Hey everybody and welcome back for another exciting deck profile. Departing from our conventional coverage of ‘Hand Rulers‘, instead, we shall be analyzing what is perhaps the most aggressive ruler to date; Berserker. With 4 ‘STK‘ and a whoppingly high ‘level limit’ of 120, it is possible to jampack ‘Berserker decks‘ full of high-cost high-impact cards. However, there is a small caveat to be wary of. With the ruler being limited to only a single organic drive per turn, it is very possible to low-roll or simply not source enough value when needed. As such, undertaking a stringent approach to the deck-building process becomes exceedingly more crucial in such instances.
The Decklist
As can be evidenced from the decklist showcased above, the deck at hand simply runs a lot of high value cards with no substantial synergy between them. This is mostly by design. Specifically, as mentioned in the introduction, this particular drive ruler is limited to a single organic drive per turn. This limitation makes it exceedingly difficult to fulfill any medium or high synergy based strategies. Even normal tier effects like Galactic Swordmaster Granmezzer‘s charge shield can whiff, effectively making him a vanilla 7/7/3 that costs a whopping 3 levels and can easily die to ‘Giant Killer‘ effects that are all too common. Of course, this is not to say that the deck has no synergies contained within its cardpool. As an example, Units like All-Terrain Transport Crawler “Danny” and Starship Captain Ed allow for that additional value to be squeezed out of your Events, even if not on a completely consistent basis.
Key Cards
Normally in my write-ups this section is used to advocate for the relevance of combo pieces or inherently key units and events to a specific attribute. However, for the purposes of this article our scope will extend beyond that traditional narrow purview.
Matter of fact, we will be focusing on cards that gel extremely well with the Berserker Ruler in general. In essence, as already mentioned several times throughout this article, the ruler at hand is limited to one organic Drive per turn. As such, any card like Darumageddon, Sakuya-hime Kami of Blossoms or Thousand-Year Sakura that allows for additional drives or the option to pick what you drive actively encourages the player to bypass this organic limitation.
On a final note, while it was mentioned above that it would be prudent to avoid deeper synergies when building a deck with Berserker, if you are steadfast in your conviction to do so, then you can at least significantly boost your winrate by including the cards showcased in this section.
Final Thoughts
The idea to do this write-up came from my most recent matches against the Canadian Team in Round 2 of the GateRuler World Team Circuit. While Berserker, as a Ruler, did have a decent showing, the matches against it did illustrate some of its key flaws. Despite being jampacked with value, the possibility to lowroll (even with the key cards included) is rather significant and can further be compounded if there is an attempt to chase synergy.
Of course it is not all bad news. The Ruler offers a great home for anyone and everyone that simply likes playing big high value targets and swinging for substantial amounts of STK. In terms of competitive prowess, it is too soon to tell and offer an accurate prognosis. The Ruler so far has seen limited tournament play and while it is feasible that more data will be available for gathering at a later date, the RNG involved in a single organic drive per turn, might be too much to turn people onto this particular style of play.
I do sincerely hope you enjoyed this write-up. If you are curious to see more, do not forget to give me a follow on Twitter and if you would like to be a part of the creative process that goes into doing these write-ups, you can also check out my Patreon.
Special shout-out and kind thanks to C. Sweeney & Kenny as my first ‘GateRuler’ related Patrons.
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