Playing Every TMNT Character - Raphael
Welcome back to Undefeated at Locals!
This week I was able to play in two different weekly local events to further my quest to Play Every TMNT Character! In this first breakdown I will be going over the “Raphael, The Muscle” deck I took to Kobolds Keep Thursday. Look out for another article in a couple of days to see the other deck I played this week.
Raphael is awesome! I built this deck on Good mostly because all the best Fire symbol cards are attuned anyway and Good gives access to Resistance Training to draw back up to 6 if our opponent plays an attack, and High Value Target which is still one of the best 1 difficulty foundations in the game.
This is one of the first characters I built a list for after all the spoilers were out, and I have been very excited to play it. I got even more hyped to play him after seeing Kai from Team Akikambara pilot a version of the deck all the way to 7th place in the OCE Regional in Canberra. It was just as much fun as I thought it would be! As you might expect from a character that is discarding their entire hand for value the highs are crazy high, and the lows are crazy low. Reaching bigger and crazier attack swing than even Pony Tsunotori can is insane but lacking the consistency of Pony entirely is certainly a tradeoff.
So, what is the goal of the deck?
First, we need the right foundations, Resistance Training early is great as it gives the option to use Raph’s discard even if we are not swinging for the kill without giving our opponent the ability to punish us for having no cards in hand. Daily Training to build in more foundations as we draw them off Lethal Slash, Wish Hard, Or Feral Shriek abilities are key to stringing out later. After that, we pretty much want to start every attack turn with Enough Talk and see where the turn goes from there, sometimes the blitz gives us further attacks to play from RFG, sometimes we have several Feral Shriek and Wish Hard in hand to discard on Enough Talk and replace our hand, sometimes none of this is true and we build and pass until all the pieces are in place. Grisha’s Attack Titan gives us a way to pick up Enough Talk or Lethal Slash from discard, Genghis Frog makes all our attacks big damage even if we don’t discard for Raph’s ability, and Raph’s top enhance makes the moves harder to block.
I also included 2 United in Battle after seeing it in Kai’s list, and 3 Angry Flurry because I thought it seemed interesting. Both just ended up feeling bad in the deck. United in Battle isn’t a fury so we can’t give it damage, it’s a VERY conditional draw 1 that never seemed to do much in the deck, if the goal is drawing cards, then something like Electric Moth is always going to be better here. Angry Flurry was nice the 1 time in 3 rounds that it got removed with Enough Talk but otherwise was a blank 5 diff clogging my hand. The next time I play the deck I will replace these with Velocity Rush and Last Ditch Effort or Rewind Throttle.
Now how did I do?
Round 1 was versus Bertolt Hoover (AoT 1), I took game one with a finishing string of Enough Talk into Lethal Slash from RFG, into another Enough Talk from hand, into 2 more Lethal Slash, discarding my hand on the last and Drawing into Wish Hard and the last Lethal Slash from the draw responses in hand. I lost game 2 very quickly after overextending and not being able to block anything on their swing. I took game 3 after a great combo of drawing into the perfect hand and removing the perfect set of 3 attacks on my first Enough Talk.
Round 2 was a very quick 0-2 loss to Marvin’s Ryu. Fighting this deck is like fighting All Might III with a bunch of fancy new tech. These games really showed how much this deck lacks consistency, I missed entirely on removing attacks with Enough Talk 4 times in 2 games, rarely had the right cards in hand to maximize the discard ability and rarely was able to string out enough to make the speed bonus matter. Add to this that I am either forced to block Rising Uppercut on my turn, clogging my cardpool and allowing Marvin to Draw 3 Stack 1, or take 6-9 damage and give him momentum on my turn, this was a very difficult but fun, battle that I lost spectacularly.
Round 3 was a 1-1 draw against Jester Lavorre, Prankster Priestess. In game 1 I built out for two turns and then quickly took the game on turn 3 after my opponent over committed their board and was left with little defense, game 2 took a while with us both just poking and passing until it came to my shot to end the game, I checked poorly on a couple attacks and probably should have built and passed again but went in anyway, failed my last attack and left them at 4 health, I thought I could survive their turn but a Big Freaking Explosion for a ton of damage took me out. We didn’t have enough time to finish Game 3 so we agreed to a draw instead. 1-1-1 on the night got me 4th place and I opened a Hang Ten alt art in my weekly pack, so I am counting it as a win!
This deck is a blast to play and I will be making a few changes and play it again after I’m done playing all the other TMNT characters. As always thanks for reading and the decklist is linked below! Come back to see what I play next!
https://uvsultra.online/deck.php?deck=rfywdHnfCbxIirfrkbAOnMbZlewBNh
