Branded Despia

Hello There! 

My name is Fluxx, Hopefully you are having a great day!

After playing Dragonmaid at locals, I decided to get my feet wet with branded despia. After serveral iterations of the deck, I have landed on something I feel can be a top contender at my locals. At my locals, we have Kash, dragonlink, spright twin, spright runick and vanquished souls. My goal is fairly simple, I want to top locals. 

There are a couple of things I want to adress with this build. 

Question 1:

What happens when I ASH Branded Fusion?

Very good question, luckily the way the deck is built, it does have recovery for ash. Yes in an ideal world, I would play Crossout, ash, imperm, and droll. From my play testing with this deck, you can dodge ash for a very long time and set up a decent board aganst your oppenent. The main win condition of this build is the puppet lock. If you have lost on board and red set going into the opp. turn you can activate red and fuse for sanctifire dragon. then puppet lock them as they cannot respond in that fusion summon window.

Question 2:

Why did you not put Duality, Thrust, or Talents?

I did some play testing with duality when the card first came out. The card can go insane; tributing any fusion to dodge an imperm or velier, Summon dragoon using ganguignol, and being able to shuffle back and draw 1 for more plays. I will probably change this list to include duality at some point, but for right now I think branded is strong enough to not require it. 

Currently, I do not own any thrust so it is not in the build but yes, thrust is a very good card to have in this deck. If branded fusion gets ashed you can activate thrust and set fusion duplication, allowing you to branded fusion on the opp. draw phase. 

Currently I do not own any talents, but in the few times I did play with it, it felt more dead in my hand than anything. It might have been my inexpernce with the card and branded at the time, but I would love to play test with it more before I give up on it.

Question 3:

Why are you playing Fenrir in a branded build?

There are two reasons I have come up with. The first is practical. Fenrir has a great effect going first and going second, the ablity to special summon the card from hand and bait out a negate is powerful for branded. Going second you need to break your opp. board. When fenrir hits the board you can start breaking your opps. board by banning one card face down, if they negate fenrir, that is fine we dont need the search, and now we have 1 less negate to worry about. 

The second reson is more of a curveball. By summoning fenrir, your opp. might think you are playing kash and might ash the fenrir. leaving you open to play branded fusion. This won't work on too many people, but if it does fool your opp. you will be able to play branded. 

Fenrir is in 3 flex spots I had in the main. It can be replaced by talents, thrust, or nibru. I had nibru in that spot and i also was able to stop naturia. 

Plans for the future:

As I mentioned, my first goal is to top locals for the first time. The second goal is to improve and keep improving in order to go to regionals and gain my invite for next years nats. I do want to improve and get better at this game. I may not stick to branded and may jump to a better deck, but i feel like branded does have a good engine to take it to the top. 

I will be updating this list as I keep playing it and writing down my experince with it at locals. 

If you would like to see videos of my matches, I have started a youtube channel.

Have a great rest of your day!

Fluxx