Tech Decks: Raphael, the Muscle
by Dani Diaz
Happy Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles release day! I’ve been so excited for this as a lifelong TMNT fan, and today I want to show off a cool Raphael build we’ve been working on at CwC.
https://uvsultra.online/deck.php?deck=ZhCYFYWNeZTTagjbYCgHRZLRxDdLuM
Raph is a Ninja Turtle with a scaling Speed enhance that increases as you add attack cards to your card pool. He also has a flavorful enhance that discards his entire hand to add 4 damage to any Fury move. So naturally, we’re going to lean into the great Fury attacks and value-on-discard cards featured on Raph’s Fire symbol.
Let’s jump into Raphael’s attacks!
Attack Lineup
Starting with the high-difficulty moves, we have Defeating the Colossus Titan. Raph has a large health pool which makes losing up to 5 health at a time more palatable for the speed bonus on this attack. Once we get down to below half of our maximum health, we can add 4 damage for a brutal 11 high for 10 with Powerful: 3. It works great as either a poke or a dunk, so it fits in great here.
PLUS ULTRA: Prominence Burn and Shin Hashogeki round out our 5 difficulties with similar abilities to commit out the opponent’s board. Shin Hashogeki is a bit more consistent with the discard gameplan, and discarding cards that remove for damage bonuses can make this move really scary. Both are also great momentum outs with the Powerful keyword.
For 4 diffs, we have Flashfire Fist: Hell Spider and Last-Ditch Effort. Hell Spider allows us to mill through our deck and give all of our attacks additional speed on play, which can be overwhelming combined with Raph’s speed enhance. Last-Ditch effort can pump speed and re-ready a foundation at blitz speed, which can either help with tempo or enable you to use I’m Awesome an additional time in a turn.
Rounding out the lineup are two 3 diffs: Besiege and Wish Hard. Besiege is a string ender with the most annoying Blitz in the world (This attack can only be blocked by cards with a printed block modifier of 3 or greater) and can become nearly unblockable with Raph’s speed enhance. Wish Hard synergizes with our discard abilities and allows us to redraw cards after discarding or dumping our hand with Raph’s other enhance.
Key Foundations
Since we’re on a discard-focused gameplan, most of our cards enable that in some way. We start off with perennial staple Latent Skill, which allows us to discard two and draw two. Full Focus allows a target re-ready for additional tempo with the cost of selectively discarding one card, allowing us to tailor our responses for the situation. Sacrifice for the Cause helps us pump damage while also taking advantage of our value-on-discard foundations, more commonly referred to as:
The Bing-Bongs
We are running the full suite of fire-symbol bing-bongs, including Mikasa’s Admission, Unabashed Manner, Feral Shriek, and Lust For Battle. These allow us to pump damage, draw cards, and modify our rival’s next check respectively. The suite allows for a fun-minigame of deciding when to use each card for the desired effect. The card draw is always an attractive option when using the hand discard enhance, but sometimes (like in the case of Shin Hashogeki) it’s much more advantageous to discard the damage pump cards for additional response-speed effects. Try out different combinations, your mileage may vary!
Other Card Types
On the action side, we have 2 copies of Avoiding Conflict, which serves double duty as a bing-bong and a card draw engine depending on the situation. We also have Cute Host Koto, which is tailor-made for a character that discards his hand for effects. With Koto, we can draw 3 cards at the end of our turn so we can attempt to play defense after going all in!
Backups are a hot commodity in the game right now, so I’ve included a few high-value ones on the off chance we draw into them. Grisha’s Attack Titan allows us to tutor a Fury attack from our discard for a block or a final blow, and Genghis Frog makes all of our attacks just a little scarier. Raph doesn’t have much in the way of control so a one of Splinter allows us to avoid one of our rival’s scary attacks by forcing it into their momentum.
And with that, the Raphael deck is complete! Give it a try sometime and let me know what you think! I’ll be tuning this one at locals going forward, and I’d love to hear your ideas as well. Drop them in the comments below!
Until next time, keep coping my friends!