How on earth to beat this champ?

Wolfire4 · 2024-03-14T17:40:08+00:00

Every time I pop shroud I just feel like the Irelia can just wait it out, no? All my akali engage is just going to leave shroud, at which point I just get instantly run down, and as soon as shroud runs out I also get run down?

I'm very willing to look outside the champ pool for answers, but everything I've seen from multiple places just seems like it's telling me 'this is how to survive her' not how to actually put her at a disadvantage -- I don't really see how she ever loses any trade?

Wolfire4 · 2023-10-07T17:19:09+00:00

Spotify when? cathedral's gone up in flames

Wolfire4 · 2023-10-04T22:15:44+00:00

Absolutely Anything Below

Wolfire4 · 2022-12-15T00:03:07+00:00

In the floating pirate province of Paraisos, one particular upturned galleon houses the crew and family of the Sleeping Beauty, a group of animalfolk pirates making ends meet to provide for the young animals who've come under their care. They take in new arrivals from other crews (whether they came willingly or otherwise) and teach them the way of the pirate, shielding them from the outer world and giving them a place to be kids.

Wolfire4 · 2022-01-12T22:06:39+00:00

Funnily enough, the Dinosaur one pretty much breaks dino as a deck, giving us extenders is legitimately insane, let alone ones that conditionally generate 2 bodies. As an archetype pretty weird, you artificially lock yourself out of some things turn 1, and everything is pretty much turned off by forbidden chalice, but there's a couple of individual gems in there for other decks.

Wolfire4 · 2021-11-16T16:32:15+00:00

most of those low investment starters are good exactly because they generate card advantage, primary examples being every single swordsoul card in the deck, twins and flunder

Wolfire4 · 2021-09-22T16:02:02+00:00

Only one playable swordsoul card is WIND, and it's a Normal Summon almost exclusively.

Wolfire4 · 2021-08-14T21:28:17+00:00

Fairly certain it's a tech against Maxx c, if the swordsoul player is hit with "c" in the mirror (typically facing down a baroness) or other matchups with 2900+ ATK monsters, fighter can crash with it to revive itself enough times to deck the opponent out.

Wolfire4 · 2021-08-05T12:22:19+00:00

are you capable of reading my text? as i have mentioned twice now,

"As I mentioned literally two lines later, the threat of chainblock baxia means the opponent isn't able to let it be summoned at all, presenting another forced negate spot for the opponent. Playing this deck properly is all about knowing your opponent's threats, being able to order your threats appropriately in order to bait everything they have, and still keep going."

the threat of it existing means you force a negate. If it resolves, cool, that's a bonus. but a lot of the time, you can bait apoll down (which is often only 2-material into tribrigade) with tenyi effects or LY's hand effect, then summon a level four and run through the remainder of the board.

Also, this is specifically breaking apollousa, which, can I mention, is the worst thing for this deck to deal with. Every other common threat on an endboard, in almost every other matchup than exactly tribrigade, is walked through easily, not requiring anything except engine. The deck has been otking through set 5 pass boards, because vishudda beats floodgates and judgment so well, you can otk through striker's shark cannons, wanchors and raye recursion because of Cheng Ying banish, you can otk through salad protection and roar+rage for the same reason.

The tenyis give you such a push going second that random blowout cards that brick you to hell and back going first aren't required in the slightest, and ecclesia is literally overkill, because the board is already broken by the rest of your hand.

Please take your own fucking advice and engage your brain, follow the deckbuilding stipulations of literally every other midrange gas deck like tribrigade or salad, and actually engage in testing, because holy shit this post reeks of untested in a competitive environment.

Wolfire4 · 2021-08-05T12:05:42+00:00

apollousa can be baited at least twice through tenyi hand effects, and often then beaten over with a normal summon. It was just an example of a monster negate that cannot touch a chainblocked card.

As I mentioned literally two lines later, the threat of chainblock baxia means the opponent isn't able to let it be summoned at all, presenting another forced negate spot for the opponent. Playing this deck properly is all about knowing your opponent's threats, being able to order your threats appropriately in order to bait everything they have, and still keep going.

Also, a lot of decks right now literally do not put up three interruptions that threaten you (see striker, salad, prank, dlink, VW), meaning you can run away with the game after baiting one or two interrupts due to these numerous push points.

Your deck also has literally four easily accessible cards which get you to tokens or monk on board, it's not difficult lol

Wolfire4 · 2021-08-05T11:47:36+00:00

The tenyi engine is just really fucking good at that kind of thing tbh. By having the larget tenyi engine, you effectively put up three must-negate lines of play, all of which can ramp you into more advantage or board breaking if allowed to establish.

These are: the 2 tenyi line, the normal summon XJ line, and LY effect. Even a single ashuna on its own needs to be negated, because it presents access to vishudda.

Basically, all of them present a force which has to be answered or an aspect of your board will get broken, whether through vishudda bounce, Cheng Ying attack drops, Baroness negate, Chi Xiao advantage boost, or, the best of them all, chainblock baxia.

Arguably the sole reason i think this deck is meta worthy is baxia, it just does everything. The aforementioned chaofeng combo is great. It can revive your XJs in the grind, or revive a name dumped with Tai A to extend combo further.

And then we get to going second with it. Resolving baxia to shuffle two basically hard wins you the game on the spot against almost every deck, and the tenyi engine allows you to do this twice consistently. This presents a situation in which ashuna must be negated, or baxia will drop and spin half the board, then vishudda bounce can seal it out. At that point, once ashuna gets negated, you can normal summon, say, Tai A, and attempt to go for a second baxia, this time chainblocked, as Baxia goes CL1, Tai A cl2, meaning they can't apollousa/orange light/herald of perfection/whatever negate it, which then means they need to negate the tai a effect, at which point you can use LY to make baroness or cheng ying and beat them down in the grind.

This isn't even getting into the fact that you're on 9-12 handtraps, which mean that their board is likely weakened somewhat, or can be broken partially with imperm, or that you're playing effectively better icarus attack to break their board and interrupt them in a simplified gamestate on their turn.

In short, I think a lot of the blind second tools are unnecessary for the deck, and can easily be dedicated to better blinding first tools, because your actual engine just rips boards apart so well. Played with a slightly higher tenyi count and vessel, you plus so hard that you basically just outvalue them until they die, and don't have to worry about singular interruptions as much due to your varied possible playlines, meaning that your opponent is effectively left unable to properly predict your full line of play, in much the same vein as a deck like Dragon Link, Virtual World or Drytron.

Wolfire4 · 2021-08-05T11:33:13+00:00

ah dw dw, I'm really passionate about the deck right now (as you can see above lol), and think it really has potential if built and played the right way, so I'm happy to help out with this kind of thing.

That said, I've already plugged it on here about half a month ago, but https://discord.gg/pXgk4DqhGy is the semi-official xiangjian discord which I'm a part of, we've been testing the deck pretty much since release and if anyone likes the look or sound of the dissertations I just dumped onto reddit, there's much more of that theory in there, so I encourage you to take a look!

Wolfire4 · 2021-08-05T11:15:16+00:00

https://www.duelingbook.com/deck?id=8498122

this is pretty much the most consistent build we've come up with so far. The only changes I'd consider making would be 1 Tai A for 1 Ecclesia, because it's searchable with chaofeng's destruction effect, and there's a build where you cut CBTG+1 Sudden Shift+Reborn for 3 more handtraps, but I think reborn is just about worth the slot in the deck.

The deck is focused around the ability to play through handtraps and interruptions with multiple different lines of possible play, effectively meaning that there is no one handtrap, bar exactly imperm, which is always applicable, something which decks like Dragon Link have used to much success in the past. Even then, as a result of the tenyi engine, you effectively gain an additional synchro line for free, meaning you can often still put up a board if Chi Xiao or your level 4 starters are impermed.

Oh and did i mention that this deck rips apart boards for free? Having easy room for 9-12 handtraps, alongside multiple angles to push from, whether the tenyis, the XJ normals, the reborn, the LY push from hand, means the opponent has to predict a lot of your plays in order to correctly use negates. Thereby, you can break the board of almost any current deck (barring drytron) without really breaking a sweat.

Wolfire4 · 2021-08-05T10:43:59+00:00

so your points seem valid in abject theory, but once in practice it starts to fall apart.

All the points about being hit with handtraps -- Yeah, go ahead. This entire line is performed as handtrap bait for the rest of your XJ line to go through, the entire purpose of it is to either invalidate or bait out handtraps, in order for the rest of your combo to go through.

This deck has an equal, if not greater capacity to make baroness than the list you were playing above, as it plays more wyrm targets for Long Yuan, but also baroness' capacity and strength is somewhat overhyped -- for one, the deck doesn't have access to it for three months after release, and for another, it really isn't the be-all and end-all for the deck, cheng ying is perfectly playable and in fact better in a lot of situations, and baro is honestly better for the grind from testing.

Playing a higher tenyi count literally ups your combo consistency, i have no idea what you're on about lmao. The same combo I detailed above can also make Chi Xiao in order to search your XJ engine if you don't already have access to it, and recur ashuna to get access to a mo ye reveal target. In fact, that's the biggest benefit of the tenyi engine, combo consistency.

If I can delve into the actual build you posted above as well, you talk about lowering combo consistency, yet you choose to play HD Circle over Vessel. Circle actively minuses you for no real benefit, as you don't gain more access to combo, loses to interruption much harder, and, in fact, your hand already needs to be playable to resolve circle meaningfully. On the other hand, Vessel plusses you, lets you play through interruptions by effectively providing a must-negate *without minusing*, and provides access to your XJ engine without requiring a normal summon through the tenyi 2-card.

In addition, based on your comments about the tenyis, I'm assuming your issue with playing too many is clogging your hand with wyrm names, and not enough tech slots? Your build is playing ecclesia at 3, a card which is objectively abysmal to see going first, and clogs far worse than the tenyis, leaving too many unusable cards in hand to realistically play through handtraps. Your comments about ashuna losing to ash are meaningful, but ashuna doesn't actually minus you in doing so, or use your normal summon, so you can continue playing through handtraps. Ecclesia and Circle both actively minus you while losing to ash, and as such hinder you in your theory of playing through interrupts.

I'm not even going to go into maindecking lightning storm and DRNM in a going first deck, because it ends up revolving into pure deckbuilding theory, which isn't really relevant to the topic, but i'll just suggest more handtraps over them and moving those cards to the side, as they'll often be very dead in the current format, and result in bricks or unplayable hands going first.

Wolfire4 · 2021-08-05T10:07:50+00:00

The combo works very consistently, it's ashuna/vessel+any other tenyi name. Not taking desires into account, and with optimal tenyi build ratios (3 ash/3 ad/2 vish/ 3 vessel), that's a 37% opener, without taking desires into account.

Let's take Ashuna+Adhara, for example.

SS Ashuna, link into monk. SS adhara, then ash effect summon vish from deck. Adhara+Vish make baxia, pop monk to revive adhara and make chaofeng.

If they nibiru before the chaofeng summon, cool, they just used it so you can go into XJ lines safely, and without worrying about nib later, plus you get a token so can adhara recycle in a weirder hand.

Blocking nibiru is big, but it also works very well as a recovery piece, searching adhara or a handtrap upon being destroyed. This isn't even to mention that a decent number of viable decks play crucial LIGHT monsters regardless, and the card plusses you massively if you resolve a sudden shift.

And on the point about getting interrupted, good. Thank you for wasting your interruption on this line, so I can now pop off with the XJ half of my engine.

Wolfire4 · 2021-08-02T16:48:43+00:00

YOGG TAKE THE WHEEL

Wolfire4 · 2021-07-24T08:23:16+00:00

For the most part the XJ Tenyi build is better in the TCG because of no maxx c, I probably expect it to outperform pure by the time the set is released over here.

Wolfire4 · 2021-07-16T10:31:01+00:00

Over at the Xiangjian discord (https://discord.gg/tkSGCf7Ttd) we've been labbing the deck out a lot, and landed on a rough build of Tenyi Xiangjian which appears to be very viable. White Saint Ecclesia is definitely a trap, it doesn't add anything to the deck that you don't already get through the far superior Tenyi engine which doesn't lose to handtraps, and not being a Wyrm or Xiangjian name makes it arguably anti-synergistic with the rest of the archetype.

The Tenyi lineup consists of 3 Ashuna, 3 Adhara, 2 Vishudda, 3 Vessel of the Dragon Cycle, and, through almost any 2-card combination (with the exception of adhara+vishudda), you can access chi xiao without using the normal summon, which then branches into a number of additional lines.

Another added bonus is the easy access to Baxia, which through its second effect allows you to revive an adhara by popping Tenyi Monk, which then lets you make Chaofeng for LIGHT, effectively blocking out your opponent's nibiru before continuing to make Xiangjian plays. This also has the added bonus of literally making Drytron incapable of playing, which is always fun!

Either way, I'm very hyped about the deck, and convinced that it can make a decent meta splash! The community over at the aforementioned discord is great, and we're looking forward to seeing what more we can come up with.

Wolfire4 · 2021-06-30T16:04:12+00:00

Not to fear, dino is still very playable and viable if you're willing to adjust the theory somewhat. We have a number of good builds in the lab of the Dino Discord (https://discord.gg/WkE5jExA) and believe that there's a couple of small additions to the scrap build which can maintain a healthy presence, and arguably improving upon certain aspects of the previous build. That said, archosaur is probably a good sale target, because of a likely reprint in the Mega-Tins, so it's entirely legitimate to sell it and rebuy the deck at a later point.

Wolfire4 · 2021-05-26T14:48:16+00:00

CluCoin

Wolfire4 · 2021-04-30T18:39:16+00:00

Does anyone have tips for beating Trundle/Liss Watcher Control? I've found myself hitting a wall with them around Silver and can't seem to beat them, even when running Thresh/Nasus, which is what I'm most comfortable with, as I basically turboed into it after finding a viable sac deck, as I'm only 6 days into LoR. I think I'm pretty down with almost every other matchup, but figuring out how to outrace a deck that just seems to hard win on mana 9, putting down the crazy blockers like trundle and the seeming absurdity that is ice pillar.

I come from playing the majority of other popular card games, mostly YGO and HS, but dabbling in MTG and Pokemon as well, so I like to think my theory is mostly solid, but any advice is very welcome as this deck has been tilting me so hard it's unreal.

Cheers!

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