This is the Ace list @JustinTuellmann and me cooked up for finals and both piloted to Top 8 in our pods of Flame Flame Fruit Colosseum with 7-1 scores respectively. 🔥
Let's discuss our "oddities":
• Playset Gu Ra Ra Ra - this card is unconditional "I Love You" and we have been shocked for weeks that most Ace lists have been running it at 0-2 copies, the card is completely broken. It improves the odd curve by a huge margin and enables defensive lines in the mid-game that allow us to retain higher hand size and life count before transitioning into our 10c turns. Additionally it makes us borderline unkillable once our opponent deploys a 10k body and we can play 10c for 6 while keeping up Don for (potentially multiple) Gu Ra Ra Ra.
• Whitey Bay - this card performed incredibly well over the weekend. While Namule and Rakuyo can perform a similar job while being 2ks, Whitey Bay technically doesn't lose a card from hand while doing so as we can later still use her as a 1k counter. The card has a number of concrete uses:
- good against Mihawk, Enel and Elbaph decks
- good against 3c Yamato and Gloriosa (which come up in our more difficult matchups) and any random chump blockers like 2c Ushimaru
- helps with playing around 4c discard Law
• Lucky Roux - this card is simply a consistency glue piece for the deck, it doesn't target any specific spot but is helpful with defensive stabilization and finding our important curve pieces (6c, 8c, 10c). Discarding useless copies of our top end or 4c Luffy is also effectively like drawing 2 cards for free as the brick would have been dead in our hand for the rest of the game anyways. Generating card advantage like this is something that is rather hard to come by in red decks. It can also be played in conjunction with 10c Newgate when its reduced.
• 4c Luffy at 2 - the card is good but a bit overrated in our opinion. It is great on curve against the Elbaph decks but those matchups are favored anyways and other than that its honestly hard to find a matchup where I really want to see it on curve. Its completely useless against Enel and gets rested and swung into versus Mihawk. Its also dead in hand in the late game and in contrast to our 8k bricks cannot be turned into counter via 5c Ace. At 2 we felt like we saw it consistently enough when we wanted to. If you add 7c Zoro to the list it is also wise to increase Luffy count as they synergize and can make us 9k leader.
After the amazing run on friday we gave it another shot at Finals. I unfortunately went 6-4, losing to what I think was a misplay in R2 paired with some unfortunate variance throughout the whole day. Justin ended 7-3 with a similar fate.
I do think the list can still be improved upon and the addition of the new promo 6c Ace could positively impact some matchups.
Vista was honestly kind of useless but we do need a critical mass of 8k characters to supply our effects.
Have fun trying the list and let us know how it's going! 😊