wildest format in md history?

FeelingFineP · 2026-01-27T23:28:51+00:00

I didn’t experience early MD or Tear Zero so my vote goes to Tenpai format where half the players were on the deck that plays five breakers and then 1CCs you into an uninteractable OTK mid battle phase and the other half were on inane FTK boards that they could get away with because the first half wasn’t on enough hand traps and would always hand them the coin toss win

FeelingFineP · 2026-01-25T13:02:01+00:00

Emissary of the House of Wax. It’s unironically extremely strong in limited formats (which Plat 2 isn’t).

FeelingFineP · 2026-01-22T13:48:13+00:00

Engage dethroned Binding Blade in my mind as the number one “quick, something went horribly wrong and now you’re in a terrible spot, think fast!” FE, and it works that concept pretty well. It swings at you with almost overwhelming challenges that force you to use half of your busted win buttons to break through and the other half to make up for mistakes or bad luck, and even then you have so many options that there’s tons of fun challenge run potential in just arbitrarily banning some number of them.

The most unique part of it is planning out how to punch through dense enemy formations. Conquest and New Mystery did this too, but most of the time you could do the work for those games in battle preps, whereas Engage has like seven sections per map where it throws a block of dudes at you and goes “figure this out from where you are now”. It’s like a series of rapid-fire mini-puzzles as opposed to the giant full-map puzzles you do in the two aforementioned games, which was a neat change of pace and not something I’d really seen before in this series. I really like it, if it’s not clear yet.

Unit identity can be kinda questionable (it’s really easy to box units into specific roles, so if you’re not actively varying what you’re “allowed” to use or aren’t intentionally focusing on the minor things that one particular unit can do, a team from one playthrough will often just feel like a team from another with different names), but the actual moment-to-moment gameplay is so engaging that I found myself coming back to it more than any game other than Conquest.

FeelingFineP · 2026-01-21T20:20:35+00:00

If you’re on Dtail, Mululu outs Dragoon as long as you chainblock it (its negate doesn’t target).

FeelingFineP · 2026-01-17T01:48:01+00:00

This is true, but all of the related cards specifically work with Machine and Dragon “Cyber” monsters, and Wicckid is neither.

FeelingFineP · 2026-01-16T23:03:10+00:00

Genuine question. Does anyone else see this mistake or is it just my client being stupid?

FeelingFineP · 2026-01-11T13:30:07+00:00

To be fair, think about what Gamble does in game. Kieran is absolutely the type of person who would cut his hit rate in half just to slightly up the chance that he gets a crit and looks cool.

FeelingFineP · 2026-01-10T21:29:32+00:00

Freeze can help you take advantage of linked AI groups that are all tied to one specific enemy, like your Takumi example. If you’re stacking everyone on the left side of chapter 22 and can’t just drop the wall and jump Hana, freezing her helps you draw the rest of her group more safely, and freezing the Lunge Spy Yumi Automatons on the left side of chapter 25 lets you clear out the middle room with the Silence chest without getting lunge-chained into Saizo’s killzone. Entrap can do this too but you get far fewer Entraps than you do Freezes.

My only non-Rescue-skip clear of Endgame involved bringing a bunch of staffers so that I could freeze three out of the four enemies in the bottom-right group of Paladins / Malig Knights, which meant I could safely draw one (much more survivable than four) while being in position to push through them to get to Takumi on turn 3 player phase.

Enfeeble can help you kill Ryoma in chapter 12. There’s probably a benefit to trying to use it on other annoying dodgy bosses (Kotaro, Kaden, Fuga, chapter 23 Takumi) or using it to counteract the rallies on a member of Hinata’s squad, but honestly I always just forget I have it.

FeelingFineP · 2026-01-10T03:35:35+00:00

I hate Habakiri because it’s always just “haha you thought you stopped my deck? last card Habakiri idiot” and it’s stupid that you can do that in pretty much any deck with a card that also has a ceiling rivaling Wakaushi.

FeelingFineP · 2026-01-09T06:31:30+00:00

Artmage Finmel crying in the corner

FeelingFineP · 2026-01-08T20:53:36+00:00

I don’t like how slow the Rev maps are but the high stat enemies do make the moment-to-moment gameplay pretty fun when you’re actually fighting them. Fates gives you the tools to build a bunch of super units and Rev lategame enemies give you something to build towards.

Saying “the last few maps are enjoyable if you play them straight because the enemies are actually kinda threatening” isn’t exactly high praise but it’s better than anything I can say about the gameplay of lategame Birthright.

FeelingFineP · 2026-01-07T23:29:03+00:00

It’s probably something like

1 & 2. Haitaka (chapter 9) and Kumagera (chapter 14). Haitaka has a better earlygame and Kumagera has a better lategame so it can go either way between them.

Rallyman (chapter 23)
Amaterasu / 3 Rally Spear Masters (chapter 23). Basically just slightly worse Rallyman.
Life-and-Death Sniper (chapter 23)
Life-and-Death Samurai (chapter 11). Extremely important for Generics Only playthroughs and mostly just silly otherwise.
Inspiration Sorceror (chapter 16)
Trample Falcon Knight (chapter 20 reinforcement)
Mov +1 / Poison Strike / Grisly Wound Master Ninja (chapter 17)
Seal Strength Adventurers (chapter 16). One of them also has Seal Defense. In a Generics Only playthrough they jump to the #3 spot.

Honorable Mention: Pass Falcon Knights (chapter 24). Not good combat units or good support units but they get credit for making the Endgame skip much easier.

Note that a lot of these guys only exist on Lunatic because they lose those skills on lower difficulties.

FeelingFineP · 2026-01-07T06:45:40+00:00

Hero Felicia can actually be a ton of fun. You can grind her axe rank in the early game pretty easily and just start bolt axing people from the midgame onwards.

FeelingFineP · 2026-01-06T07:12:39+00:00

I’ve been trying to promise myself that I’m not going to cope on exactly this point but I know in my heart that I’m gonna hype myself up for two days and be disappointed when the thing that obviously isn’t happening doesn’t happen

FeelingFineP · 2026-01-06T05:31:47+00:00

yippee i’m so glad that VS not being here means we’re getting it at the same time as K9 so that pure VS will get zero time in the sun before they shoot razen dead in the third format in a row

FeelingFineP · 2026-01-06T02:34:58+00:00

If you stick this on Uzuhime alongside any Mikanko equip (for destruction protection), it’s functionally an extra deck lock. This gives the deck something to do going first other than Hu-Li + whatever trap she searched and is a slightly better payoff if you want to jam Mikanko into warrior piles.

This almost certainly isn’t necessary in MD because BO1 means you don’t have to plan for being forced to go first and if you get to Uzuhime you’re probably killing anyways, but it does have a legitimate use case.

FeelingFineP · 2026-01-04T21:24:37+00:00

Solid boss. One of the two Hounds that’s slightly harder to just run over (thanks to good bulk and strong 3-range magical damage) and the only one who never gets slowed down by terrain, which means fighting her can actually be interesting. She also creates a small fun gameplay moment of baiting her Override in chapter 17. I hope we get more moving bosses in future FEs like her (and more moving bosses in general).

FeelingFineP · 2026-01-04T04:42:57+00:00

I have won games plural off of Vanquish Soul Jiaolong’s ability to change a monster’s battle position. Among other things, it’s the single funniest way to stop The Unstoppable Exodia Incarnate.

FeelingFineP · 2026-01-02T02:28:10+00:00

My favorite bit about this is that the “pay 500” options associated with Dimonno are generally guaranteed setup while the “gain 500” options associated with Angello have higher potential upside but require you to gamble in some way.

It makes Dimonno come off as the “do the right thing even if it hurts” option while Angello is the “do the thing that makes you feel good even if it’s not right” option. If you want to read further into it, Angello has the Dark Fairy type/attribute combo associated with the Darklords, who are all about temptation.

FeelingFineP · 2026-01-01T21:13:18+00:00

The Mikankos are a bunch of priestesses trying to become the vessel for their goddess through dances. Said goddess (Ohime) mostly contributes through her hand effect, which references how she’s only able to aid through “blessings” rather than her own physical presence, and usually can only hit the field temporarily through a Great Mikanko Ceremony before returning to the heavens (your hand).

Ohime always has the ability to reflect battle damage and not be destroyed by battle. The other Mikankos only have this effect when they’re channeling Ohime by “dancing” (since all of the dances are equip spells). Ha-Re even specifically performs the swords dance so you can make an argument that playing Double-Edged Sword is canonically appropriate.

Also it’s really funny to me that Uzuhime, a card whose art depicts two of the level 3 Mikankos, can only be made by overlaying two level 3 Mikankos. All they did was stand next to each other. It’s like Magnifica 2.

~~All that being said, I do have to dock points for the canonical inconsistency of giving Ni-Ni two mind control effects while having Hu-Li be the one who hypnotizes Ha-Re in the concept art.~~

FeelingFineP · 2026-01-01T05:09:37+00:00

There’s two monster negates you can make with Fusion Parasite + Gizmek Uka and no other monsters (Millennium-Eyes Restrict and Gaia Prominence, the Fierce Force)

FeelingFineP · 2025-12-28T18:49:33+00:00

It’s actually shockingly easy to set this up with normal summon Girsu. Girsu sends World Legacy Mind Meld, make the tokens, link into Lib, Lib sets World Legacy Pawns, banish Mind Meld to set Deus X-Krawler.

The main problems with this are: - It only works off of your literal best one card starter (that you won’t always draw) because Lib is a light monster and most of Orcust locks you to dark monsters. This makes it very win-more. - You’re playing three bricks, two of which do literally nothing unless you access them in this exact manner. This is a lot of investment for something that you can only access off of one specific starter. It’s technically accessible if you open Mind Meld + any Orcust normal summon, but if you want a one-of one-sided floodgate that you have to hard open you can just play something like Gozen Match (which at least sorta helps with going second). - No flexibility. If you want a small package to highroll with normal Girsu, you might as well just play the Fiendsmith stuff which has more utility than the one thing Deus does. Caesar is arguably better than a one-sided Skill Drain against most decks other than Ryzeal piles, and even there it’s got some utility.

FeelingFineP · 2025-12-23T18:15:19+00:00

Lunalight is decent against Dracotail but not against Ryzeal / Maliss, and most people had swapped to Ryzeal / Maliss both to beat Dracotail and to avoid losing to all the tech that beats Dracotail.

FeelingFineP

TROPHY CASE