Power Nine of UFS

1. Addes Syndicate
2. Yoga Mastery
3. Olcadan's Mentoring
4. Feline Spike
5. Lord of the Makai
6. Chain Throw
7. Emptiness
8. Higher Calibur
9. Shinobi Tradition

This is my personal power nine for all of ufs history. 5 of these are banned or errated in someway. honorable mention goes to kunai and kasumi gaki, two of the greatest enablers ever. i think over time psycho focus will make it's way up this ladder.

Character power nine imo, in no order.

1. banned chun li
2. banned cassy
3. banned hugo
4. banned talbain
5. promo naks
6. ur dhalsim
7. promo adon
8. Promo ukyo
9. banned ibuki

No Absurd Strength? That card was nuts...

1. Chain throw
2. Absurd Strenght
3. Infiltrating
4. Higher Calibre
5. Addes syndicate
6. Kasumi Suzaku
7. Rejection
8. Shinobi tradition
9. The Gorgeous Team

Honorable Mention:
Ibuki (doesn't matter which one as long as she has evil)

Agreed, except Defender of the Empire should be there. Truly a card that absolutely did not care about anything your opponent had.

Bitter Rivals should absolutely be up there. That card was beyond overpowered.

Bitter? Really? Um, no, it doesn't hold a candle to several early set cards.

Also, Promo Zasalamel is better than most of those top 9 characters..

yeah i made this power nine in a hurry, i mean i missed stuff, but look how dumb that nine i have is. absurd and infiltrating def need a spot lol

UFS doesn't need to be like MTG where there's a "Power 9" list. Make it a power 12.. hell.. we do have 12 symbols (infinity doesn't count) in this game.

Excluding characters.... and starting with three choices I'm suprised haven't made any appearances yet

1. DOUBLE DEALING
2. TO THE BONE
3. CONCEALED SHALLOW SWIPE
4. Defender of the Empire
5. Happy Holidays
6. Addes Syndicate
7. Revitalize
8. Military Rank
9. Kubi Ori

They're banned for a reason . Broken Leg was just barely edged out, and Turbo should probably be on there but Iunno if it was even legal in 1 tournament or banned immediately on release.

Cards that are legal in legacy, with a much looser order:

1. Infiltrating
2. Absurd Strength
3. Emptiness
4. Vast Resources
5. Battle Prowess
6. Experienced Combatant
7. Replenishment (would be Feline Spike but for the errata)
8. Chain Throw (I know this should be higher, but not sure where)
9. Clones

I dunno, I've always been a sucker for card advantage :b

@shajir: This is the UFS Power Nine not Evil Power Nine lol

Man Scott, you slipped up with no Promo Zas I saw him and wanted to play him immediately when he was released lol. So much destruction.

Yoga Mastery should be #1 on every list. Pretty much at least 4 of any list made will be negated by YM. It was NO before Addes/Red Lotus became NO.

NEWFS Power 9 *excluding characters*

9. Relentless - The best draw in the format IMO. Works on either players turn, nets you 2 cards at otherwise no cost with otherwise given circumstances.
8. Cursed Blood - Multi-purpose, speeds up building process, hates on foundations.
7. Intimidating Presence - Extremely useful for slowing your opponent down and keeping the pace in your favor.
6. Pommel Smash - Choice commit and stun. LOLCombos with Ruthless.
5. Soul Wave* - As discard appears to grow (Nina, Kisheri), often sharing Death and Void, Soul Wave* is leading the way in anti-discard.
4. Torn Hero - The biggest deturrent to commit since Lotus, Torn Hero MAJORLY discourages the recent influx of Stun cards.
3. Knight Breaker/Dragon's Flame - These are the primary kills of NEWFS. Not much else to say, 'cept prepare to lose when they hit the table.
2. Stand Off - A gigantic discouragement to blocking if I ever saw one. Why make a control check against 6+ when you could just Stall Off? Even if they tap two, they've now tapped two resources.
1. Path of the Master - I've already said my piece on this powerhouse of a card. No more infinite bull, sheesh.

These lists are missing three important things.

Ira Spinta

The Curse Broken

Penetrating Lunge/Takin' You on a Journey, Girl

kthxbai

MegaGeese said:

Dis caad was teh ***.

Penetrating Lunge... Wafflecopter said:

Penetrating Lunge doesn't beat F Commit 1: Take any card in your discard pile.

PLunge doesn't beat infinite Chain Throws, infinite Material Advantage, no progressive difficulty, or any other shenanigans TTB enables.

PLunge makes Shallow Swipe roflstupid, but it's got nothing on it.

Lunge doesn't beat DotE's stupendous card advantage or the Dark Empire combo

Hitting all 4x HH against a deck that ran more than 6 total attacks/offensive blue cards (a la Hammer, Lunge) would tend to win you the game... and it was easier to hit 4 HH than 4 Lunges.

Lunge might be better than Revitalize, especially given the ruling that it doesn't draw cards unless you were hurt beforehand. I dunno, Revit would force Lungers to wait until they had a certain kill, either don't block and die or block and die, which could be countered by a Holding Ground or Made Not Born or lalalala...

Lunge isn't better than the 2nd best recursion ever printed (after #1)

Kubi Ori kills people more easily than Lunge, I think, especially without needing Hammer. Take promo X, 28 damage to the face. Take SR Vega + Gyulkus. Hell, go to the present day and stick a Ymirfang behind it XD

The Curse Broken definitely deserves a spot somewhere, Spinta ditto.

Happy Holidays is the most pain in the ass card ever printed.

It was sooooooo boring playing games with that card and just going build, build build to CSS/Feline/Whatever.... and there were very few counters, less so than most of the cards on those lists

Honorable mention Emptiness back in its hayday was a major PITA

knight breaker and pasta

I believe power nine would have to be something that is useable by all characters that share a symbol with it. So no characters themselves, no character only attacks or attacks that are only busted by certain characters, and no banned cards as the power nine are not banned.

In no order:

yoga mastery
absurd strength
wearabouts unknown
daily routine
chain throw
friends and rivals
emptiness
infiltrating
AND THE ONLY CHARACTER WHO DESERVES TO BE ON A POWER NINE LIST

MATT KOHLS(THE ORIGINAL)

• Yoga Mastery
• Lost Memories
• Start Over
• Friends and Rivals
• Absurd Strength
• Chain Throw
• Emptiness
• Tag Along
• Battle Prowess

Yeah, there's a couple of surprises up there.

Nyobari said:

I'd rank my power nine as such.

1) Happy Holidays

2) Yoga Mastery

3) Defender of the Empire

4) Higher Calibur

5) Addes Syndicate

6) Olcadon's Mentoring

7) Concealed Shallow Swipe

8) Absurd Strength

9) Red Lotus of the Sun

My reasoning is as such

Happy Holidays is the most broken action ever printed in this game, and will probably remain so until this game goes the way of the dodo. Given the environment it was in, and how much draw/recursion was present, there were games that would often be decided on who had the last Happy Holidays go off (and therefore the first chance to attack). Other than HH there hasn't been a single card that says "You don't get to play the game the way it was intended to be played".

Yoga Mastery should be fairly obvious. This is another one of those essential "no" cards that, when combined with Ring Veteran and Lost Memories. Created the unholy "Trinity". Mastery is really the only real offender out of those three, as it was essential and reusable. Ring Veteran was relatively (given that day and age) expensive, and Lost Memories was perfectly balanced. I'd honestly love to see Lost Memories come back as an exact reprint myself.

Defender of the Empire: Free card draw to be abused whenever the opponent so much as sneezes? I can't count the number of ways this card enabled some absolutely stupid stuff. Dark Empire was the most prevalent of course. No deck should be allowed to draw a fresh hand for free because the opponent was trying to defend themselves. Well intentioned, but an utter failure of card design.

Higher Calibur: You played with it or you lost. It's that simple. Another well intentioned card that ended up an utter monster due to the current designers being in such a panic over the state of the game that they forgot to actually look at their game and see what kinds of interactions this card created.

Addes Syndicate: Broken. The wording was broken, the errata trying to balance didn't do anything effective, and to top it off it saw such a limited print run that it shot upwards of 80 dollars a piece on the secondary market. Another card that you played with or you lost. It didn't matter how powerful your Air deck was or how many Feline Spikes you had. If you were staring down an Evil deck or a behemoth such as AlexCSS if you weren't matching their Addes Syndicates and Higher Caliburs and BRT's one for one you lost.

Owlface: UFS was actually a 55 card+character card game for a while, primarily because Olcadon's immediately took up 4 slots without so much as a second thought as to what else could go there (the answer is nothing). This card single handedly defined whether certain symbols were playable or not based on whether they had any Olcadon's defense. If you didn't, you didn't play the symbol competitively.

CSS: Single handedly warped the entire environment around it. Grey Wars started because of Happy Holidays and THIS card. Could arguably also be used as the forerunner of the "Why bother with more than 4 attacks/Attacks at all?" mentality that dominated the environment at WORLDS this year. There was no point to any other attack when CSS existed.

Absurd Strength: Turn 1 kill enabler, turn 2 kill enabler, turn 3 kill guarantee. Yet another card printed when the (then) current designers hit the "PRINT MOAR SILVER BULLETS" panic button. Would have been an excellent card as a 1/5 block with only the momentum kill ability on it (that was the panic button part). The +6-7 damage was such a short sighted tack on ability to make it "versatile" and "thematically relevant to Sankuro" that they apparently completely forgot that other characters could use it.

Red Lotus of the Sun: Because Ibuki's Immortal Technique wouldn't be quite so immortal without it. Makes Chain Throw eat a D, makes ANYTHING that EVER tries to mess with your staging area eat a D. Highly versatile and in a symbol that will go down in history as the strongest spread ever. There will never be another Lotus.

And seriously, if anything ever comes close to matching Evil's power level back when it had Addes/Higher Calibur/Lotus/BRT/Rev Calling/Cutting Edge/Megalomania/Infiltrating/Chain Throw/Kunai/Absurd/Happy Holidays/Oral Dead/Kung Fu Training I will eat the shirt I'm wearing when James Hata wins worlds with it.

Scott, did you mean Psycho Style?