This round pairs me against Aether which looks like yet another daunting uphill battle from a brief overview of the current situation.
Aether has 125 cards remaining in their vault.
Last round they used the following decks:
Spoiler for Hidden:
Hover over cards for details, click for permalink
5um 5um 5um 5um 5um 61o 61o 61o 61o 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 622 622 622 622 63a 63a 7ta 7ta 808 808 808 808 80g 81q 81q 8ptHover over cards for details, click for permalink
5up 5up 5up 5up 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61q 61q 61q 61q 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 622 622 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 7td 7td 81q 8ptHover over cards for details, click for permalink
4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 55q 55q 590 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61r 61r 61r 61r 61r 61r 63a 63a 63a 77g 77g 77g 77g 7dm 7dm 8pmWhich comprises 90 of their 125 cards. 18 more are going to be from salvages. This results in 17 unknown cards. They have matches against
and
as well.
Of the decks Aether has remaining I'm fully expecting a Devtal of some sort to be used against us. Dims are going to be rampant, and we can probably expect Steals as well. Air has access to a Sanc stall and a Grabbow, Time has 2 Novabows at their disposal; it's undoubtedly their best option to use it against us.
Now, countering Devtal is going to be fairly tricky, especially if it's using Dims. Devs will drain our quanta needed to Fractal spam or Silence our way to victory, and Dims will be used with this to make sure they can't be touched by our Frogs. Silences are required. The rest is...still to be determined. Fortunately even without the event card I have access to 11 upgrades, meaning that we can get some early quanta generation from Pends to counter the Devourers. The remainder of the deck will need to be focused on our win condition, which at the present moment appears will have to be through damage alone, but there is another possibility... Our salvage against Time grants us the possibility of adding 2 Hope and 4 RoL to my deck. If we add these cards then we will be able to add deck out as a possible win condition. However, the drawbacks of using this as a strategy will be huge. For one, the odds of drawing a Hope are not good and two, if either RoL, Hope, or Fractal comes too late then we'll almost certainly get quanta denied by the Devs before we can wall them.
For now I believe that a Frogtal stripped of Dims and Lightnings which focuses solely on Fractal spamming and Silencing for victory will be needed. It's predictable, but it seems to be our best chance at the moment. But before I get ahead of myself, I should mention that Aether has the possibility of salvaging 6 Sancs and 2 Miracles from Fire and 5 Archangels from Light. Though I don't think that we'll see that from them given their current situation, it's still a considerable threat if they do use it.
I will conduct a fair amount of testing to see if any breakthroughs appear or not.
Salvages: Unless we go the RoL/Hope route against Aether we may as well just salvage all of the Aether cards from Time. At the moment they're the only cards we'll be able to use and we can convert any extra copies of what we already have as needed.
Event card: We'll probably be betting either 30 or 31 cards on this, 30 seems logical. Spare upgrades should probably go to Pends.
Final note: We're actually starting to approach the point where we're able to field 2 separate decks again during the duel phase. From a strategical standpoint it would be in our best interest to avoid this since we literally cannot have 2 separate functioning decks, so I'm going to throw out the idea of claiming no salvage for each of our duels from henceforth to prevent another Event Card like last Round's from potentially screwing us up.
