I whipped up a 4-dot alex deck with the coming of the new set, he is kind of my boy so I had to give him a shot.

Everyone really hyped him up given the rulings on his ability and what not, but having played the guy, he is suprisingly not bad? But hardly anything special.

Here is the list, below will detail how it works.

1 - Alex 4dot

Assets - 8
4-Olclandans
4-Times Square

Actions - 6
3 -Tagalong
3 -Siberian Training

Attacks - 11
3- Boomerang Raid
4- Kuz Reppa
4- Chop

Foundations - 36

4- Pyscho Style
4 - Chesters
4 - Bitter Rivals
3/4 - Raw Talent( it tends to get put into play by opposing olcladans)
4 - BRT

4 - Trapped in a Nightmare
3 - Lesser of Many
3 - Lord of the Makai
2 - Powerful Style
4 - Saikyo Ryu

The deck is suprsingly complicated to play because it can win out of just about nowhere given the right circumstance.

One thing you always want to do is activate his Response at the start of the turn, the ruling on it stands that you do not need a facedown card in your cardpool to activate it, and the wording allows for EVERY CARD DISCARDED FROM YOUR CARDPOOL OVER THE TURN WILL ADD TO IT. This means youactivate it for zero, then you go one your merry way cardpool clearing and your attacks get bigger and bigger.

The key Cards to this deck are Raw Talent, Bitter Rivals, Kuz Reppa, and Times Square, pretty much in that order. if you have Raw Talent,Bitter Rivals and Times square in play, and a Kuz Reppa in hand, you pretty much win. Lord of the Mak helps, but is not a must.

A kill turn will typically go sort of like this.

Alex R for zero - (lesser of many evils if needed) - Play KReppa MAKE SURE IT HITS FOR AT LEAST 1 with Alex E - Now you either have the multiple of Reppa in pool, or you went digging with the enhance from Reppa for a chop plus any other attacks(more reppas plz) - Play chop, let it flip if you don't have times square use raw talent to clear the reppa/reppa multiple- if you have times square Alex Form to clear your cardpool and begin playing with -2 diff- Continue playing every Reppa you have until you are out of reppas, using the enhance on Reppa to filter through your deck for boomerang raids, more reppas and chops and using Raw Talent to continue to clear out the facedown attacks after they connect, Alex's Floating R + raw talent will continue to make the Reppa's bigger and bigger meaning you filter more cards and find more attacks, once you are out of reppas, starting using all the boomerang raids you found, at this point they should be HUGE and it should be over if the Reppas didn't end it, but if the boomerange raids can't put them away, finish it up with any chops you might of found.

This may sound a little elaborate but I promise you, once it happens it tends to work crazily smoothly and this build of the deck has never failed to put someone away once it got going. If you dont hit a Times Square that is okay, a lot of the times you don't need it to win, Alex's E+Reppa+Raw Talent+ Bitter Rivals can get the job done pretty well if your control checks play nice.

The Deck doesn't draw super consistant and doesn't build all that super fast because it's only card advantage comes during the kill turn, but it get's the job done about as well as any deck could hope to.

Cards people will surely say WHY DIDNT YOU PLAY CARD X!

Ready for Anything - a 4/3 asset that helps me kill people, except I have absolutely no trouble killing people, that is actually the LAST of this decks problems I promise.

A Clouded Mind - It is a First form, requiring you set it up with the Alex form to leave facedown cards in your card pool, this is asking to be killed, asking to be put into play with olcladans and yes, I had it in the original build and never once got to use it. Times square is just way better in every form.

Olcladans Tech - All doesn't have good olc's tech and I'm not going to waste a slot playing bad olc's tech, Instead I play foundations in quantities that im perfectly okay with getting switched around, is it ideal? God no. But it gets the job done.

Card Draw - All, the king of card draw, has honestly pretty terrible card Draw in Block 3, Hugo's support is the best it has to offer, and if you wanted, you are more then welcome to play Hulking Brute, but as soon as you get one out, people will start stuffing them into play with Olcladans and you can't use it on a kill turn since it shuts down reppas enhance. If All had some of the excellent card Draw/recursion(Seong Mina, Sogetsu and Mai support) Water and Order feature in the block, I would be much more inclined to use it, but for some reason All has become some sort of unfocused jack of all trades.

Dedication - Is actually pretty okay, and was in the first draft of the deck, I ended up cutting it for trapped in a nightmare because I found too many times I needed to knock down a holding ground or a Chesters with trapped. Will also get thrown into play En-Masse by Opposing olcladans.

And that is about it, the deck amassed a supring amount of wins, and got a few good old fashioned ass-whuppings in the 3 weeks I played it, it was a lot of fun when it lasted, but I'm about done with it now. I recommend giving it a shot to anyone who wants to pants some people with a painfully average at best Char from the new set.

Out of curiousity, what are your losses to?

I went 1-2 against Water Sakura,

I went 1-1 Vs Olexa's All Remy monstrousity

I went I think 1-2 against Order Sophie

1-1 Vs Victor Reanimated Loop(mentally unstable/Megaspike) deck

Were all some of my losses

I beat some pretty okay decks with it too, obviously I never got Swept by any of the decks that I lost to(tho the water sakura win was a bit on the luckish side) I even beat a JT with it since the deck relies on very few foundations to win, I ended up getting out pretty much just Bitter Rivals/Raw Talent/Times square and going off for the win which was nice.

The deck can just kill people with very little board presence or even board control, since the current era makes it nigh impossible to stop enhances, and thats all the Alex needs to resolve to get the win.

Nice deck list. It sounds like a lot of fun to play around with, however I don't think we'll be flipping quarters to see who gets to play this at worlds this year. Plus, even if you could make a viable tournment worthy deck out of this version, I wouldn't want to fight for diversity with other promo alexs.

Last, on a side note who from MI is playing Water Sakura currently?

failed2k said:

Monster Lariat. Play it.

Also - no Seal, KFT, or Yoga Adept? O.o

MegaGeese said:

Monster Lariat, Seal and Yoga Adept are all MIA for the same reasons, I didn't want anymore 3/2 checks. All builds it's foundation at a reasonably high difficultly curve and lacks quality low difficulty foundations in general, with the Exception of Saikyo-Ryu in general it's 0/1 diff foundations are painfully average and are basically begging to be put into play by Olcs.

KFT is a bit trickier and was in the original incarnation, but I found that I never wanted to use the speedpump since once a KFT gets into the cardpool, I can't get it out like I can any attacks and the Action Negation I never found myself needing/using. In General it would just clog up my hand and I would end up playing it as a block most every game.

And for Paul, Al C Rocker is playing it right now, I kind of came up with the concept like 2 weeks ago during a brainstorming session and it works stupidly good(and terribly unfun to both play and play against)

Afternoon Mr. Ray

Deck looks good, even if the new Alex isn't up to the level of the promo. Oh well... I guess we were spoiled with the Promo Alex... thankfully we don't have either you or Paul in the UK to scare people away from running the promo!

One of our local players is currently testing new Alex, will point him in the direction of this list for inspiration. Chop seems to have almost too-good stats. From watching our local Alex, the Chop+Boomerang Raid combo doesn't seem to have problems with attack difficulties on kill turns at all... it seems to kill of 3 diff and 4 diff's!

How is Siberian Training working out? It's one of those cards that you don't see that often but seems really good.

Also what about Tae Kwan Do Zephyr? Maybe two or three copies as both anti-Rejection and maybe to pad out into a multisymbol Fire line? Would Owlface, Times Square, Bitter Rivals, TKD Zephyr, Raw Talent (and Chop+Raid if needed) allow maindecking Blinding Rage off symbol as anti-Owlface?

Water Sakura sounds like it could get very dull, very fast. At a local tournament, we had a Water Lizardman vs Treasured Gift Chae match. After about half an hour of trading blows, redux, lifegain and the realisation that both Plasma Beams and Treasured Gift repsecitvely wouldn't win the game for a good long while... we ended up calling it a draw and going to the bar!

TTFN, see you at Indy.

Matt.H

Hey man! How goes things a zillion miles awat!?

Tae Kwon Do was left out as a Meta-choice more then anything else, our area when I was playing the deck was very light on damage reduction, if I were to play the deck for 1 more week, I would axe powerful style for Tae Kwon Do, and honestly, if I were forced to take this into a major/mid-major tourney it would be in there too. I used powerful Style because there was a LOT of back and forth attacking going on while this deck was together, and just getting a copy or two out would end up buying me some free lives.

The Blinding Rage issue is a whole nother beast. With Taekwon Do you might be able to pull it off, it would require a lot more testing and tweaking then I was willing to put into the deck haha. I've tried to make the splash with my Regular Promo Alex deck and I couldn't pull it off, so I didn't even try this time around. There is some quality All/Fire stuff floating around, I would probably Pull Trapped in a Nightmare back out despite my Mancrush on the card and put in one of the All/Fire 2 diffs(maybe Dedication back in) to give myself a even better spread for splashing if I were to try it.

Siberian Training is really REALLY suprisingly good? At times I like it more then Rejection because of the drop all the way to zero, it hurts things like the mentally unstable loop I mentioned earlier along with anything else that relies on dealing damage. It is pretty much locked into my Promo alex deck and any deck really with the symbols.

Water Decks in general are a bore and really I feel like it is easily the most underestimated symbol in the block, it has like 6 of the 10 best non-infinity cards in block 3 in my eyes, and only really lacks a solid olcladans counter. It has some of the best damage reduct/lifegain, best card draw, best recursion, best commital effects and a few GREAT utility cards(Shooting Capo)along with a few really good attacks.

It really is a pretty impressive symbol in the block.

I need to get my hands on some foil "Zangief is a Pepsi fan" and try it out... Also, what would be your opinion on Silver Spoon? not only is it great tech that you can clear away with Raw Talent but I've been thinking of running it in my decks for quite some time, as soon as something comes along. I've been running it in my Fire/Water version of this deck off of Promo Rikuo ( ) along with Wild Fang to get extra facedown cards in my cardpool since I'm not Alex and can't turn my attacks facedown.

quarzark said:

Wild Fang is tricksy Techy and one of my first ideas with the deck, since you can basically go infinite with it and Raw Talent/Bitter Rivals/Times Square.

I never ended up trying it because I didnt want to attack off a different symbol then I built off of since with only 6 handsize and no real draw accel you have to play attacks sometimes and build just to clean up your hand a little.

Silver Spoon is a GREAT card in the current meta since so man yof the current primary kill conditions are Multiple/Powerful and it makes a ton of sense in Alex with the ability to keep them in pool with his form then clear them for goodies during your turn but on that note

All has this CRAZY high foundation difficulty curve in Block 3, and In most cases I just cant justify Silver Spoon over some of the other 3/4 diff foundations I feel I need to play (Make a Difference, Bitter Rivals, Chesters) not to mention stuff like Seal and Lynettes just to name a few more. I just can't make the space for it, tho sideboarding it is a decent idea for sure, and mainboarding it if you have room is awesome, I just can't find the room.

failed2k said:

figured. I guess it makes more sense for those characters who can make use of boomerrang raid (if it shared symbols with the new Raphael, I'd use it in a heartbeat) but don't have Alex's E: to use those cards to get more facedown cards in their cardpool.