The all-purpose tool kit

Today, I'm going to be examining cards that everything I've heard qualify as "staples" for all decks.  For those not familiar with the terminology, a "staple" is a card that literally all decks should use, or at least a heavy majority of them.  I'll give the reasons for including them first, and then I'll go for the counter-arguments.  If you want to hear a bunch of things you already know because I speak ever so elegantly, you'll probably enjoy yourself.  If you think I'm about to give you a bunch of bull and you just want to watch a trainwreck, I hope I give you some interesting thoughts.

First up, I'm definitely going to tell you some things you already know, because I've commented before about how awesome it is.  I stated how troublemakers are incredibly useful for slowing down the opponent's deck.  They don't do anything positive for you unless you're Rainbow Dash, but playing a troublemaker early on will slow your opponent enough for you to get your own strategy going.  Yellow Parasprite is definitely the best one to play on your first turn, especially if you can play two, and even more especially if you're the first player.  For the cost of 1 action token, you can probably expect your opponent to lose 3 cards.  Sure, I'm willing to pay 1 token and give a victory point to make the opponent discard 3 cards!  This hurts especially hard when Coco Cruise is out there, though that means you would've played it a bit later.  The only problem is that it doesn't really do much outside the early game, but the effect it can have on said early game is heavy enough that you should be ashamed of yourself if you're not running it.

Cloudchaser definitely works hard to make your deck get turbo-charged.  One of my friends (real, not card type, I mean he's my friend and we play cards but he's not a friend card, anyway, one of my friends...) likes to describe it as such: Do you play friends?  Oh, half your deck is friend cards?  Yes, you absolutely should play her.  This is probably the case with most decks, especially if they're also playing with blue and/or yellow.  You'll get far better benefit out of Cloudchaser than you would out of Two Bits, and she's significantly cheaper than Twilight Sparkle, All-Team Organizer.  This also combos with anything that lets you ready your characters, so you can make a lot of action token profit.  Let's just see what http://haluz.org/mlp/ has for the average price of Cloudcha-$20?!  Well, at least I know I can stand to make a ton of money when Canterlot Nights comes out if I find I just can't make her work in my main deck (oh I know you're all waiting for this one).

Flitter is arguably one of the more efficient cards for tokens-to-power.  Yeah, Twilight Sparkle, Ursa Vanquisher actually gives you just outright more power for your tokens, but you need 3 purple out already to play her in the first place.  Flitter gives you the one outside color you need to confront a 1/1 starting problem (unless you're already playing pink), and gives you even more if you have to hit a troublemaker.  There are plenty of 1-for-1 cards out there, and as we found before, you're probably going to at least face a Yellow Parasprite.  So far, we're 2 for 3 on staples being common.

Sadly, the next staple breaks all sorts of patterns.  It's fixed, so to get a full playset, you need to buy 2 copies of the Twilight/Applejack starter set.  She costs a whopping 4 tokens and gives 3 power.  This is definitely a heavy hitter, but she's quite worth it.  Her effect will apply even on troublemaker faceoffs (to be honest though, I can't figure out the flavor behind that).  Considering most people's decks consist largely of 1 and 2-power friends, she is just going to wreck everyone's day.  Though Bright Bulb will force friends to go away, Lady Justice will make them not want to approach in the first place.  Usually what you'll find is they'll even out their character distribution until they're ready to force a double problem faceoff.

 

Cross-Examination

To be honest, I'd be really hard-pressed to find a legitimate reason not to include Yellow Parasprite.  Someone gave me a really good shot at it today, because he doesn't run any troublemakers at all in his deck.  He said that since his deck consisted mostly of smaller characters, his flips would usually be poor, so he feels the opponent will just defeat it quickly.  His deck wants to just swarm with characters and use the "win a problem faceoff" effects to establish a dominant position.  This is a reasonable point.  If you will only flip 1, maybe 2 strength on average, the opponent will only need 4 or 5 power to realistically take it out and gain a point.  Here's the thing, though.  In the meantime, if you get it out right away, it will still take a bit for them to get there, and they'll be losing multiple cards.  If they lose as little as 3 cards, I'm fine with giving up a token & point.  This is the only one I'll concede as being a pure staple.

So, why do I not include Cloudchaser in my main deck?  For reference, let's take another look at the deck I mentioned in my last article that I'm totally not plugging because I decided to put it up in the middle of a Tuesday and it got buried under everything else.  Most of my Friend cards in there cost 4.  They all pull a lot of weight by themselves.  When your friends on average cost about 2, you can afford to play a lot of them, so using Cloudchaser once per turn ends up affording you a lot of tokens.  If you only get to use it once every 2 or 3 turns... she's a lot more underwhelming.  Also, I have to pay attention to the average flip power I have.  In her place, I run Undercover Adventure so that Rainbow Dash can flip more, though I am considering running What Went Wrong? instead, as my sole copy of it in my actual deck managed to save my troublemaker from being defeated once.  I don't play enough friends to make Cloudchaser work much and her low power makes my flips much less awesome.  That officially makes it not a staple.

That said, all of the other cards I'm listing here are also in my main deck, so... there's that.  Now, why would you not include Flitter in your deck?  Um... to be honest, there's not much.  Even a pink deck would probably want to run her.  The thing is that she's very vulnerable to all sorts of removal.  A slight breeze will take her out.  Then there's the problem that kind of exists with most of these cards.  Let's say your deck is primarily, oh the horror, white/yellow.  If you include a playset of Cloudchaser, Flitter, and Lady Justice, your deck's colors are awfully diluted.  It's going to be harder to confront your problems the more you include off-color friends.  The benefit Flitter gives you is not tremendously high.  It's just high for her cost.  You might want to avoid her just for the sake of keeping your colors focused.


Lady Justice's main problem is that she's rather expensive.  If your deck is trying to be particularly aggressive and swarm with a lot of little characters, Lady Justice becomes unnecessarily heavy.  Her effect is also entirely control.  The limited field of options at the moment might make her possibly worth including in such a deck (it might also make such a deck less viable in the first place), so she could drop in usefulness as more good aggro cards come out.




Ok, so there's basically the best cards overall.  They're all easily playable, but the main risk you take with running all of them is in diluting your deck's colors.  Of course, you don't have to worry about that much if you count them as support cards, but then you have less awesome support.  I just made your deckbuilding simultaneously both easier and more complicated.  You're welcome.