Let’s Talk Water
Hello Casters, it’s DiRTy here, back again to talk about the water tower. I know that it’s at the top of everyone’s mind now that we have our tower dates and water is the first one up. So today I wanted to spend some time talking about the water aura type, what it does best and how it has functioned in the past. I wish I could just give you a catch all decklist and say this is what is going to be the best thing for you to play, but unfortunately, I can’t do that, we have a ton of very creative minds in MetaZoo competitive play and the chances that we see things we’ve never seen before are very high. But what I can do is describe my knowledge of the water aura type and the history of how it has been played in the past to help you in your theory crafting of new builds.
So, what is water good at? For me there are easily two things that come to mind. First, water has the most draw power in the game, in fact, if you look in the rulebook under the section describing each aura type, water is specified as “Fluid Beasties who are masters of bookmarking pages”. What does this mean? For me it means that with the water aura type it is easy to go over the minimum deck size of 40 cards, as usually your power to draw out cards is going to allow you to see most of the cards in your deck. It also means that you can afford to run some cards that may be a loss in overall card advantage if they provide a winning swing in tempo. This is because with waters ability to draw with most of its cards you will likely make up for the loss in card advantage.
The second thing that I think water has going for it is Beasties that have powerful disruption status effects. Paralyze is seen on some of the most commonly played water Beasties, one of the, if not the most powerful status effect in the game. Paralyze essentially erases all text from a page until the end of the next turn, rendering it unable to attack or use powers, this includes attacking back when attacked. With waters most popular Beasties being so bulky, with high LP and sometimes abilities or traits that make them harder to deal with, paralyze can really change the tide of battle in your favor. Some of the other status effects we see on water pages are poison, confusion, and of course, the almighty Loveland Frogman, who inflicts multiple status effects upon using his power. Status effects are heavily integrated into the way water plays and is going to be something that we have to keep in mind as we build our decks going into this event.
With those two factors taken into account I wanted to take a look at the water decks that have been played in the past and try to better understand what it is they tried to accomplish. The most commonly played water deck of the past was Loveland Lockdown which relied on Loveland Frogman to lockdown the game early and deal with any potential threats the opponent may throw out. The decks middle game consisted of using Wallowa Lake Crustacean, a powerful card with multiple things going for it. Firstly, it has the trait Stoneskin, which when combined with its ability to half any attacking damage provides a very strong wall that is very difficult for the opponent to break through. Secondly, its attack not only paralyzes, but when it destroys a Beastie it draws a card. This will definitely be a prevalent card going into the tower and something that you should have an answer for. Lastly, the late game for Loveland Lockdown was the big Beastie, Chessie, which doesn’t do a whole lot of fancy stuff like our previous mentions, but the sheer attack power it provided could easily close out games.
Now, we must keep in mind that with the 60/40 water to non-water page restriction, it does not allow us to run a card for card version of previous Loveland Lockdown builds and takes a lot of the power away from the deck, that being said, looking at it we can see why water was a powerhouse in the past and still continues to be piloted to success by a select few of our top casters. In my personal research I have found that many people have been experimenting with dual aura decks and trying to find ways to swing the water mirror matches into their favor by using type advantage, while you do give up some consistency and lose out on some of the powerful non water staples to do this, it should definitely be something to consider, not just for your own deck choice, but when building your deck and sidedeck for the event. One thing I want to stress to all of you before I end this article is to make sure you stay up on current rulings. With events like this, often many questions arise that were never asked before or that are being looked at in a new light, as such we often see rulings being changed or added to the index that were not there before, don’t be caught with your pants down, if you plan to compete stay informed. That’s it for now, I plan on writing other articles that pertain to the Towers as we march forward into this new year, including more articles on the water tower and how to keep you best prepared for the events to come. This is DiRTy signing off, tune in next time for more competitive MetaZoo content where I attempt to help you take your game to the next level, much love!!!