Five MHA CCG: Heroes Clash Decklists

Welcome Heroes! Set 3 of the My Hero Academia Card Game, Heroes Clash, is releasing worldwide, and we can tell by its design that this set is very much a toolbox to deepen the deck building potential of many of the game’s characters, including those from sets 1 and 2 – and promos!

The most exciting time to deck build is right when a set is new, and all the unproven ideas are still on the table! I’m certainly not immune to this excitement, and I’ve already pulled together piles of deck list ideas that all could deserve some testing. In today’s article, I’m going to share with you all five of those decklists for you to steal, compare notes with, or take ideas from!

Once again, these ideas are untested but have reasonable theories behind each of them. In the interest of everyone’s time, I’ll be sharing the list, and then leaving brief comments about the idea of each one. Today we’ll be going over decks for All Mashirao Ojiro 2, Good Toru Hagakure 2, Order Ingenium, Void Hanta Sero 1, and Fire Fumikage Tokoyami 1. Let’s check ’em out!

Our first list is Mashirao Ojiro 2 under the All symbol. There are actually a number of very interesting builds for this character – I’ve seen a very cool Water build using a Ranged package as well! – but what we went with here is a higher risk, very high reward strategy utilizing Staff Strike. The idea with this deck is to take Ojiro’s two abilities – an extremely potent buffing enhance, and a strategic attack pickup enhance – and create game winning Staff Strike strings with them. If you can land a Staff Strike with the combo online, Ojiro is capable of not only buffing it to be a very relevant attack itself, but the next attack you play allows you to pick up the first Staff Strike, and then replay it as your second Weapon card after the Staff Strike Combo, meaning that Staff Strike can cause itself to be played with no progressive difficulty when played again. And, of course, you’ll get to continue to draw cards and hopefully chain more attacks on afterwards until the opponent is firmly in the ground.

To augment this, we have tools from the new Eraserhead Starter Deck that try to manage our resources when creating these strings. The 3-difficulty Binding Cloth Precision helps cheapen your cost to chain, and Binding Shoulder Rush can be an excellent first attack after Staff Strike to let you potentially gain resources by readying a foundation. Total Erasure Binding is a fantastic attack to use in the middle or at the end of a string to eliminate a batch of the opponent’s defensive effects and clear the way to victory.

In our foundations, we have a few neat tricks to utilize. Student of the Art, of course, helps us set up our zones for Ojiro’s enhance, as well as some of our combos, and the new starter exclusive Prone to Dry Eyes is a card that can do a lot of work especially as we’ll be drawing extra from Staff Strike. There’s also a cute new card we can take advantage of called Hero’s Inspiration – in a Staff Strike-focused deck, Hero’s Inspiration’s enhance can be used after Staff Strike is played, but before its enhance to draw a card for each foundation in your card pool has been used. You’ll get a card from Inspiration, an additional card from Staff Strike’s enhance, and the combo enhance on Staff Strike can then be used to ignore the penalty of stuffing your own card pool!

Hagakure’s new card is a fan favorite, and for good reason. She’s got the ability to effectively speed buff every attack, but in a way where both utilizing buff resets and building into deadlock to gain resource advantage are less effective methods of combating it. How sneaky! She’s also got a very potent Commit response that allows her to force a recheck on the opponent’s attack once per turn – and possibly make the next check even worse.

Once I took in the card pool available in her resources, what I settled on for a first build is sort of a Kirishima 2-flavored concept. By that, I mean a deck that is going to utilize her ability to really turtle down and build up to the right turn for a hard hitting string where every attack is generating value. Much like K2, her once per turn commit response gives her an on-card method of ignoring an opponent’s attack, and in Good she is afforded a suite of excellent defensive tools like Specialist of Sound, High Value Target, Manly Passionate Guy, Harden, Male Bonding, and …So Manly. Cheerleader, the foundation with her special Hagakure First Form, is a very cool card that lets her build both players up with a facedown foundation, setting up her Enhance and also playing very well with our attack lineup.

The Kirishima kit attacks, Hardened Chop and Hardened Jab, both help her manage her resources and allow you to play with those face downs you’ll build with Cheerleader, and Texas Smash is going to provide the kill power you’ll need sometimes to go alongside your solid value generation and pseudo-speed buffing. Seven stun-2 attacks in Back Alley Haymakers and Create: Capture Nets are there for a very specific reason – opponents may be reluctant to build to 8 (or even 7, considering Cheerleader), so we are setting up to punish the opponent no matter what by threatening to stun them out if they don’t build enough instead. And, of course, Invisible Infiltration – I predict you’ll see this in a lot of decks beyond Hagakure, but it’s even better in her with the Breaker 2 for added defensive play. In here, it does some absolutely amazing stuff – from allowing you to re-use powerful cards like Cheerleader, First Impressions, New Training Method, and Passing the Torch, to neutralizing an opponent’s defensive tech for a late push, as well as just simply letting you ready up a committed foundation for resource gain. It even triggers Small and Limber for added resource advantage!

This may be a surprise, but I think Ingenium is a little slept on. He’s an underrated character who is getting some very nice options to play with in Heroes Clash, and may be worth revisiting!

What we need to think about here is what Ingenium does that Iida 1 doesn’t, as the two cards are quite similar. Ingenium’s big advantage is being able to make one attack per turn hit pretty darn hard. Set 3 just so happens to give us a new UR called Engine Boost – and, among the Iida-clan speedsters, in my opinion, brother Tensei throws it the best. Under Ingenium, considering no other effects than your character, Engine Boost can turbo out of the gate on Turn 2 as a 9-speed Mid attack for 9 damage, by using Ingenium’s response, enhance, and EX with the free momentum it provides. However, it can be even more – Heroic Lineage, Like the Wind, and Ice Gliding provide some interesting methods of pumping it further if you wish, and if the opponent tries to use their own enhances to reduce its stats, Ingenium will get to ready them back up to either use again or save for the next attack. Many times, the opponent may just have to take the hit, and 9 damage is plenty hefty to feel comfortable building out and passing to play defense when that happens!

When it’s time to string, Ingenium can go hard with the usual Iida-clan suspects – as always Recipro Extend threatens a scary next attack and guarantees a draw, while the new Blitz Knee is a very cheap attack to throw mid-string for some added poke – and can even be used with Ingenium’s damage pump to try to bait a block and clear the way for a game-winning Recipro Burst. We also get to run Electro Jolt as another way to guarantee building momentum early on when Recipro Burst is looking like the route to victory. And since he doesn’t synergize as well as his younger brother does with Recipro Burst, Jolt and the new action Engine Trouble give you extra ways of adding a little more speed to the Burst while also acting as targeted defense hate.

The slimmest deck today is Hanta Sero 1 on Void – I’ve seen some other very interesting lists for Sero 1 as well, so I wouldn’t be shocked to see some variants hit the table in events! This one is focused on utilizing some of the excellent new discard tech, particularly Blood Moon Rending! The goal is to rip up the opponent’s hand and go for the dunk, using Sero’s once per game ability to get the final card or bit of info you need to be able to take them out.

Training Knife Strike and Blood Moon Rending are really a match made in heaven here, as Training Knife Strike forces a card out of their hand either way, and with Sero able to turn it to any zone, you put your opponent in a difficult position to either block – hopefully partially, causing you to draw cards with Sero’s response – or take the damage and still go down a card. Binding Cloth Whiplash makes a great follow up to ready resources to string deeper, while Binding Cloth Assault can help draw more cards in case you haven’t seen Blood Moon Rending yet – as well as set up another weapon in the discard pile to pump up Rending. When you do get to Rending, Sero gets to use this attack to it’s utmost potential – his padded hand gives you plenty of fodder to discard to it, and he can selectively pick out a zone to force on any subsequent attacks to guarantee damage with his zone-changing Enhance. Tape Swing and Blinding Cloth Drop Kick are there as some simple high damage attacks to close the game with once the opponent has run out of defenses, if needed!

Foundations are largely aggressively slanted here, but a new card that makes a nice splash in here is All Worked Up, which works both as a card to discard to Rending or Assault to get the damage buff, or a clutch resource management piece when you are heading into the game-winning string. And another new card that will be very key is Can’t Escape Me… – an easy way to shut down draw effects that can get the opponent out of their block-lock!

Our final deck for today is an old tournament standby, Tokoyami 1! There’s nothing particularly unusual or glaringly different about Tokoyami in set 3! We still weight on attacks because we make a lot of checks on 3s and we want to string deep and power up Frigid Heatwave, but with Set 3, Tokoyami has even more toys to push him back out of the shadows and into prominence once again.

Most notably, of course, is Twisting Azure Inferno, and absolutely nutty card that effectively doesn’t count against progressive difficulty and makes all your attacks harder to block – and gets to turn its buff on from just playing a single Summon Dark Shadow. Tokoyami can now go even deeper with even more difficult-to-block attacks, and because of how powerful the Tokoyami string is now, we ignored many defensive foundations in the list and just focused on ways to ensure our string wins the game as early as we can – which is exactly what Fire is good at! New foundation Fast as Flame lets us speed buff any attack even further, and Press Conference gives us another way to manage resources to help us play the attack-heavy list with fewer troubles.

Another new attack that’s lovely to see is Ignited Arrow, which guarantees either damage or an additional attack in hand – or both, if it’s partially blocked! – and helps mill further which can be nice when trying to find Summon Dark Shadow right away. While a more rounded list could see better success as the meta develops, early on in any metagame, aggro decks tend to shine as Control decks haven’t yet figured out what they need to build to control, so all-in on Aggro can be a very effective way to build right as a new set releases!

And that does it for our first five Heroes Clash decklists! If you enjoyed peeking at these ideas and want to see more, let us know! You can always feel free to leave a comment below, hit us up on facebook, or – and this is definitely the best of the three – join the Maindeck discord to chat with us, discuss decks, and join our free to play webcam leagues for MHA and other TCGs!

Until next time, heroes!