Gesundheit

Not sure how good this one is - definitely slow and doesn't like to see disruptors like Shred early on, but has some insane synergy. It took me quite a while to work out the maths of how much damage I was actually doing because of all the modifiers!

𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁

Reveal Shiho to try and go first, but the gameplan is generally the same regardless of who goes first. Also start Ral and Piiko.

In the Library Zone you have Tale of Flowing Water, Codex of the Lost, and Rec0rd Totem.

𝗧𝘂𝗿𝗻 𝗯𝘆 𝗧𝘂𝗿𝗻

Turn 1: Play your totem out, and usually just swap Shiho into Mi-K0 UNLESS the opponent has some hyper aggressive shenanigans, in which case keep her in since she can heal someone for 3 next turn.

Turn 2: If you know for sure you'll survive this turn without taking a crash, play the drifting gardens. This is the ideal choice because it gets Piiko down to 1 card in the stack, letting ink start building up. You have exactly 3 cards in the list that would activate Ral Kaid's ink condition, so that one's pretty much off the table, and Ri/se is a one time thing. So you need Piiko generating ASAP. {Otherwise, you can go the other ink route which is to swap in Rise and pay for the 2 ink, then next turn set up Dissolution and catalyst, although that takes you down a different path which I won't continue here.}

Turn 3: Things will change here depending on the opponent, but the eventual goal is to have at least 4 ink, along with Crackling Stroke, Agile Stroke and Catalyst set up to start the combos. So patch remove if you need to, but the best turn 3 is to play Crackling and Catalyst, ideally onto Piiko. This is also a good time to swap Mi-K0 out to bring Ri/se in after you play the catalyst, so that you have the flexibility to set up Dissolution Kana next turn.

Turn 4: The game is obviously very unpredictable at this stage, but let me just outline the combos here. This is usually another setup turn (the last one I promise!) or healing/disrupting the opponent, but next turn onwards you have a pretty scary amount of consistent damage that's ready to use every turn.

So: The best setup is to have: the totem, drifting gardens, catalyst, and crackling stroke all stacked on Piiko. Agile stroke can be somewhere else on the team for redundancy. You'll want 4 ink, preferably more. There are many sequences you can do with this, so here's probably the best example on a later turn, with your full 8 ink (so it seems more impressive XD). First, activate Tale of Flowing Water targeting Shiho with the heal, so that she buffs the command by +1(H); you want to scribe on both the Crackling Stroke and Agile Stroke's effects. The Catalyst will buff the 'lose 1(H)' on Crackling, and the 'this phase' buff will add another +1(H). So altogether with those buffs your first activation hits for 4, in the form of health loss. Next, you want the Rec0rd Totem on Piiko, but before you exe it, use the Drifting Gardens exe- with the Catalyst buff and the 'phase' buff, and now 2 totems, it will allow you to make 2 enemies lose 3 health each. Then you can use the Rec0rd Totem exe, using your last 4 ink to again scribe the phase buff and the lose 1(H) onto it. Here you get the Catalyst +1 on both the Crackling Stroke scribe effect, and the Rec0rd Totem itself, remember to add on both phase buffs, so that brings the effect of that one exe up to: deal 1(P) and target character loses 5(H). Also if you need one more damage you technically can activate Agile Stroke's exe too.

𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗚𝘂𝗶𝗱𝗲

Ri/se: Important for a few reasons, although not necessarily crucial to the main combo. She really helps with ink generation, as the play pattern is very ink hungry, so you usually want to get full value out of the ambush. The way she's built at the moment, you can only realistically expect to use Inkstone once in a game, which I will go over in the replacements section. Dissolution Kana provides great flexibility to your squad, as you have plenty of cheap stuff that can get a bit out of order when removed, so you can cycle away to your heart's content with kana! It especially combos with Shiho, as I'll cover now.

Shiho Zenji: Very much the utility character of the squad, with a ton of flexibility. As mentioned, with dissolution kana she can basically come in ready and get to whatever card you need in her stack for free. It's worth diving into this stack a bit as it may not be immediately obvious how to use it. First up, the 2 card combo of Cascading Illumination and Incrutable Koan allow you to heal a character for 3 health, and situationally 4. You attach Cascading to one of your characters not needing the heal, then hit them with Koan, triggering the reaction effect to heal a different character by 3, while the first character goes back to full. If Shiho herself is damaged a little it allows greater effect, as she can give the Koan one less damage and one more healing (doing 2dmg and healing 4), therefore netting herself 2 heal, and cascading 4 onto another character. There are some other small ways to trigger the cascading in the deck as well, so it doesn't just rely on this combo. Keep it in mind for Polar Flip too. Inscrutable Koan is also great to just crash an enemy at 3 or less health. Finally Izanami Install is a great card that I think gets slept on a lot. The obvious synergy is Koan which can crash itself, but also just if one of your important patch carriers ends up crashing, you can easily salvage back your patches from the crash pile over time, so it doesn't destroy your gameplan. You can even steal enemy crashed stuff, so it just gets scarier throughout the game, giving your opponent too much to play around.

Ral Kaid: The carrier I chose for the 2 main combo patches of the deck. I would rather have Gargaunaut Prime since I think Ral's ink condition is way too hard, and Garg has more health, but I really wanted to include Polar Flip in the deck since there's a good bit of synergy. Mainly, health loss doesn't stop it from being triggered in the same way that (P), (A) or (C) damage does, and since most damage in this deck is through health loss, you get to do the heal damage afterwards or just whenever you want. You can use the aforementioned Cascading/Inscrutable combo to generate a 3 heal to turn into 3 damage, or you can buff up a big Tale of Flowing Water to deal huge damage.

Piiko: The primary ink generation, and very important totem carrier. She's usually the most convenient character to stack your patches onto, since the Drifting Gardens has to go onto her, you may as well get the full Catalyst value by putting all your 'buffable' stuff there too. At 8 health she is a little vulnerable though, even with all your healing. I would say to only swap her out if she's going down really early, before you have enough ink, but otherwise you can just let her go and stack patches somewhere else.

Mi-K0: I'm still kind of iffy on M-K0's stack. Of course Catalyst is an integral element of the deck, but Putrid Blossoms and Lotus Hex don't have much synergy at all and are mostly a backup if anything. It's a tough balance to strike to try and get value from her ability without leaving her sat doing nothing late game when all the patches are out.

𝗥𝗲𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀

I'm looking at a few specific things still with this deck. One is the hungering kunai on the chopping block, since ink is super important to have for the gameplan, and it would be nice to be able to use inkstone lots in a game. So I have 3 main options there: Shorthand Record is a potentially obvious choice as it benefits from lots of ink so it's a good standalone backup. And probably on turns where you would use inkstone you wouldn't be doing large amounts of transcription so it would be ok to spend the 2 ink cycling past it for free with kana up. The other 2 are utility commons, namely Trim the Line or Blank Mask.

Another interesting option is bringing 101 or Hanbei so you could use Mirror Drive - there are a few great exes to copy, especially if you can transcribe with the record totem's exe as well. They would probably have to replace Shiho, so probably 101 could come in relatively pain-free just swapping Izanami or Cascading for Mirror Drive.

I think Polar Flip could be cut, although I need more testing to see how useful it really is for the deck. It being cut would allow me to use Gargaunaut though, who could bring Tome of Ancient Scripts - that would create some crazy damage with the extra 2(H) buff.

And lastly Mi-K0 needs some looking at, but I still don't know what to do with her.

Thanks for reading, enjoy the deck!