TAK Games > Regionals Deck Analysis #3 | Nash’s Red Piccolo

Regionals Deck Analysis #3 | Nash’s Red Piccolo

Nash fights it out on Table 2 with Red Piccolo.
Nash fights it out on Table 2 with Red Piccolo.

Before taking a look at the remaining regional winner decks (Nathan W.’s Orange Krillin and Carl’s Namekian Piccolo), we wanted to highlight a regional finalist’s deck showcasing some of the versatility in deck choices available in the meta environment.

Nathan Ash – Red Piccolo

Nash piloted Red Piccolo all the way to a Top 4 showdown and proved Piccolo isn’t just a one trick pony with a Namekian deck. It is true, however, that some of the synergy between Piccolo’s personality powers and an MPPV victory remains just as valid in Red style as it does in Namekian. But the Red varient utilises some burst anger that only Tenshinhan can reliably match.

Piccolo does some great work from level 2 to 4, and uses those powers to his advantage to max out his anger either by directly using a critical damage effect or giving Piccolo the tools to generate one through damage. His only drawback in Red is his Level 1. With no anger gain other than cards drawn, this can sometimes leave Red Piccolo vulnerable early game. By maxing out on Red’s cards that gain 2 anger with secondary or hit effects, this helps to mitigate some of those problems.

I’m particularly impressed by the use of the sole Red Tactical Drill in the deck. On face value this might seem like wasted space, but when you team it with Red Stop which can grab the drill back to potentially help conserve anger it can put in some great work. This also adds to the flexibility of the defensive package in the deck. A vulnerability present is the reduced amount of pure energy blocks in the deck, which leaves you open to having your anger reduced via critical damage effects generated by your opponent’s energy attacks. Red Energy Defensive Stance is the favoured second energy block I see in most Red decks to help with anger.

Red Tactical Drill
Red Tactical Drill keeps you angry. Grrargh!

Having the Dragon Balls in deck as well to give a back up win condition is a great part of this deck. By making your opponent choose between you keeping your anger, or keeping your Dragon Balls, you keep some of the power on your side of the table.

The attacks used in the deck are all very solid. By focusing on using a majority of physical attacks to gain anger, you leave your opponent unable to stage lock you into not being able to play your attacks. When teamed with physical blocks being slightly less prevalent in the environment, it gives the deck some great tools to press on with a Survival Victory if it catches someone unprepared to halt the chain of attacks Red has the potential of bringing to the table.

With only 14 cards in the deck that can’t be used during the defender phase, it represents a good balance to help ensure you can pin your ears back and go for your wins either as the attacker or defender in most draw phases. And with multiple ways to help cycle cards in and out of your hand, the deck shouldn’t be as susceptible to bricked hands like some other Red decks can be.

If I was looking at this deck for ways to improve it, I would like to see cards like Red Left Bolt or Red Heel Kick added into the mix to help keep combats going. The longer you keep your opponent in combat, and generating anger through critical damage effects or pure secondary effects the better. Both these cards offer you ways to keep setting up your combats. Red Left Bolt isn’t going to get you the same value in Piccolo as it would in a Tenshinhan build, but you can always make sure that the card on the bottom of your deck is going to keep the anger train rolling.

These types of decks add some great variety to the meta, keeping everyone honest in their own deck building to be mindful of a burst anger deck that they might not see coming. As Nash showed, you can get some good success with Red in a meta that might be expecting more of the usual players in Ginyu, Krillin and Namekian Piccolo.

Good luck and game on!

– Trent (@TAKGames_Trent) and Kyp (@justkyp).

Regionals Deck Analysis #2 | Dave T’s Namekian Piccolo | VIC Regional Champion

Trent continues his regional deck analysis series with Dave’s winning Namekian Piccolo deck from the Victorian regionals.

Dave T’s Namekian Piccolo

Vic Regionals - David T.All day I was glued to Twitch watching the Victorian Dragon Ball Z Regionals unfold. I was impressed at the meta choice of Namekian Piccolo considering the field. Namekian had strong match ups against a good majority of what was on offer to play so it wasn’t surprising to see three make it to the Top 8.

After watching South Australian players David T. and Matt B. pilot this particular deck, I was interested to see the final list. There are a number of strong choices made in both the cards utilised and the numbers in the deck. Given Matt B’s record in the Score Dragon Ball Z game, it was no surprise to see a multi-victory deck sported by Team South Australia. Having a backup victory condition helps to keep your opponent guessing with the cards they need to keep and how to best utilise them throughout the game.

The thing most people would find surprising is the amount of “1 of” cards in the deck. But such is the nature of Namekian. It can get away with this easily, giving the pilot the choice of cards they need to retrieve with searchers like Namekian Overtime, and selective rejuvenation late game to increase the chances of use. But, the flip side of this also means that should your opponent lock you down on both MPPV and DBV, you’re going to have to grind out the long game if these cards are removed either through Endurance or by other means.

The rest of the deck is fairly standard Namekian Piccolo that we have seen through Set 1 and 2. The block package is fairly standard, except for the choice of Namekian Stance as the second pure energy block. This does help in the match ups like Ginyu and other more aggressive decks, obviously to help protect your anger and Dragon Balls.

One setup present in the deck that I haven’t seen a lot of players use is Namekian Concentration. Teamed up with Namekian Growth, there is some serious rejuvenation that a lot of beatdown victory decks would find hard to overcome. Since the deck may be a little vulnerable to removal of other win conditions, this helps with the long game. Since Namekian would hardly be an aggressor, passing combat just helps feed Namekian Concentration and adds to the annoyance the deck creates for aggressive builds.

The list is very solid, without being too focused in any one direction. It will be interesting to see if a further tweaked version of this deck is played at Nationals to continue with the Namekian renaissance.

Game on!

– Trent (@TAKGames_Trent).

 

Regionals Deck Analysis #1 | Daine B’s Black Ginyu | QLD Regional Champion

We are now at the halfway mark through the Australian regionals season, and with Nationals on the horizon, Trent analyses the decks that have won so far in Queensland and Victoria. Both decks showcased the strength of Ginyu and Piccolo against the vast majority of decks making up the metagame down under.

Daine B.’s Black Ginyu

This deck moved through Swiss by the barest of margins, scraping in to 8th spot. From there, Ginyu showed the way he is able to dominate other decks through sheer weight of numbers in actions per combat.

Daine played a very aggressive game in the majority of match-ups. When he was fishing out allies with his level 1 power he would continually go for allies like Jiece to keep the pressure on his opponents. In most matches, this did him little disservice overall, but against Namekian and Blue nabbing Frieza or Nappa might be better tech.

Black Swirl provides so much return for so little cost.

The choices in energy combat cards are very strong. You would have to go a long way to argue about dropping any of these cards. Black Swirl is a card I see too few of in many Black decks and it gives you so much for so little. Being able to deny a potential block, or prevent a crucial card being played against you can be a huge plus. Withering Fire bridges a small gap in Black’s arsenal by providing a way to deal with drills from Orange and Blue.

All in all, the deck is extremely solid. If I could pick one thing I would change about the deck is that it doesn’t have a solid way of levelling on a consistent basis. There are cards like I’ll Dig Your Grave! but sometimes it is not optimal to use the hit effect when the Black style doesn’t deal well with MPPV. With lots of decks being able to generate critical effects, being able to get to Ginyu level 2 is crucial to retaining your board control. I would really like to see the inclusion of Black Overhead Burst for extra anger. How I would fit this in, and my second improvement I would suggest, is reducing circumstantial cards like Black Scout Maneuver and Wall Breaker. Both offer some solid tech, but running three of means that you will be running into these cards more often, and sometimes they can clog up your hand when you’d rather be laying down another heavy attack.

Daine had a great deck choice and piloted it well to the end of a long day.

Victorian Dragon Ball Z Regionals Report

Vic Regionals - Khalil K.With a very even showing from Black, Blue, Namekian and Red styles, the Victorian regionals bought together play groups from two different states for a tournament meta mash-up. What would prevail?

The following counts on styles was seen:

Black Mastery – 11
Blue Mastery – 12
Namekian Mastery – 10
Red Mastery – 10
Orange Mastery – 4
Saiyan Mastery – 4

After six brutal rounds of play, the following players emerged for our Top 8 cut. Deck lists are linked below:

Nathan F – Blue Wheelo
Kuan-Ju L. – Black Ginyu
Nathan A. – Red Piccolo
Daniel S. – Black Krillin
David T. – Namekian Piccolo
Shaun D. – Namekian Piccolo
Fahad R. – Black Krillin
Matthew B. – Namekian Piccolo

Following the first round of finals, the top 4 showdown featured a battle to represent home states in the final as South Australians Matt B. and David T. faced off in a 100% mirror match while Victorians Nathan A. and Kuan L. battled for dominance.

Ultimately Kuan and David prevailed to make it into the Top 2, where David won with a convincing 2-0 victory, winning first by anger, then by Dragon Ball victory to prove the Namekian triple threat remains a strong contender post set-3.

VIC Regionals - Matt B. Vic Regionals - Kuan L. Vic Regionals - David T. Vic Regionals - Alex Vic Regionals Vic Regionals - Tobye R.  Vic Regionals - Nathan F. Vic Regionals - Shaun D.

2015 Victorian Dragon Ball Z Regionals

The Victorian Dragon Ball Z regionals are underway with 51 Z Warriors travelling from far and wide to battle it out for ultimate victory!

Today’s event ended up with the following counts on Mastery types:

Black Mastery – 11
Blue Mastery – 12
Namekian Mastery – 10
Red Mastery – 10
Orange Mastery – 4
Saiyan Mastery – 4

Today’s regional event is hosted by Guf Ballarat and is streaming live on twitch.tv.

Feature matches today include:

Round 1: Tobye R. vs Jye W.
Round 2: Aaron B. vs Ryan H.
Round 3: Tobye R. vs Shirlene L.
Round 4: Kuan-Ju L. vs Daniel S.
Round 5: Kuan-Ju L. vs Shaun D.
Round 6: Kuan-Ju L. vs Matt B.

ROUND 3 UPDATE

The players have broken for lunch after round 3. We currently have 7 players undefeated.

Shaun D.
David T.
Tobye R.
Kuan-Ju L.
Daniel S.
Tyson M.
Matt B.

ROUND 5 UPDATE

We currently have 2 players undefeated moving into Round 6.

Kuan-Ju L.
Matt B.

TOP CUT UPDATE

After 6 rounds of swiss the field has been cut down to 8 players moving into the knockout rounds. Piccolo Namekian has made a strong showing after seeing very little action in other regionals around the world. In no particular order, we have the following players and decks:

Nathan F. – Blue Wheelo
Kuan-Ju L. – Black Ginyu
Nathan A. – Red Piccolo
Daniel S. – Black Krillin
David T. – Namekian Piccolo
Shaun D. – Namekian Piccolo
Fahad R. – Black Krillin
Matthew B. – Namekian Piccolo

FINAL UPDATE

Congratulations to David T. who piloted Namekian Piccolo to a 2-0 victory over Kuan-Ju’s Black Ginyu deck in the final. A big thank you to all who participated and we look forward to seeing some of you in Newcastle at Good Games next week!