Behold the Snow Flames!

I said I was going to start updating my Fan Card Page with VRains stuff and we'll kick it off with something that's not Thunder related for once.  Instead I'm going to show off my Water Attribute Pyro Archetype called the "Snow Flame."

These guys take visual cues from Bluish Flames, Ice Barriers and Nekroz to create a group of high fantasy warriors (so Knights, Mages, Elves, etc) that are wearing pale armour while controlling flames that are literally made out of snow.  The main deck monsters are named after the months of the year while the extra deck monsters...aren't (maybe I'll change their names to go with the days of the week?) and right now they all happen to have 900 defense whenever applicable.
Now for what they do the Snow Flames are a spammy theme with the ability to flood the board with monsters out of the deck with the intend of rapidly Link Summoning their boss monsters the "Azure Snow Flames" who all have the ability to call Snow Flames out of the deck to their Linked Zones.
Sounds easy right?  There's a catch to this.  Snow Flames instead of calling specifically out of the take instead make you look at the bottom cards of your deck for Snow Flames that can be Normal Summoned, and then you special summon them.  After this you proceed to put the cards you looked at on the bottom of your deck in any order.  I fully admit to taking this idea from Gold Paladins as the concept of easy board building but at the risk of bad RNG balancing it out making the deck an exciting gamble to play.  That being said rather than top call, I figure why not take a concept that's almost never been explored and instead focus on using the Bottom of the deck?  This will lead to some interesting interactions like having an absurd resistance to tucking effects.

Here we go;

Snow Flame, Janarius
Lv.4 Water
Pyro/Effect/1800/900
When this card is Summoned, you can look at the bottom 3 cards of your deck and special summon 1 Pyro Monster that can be Normal Summoned.  Put the rest of the cards on the bottom of your deck in any order.  You can only activate the effect of "Snow Flame, Libertus" once per turn.

Snow Flame, Februarus
Lv.3 Water
Pyro/Effect/1300/900
If this card is summoned by the effect of a "Snow Flame" card; draw 2 cards, then place once card in your hand on the bottom of the deck.  You can only activate the effect of "Snow Flame, Februarus" once per turn.

Snow Flame, Marchus
Lv.2 Water
Pyro/Effect/1000/900
When this card is summoned, you may look at the top card of your deck and place it on either the top or bottom of your deck.  When this card attacks, it gains 500 Atk for each other Pyro monster you control during the damage step only.

Azure Snow Flame, Freeze Squire Elf
Water Down
Pyro/Link/Effect/500/900/Link-1
Min 1 "Snow Flame" Monster
This Mutually Linked card cannot be Targeted by attacks or card effects.
When this card is Link Summoned, you can look at the bottom 10 cards of your deck and special summon up to 1 Pyro Monster that can be Normal Summoned to this card's Linked Monster Zone and put the rest on the bottom of your deck in any order.  You can only use the effect of "Azure Snow Flame, Freez Squire Elf" once per turn.

Azure Snow Flame, Prominence Knight
Water Up, Left, Right
Pyro/Link/Effect/2500/Link-3
Min 2 "Snow Flame" Monsters
When this card is Link Summoned; you can look at the bottom 10 cards of your deck and Special Summon up to 2 Pyro Monsters that can be Normal Summoned to this card's Linked Monster Zones and put the rest on the bottom of your deck in any order.  You can only use the effect of "Azure Snow Flame, Prominence Knight" once per turn.

Azure Snow Flame, Frostfeed Dragon
Water Left, Down-Left, Down-Right, Right
Pyro/Link/Effect/2800/Link-4
Min 2 "Snow Flame" Monsters
When another Pyro monster is special summoned, this card gains 200 Atk until the End Phase.  Once per turn, you can put one card from your hand or side of the field to the bottom of your deck; you can look at the bottom 10 cards of your deck and special summon up to 2 Pyro monsters that can be Normal Summoned to this card's Linked Monster Zones.  You can only use this this effect of "Azure Snow Flame, Frostbreak Dragon" once per turn.  When this card attacks, if the number of "Snow Flame" Monsters linked to this card are 3 or more, your opponent cannot activate effects until the end of the damage step.

Snow Flame Gathering
Spell Card
Look at the bottom 5 cards of your deck and add up to 1 "Snow Flame" card from among them to your hand and place the remaining cards on the bottom of your deck in any order.  During your Main Phase, if this card is in your graveyard, you can banish this card from your Graveyard; choose 5 "Snow Flame" monsters in your graveyard, shuffle them into your deck and look at the top card of your deck and place it on the top or bottom of your deck.  You can only activate 1 effect of "Snow Flame Gathering" once per turn and only once per turn.

Snow Flame Barrier
Trap Card
You can only activate this if the number of Pyro Monsters you control are 3 or more; during this turn, "Snow Flame" monsters you control cannot be destroyed by battle or card effects.

Right now giving everything hard OPT limits how much of a board can be made, but these guys have the ability to summon Pyro monsters outside of their theme and I'm certain I can think of some more effects for these guys in due time.

I'm not dead!

Just making this short post to inform everyone on the status of the blog as it's been almost 2 months since my last post.  Suffice to say I've been occupied.  Most of Feb and a good chunk of March was spent moving myself and two family members on my weekends off meaning I had very little if any time to actually sit down and play card games.  Thus I found myself becoming more inclined to tackle my video game backlog and Dragonball Xenoverse 2 commanded much of that time.

17 years later, Shellvia at long last achieves her dream of being the Tifa + Goku character I wrote her as.

I'm not going to go in depth on the game but suffice to say I had a blast playing it.  Being able to take my own characters from my 9th Grade English project and fit them into the Dragonball Universe is amazing and if you consider "clearing" the game beating all of the Story Missions, Parallel Missions, Expert Missions, Instructor Missions and Academy Missions as one character, then this game takes a LONG time to beat due to variance.  While you'd think this game is a Budokai Tenkaichi that you play as an OC, it's actually more of a Western RPG with a Tenkaichi battle system used for combat with horrendous AI as allies and borderline obnoxious enemy CPU.

It also ties into my mood in regards to card games as of late as playing Xenoverse 2 the way I did was enjoyable as I didn't have to metagame super try hard to handle things.  I was able to do it at my own pace, in my own way and found enjoyment for it.  I honestly don't think I can say the same for Yu-Gi-Oh! right now as our locals environment is the kind that doesn't really allow for that kind of playstyle.  You've got the good players playing the best decks, the people who think they're as good as them by metagaming to beat them and then the terrible people that think playing Synchrons in 2017 is still cool.  I hold nothing against these people as they can't help it if any of these decks are cancer or cards like Dimensional Barrier are toxic to the game but I don't see myself enjoying games against any of this with any deck that's not Tier 1 and with no intentions of going to Nationals I honestly can't justify dropping the funds on a 300 dollar deck that's just going to die after the next banlist/Link format.

Now before anyone gives me shit about making that point even though I'm probably going to be dropping about 300+ to update my Vanguard decks bear in mind that given the nature of that game those investments are going to hold for 1-2 years.  That game almost never completely guts a deck 6 months after it's release like Konami will do with say, PePe or OCG Zoo.

But yeah basically at this point I'm more or less going to be a spectator for Yu-Gi-Oh! as Nord has things under wraps from the player side.  Maybe Stove will give him a few runs for his money and that'll be entertaining to see.  TL:DR don't expect Tournament Reports for Yu-Gi-Oh! until Link Format comes around.

In regards to Vanguard it's an interesting case as I own the 2 best decks in the game and they're surprisingly inexpensive to update (even with Waifu tax involved, my Granblue deck should only cost 150 to update when the new set drops which considering I'm talking about 6 RRRs, 2 GRs and 6 RRs for a Tier 1 deck is QUITE the steal compared to the near 250 I'm going to need to shell out for Neo Nectar), however if I had to choose one over the other I'd have to go with Nightrose Granblue due to how complicated the deck is to play in comparison to Time Leap.  I'd happily sell the deck but due to it's now ridiculous price tag of 500-700 (to put it in perspective I essentially put 200 dollars into the deck, 100 in actual cash and another 100 to get a 4th Nextage while the rest of it was obtained via trades) there's no way in hell I'd be able to move it in a local area filled to the brim with poor people.

Thing is I don't actually NEED to play them either as our environment is the type where I can honestly get away with playing just about any deck I own and usually getting the win or an enjoyable match out of it so generally my Vanguard locals are a fun time.

Pokemon is something I'm going to try to get back into.  I'm building an Umbreon GX deck though by the sounds of it I'm better off building a Waterbox deck because Water is getting a Dark Patch clone and THAT doesn't sound OP OP.

Lastly now that we know what YGO 6 is about and Link Format, I'm going to have to revise my entire fan card compendium in order to line up with it.  I've already reworked my Thunder support to be Link Summon focused so keep an eye out for that.

Until next time.