Tech Decks: Hange Zoë
by Richard Bernard
Howdy gamers, and welcome to my first article for Tech Decks. This article series will touch on decks that I think are super spicy and can hold their own against Meta Monsters or are a Meta Monster themself. Our first character that we will touch on is a personal favorite that I have been gearing up for the upcoming Louisville Regional, Hange Zoë.
Hange is a 31 Health and 6 Hand Size, Life and Fire character from Attack on Titan’s first set, Battle for Humanity. Their abilities are all statics, meaning that they are always active unless they are sealed. Their first ability allows us to start the game with a 4 difficulty Titan backup already built into our stage, which until recently had some very lackluster options. With the addition of The Nine Titans from throughout the Ages, Hange has become less of a niche pick and more of a meta monster. While also being able to build in a copy of Nine Titans for free, they also defend them. All of your backups with difficulty 4 cannot be attacked. This means that very few things can take out your copies of Nine Titans. Their final static allows us to commit one backup per check to help us in passing them, this is similar to what Mimic does with assets. Unlike Mimic, we pump our attack’s speed by 2 when committing a backup, rather than giving or reducing damage.
This build is going to be focusing on the Life Symbol with the deck split into four parts: Enablers, Defense, The Combo, and Sneaky Wins. Let’s jump right in to the Enablers.
The Enablers
The first of our enablers is Beast Titan Attacks. Our highest difficulty attack is also one of our greatest enablers -though not as an attack. While the front side of this card can be quite useful (becoming a possible 16 damage or higher throw), the backup side is what helps make our game plan consistent. The ability we’re interested in here is the first one, which allows us to snag a Ranged attack out of our discard pile to our hand. While our deck has 2 Ranged attacks, we will almost always be picking up The Beast Titan’s Rock Barrage; more on this card in The Combo section.
Our second major enabler is Grisha’s Attack Titan, a 2 difficulty backup which allows us to sacrifice it at Form speed and pick up a Fury attack from out discard pile. The deck only runs one Fury attack for us to pick our of our discard pile: Titanpile. We will also go over this card in The Combo section.
The final card in our Enablers category is The Manipulations of Zeke Yeager, an expensive 5 difficulty foundation lets us Mill 1 every attack and if the card milled is a Ranged or Titan card, we add it to our hand. While this card is expensive in difficulty, we can always guarantee it passes if we are on the draw, making it an effective tool for hand sculpting and defense. With the way the deck is built, Manipulations should get a hit about 56% of the time, which is fairly consistent all things considered. Next on the docket, let’s lean into our defensive capabilities.
The Defense
Our defense will be split into 2 minor subsets, as well as one card that doesn’t fit into either niche. That card is Filled with Doubt. This card exists for one purpose and one purpose only: to disrupt our opponent’s game plan and to protect our backups from Violent Animus Shot. I guess that’s two reasons? Whatever. Anyways- the subsets of Defense are Damage Reduction and Speed Hate.
Damage Reduction
Our Damage Reduction (DR) cards do just that, reduce our opponent’s damage. These cards include Nine Titans for its -4 damage at response speed, Titans Under Orders for its -3 damage (which can be used twice), Loyalty of a Friend for it’s -1 damage for each backup in our stage (usually averaging -5 throughout the game) and lastly Hitch Dreyse, for another -5 damage (if we have 5 backups, that can also be +5 damage when need be). Another card that helps in our DR game plan is Frantic Rescue. This makes our opponent’s attacks more expensive for the turn whenever we take an unblocked attack. This allows us to hopefully slow down our opponent’s attack turn to a halt.
Speed Hate
Our other defense game plan is Speed Hate- this is intended for the attacks that are just uneconomical for us to DR in order to block them. These cards are Dramatic Exit, which gives minus speed per backup in our stage +1, or gives speed for the same amount. In practice, this card feels a lot like one of my favorite cards in Retro: Wisdom of Castor! The last speed hate card is Resting Up, a card that gives -2 speed, or -3 speed if our character is committed. Since our character has only static abilities we’re completely free to commit them to make the most of this ability! In fact, we’ll almost always commit them to boost our offensive checks by the time we get to our opponent’s turns, making Resting Up a freebie in this list. Concluding our defense category, we move on to the bread and butter: the Combo.
The Combo
Our main combo in this deck is consistent and leans into a 3 attack string. We start with Unyielding Destruction to destroy both stages down to 4 foundations. (We don’t mind this as much as we can commit a backup for each check!) Then, we play Beast Titan’s Rock Barrage. (Don’t forget we can pick this up with The Beast Titan!) This attack allows us to effectively Stun 2 and target commit another of their remaining four foundations, as well as build in a non-unique backup from our discard pile depending on the situation. However, for the combination here, our primary options will be Grisha’s Attack Titan or Nine Titans. Grisha’s allows us to pick the final piece of the puzzle out of our discard pile, giving us some extreme flexibility in finding the exact combo pieces we need to see. This attack, as mentioned earlier, is Titanpile. Titanpile is an attack that gains damage based on how many Titan backups are in your stage and even only four, this attack can get very scary at 12 damage, and it gets even spookier with Nine Titans. The flexibility is near endless. There will be some match-ups where the combo is more difficult to pull off, so we have our next category, Sneaky Wins, to help us eek out games when the combo just isn’t feasible.
Sneaky Wins
The first of sneaky win cards is Falling Titans. This card can essentially be played once per backup we have in our stage. Therefore, if we have 5 backups, we potentially have 30 damage through just this one attack after it is played multiple times. The foundation it builds down into is also helpful and allows us to re-use our Nine Titans or other backups when needed by healing their stamina by 10, which is always full health.
The last of our sneaky win cards is Harness Undeath. This card can completely steal games, especially against other backup decks. This attack can burn out opponent for each backup in each of our discard piles, not to mention it can also give itself Echo (and thus increasing the burn it can do) by sacrificing one of our own backups, forcing our opponent to either hold an answer for it, whether it be two low blocks or a seal/anti-burn effect. This means one less thing for our Titanpiles to worry about.
At the end of the day, this deck is an absolute blast and is quite competitive. It took Hange some time to get going in the meta, but if there was ever a time, it’s now. Down below is a link to the list. Feel free to comment below if you have your own ideas with Hange or if you try the list, let us know how it went! Thank you for reading and as always, Stay Curious and Keep Coping!
https://uvsultra.online/deck.php?deck=aBNhxHbNWBNtynWVlpJkhWViGPVWtt