Sunday, June 24, 2018

Today's Card Analysis: Ravenous Dragon Gigarex and Fierce Claw Dragon Laceraterex

 
The Japanese Cards of the Day for June 25th, 2018, are Tachikaze's VR and an R from V-Extra Booster 01: The Destructive Roar, Ravenous Dragon Gigarex and Fierce Claw Dragon Laceraterex.
Ravenous Dragon, Gigarex
AUTO [Vanguard Circle]: When it attacks, put up to 1 card from the top of your deck face-down as an Equip Gauge on each of your rearguards. This unit gets Power +5000 for each of your rearguards until the end of that battle.
ACT [Vanguard Circle]: [Discard 5 Equip Gauges] 3 of your front row rearguards get Power +5000 until end of turn, and if the number of cards in your opponent's damage zone is 4 or less, deal 1 damage to their vanguard.
Gigarex, at one time the inarguable worst Triple Rare in the original game, has been upgraded into an incredible boss card that acts both as an engine for their Equip Gauge-based draw skills and a means of pushing the opponent to higher damage thresholds. In combination with Sonic Noa or Savage Raider you can load a Blightops with 2 Equip Gauges using Gigarex, then retire Blightops via Noa, a rearguard Deathrex, or Refilstego, to add those 2 Equip Gauges to hand and score a +1 to +2 in card advantage depending on which unit you retire Blightops with.

While Gigarex's first skill is a setup ability, his second skill is a devastating finisher that deals direct damage to the opponent by removing your rearguards' Equip Gauges as a cost. Note that this skill isn't once-per-turn, so if you have 10 Equip Gauges in play you can deal 2 damage to the opponent and give +10k to the front row rearguards, though that's extremely hard to pull off. However, because the card does not negate the effects of the triggers damage checked in this way, the skill can backfire on you by giving the opponent more power than you gain through using it should they damage check a trigger. (Bearing in mind that triggers are +10k now and Gigarex only gives +5k.) Also note that Gigarex is designed to synergize with the additional Accel Circles as much as possible by buffing them with his second skill rather than focusing on his normal rearguard circles, and his first skill allows him to power up based on having additional Accels in play.

Fierce Claw Dragon, Laceraterex
AUTO [Rearguard Circle]: When placed from hand, you may put the top 1 card of your deck face-down as this unit's Equip Gauge.
AUTO: When retired from Rearguard Circle, [Cost: Soulblast 1] put up to 1 card from this unit's Equip Gauge into your hand.
Meanwhile Laceraterex is akin to Blightops and Raider condensed into a single grade 1, though each skill is less powerful as a result. Because you can only add a single Gauge to hand by retiring Laceraterex, he's effectively a one-for-one trade in most circumstances. Sonic Noa is the only card that can plus off of Laceraterex currently, due to itself being a one-for-one retire-draw, and with much of the Tachikaze deck known to us we probably shouldn't hope for too much more in the department of draw skills. At present there's one Triple Rare, two Single Rares, and several Common slots of the set still unfilled.

The previous Japanese Card of the Day was Spike Bouncer.

V-Extra Booster 01: The Destructive Roar will launch in Japan June 29th, 2018, and August 2nd for the English-speaking world. The accompanying new anime series, codenamed "Origin," began airing May 5th, with an English-subtitled simulcast on both YouTube and Crunchyroll.