Monster Rancher Battle Card Episode II, Blitz Decks

Monster Rancher Battle Card Episode II was released in America in 2000 for the Playstation.  The story says that this card game was played by children who were too young to raise monsters, but it was eventually widely popularized and is now played by children and adults alike.

Battle pits your deck against one of the computer opponents’ decks.  You will choose one of two cards on the screen.  The one with the disk chips on it goes second.  The player who goes first is immediately put into the guts step, and they are only allowed to make two guts.  Guts are what you use to play cards.  The more powerful the card, the more guts it will cost.  On your turn, you will play any attack cards you want to play (if you have the guts for them) and then you will be able to sacrifice any number of the cards in your hand.  The cards you sacrifice become guts.  You will always draw up to a hand of five cards in this game.  So no matter how many cards you sacrifice, you will always return to five cards at the beginning of your next turn.  A player loses when all three of their monsters are knocked out or they are unable to draw a card.

Blitz decks are the fastest decks in the game.  They use monsters that have a lot of attacks that require low guts.  The only problem is that many of these monsters have low health, which could lead to all of your monsters getting killed off before you can do much damage.  These decks are usually pretty balanced when it comes to attack and defend cards, due to the fact that most of these 5-6 health monsters are very easy to kill and need to dodge or block attacks to survive.

Good choices for a blitz deck are monsters like Tiger, Hare, Mew, Pixie, and Ghost.  These monsters have a lot of low guts attacks, for example Pixie’s kick and bolt which are 1 gut for 2 damage.  Hare has a lot of powerful attack cards like headbutt that does 4 damage for 1 gut, though if it hits he will take 2 damage.  No matter what the combination of monsters, it comes down to the simple fact that you will need to survive long enough to kill the enemy monsters.

That is the reason why you don’t really see these decks in the highest levels of the game.  Because of the monster’s low health, you will need to keep defense cards in your hand, which will limit the number of guts you can make.  This in turn will lead to you being able to attack less.  Plus, for every card you attack with, that’s one less card you can turn into guts, which means you will have less cards to attack with on the following turn.  The blitz deck is honestly like a less efficient balanced deck or a badly formed power deck.

However, despite these drawbacks, it is still possible to form a decent blitz deck.  You will just have to use monsters like Plant and Knight Mocchi, who have higher health while still maintaining the low gut cost requirements.  Without the ability to use these monsters, you will find yourself being frustrated as your monsters are knocked out in one shot while you have to whittle down every target and spend a lot of effort to take down one monster.  So unless you can find high health alternatives, stay away from the blitz deck, especially if the opponent is using a power deck.

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