A Billion Cheetahs

Sometimes I wonder if I should've just waited to do this series once I had unlocked all the cards, but given that it's the year of our lord 2020 *checks calendar* chapter 3 and I'm still not done, this would have never been posted. This character is one such person, as the healing pack is endgame material (because LP gain is famously OP in Yugioh). Tagforce 1 #36: Marcel Not to be confused with Marcel Bonaparte, the weird French kid who was possessed by Yubel because they were sick of how French he was. He isn't in this game. The Marcel from the show didn't make an appearance in the show until A Jewel of a Duel: Part 1, which aired in America after Tagforce 1 came out. Them having the same name is just a coincidence because why would the people dubbing the show care about a video game. The Marcel I am going to talk about is also a Ra Yellow student and is notably less French. Marcel has a very standard schedule, heading to class early and he heads back to the Ra Yellow Dorm after school. However, what's interesting is that in both cases he is standing right next to the teacher in the area (Crowler in the Classroom, Sartyr at the dorm). From this and his deck choice, I imagine that Marcel is the teacher's pet. Always on his best behavior and excelling at all of his classes. He gets confused by Jaden and Bastion referring to each other as #1 and #2. (It means that Jaden is peepee and Bastion is poopoo.) He also has this line when you beat him in a duel. Thanks, Marcel. There isn't really much else to say about him. With such little dialogue in the game, it is difficult to discern his entire character. Right now, I'm convinced that his personality is that he goes to class. The main appeal to Marcel isn't his character though, it's his deck (this comes off as weird as the line about how I creamed him). Marcel runs Agents in the first form, which focused on creating a LP gap between you and your opponent so that you could achieve big numbers on either Mars or Saturn's burn. I think he's one of the best Ra Yellow duelists in the game, even though he has no answer for Marshmallon or Spirit Reaper. He also has the only healing deck in the game that actually tries to win instead of sit around. He can tutor up his own Marshmallon or a surprise Mars with Shining Angel, which is pretty nice for consistency but as an AI this usually means you get to attack an Attack-Positioned Marshmallon several times if you know that it's coming. He can't float into Kelbek since it's EARTH, but Kelbek is still pretty good at buying him some extra time or clearing up the board for a sudden Mars kill. Nimble Momonga is here for the reason it's in any other deck: healing and potential Tribute fodder. It's one of the best heals in this game because he can gain up to 3000 LP while blocking up to 3 attacks, then on top of that you're also thinning your deck. The Agent Mars/Saturn win condition is ok I guess. If he's able to be more aggressive than your opponent or if you manage to find an early heal you can leverage that into a monstrously good Mars. Saturn is less useful until it becomes time to go for the win since you need to Tribute Summon it and it's just a 2400 vanilla until It's Time to Tribute It. But on the other hand, if you are quickly overwhelmed and can't possibly have more LP than your opponent, then you're just fucked. Both Mars and Saturn are dreadful when you're losing. Zolga has some decent ATK, and the 2k healing when you Tribute it is... there. This is definitely the place for it, but it's just such a meh card. Celestial Transformation lets him toss a Saturn onto the board, which is really nice. Lets him do a double Saturn burn for game, except his AI isn't smart enough to go for that. He won't ever Tribute Saturn unless the one Saturn can kill you. So this is just a dead card for him even though it's pretty good here. Cestus of Dalga is a card that seems like it would be great here, but I think it's underwhelming tbh. It only boosts the monster's ATK by 500, which is pretty low for an Equip. The healing is nice but this is usually only by a small amount. It does mean that if the equipped monster manages to score a direct attack then Mars/Saturn becomes very threatening, but he's just not aggressive enough for this to happen very often. Giant Trunade and Heavy Storm lets him clear up backrow for a game-winning push with Mars or Saturn, though Marcel's AI likes to use these spells much earlier than he needs to. Another bad thing about the Agent wincon is that Sanctuary in the Sky just sucks. The damage prevention is useful for maintaining your lead over your opponent's LP, but if you are losing monsters to attacks then you're still very much in trouble. The best thing about it is that he can float his Shining Angel into Marshmallon and not have to worry about taking any damage. Ceasefire and The Spell Absorbing Life are pretty nasty for being able to nullify Flip Effects, not to mention the damage/healing they do helps Marcel out a ton. The AI waits for a threshold of monsters on the field before playing these, which is fair and all, but I've seen times where I would Heavy Storm him and he refuses to chain either of these cards because it just isn't worth gaining 400 LP even when he's about to lose that card. Draining Shield is annoying. Stopping an attack and gaining 2000+ LP is really good for him. Marcel needs a win condition that isn't Agent Mars or Saturn, something that helps him out when he is behind. I think that replacing one or two copies of Zolga with Mudora, which can get some respectable ATK once he gets a few Fairies into the GY. He should also run Magic Cylinder since it's a Draining Shield that gets you closer to victory rather than further away from defeat. There are probably some other fixes that could be made to his deck but I would need access to his heals in order to playtest for myself. Marcel gets a 4/10 from me. As a character he's just there, strangely close to teachers all the time. But his deck is pretty decent and cool.

I'd say I'm excited for this next character but April Fools already passed. Tagforce 1 #35: Maki Maki is one of the academy's few female students, and as such you can expect to find her in places that would make sense for an Obelisk Blue girl to be. In Maki's case, you can find her at *squints* *continues squinting* *raises eyebrow slightly* the boys dorm all day long. When you go to ask her "What are you doing at the Obelisk Blue boys dorm? I think this might be slightly illegal?" She dodges the question by talking about someone living in the forest. As you can see, she's very good at changing the topic abruptly. She goes from talking about Damon to immediately accusing you of being a criminal for reasons that our top scientists are trying to figure out. As you can tell from that final line, yep, Maki is one of them. A tsundere. In addition to this being such a tired trope, it also means that everything she says is said in multiple dialogue boxes. She talks so damn much. Wao look at this crybaby I don't like this character, and unlike Maki my dislike is genuine. Interacting with her in any way leads to her being a tsundere for multiple dialogue boxes. She isn't a baka (entertaining), she's a baka (annoying). Don't be any kind of dere to me, please and thank you. The one saving grace of this character is that her deck is actually pretty good. She uses Giant Germ, Mystic Tomato, Newdoria, and Sangan for Creature Swap, getting a very good deal much of the time since she still benefits when those cards are destroyed. If you think of trying something similar with your own floaters, then she can counter that with Dark Ruler Ha Des. And if you try to summon a monster stronger than Ha Des, she can counter that as well, not only with the Creature Swaps, but with her traps and with Megamorphing a Slate Warrior/Goblin. Her ability to counter backrow is pretty much the standard, but she does run Giant Trunade which the AI seems to use pretty well. They're not the best with it, but they won't Trunade the first chance they get usually. The only change I can think of would be to replace a Ha Des with Great Maju Garzett because this deck could get a pretty strong power spike with it and Creature Swap. Maki gets a 3/10. Her deck is really good and her lines can be slightly funny, but I just don't like this trope.

Wow where in the world have I been. It's been over two months since my last entry! Like, I've been here this whole time, just in a permanent state of Not In the Mood to Do Anything Ever Again. Then Master Duel came out and I got carried away with that. It's cool and pretty, but it is severely lacking in good single-player content. It's kinda weird putting single-player content in a multiplayer game like Yugioh but they've kept doing it for all these years and I really appreciate it. So hopefully they do more with the single-player in that game, or else it's back to Duel Links for me. Another thing, this blog has broken 10k views! Sure, most of them are from me or are from bots, but it's still pretty cool that this has happened. So here's the next duelist, a tree. Tagforce 1 #34: Loggy I imagine that his parents are named Trent and Camellia. Loggy can be found at the Main Gate during the mornings before class, and afterwards can be found at the Slifer Red dorm. These are generic placements for him but I think it serves his character well. Loggy is new to Duelist Academy, probably even being the newest student to enroll before you came along. He's also new to Yugioh in general, making rookie mistakes such as overloading his deck. That second image was a waste of a textbox. Could've easily merged 2 and 3 into one textbox but nooooooooooooooo. This tip seems obvious but it really isn't to people new to card games. I know that I used to make the same mistake when I was a tiny, insufferable child. Even as a medium, still insufferable adult I still have issues convincing myself to trim down on deck size in rougelike card games such as Slay the Spire and Monster Train. (Both of which are incredible games that I cannot possibly recommend enough. Seriously, check them out if you haven't already.) There is also a sense of camaraderie that he feels towards his fellow Slifer Red students. He's more willing to duel you than someone from another dorm. Loggy, to me at least, comes off as someone with stars in their eyes. He's excited about this new hobby and is only coming to terms with how difficult and serious Yugioh actually is (at least in this universe where card games save the world). It isn't a particularly deep personality but there's no way we could get anything like that from a generic character. Loggy runs a deck that is heavily themed around masks and could easily defeat the entire Coronavirus in single combat. Against other Yugioh decks, however, it isn't nearly as good. The goal of this deck is to get out The Masked Beast and own the Battle Phase, but in the meantime he can protect himself with Mask of the Accursed. He can also boost a monster with Mask of Brutality and go on the offensive. The main weakness of this deck is that in addition to there being no additional consistency to his Masked Beast at all due to a lack of Manju/other support, he runs like 30 filler cards. Yeah they're thematic, but they're just pretty bad. Then there's the Man-eating Black Shark, which not only requires three fusion materials for a monster with 2100 ATK, but doesn't fit in mechanically nor thematically. Mask of Darkness is a great card but Loggy only runs 5 Traps, 2 of which are Continuous and also antisynergistic with his deck's goals. Masked Sorcerer's stats are too low to really be used as an advantage engine. The best way to use a card like this is to protect it with stat-modifying cards like Mask of Weakness or a coin-flip Fairy Box thing and using the draw to replace the cards you spend. It does seem like a neat idea for a really casual deck, especially with the Toon version. Mask of Brutality is only here for thematic reasons. It's almost entirely worse than Axe of Despair except for the very niche case of using it against an enemy wall to lower its DEF, except if you put it on your monster you get an equal boost in ATK and it doesn't go away afterwards. Mask of Dispel puts your opponent on a clock if they run any face-up backrow. It can be threatening at times, but at other times it can be entirely ignored. Mask of the Accursed is just a worse Nightmare Wheel unless you're willing to search for it with Iron Blacksmith Kotetsu. Ideally you would use this to shut down an early-game threat and then burn them for a couple of turns if you can't immediately counterattack. Otherwise you're better off running actual removal. Mask of Restrict is a powerful sidecard against Tribute Summons and Rituals. However, the boss of this deck is... a Ritual monster. So this card works against your owl goal. Mask of Weakness is similar to Rush Recklessly, but trades quick-play speed for the ability to work regardless of what battle position your monster is in. It works here because you can use it with your Defense-position Masked Sorcerer or an Attack-position Grand Tiki Elder. It still isn't a particularly great card, weaker than Shrink. My take on fixing this deck would be to remove the filler, add Ritual support, and probably go for Chaos Sorcerer since there's a good deal of LIGHT and DARK monsters to use. But since I still don't have Chaos Sorcerer and I also want to make a Chaos Ritual deck on a different entry, I'm going to try something new. I'm going to make a deck based off of one of the anime-only cards (well at least until 2018). See if you can guess what it is before you click the spoiler below! I've only tested this deck out a few times, but this entry has taken me all day to write (mostly thanks to just how easily distracted I am) and I kinda want to get over it already lol. So, yeah, the answer is Doom Lithmus Swordsman. If you guessed that correctly, you win a lifetime supply of air. Wait, I might actually have to hold up my end of the bargain with that. Uhhhh... let's not get hasty... While it isn't quite as strong as The Masked Beast, Doom Lithmus Swordsman cannot be destroyed by battle. This is great if you need to put up a barrier while you try to find a Continuous Trap. More importantly, it, like Tenkabito Shien, it completely unaffected by Traps. I could've made this deck when I was reviewing Deloge, but tbh I didn't have Doom Lithmus Swordsman at the time. You have to max out Bastion's friendship meter in order to get it. A monster with 3000 ATK, immunity to battle destruction, and can't die to BTH/Saku is actually pretty good. Gravity Bind and Begone, Knave! are excellent defensive options that you don't need to worry about at all once you get your Doom Lithmus out. Plus, as an added bonus, you can actually bounce your own Ritual searchers to re-use their effect. With this card bouncing your opponent's monsters as well, it should be even easier for you to get a hit in with a Manju. I'm not entirely sold on running triple Masks of Darkness since there are so few Normal Traps. I'd probably switch one of them out for something else, but I'm not too sure what. I want more monsters (that are at least Level 4), but I can't really think of many good options here. I've found myself using Ritual monsters as fodder and having to recycle them with Avarice if I want to use my other Ritual spells. I think that I'm going to give Loggy a 7/10. He manages to have a very useful gameplay tip for beginners to card games while still having an actual character. His deck isn't really great, kinda annoying because like Laurence before him, it's really easy to lose out on the no-LP-lost bonus. It's exciting when he does bring out Masked Beast, but when he doesn't he just rolls over and loses, which is kinda disappointing.

These last two weeks have been eventful. I had made a status about getting sick, and I'm gonna go further in depth on that over here. Went to go get some food from Zaxby's. Pretty alright fast food place, but wanted to try out something new from there. So I ordered a chicken sandwich. This was a mistake, because holy shit was that thing loaded with pickles. It was more of a pickle sandwich than a chicken sandwich. I'm personally not a fan of pickles, so anything more than the bare minimum amount of pickles on a sandwich tends to be too much for me. But sadly that sandwich wasn't done being mean to me, because the next morning I woke up with food poisoning. At first it wasn't too bad, mostly constant trips to the bathroom and the sick urge to hibernate. I know my sleep schedule is a revolving door of inconsistency and chaos but at least during normal times I would at least have an idea of when I'll be going to bed. Not this time. It was always naptime, and when it wasn't it was time to lay in bed waiting for naptime. And then that night I got a grim reminder of just how much throwing up fucking sucks. I'm pretty sure I hadn't felt worse than I did at that time... maybe ever? Soon this would all come to pass. I even got myself some chicken patties and some other ingredients to make myself some chicken sandwiches, and it was great. I really shouldn't expect silly corporations to be better than me at making chicken sandwiches. Imbeciles, the lot of them. And I didn't even get sick from these. Get fucked, pickle sandwich. But I would get sick again. But for a different reason. A few days ago, I was given some food from Wendy's. Nothing fancy, just some chicken nuggets and some fries. I've had this before. They're alright, I guess. Not really worth the fast food price unless you're just really not in the mood to prepare food yourself, and even then it's kinda eeeeh. And that's what caused me to get food poisoning for the second time this month. So ooooh boy, time to go through all of that shit aaaaagaaaaaaaaain. Except this time it was a little worse because I ended up puking on two different occasions. What's weird is that a family member had chicken nuggets from there as well and did not get sick. Not entirely sure what's going on. Try as they might, chickens will not kill me. I refuse to allow it. Anyway, this blog is about the Tagforce series, not my personal journal of birds that were rude to me, so let's not forget why we're really here. Tagforce 1 #33: Lily Lily serves the role of the Obelisk Blue student hanging out in the shop during the mornings. This makes her a great candidate to farm for DP since you don't need to waste in-game time by leaving the shop. I think it's a bit weird that both Dinosaur duelists are farmable in the shop when there are quite a few other Obelisk Blues they could've added instead. After class, she will hang out at the Obelisk Blue Girl's Dorm with her friend Disa. She also serves as one of those "gameplay tips" NPCs. In her case, she tells you that Fusions can be good because they can be played from the hand, but that seems to be a poor translation. I think she was referring more to the ability to fuse materials from the hand. The poorly worded tip doesn't end there, as she then goes on to warn you that they can be difficult to use if your timing is off. Which, um, what? Fusion summoning is barely involved with missing the timing or whatever, at least in this period of Yugioh. The only thing I can think she meant to say is "Don't Fusion Summon a monster into a BTH, nerd." This would be a great tip if it were actually translated properly. Fusions were GX's big thing, so warning the player about being reckless and losing multiple cards to a single Trap Card such as BTH would be really useful. It would've also been nice if Lily were a duelist who used Fusions. She also references that Jaden uses Fusions, but forgot his name and thinks that it's "Slacker." This doesn't really work though because all of the Slifers are called Slifer Slackers, not just Jaden. Lily is someone who has a few lines that are a bit... weird? They aren't even weird in a way where you could piece together what her character even is with them. She just says things in a strange way. She still has no real personality. This is Lily's take on Dinosaurs. While Andrea aims for bringing out high-leveled monsters, Lily is more focused on small but still powerful monsters. A lineup of monsters like Sabersaurus and Hyper Hammerhead with other utility dinos like Element Saurus and Mad Sword Beast is pretty decent, especially if backed up with Jurassic World. If that doesn't work out for her, she can mass-banish those dinos and make way for a Tyranno Infinity beefed up by Megamorph. It's a cool deck idea that is especially hampered by bad AI. Not only does Lily refuse to use Solemn Judgment until below 2500 LP, but she also won't use Survival Instinct. As for Soul Release, she only uses it on the opponent's cards and occasionally a spell or trap from her own GY. So the only way that she tends to banish her dinos is with Big Burn. Black Stego is especially meh without Jurassic World boosting it. With the field spell you can at least take out battle floaters. Its effect allows you to be aggressive and get some damage in with it while still basically being in defense mode. Without a card like Dark Driceratops to use this as tribute fodder for, Black Stego is probably her second worst monster here. Element Saurus is arguably the best Element monster because of the EARTH effect and the Dinosaur synergy. Lily can easily supply the EARTH herself, and if you duel her with a FIRE deck then it just gets even better. I've had the misfortune of her summoning it and taking out my Command Knight. Gilasaurus is more often than usual a free Special Summon because of the way that Lily uses Soul Release, but it's not a card that she can utilize very well. At most, it's an extra bit of damage sometimes, but usually it's just a throwaway monster for her. Hyper Hammerhead gets around walls and bounces anything that kills it. A versatile card that gives Lily plenty of breathing room. Mad Sword Beast isn't as effective as Hyper Hammerhead, but it gives her some extra damage versus some defense-position monsters like Treeborn Frog or the Scapegoat tokens. Morphing Jar tosses dinos from her hand into the GY and lets her restock her hand. Card Destruction is in a similar boat, just less risk for less reward. Jurassic World's +300 boost is not too shabby, to be honest. Most of her utility dinos have statlines that are just a little too low, and this brings them up to speed. Megamorph is already a versatile card for being able to double or halve the stats of either player's monsters depending on LP, but the real reason it's here is because it also works with the stats gained by Tyranno Infinity. It gains 2000 ATK per banished Dinosaur. And then there are the three ways to banish Dinosaurs: Soul Release, Big Burn, and Survival Instinct. Soul Release can preemptively take out powerful monsters from your opponent's GY so that they can't be revived with CotH or Premature Burial. Most importantly, it doesn't have a requirement in order to play. Big Burn counters the same cards, but in a reactive fashion, so that means that the opponent will lose their card. It also can banish even more cards than Soul Release later on in the game, allowing you to both wipe your opponent's GY and fuel a ridiculously strong Tyranno at once. It would easily be best card in this situation if it didn't need your opponent to interact with the GY first. And then there's Survival Instinct, which pulls ahead of Soul Release in self-banishing. It lacks the versatility that the other two cards have, however, as it can only banish your dinos. It does come with some healing, which can be nice but it may also mess up Megamorph plays from time to time. When trying to fiddle around with this deck, I tried a few other options. First was Fusion Gate to make Bracchio-raidus. This seemed neat at first glance because you could power up Tyranno Infinity by 2000 while getting a 2200-ATK monster. This didn't quite work out because this deck is already pressed for space, so cutting utility dinos for Bracchio-raidus's fusion materials hurt your ability to deal with defense-positioned monsters. In addition to not being that great of a payoff. Then I tried Dimensional Fissure, and I think that was the way to go. You have to draw it early and it is subject to removal, but you can just banish all of the monsters. You can even run Macro Cosmos as backup copies, though it's worse because you have to wait a turn to wait it and you don't really care too much about banishing Spells and Traps. I'd still run a Soul Release just in case. Looking at the monster lineup, the only real issue I have with it is the triple Gilasaurus without any real payoffs for Gilasaurus specifically. You can switch some of them out for extra copies of other cards. Maybe even something like Kabazauls since it has more ATK. I also don't think you need three copies of Mad Sword Beast. Oh, and definitely add a Cyber Jar so you can get more dinos out onto the field faster. I think that Lily is about a 3.5/10. She's mechanically useful, has a cool deck concept, but that's it. She has no personality. The tip she offers is confusing and doesn't fit her at all. Andrea is easily the better-implemented Dinosaur duelist. Going down the list of generic NPCs, the next one is another teacher, but like with the other teachers I need to see if he has any new dialogue in chapters 2 or 3 before properly reviewing him. Instead, I'll take a look at another Slifer Red with a deck based off of a certain pair of duelists from Yugioh.