Image courtesy of UVS Games
The third Attack on Titan (AoT) set releases today and with it comes an exciting new infinite combo! It involves four cards total, but it’s harder to pull off than it looks. Let’s take a look at how the combo works, ways to beat it, and the best characters to use it with.
The Infinite Combo Pieces
Military Airship is an incredibly powerful asset from the newest set. Adding a card from the card pool to your hand without any extra restrictions is an ability that hasn’t been printed since 2008. The last asset to have a severely limited version of Military Airship’s enhance had to be banned in all formats. Tasty Riff is a fan favorite card that seemingly already had its heyday but I expect it to make waves again with its enhance to build any card from your discard pile. To begin the loop you’ll need two copies of each card and at least five counters on your character. The Military Airships can be in the discard pile, and two Tasty Riffs need to be in hand.
The loop itself is incredibly easy once everything is in place. Simply play a Tasty Riff as your first card in your card pool. Use the “first enhance” ability to build a Military Airship if you don’t already have one. Play a second Tasty Riff as the second card in your card pool and use Military Airship during the enhance step to add the first Tasty Riff in the card pool to your hand. Play the first Tasty Riff again as the second card in your card pool and use the “first enhance” ability to build a Military Airship. The unique keyword will cause you to sacrifice a Military Airship of your choice and of course we choose the committed and frozen copy to send to our discard pile. Then add the first Tasty Riff in your card pool to your hand again with your new Military Airship. You can then continue to play Tasty Riff checking against a five difficulty while building the sacrificed Military Airships to continue playing them forever.
What’s Good About This Deck?
The best thing about this infinite compared to previous combos in UVS history is that you don’t have to deal damage to make it work. The old Tiger combo not only needed you to hard build a unique foundation but needed you to deal damage to continue each iteration of the loop. Not to mention that combo is character specific. Most decks will have to deal damage at some point to get the counters necessary to make this work, but there are attacks like “I Won’t Back Down!” that will help those dedicated to pulling off the infinite.
What’s Bad About This Deck?
UVS has a wonderful infinite protection system with control checks. While we feel comfortable enough to call anything that can be played as many times as you have cards in your deck to make a control check infinite because this combo involves two checks there is some counter play if the rival can stack the top card of your deck like Krista Lenz. Part of the combo requiring cards to be in the discard pile also makes them more vulnerable to removal effects from popular cards like Deception Dagger. Damage Reduction is also a big part of the format so getting the initial counters from Tasty Riff dealing damage could be an uphill battle with its base damage of three.
How Do You Counter the Infinite Combo?
Driven by Retribution is a two-fold answer so it gets top billing here. Luckily Tasty Riff is a low damage move so taking damage to trigger this response shouldn’t be too punishing. After you take damage, remove 1 Tasty Riff from the rival’s card pool and as a bonus you get to de-build them a card from their stage to their card pool. This means that not only do they lose one of the attacks they want to loop, but one of the Military Airships will be stranded in the card pool as well making it take extra copies of these cards to continue the loop. On top of that, pushing the difficulty of further Tasty Riffs to a six will often limit the loops based on the rival’s foundation count.
Format all-star Hacker Extraordinaire returns as defensive asset hate is becoming more and more important. Get into an arms race with the rival over whether or not you can flip more assets than they can build. Flipping the assets into face down foundations can also make them harder to recur from the discard pile as now it will require a way to sacrifice it.
Filled with Doubt is a simple and clean answer to this combo. Sealing a Tasty Riff that needs to build a Military Airship will shut things down pretty quickly if the rival doesn’t have additional copies to play and a way to clear the progressive difficulty of the blanked attack. Having a private information answer will go a long way in combination with other forms of disruption.
Characters to Build With This Combo
Ochaco Uraraka IV: Ochaco’s huge speed bonus is gonna help you generate counters from Tasty Riff dealing damage in the early game. Her unflip ability will help fight back against the Hacker Extraordinaires of the world. What might be the most unique however, is that her ability to ready face downs is not limited, so once you’ve got the loop established her response is a failsafe against checking poorly.
Historia Reiss, Secret Identity: Historia is the queen of counter generation and has a different take on starting the loop. Tasty Riff doesn’t actually care which type of counter is on your character as long as there are five of a single type. With a singleton foundation lineup Historia will have the counters necessary to begin the endless airship waltz as soon as early as her first turn!
How Strong is This Combo?
While there won’t be many decks that are able to find success with a single win condition the amount of resources the rival needs to shut down this combo is gonna open the door for a lot of decks. Two checks aren’t easily slotted into most decks however, so don’t expect this to be an auto include either. Two of the three symbols of Tasty Riff not appearing in a booster set for almost a year is definitely gonna limit the options as well. I would be shocked if this combo doesn’t appear in more than one top cut before the end of the year though!
