Game Design Article: Deckbuilding with Girl Power

Void Woman Aggro
By: Tim Frie

This Woman deck presents a fun and quick-paced aggressive deck. Woman’s signature Rupture Driver gets you back resources needed to push big damage through. Having the Nomu trait lets Woman play More…Power… more easy, allowing us to go a little more heavy on 5-difficulty attacks. You get a huge advantage from the Midoriya 4 punch package, drawing cards with Rejuvenating Smash and pushing a long and deep kill string with Repeated 100% Smash. Finally, cards like Button Collector let us keep fueling our attack turn. Feel free to poke every turn just to test the waters, but you will definitely want to be prepared to try and play 3 or more attacks for your final push for a victory.

Earth Kinoko Combo
By: Jeremy Ray

My favorite deck from Girl power is the fungus queen herself, Konoko Komori. Leveraging a ton of card advantage from cards like Battle Aura Release and Fearsome Transformations to try and keep up continued pressure and scale up her Mushroom counters at a quick and steady rate. The deck needs time to reach its full power, so I play a suite of defensive tools and tricks. From hand we rely on cards like Faith Shield and Referee Juri to catch our opponents off guard. On the board we have cards like Incredible Display and several speed reduction options to stretch our blocking options as far as we can. Once there are enough mushrooms in play, the offense solves itself, making every attack a big damage threat and turning Splitgill Lung Strike into a game ending bomb. The deck runs 4x Shroom-Shooter as my favorite combo piece, and if I can I try to have one in every opening build. It quickly helps ramp up the mushroom count, while setting up some big plays during the game. Re-readying key tools like Incredible Display, Fungus Among Us and even Komori herself when the time is right. It creates some powerful play lines and additional copies sport an excellent +1 high block so even extras don’t feel too bad.

Evil Lady Nagant Combo
By: Clint Badger

Keep the momentum flowing to dictate the pace of the game with this tempo deck!

Lady Nagant aims to keep her opponents on the defensive with a series of attacks, utilizing Echo and Lady Nagant’s form ability to keep her card pool face down for Grape-Pinky Combo Mineta Bounce and “Borrowed” Goods to keep their combo abilities live.

This deck makes great use of the foundation Showing Off, especially with Lady Nagant’s form! Did you know that 3 is greater than the sum of 0x2?

Life Ibara Aggro
By: Barrett Bryant

Ibara Shiozaki gets a huge glow up; or should I say GROW up!
Low attacks are coming back in full force with Black Abyss. This incredibly strong Ally attack is the ideal target to send to our momentum from the discard pile with Friend of Animals, or even sending it to our momentum from the card pool with Piercing Thorn Lances. With extra damage pump from Training Weights + Defiant Stance, the Life symbol is sure to be a contender in this format while also having players rethink their low block count!

Evil Shigaraki 3 Control
By: Will Howard

So you just cracked open your boxes of Girl Power and you want to really utilize these awesome new cards. What if I told you that we didn’t have to look at Girl Power for our character to play in this format? What if I told you that a certain white haired villain has been here all this time and that he is ready to use some new toys? I know I know, big shocker that I, William Howard aka CrossFate, is recommending Shigaraki 3 to everyone. I know you may be thinking “But Will, Shigaraki didn’t get a ton of cards in this set” and to that I say “no way”. Shigaraki struggles with hyper aggression, but he can also struggle with cracking giant board states. May I now show you exhibit A, Decay Awakened.

We finally have a mass destroy ability back in the format in the form of Decay Awakened. This card lets you look at these crazy walls your opponent’s build up, and just tear them down to the ground. Being that you are Shigaraki, you get to hurt their initial build turn if they check poorly, so the downside isn’t as bad when we have our character response. On top of this amazing action we also have some new foundations and attacks at our disposal. Blueflame Eruption acts as an extra filter and is another cheap low zone attack to play after our other numerous low attacks. I’ve personally always struggled a bit when looking for a low block attack for shigaraki, and now I think that slot has an easy inclusion with this new attack.

Not only do we get some new powerful attacks and actions, there are a number of foundations we can really benefit from in this deck. Condescending Explanation is the In The Typhoon replacement we have been looking for since that card rotated. We get rid of any card pool abilities the card might have, don’t have to clear the card from their card pool, and we don’t have to open ourselves up to counterplay like we do with Invincible Body (or the +4 mod). Fighting for Control is also another great inclusion to the deck. This can be the card that lets us live turn 2 because it is unconditional -2 to a check for an attack. We have always had In Control, but that only messed with throws previously. Now we can use our new foundation for any attack they throw at us.

I know I am a permanent stan for Shigaraki 3 on any of his symbols, but I truly believe he is one of the top contenders for this game currently. He rewards you on your decision making and features some of the most intractable gameplay in my opinion. As you open your packs and sleeve up your decks, consider giving him a try with your new cards available and see if you can grind your opponents down to dust