Welcome back everyone, today I am officially codifying a series of What’s Pippa Playing, where I do a dive into the decks I have been jamming recently, going through my thought process and doing a deep-dive into how and why the decks work as they do. Today I am featuring some of the decks I have been having the most fun with, all of which are a big different than you might see out in the wild. I also wanted to note that two of these decks are on my short-list for the St. Louis regional (foreshadowing!), so continue to read if you’re interested in some spicy-yet-competitive lists!
Making Massive Moves with Mimic
Starting off with a slight update to a previous deck, I just can’t put Mimic down. This character is an absolute blast to play and fits my style wonderfully, and I believe is wonderfully positioned within the metagame currently. With solid offense and endless Breaker, he is able to halt almost all aggression thrown his way, while being incredibly resilient to much of the board-interaction within the game currently.
This updated list is a riff off of the Fistbump Mimic list I took to Nationals last year, and since it has gotten plenty of amazing tools to add onto the deck. The biggest addition is Patchwork Baby, an insane new game-ender introduced within Girl Power. Combined with the plethora of unique keywords this deck can run, while also being able to fetch missing ones at a moments notice, this deck can throw the most consistent babies around (phrasing). One of Patchwork Baby’s biggest issues is playing it late into a string as a 5-difficulty move, which is aided with Mimic’s signature Trigger, giving you ultimate control over your checks and being able to string longer than expected.
Another bonus of Mimic is running a lower attack-to-non-attack ratio, given your ability to often pick up whatever you want once-to-twice a turn cycle. This not only helps reduce the variance of the deck and offer better consistency, but is enabled by Mimic’s face to always have offensive pressure. Deadly Ruthlessness, a throwaway uncommon from the Dark Tournament, helps with this in enabling you to make more checks to dig for assets to find attacks over the course of a turn cycle.
Two other new cards that make a huge splash in Mimic are both Unsettling Aura and Rifle Arm, both being 2diffs that focus on speed control. Unsettling Aura is one of the best new cards for Mimic of the last two sets, given it is online most of the time and offers some of the most potent repeatable speed control in the format while also featuring an awesome 1-mid block. Rifle Arm is its partner-in-crime, giving more speed-hate while also having the upside of being able to pump the speed of our moves, something Mimic severely lacks. As a bonus, Incubating is an awesome speed-control 1-diff that is effectively free, giving this deck an incredible defensive backbone when paired with Surviving the Final.
As for other newer includes, Team Dr. Ichigaki is one of the new assets from the Dark Tournament, giving an omni-cancel which is incredible within this format. Cute Baby # 202 is another awesome addition, giving bonus damage-reduction while also bumping the keywords of the attacks, whether it be the numerous Breaker abilities or the Powerful/EX/Stun ratings of Patchwork Baby to close out games. For attacks, 80% Power gives another Breaker ability while also threatens deadlock for the rival, which combined with Vile Seizing and Surging Crystal Darts provides incredible end-game threats. And lastly, Trace Eyes is just a wonderful value attack that can chip the rival or provide twice as many attacks to carry the stats Mimic pumps.
Mimic overall is a very fun and stable character that I feel has plenty of solid matchups within the metagame given his ability to endlessly Breaker the rival to prevent strings while also swinging for a large amount of damage on every single turn. One of the underrated parts of Mimic is being able to disregard deadlock, giving him a powerful endgame as he can threaten deadlock while never having to fear retaliation from opposing deadlock.
Combine this with his ability to consistently keep the rival off of long strings in the early-game, and you have one of the most stable and skill-expressive characters in the format. I would expect Mimic to show up at St. Louis, though not in droves. This character certainly isn’t for everyone, but the few people that will be on him will likely make deep runs in the event, and he is currently my first pick of decks I am bringing for the event.
As for tips on the deck, Mimic has a notoriously poor early-game, so that is the time to pressure him when he hasn’t fully set up his stage. If he cannot find his power cards or defensive blocks he can struggle in the first few turns, but afterward once he has his engine set up, he becomes a menace. Additionally, Mimic relies heavily on finding his speed hate for defense, and Mimic with Trigger is vastly stronger than Mimic without Trigger, which should factor into your mulligan decisions for the deck.
Speaking of mulligans, I wanted to briefly touch on them and the concept of drawn win-percentage. Often I will see players toss back hands with important cards, or keep less-important ones that they should be dumping away. Let me dive into examples from other games, primarily Hearthstone and Magic: the Gathering (it will be brief, I promise).
For Hearthstone, one of the most important metrics when evaluating mulligans is not only your curve of keeping cards you can easily play, but a nifty statistic called “drawn winrate”, which is simply the average winrate when you see a specific card within your opening hand. Often these cards are key pieces within your gameplan, and the concept compares very favorably to Mimic and finding Trigger early-game. As alluded to, Trigger turns Mimic into a vastly different character, and games that you find Trigger early are incredibly favored, to the point that if you see Trigger in your opening hand, I would often keep it even if it provides an inconsistent or suboptimal build.
This concept also applies to other decks as well, specifically around tech cards. Finding the important pieces against certain decks is often more valuable than finding a higher quantity of lower-value pieces. I’ve seen countless players (even good ones!) keep hands that build well but lack any powerful pieces for the matchup. This manifests most often on player 2’s side, where they simply keep all grey and mulligan all the orange, when in reality mulliganning some grey is a solid option. Obviously keeping a solid curve is the most important, but given the freedom of the player 2 mulligan you can often be far more aggressive with your mulligans, especially given your ability to review and draw additional cards on turn 1.
In MtG, there is a deck called Tron, where the premise is that if you find 3 specific cards early, you will powerspike much greater than other decks early on, letting you take a severely commanding position in the early-game that can often snowball to a win. Despite MtG mulligans working closer to UVS player 1 mulligans (full hand mulligans, as many times as you want, but at the cost of 1 less hand size each), they will often go down multiple cards to find their combo pieces due to how impactful they are.
Equating this to UVS, you may have a keepable hand as player 1, but would you want to build Faith’s Shield, Evade and Copy, Steadfast Resolve, and Syndicate Target turn 1? I highly doubt not despite being a perfectly reasonable build, I would rather take a risk to find more powerful foundations such as Without a Vision, Incredible Display, and Fast Friendship even if it puts me at an early comparative deficit.
Mulligans are easily one of the most overlooked mechanics of UVS, and while most of the time players make decent decisions around them, I would postulate that often players don’t consider the full ramifications of when they keep hands versus when they should toss them. Even if it only comes up in 1 out of 10 games, keeping these principles in mind will give you a few more percentage points over the course of a long event, and is a heavily under-practiced skill that should be kept in mind as players prepare for large events.
Creating Captivating Combos with Toga
Oh dear sweet little knife girl, Toga3 has been on the rise ever since her release in Jetburn, and with Black Abyss from Girl Power she is finally one of the top contenders within the meta given her powerful committal and ability to cheat Black Abyss into momentum to abuse its powerful scaling effect. While most lists take advantage of it on Chaos, it also notably shares the Life symbol, which I believe provides a ton of distinct advantages over Chaos. With that teaser, let me get right into the list!
The biggest advantages Life has over Chaos is the consistency of enabling the Black Abyss gameplan, as well as the specific utility pieces available on-symbol. Other than Black Abyss, Toga3 benefits greatly from Canister Creation Strike in enabling her and providing a powerful mid-and-end-game threat. Being able to “level up” foundations into higher difficulties gives vastly more flexibility than Chaos, which also lets us find tech pieces with incredible consistency.
The standard gameplan of the deck is to apply solid early pressure through Toga’s big stats on her first move, using it to stack Black Abyss into her momentum to close out the game before it goes too long. While Chaos shares the Command Pigeon Flock into Friend of Animals combo, it lacks access to Stalking Her Prey, which serves as a way to hot-swap momentum between each other (which can then be tutored with Dark Tournament Looms!), but also doubles as a powerful piece of speed hate.
I mentioned tech pieces, and Life has one of the best suites of them as well. With Faith’s Shield and Evade and Copy being the standard blocking tricks, it also gets access to Keeping Eri Safe which is very valuable against stun-oriented decks (such as the mirror match!), but also an underrated card in Partners in Crime, a 2-difficulty reprint from the Dark Tournament. While the primary use is to rig the game when you play an attack, it also features an ability to trade a momentum for one of your rival’s which in a format being terrorized by Amajiki and Toga3 is a gigantic boon, while also incidentally hating other decks that have a harder time stockpiling momentum.
The Life symbol also gets access to Keiko’s Aid, arguably one of the best defensive tricks in the format currently. The ability to stunt your rival’s offense is invaluable, and something that Chaos lacks. This is further heightened by the consistency offered by Canister Creation Strike, giving access to these on-board effects almost whenever you want.
Overall it is a fairly basic list utilizing a bunch of powerful life cards, with Instant Shining Flash being back in the format to give further momentum hate and string-ability, while Incredible Display and Deft Maneuvers are generic solid pieces, with Without a Vision rounding out the lineup as a solid offensive and utility piece with one of the most powerful deadlock abilities in the format.
Toga3 is another one of these decks on my short-list for St. Louis, again given her stability while also having solid answers to many of the decks within the format. She is one of the few decks playing towards a committal gameplan, which gives her an edge as the rest of the meta will have to specifically tech towards her while being less impactful versus the rest of the field. She also presents a very consistent gameplan that the rival has to reliably defend against, which given the mostly low-zone attack package gives a solid chance of always enabling your gameplan. The ambiguous attack zones also can lead to 50-50s regarding if your rival held the correct block zones or not.
While players will likely be preparing for Toga3, the Chaos symbol is the one that will draw the most hate, while Life has plenty of tools Chaos doesn’t, with some drastically changing how the deck plays and approaches matchups, which is part of the strength of it. It also offers a lot of flexibility in terms of tech inclusions, with the prior-mentioned Faith’s Shield and Evade and Copy, with Gory Stab being an additional momentum hate piece that Chaos sorely lacks.
The reason I am a tad more hesitant on Toga3 is while the power level is there, she doesn’t have actual card advantage on face which limits the number of things she can ultimately do and the decision points she can make. I love flexibility with my characters, and lack of card advantage is a big limiting factor for that. As side reasons, I dislike playing “meta” characters, with Mimic being an exception due to being low presence despite his strength, while also fitting my playstyle very naturally.
The second, more petty reason for why I may not play this character; she is boring, mostly. Toga’s primary gameplan is very linear, with playing a single big move and stacking up Black Abyss’ to eventually dunk the rival with pure stats. Now, the list I presented has some spice and flexibility, however that is due to the cards surrounding the character rather than the character herself. The character is strong, however her rigidness in gameplan can lead to very repetitive play experiences, which I am personally not a fan of.
Mathematically Meticulous Momo
Onto the final deck for today, and one that is unlikely on my docket for St. Louis, is Momo3! While most variations of this character focus on playing the long-game, this is a much more midrange variation, and it is built around a very underutilized card as well! I wouldn’t recommend taking this to a major event, but I would recommend it for local play given the decks’ unique playstyle and how cool it is to see these pieces interacting! Without further adieu, let's get into Momo the Kindhearted!
As just alluded too, this deck is focused around Kindhearted, a relatively chaff common from the Dark Tournament. The effect is minor, but the true usefulness comes with being able to build it in mid-turn, allowing you to simultaneously scout checks and dig for attacks. Using all of the ways that Good has to build in foundations mid-turn, you can repeatedly and reliably use the effect multiple times in order to have supreme control over how your turn and hand is sculpted.
Attacks such as Invisible Infiltration, Tasty Riff, Lurker’s Strike, and Canister Creation Strike all give us this utility to enable Kindhearted, while Lightning Rod and Command Pigeon Flock add to our build shenanigans while also strengthening our board to make it resilient to the EIGHT 2-checks in the deck. Because of Kindhearted, we can dodge the poor checks and rig our hand with the very aggressive attack ratio to apply more pressure than expected early on into the game.
The biggest issue of the deck is the lack of damage, requiring several long strings in order to properly kill the rival, which while we are insulated, is still a big ask in the current metagame. Decks are currently very threatening, and Momo can’t apply the same amount of offensive pressure due to her lack of damage pump. She can consistently throw long strings to pressure the rival, though it is much less effective when you need two-to-three in order to properly kill a rival. Factoring in that you also have to survive against the rival trying to kill you, and this deck simply doesn’t have the oomph to compete with the top decks in the format. This however doesn’t stop the deck from being a fun option if you just want to rig the game and play a bunch of attacks.
As for the rest of the deck it is fairly self-explanatory, with The Final Test being online from Kindhearted, while Breaking the Cuffs is a pet card of mine that lets Momo try and apply more pressure by making a single big move every turn. Team Stash also helps alleviate the stats issue by being buildable with Command Pigeon Flock and giving a significant bonus to the next attack we play (for the most part). One benefit of running a lot of weak attacks is that you can sometimes swim in momentum, making Refreshing Blend a great option to help fortify our board while reusing our commit effects. -
As for the Pippa lesson with this deck, I wanted to chat about the meta and the bloat of “solid” characters within the game. One of the best things about UVS as a competitive game is that the meta is so diverse you can regularly show up to large events and not play against the same deck twice in a tournament, which on the surface shows a healthy meta, but I would like to take a moment to truly dive into this topic.
While the metagame is seemingly healthy, which I would argue is mostly correct, there is still the asterisk attached of looking into the overall power level of the game. Now as a preface, I personally enjoy a high-power game as doing powerful things feels great as a player, and the game is best when a wide variety of characters have the same power-level to encourage a wide metagame. While I believe the game is mostly there, there do exist a few outliers in terms of power level, with the Godzilla characters (Rodan in specific) pushing the limits on how strong characters are allowed to be. Each character features an inflated health total, which is something I have been pushing for a while, while also having powerful effects, each of these characters is a potential meta contender. This in itself is good, I am glad that powerful new characters are being released and making a splash, but this is also at the cost of pushing other characters out of the metagame.
Rodan, Godzilla, and Bionic are the primary culprits, with the former being an Eraserhead1-style control deck, Godzilla being in a similar space to Younger Toguro, and Bionic existing in the same 6-handsize statstick space as a variety of characters. While this isn’t an issue, it is the power of these characters that worries me, as they inherently stress the metagame and what decks can stand up to them. By introducing these powerful new options, it constricts the middle-tier of decks that could be meta contenders and pushes them further from viability, creating a wider divide between the goods and the greats.
While I don’t think it has necessarily gotten to a worrying point, the recent Attack on Titan reveals have reinforced that character power-levels are going up, which in the interim of rotations will continue to push characters out of the metagame. There is currently a bloat of characters that could theoretically do well at an event, which has always been the case, but with the higher power level more and more of these characters are being pushed into obscurity.
One of the best parts about this game however is that there are character loyalists, there are people who will bring these “suboptimal” characters to events, and that is the beauty of UVS. I am glad we have a community and game that supports the wide meta, and as someone who personally enjoys playing off-meta, I am very thankful that this game allows me to do just that. Though as discussed, that is potentially becoming more difficult, especially as character creep is continuing into Attack on Titan, which could further constrict the meta.
For now however, I believe the meta is in a fairly healthy spot. There will always be decks above the curve of the average, but right now I do not believe they are obscenely so. The primary issue that I have with the current meta is that stats are king, leaving more “interesting” (subjective term right here) characters off to the wayside as they cannot keep pace with some of the massive stats coming out of characters such as Godzilla, Endeavor3, and Ochaco4.
As the final note on this subject, it is currently the 6-hander meta, with the primary other contenders being 7-handers with defense on face such as Rodan and Pony, or huge 5-hand-size stat-sticks such as Byakko and Woman. I believe this is a good thing, as games between 6-handers can easily stretch into the mid and late-game, assuming no blowouts in the early turns. This leads to interactive games with solid back-and-forth, which truly shows the core of UVS and how wonderful of a game it is.
Move to End Phase
So that is it! Several of the decks I have been enjoying recently, including some potential contenders for St. Louis, as well as some of my thoughts on the overall game and mechanics within. The goal is to do this style of article more often, not only to share some of my favorite brews, but as it is something fun that I can write about easily, which means there should be more frequent posts as well! These will hopefully help pass the time while I work on larger-form content while also getting back into the swing of things.
As a quick mention as well, if you see me at St. Louis come say hi! I always appreciate the conversations I have with members of the community, and I truly appreciate everyone who likes to read me ramble on about this game that I love. Thank you so much for making it this far, and until next time!
very interesting lists, like them a lot