Characters:

1 6/6 Mr. Marate +0M

Assets:

4 4/4 Jeff's Gloves +2L

Actions:

4 3/3 Perfect Grapple +3M - 6/3 Attack 3M4 - Throw

Attacks:

4 6/2 2M7 Gigas Breaker - Hugo Powerful:1 - Throw

4 4/3 3H4 Hugo's Body Press +2H - Hugo Powerful:1

4 5/3 3M4 Power Drive - Punch - Reversal

Foundations:

4 0/5 The Tae Kwon Do Zephyr +2L

4 1/4 Battle Prowess

4 1/4 Huge Wrestling Army

4 1/5 American Made +3M

4 2/5 Travel Abroad +4M

4 2/5 Iga Legacy +2L

4 2/5 The Ways of Punishment +0H

4 2/5 Will For The Fight +3M

4 3/4 Hulking Brute +2H

4 3/5 Criminal Past

Total: 61 cards

Sideboard:

1 6/6 *Hugo* +0M

1 6/6 ::R. Mika:: +0M

3 7/2 3M8 Sardine's Beach Special - R. Mika Reversal - Throw

3 3/5 Come Through in the Clinch +3H

After all the hype about the new Hugo and Block 3 in general, I forgot about Karate. Perhaps I'll try a version of this deck too!

Block 3 build with a block 2 character... one must wonder why

Karate just isn't Karate without Flying Cross Chop, Clones or Irresistible Force. Tsuji Hayate would be pretty awesome too...

Difference is, you can full block Clones and Tsuji Hayate. Adding Irresistible Force means that you need to discard your entire hand to be able to use it. One single solitary Holding Ground/Make a Difference/No Memories/The Evil-Doer Destroyer/R. Mika and you're screwed.

What made Karate great to begin with was Overhand Throw. Then that rotated and people had to comform with the lesser version of it, Power Bomb (which I should mention is an ultra rare and barely anyone has access to it).

Now there are better throw options. While Perfect Grapple may seem useless, I'm only focusing on the attack side of it. As long as I live, every turn Perfect Grapple to the face for anywhere from 4 to 9 damage is hard to ignore.

As for the other attack slots (besides Gigas Breaker for the same reasons), Mr. Karate needs card draw badly. Since it's not straight off of All, it seemed hard to do at first.

But oh well, Terry and Hugo both have Earth.

Jeff's Gloves is crack (just noticed I wrote it as a 4/4 and it's really a 4/5). Power Drive is a Reversal you can use with Mr. Karate boost (the first since that crap Ryu kick), and will always draw you a card (unless I misinterpreted it). Hugo's Body Press... well I like the art. Plus while it's slightly less spammable than Clones, it nets you almost the same amount of damage and is not completely useless in the face of Olcadan's. And it can draw you a card, and is off-center. And has a block. I don't want to SAY it's better than Clones, but I can say it's far more useful.

And in case that someone wants to use some low-handsize character for no reason whatsoever, Hugo's there to switch in.

I disagree that the ONLY thing that made Karate great was OThrow -- it's just his sheer damage output spread over multiple attacks, with no foundations necessary. That is, necessary for the damage output. Flying Cross Chop is a solid 8 damage attack... for 3 difficulty. Ditto Clones, and Clones even rolled a 5. Sure, it isn't guaranteed to go through, but you played it for 3difficulty, after you played some other attacks. And those other attacks are things your opponent REALLY wants to block, like Slash Elbow (Hugo's Body Press is a reprint of it without a split side, wonderful card) or whatever you played immediately after OThrow.

I gotta wonder about some of the foundations too -- Criminal Past does not merit inclusion in this aggro deck, with bad stats and an ability that basically reads "Take half damage, your opponent gets -1 momentum at the end of the turn". Iga Legacy is a stitch for poor attack choice IMO, and one Chinese Boxing or Inhuman Perception and you'll get stuck sitting on multiple overcosted throws with no way to ensure their control checks. Tendon Strength is 10x better than Will for the Fight IMHO, simply because "Playable while committed any number of times per turn" >> "Once per turn". Ways of Punishment is a great card, but you have no answer to Gorgeous Team and you play the expensive-throws game - why even bother, especially with only 4 cards readily available to discard for it?

Let me get into my reasoning on the attack lineup a little more. Basically, your choices are 3~5 difficulty attacks at not-too-great speed with no real way to guarantee their damage, or 5~7 difficulty throws at miserable speed that can only be redux'd or kept out of momentum by specific anti-throw or anti-momentum techs. There's a couple different things that point toward the former as the better option IMO:

• Your opponent cannot disrupt your ability to play them except by interfering with your control checks or hand. This form of disruption also affects the costlier throws, and generally these abilities have steep costs associated with them. On the other hand, the throws rely on either risky control checks or large foundation bases, making them much more vulnerable to general disruption and almost impossible to string together.
• Once your opponent figures out that you will need a lucky hand or exceptional control checks to be able to OTK them, they will be able to play a much looser game with you. When you assume your opponent will be able to block everything you do, and you rely on chip damage from throws, you basically forfeit your ability to push through a fatal level of damage without extreme board advantage [which you have no real way to generate]. And board advantage is a much more easily judged thing than, "Does my opponent have [cards] in their hand?" where [cards] could be "a pile of attacks that will kill me", "appropriate blocks/Rejections", "two high attacks and one mid"... etc. In other words, you can easily tell when you won't be able to pass your control checks because your Iga Legacies are Chinese Boxed, but neither you nor your opponent can be certain that "he's got enough blocks to stop my offense in its tracks" or "I'm completely dead, he's got all the answers he needs"
• On top that, throws are far from guaranteed damage nowadays. Fast Food Lover and Tira's Contract both have abilities that read, "If this attack is blocked, it deals no damage." Just like Holding Ground hoses Irresistable Force, there's ways to easily hose 1- and 2-speed throws. Unless you do something to fight for board position [which isn't impossible in every game, even with 5HS].

Also, IMHO, Karate has a fine matchup against weenie HSers - unless they're the 5HS version of Tsunami Sabre Guy, they tend to be slow and laborious to set up their win conditions, so you who starts looping medium-sized chunks of damage at their face from T2 stands a better chance of wearing them down than someone who only runs 12 attacks and no real good recursion [a la Evil Chain Throw loop, oh noes 5 dmg a turn, how will my 37 vitality dude ever survive for 7 turns... ]. Karate puts up 10~20 dmg a turn, every turn, unless he fails a control check. I recall a tournament several months ago where my first matchup was 4HS Huitzil -- about 60 Overhand Throws and a very well-timed Terrible Discovery later, I got the win in game 3. [he got his Geri loop early in #2, in case you're wondering]

btw, R Mika does diddly against Karateman, her reversal ability can only work when her opponent is sitting on 4 or more cards... when does THAT ever happen?

Wafflecopter said:

The one reason to run Karate was Overhand Throw because it's the ONE attack that if you only drew ONE of them, over the duration of the next few turns, while you drew more attacks, they would get hit in the face. You don't need to draw 3 attacks in one turn to kill with Mr. Karate as long as he drew a single Overhand Throw turn 1 or 2. 5 difficulty turn 1 isn't unheard of, plus you can also set up more afterwards. So you could attack, deal damage and set up, until you were able to draw more attacks (or kill). Its bonus (as well as Power Bomb) helped boost whatever attacks you drew.

While throws aren't as ridiculous anymore, Perfect Grapple is 6 difficulty, which can be hit easily turn 2 and on. Gigas Breaker, well that's there for no good reason. Sure it does the same thing but it's more of a late game choice.

As far as Fast Food Lover goes, it's the only true counter to throws on Earth, considering that Inhuman Perception can protect against Tira's Contract. Then again he doesn't have many cards in hand to ditch. Which is why Criminal Past is there. Blocking is kind of hard with no cards in hand. With Battle Prowess and Criminal Past (don't remember if I included Battle Prowess in here), you will fully block one attack with almost no repercussion.

Wafflecopter said:

How did you wrangle the code so that you actually got two seperate quote blocks? This alchemy is unknown to me D:

On Karate, the fact that both Overhand Throw and Perfect Grapple + Mr. Karate deal unlimited damage given an unlimited number of turns does not make them equivalent in the mean time. The problem is worsened due to PG's higher difficulty, lower damage and absence of an ability. "The throws aren't as ridiculous anymore" is reason enough for me to abandon most of them outright; against many decks, you will be able to push a few attacks through without needing the throw keyword*, and against the decks where that doesn't work your throws will likely be dealt with as well. Sure, you can play that Gigas Breaker every turn, but Athena or Chun Li can easily play Rejection every turn too, Talbain can lay down Amy's/Battle Prowess/Mysterious Stance + hand full of blocks, virtually any other air/death/earth deck can win the Inhuman Perception war and keep you off your R:... the combination of recursion and throws has been nerfed both by a drastic upswing in recursion and the power of reusable abilities, and by the huge reduction in the effectiveness of throws.

*On this topic, the All build fares much better by being able to run Bitter Rivals and Saikyo Ryu; you could also try it dual/tri symbol. I've had some success with this sort of thing in the past, and Hugo's tri-symbolling support certainly helps.

[ It occured to me as I typed that Earth DOES have an answer to FFL in the form of Distractible, which also counters Rejection and any other form of damage reduction. But you're gonna need about 5 sets of that per deck if you want to answer everything that you'll need it for. ]

Just end the quote with "/quote" (with brackets instead of quotations) then copy and paste the "quote eid=27893" or whatever number (with brackets instead of quotations) with whatever piece of text you want to quote, then end the same way. The important part is to copy/paste the numbers; otherwise you get an error or something.

Back on topic, perhaps an All version would fare better due to Bitter Rivals. This would also mean that throws wouldn't be needed. I'll probably get to work on it later on.

I'm thinking perhaps toms of All/Death (some Death and Death/Earth maybe) support with All/Earth attacks.

For the not-mono-Earth build, Light of Justice [Remy support] would own - 3M4, two symbols, "E: Both players draw 1 card". Free card draw! I'm conflicted because it doesn't chain Earth for the blue cards, but it's freaking free card draw. And you don't run the blue cards, so you'll love it!

Oh crap, I forgot to demand that you include Heisheng Jian in every Karate deck ever, it's so fantastic. 4-diff is plenty easy enough. No one ever runs low blocks, plus it only does 6 (and my favorite part is how the phrase "only does 6" almost never makes sense in any other context), so no one ever blocks it. And it fetches you something good every time. Not always what you wanted, but if you try sometime you just might find... Mr. Karate threw a brick at you and you died.

Karate's symbols have a suprising amount of overlap, not just with Hugo's support, the problem is getting your T1/T2 flow right so you have what you need to win via looped moves against every deck, and still be fast enough to stomp aggro decks before they go off.