Editor: Anthony Macali. Wednesday 6th July2005.
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Editor: Anthony Macali. Wednesday 6th July2005.
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by Enchante Chang Hi Guys and the few Gals out there. I’m going to talk to you about the Kiwi creation “Kiwifruit Deck”. I will look at the processes it went through from being Modern age to Golden Age, the deck that James White, Shaun Hayward and Iain Kenderdine played at the $10K Sydney, the changes I have made to the deck and finally reverting back to modern age. First off I would like to note that Nik Smith originally started playing with
GL/EE decks, but his Kiwifruit This deck is very powerful and usually quite consistent; it has 8 ‘tutors’ and 4 Book of Oa’s to find drops from very early on. With 12 ‘2 drops’ it is almost impossible to miss it, and even if you do, on turn 3 you could play Dr.Light, use The Ring has Chosen, find Kyle Rayner, discard him and bring him back with Dr.Light and get a construct. This deck is both defensive with Guardians Reborn, Lanterns in Love, Tomar Tu and aggressive at the same time, thanks to 4 Oa’s, 2 Light Armour and 3 Battle of Wills. In the End James finished 5th, losing in the quarter-finals to Scott Smith.
Not only was Scott playing ‘Sentinels’ but it was the worst version
for the “Kiwifruit” deck in that it packed 4 Total Anarchy which
would wreck the Dr.Light engine that gives this deck it’s solid base.
James went 7-2 in the swiss. These are the match-up’s. New School: Very winnable, they rely on on-going plot twists
too much. Now the problems that I see with this deck are that there are not enough attack pumps and multiple Oa’s suck. That fact that Idiocy no longer applies and Overloads have gone away makes this deck a lot better because the non-relevant cards go and you are left with a more solid deck in general. Besides not having enough attack pumps, there aren’t any defensive pumps. In the beginning there was Cover Fire but that proved too fruitless (all pun intended) because if they knew to play around it then Cover Fire was never put into good use. Changes that need to be made: Here is my updated version GE Free Kiwi Fruit Dodge: The best defensive pump has to be added here. With
Light Armour sometimes Dodge will get you out of sticky situations and still
stun them which is great. I find this version a lot more consistent and also very aggressive. Here are some reasons for the other omissions. Scarlet Witch: Without Idiocy it just doesn’t seem that
good, there are some decks that hate his card like FF burn/combo and other random
combo decks but I would rather not play with it and those combo decks die to
multiple Breaking Grounds. As you can see the deck is mostly Modern Age except for Beatdown and Dodge. In play testing I just used them as proxies. Beatdown = No Man Escapes the Manhunters and Dodge as Helping Hand. I am finding that the Modern Age format is very fast. Helping Hand should be used early to maintain board presence or else Helping Hand won’t do you any good. No Man Escapes the Manhunters should be a 4 of as I find being able to move hidden guys is a must and because of this Krona/Sinestro isn’t as useful, maybe cards like Coast City need to be looked into and maybe just maybe a different 7 drop. I like how this deck plays out. How Kyle gains you card advantage, especially with Dr.Light. The KO effects with Remoni and Sinestro, the guy who makes your 2 drop stun their 7 drop. Hope you guys and few gals enjoyed the read. Enchante’ |
version was not as tuned as it could be as this was his
first ever attempt at building aVS constructed decks. Later Shaun wanted to
test Green Lantern Stall because our “Gamma” deck wasn’t working
out and he said that he wouldn’t be caught dead playing the purple robots
again. The next morning Shaun and James said they had a new deck; at that time
all we did was focus on beating one deck, that was ‘curve’ and we
did. The other big deck was Teen Titians and we played this many a times with
me smashing James over and over again which was very frustrating for him but
then…$10K Philly rolls around and Idiocy ruled so we had to compensate
for that match-up and the addition of 4 Breaking Ground (originally the deck
only had 1) and 3 Scarlet Witches to fight off the Idiocy deck. This in turn
made us think that Titans would not have much of a presence since it doesn’t
have a match-up against the robots and if you could not play titans well (which
is really hard to do well) then Idiocy will also smash you. Even with the BAD
match-up against Titans the Kiwi Contingent weren’t as worried as they
predicted there would not be too many Titans around. What James and Shaun were
later to find out was that before they had a fantastic match-up against sentinels,
now tuned into a 50/50 match-up because they had to compensate for the Idiocy
match-up. Here is the deck that they played at $10K Sydney.