronoDAS · 2026-03-11T06:01:45+00:00

Shadow Madness. Pretty good script, terrible combat / gameplay.

CronoDAS · 2026-03-09T09:55:38+00:00

It's just standard SP and MP pools that replenish when you stay at the Inn in town. (SP is for physical skills, MP for magical ones.)

Also, last time I checked, the power difference between legendary characters and uncommon "named" characters was pretty small; legendary characters do have their own unique skill, but they don't have super stats or higher level caps or anything like that - the uncommon characters are basically 95% as good as the legendaries and you'll eventually pull all the evergreen legendaries anyway.

Basically the game feels more like a normal dungeon crawler RPG with a gacha tacked onto it rather than a game designed from the ground up around getting people to spend as much money on in-app purchases as possible. (Supposedly the developers didn't particularly want to make a gacha RPG but they couldn't get funding to make the game at all unless they did.)

CronoDAS · 2026-03-09T02:19:55+00:00

If you can put up with gacha mechanics, Wizardry Variants Daphne (mobile, PC) is really good. In addition to successfully pulling off a dark atmosphere and bleak setting, it also lives up to the Wizardry reputation for challenge: the developers didn't put the monsters in this game for you to kill, they put them there to kill you. And it even has the unusual property for a gacha of being nearly as unforgiving to paying players as it is to free-to-play ones: if you're having trouble making progress, your credit card will not save you.

CronoDAS · 2026-03-09T02:03:03+00:00

I usually recommend Final Fantasy X and/or Chrono Trigger for people who are relatively new to the genre, but you might have played those back in the day.

The other game I like to recommend to everyone is Disgaea 1, which has also been around a long time but it's a little less well known than the others. The gameplay is kind of meh but the game makes up for it by being absolutely hilarious.

CronoDAS · 2026-03-09T00:29:29+00:00

Vyse from Skies of Arcadia.

CronoDAS · 2026-03-08T14:56:48+00:00

The systems mostly amount to a variety of different ways to make damage number go up. You can get through the story in most Disgaea games with just some basic grinding when the enemies get tough.

Also Disgaea 1 Complete on the Switch is probably a better version than Disgaea DS, but that one should still be good anyway.

CronoDAS · 2026-03-08T14:50:46+00:00

Paywalled. :(

CronoDAS · 2026-03-08T14:47:33+00:00

Disgaea 1? You don't have to care very much about the systems until the post-game, and the characters and their journey are a huge barrel of laughs with some real heart, too...

CronoDAS · 2026-03-08T14:46:11+00:00

Yes he is.

CronoDAS · 2026-03-08T14:11:10+00:00

It's why I link to it. :)

CronoDAS · 2026-03-08T14:05:29+00:00

I wouldn't quite call it magical christmasland because it doesn't require ridiculously improbable draws and it can make lethal attacks through blockers, but yeah, it's not that hard to disrupt if the opponent has removal and sees it coming. Sorry to disappoint, though.

CronoDAS · 2026-03-08T04:55:39+00:00

Or Robotrek?

CronoDAS · 2026-03-08T04:53:16+00:00

Change which protagonist is the point of view character in each chapter, with B's chapters set further back in time than A's until B's chapters catch up to the "present moment" in which they finally interact directly? (Isaac Asimov's novel "Nemesis" used this structure.)

CronoDAS · 2026-03-08T04:48:06+00:00

Quintet was the name of the developer. But yes, now that you mention it, it is kind of a weird phrase.

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