Notes & Combos
IGNISTER MALISS: THE T0 TERROR
Climbed from M5 to M1 with a standard-ish build: horrendous coin flip rate of ~37% but overall win rate hovering around ~68%. Note that these are my day 1 ratios & tech choices, which will very rapidly change as counterplay develops.
The core idea of this list is to win against Lancea at all costs, even at the expense of the traditional Maxx "C" outs. This is because the @Ignister cards allow Maliss to eat through everything that isn't Lancea or the "C", so in reality, the minigame tools of Called By + Crossout are only very useful in that limited scope. I would much rather replace these slots with handtraps to make going second bearable.
I also wanted to tinker with the theory of Backup being the centerpiece, which is the reason for the 2x A.I Meet You, a flexible searcher for the Ignister engine = more answers to Lancea. This is still largely experimental, but I really like the vision of getting to make your half-boards as much as possible even under the turn-skips. After all, Step 1 in Maliss-land is just being able to play. You can easily swap this slot for other non-engine / defensive cards, however.
As for other non-engine, I'm heavily skewing towards cards that can help vs. the mirror. That's the main reason for the wacky OCG-coded ratios — Droll, Fuwa, and Imperm are "good" vs. the non-Maliss matchups, but I've cut them all to 2 in the interim. Opening Lancea and a friend is what I always want to see. Since it's the first day, many people fumbled their lines into Nib, but this might be cuttable for the 3rd copy of Imperm or Droll as people tighten up their sequencing.
Originally I had Dharc in the Extra Deck, but I lost a game where my Backup + NS line got blocked by Imperm on S:P, so Lizard is back in for now. Link Spider has also never come up, so I might switch it out for Cerberus if Chaos Hunter usage starts trailing up.
Overall, the climb was pretty uninteresting — the mirrors are often just blowouts with people scooping to one action, so for the game's sake I hope this deck lives a short happy life terrorizing poor souls, before dying a long good death.