Bravos Deckbuilding Part 3 - Kojo

     Parts 1 and 2 looked at Atsadi and Basira decks. There is going to be some repetition in this article, so where I’m talking about similar things here I’m probably going to refer back to a previous article.

     This one is going to finish off the Bravos heroes by looking at Kojo decks. More so that the other two heroes, Kojo has so much more variety that you can do that there’s going to be no single Kojo deck. This is because his ability (to create a Booda token every other turn) doesn’t give you a particular line of play that benefits him the most. Hence you can look at Kojo decks by the style they adopt rather than the few specific card changes. I’m going to therefore in this article have sub-themes to define the different Kojo decks.

Kojo Decks

1. Speedy Kojo

     The idea behind fast Kojo decks is to play lots of lower cost creatures that provide more from them than the mana you put into them. The plan being to get far enough ahead early so that you can then win on one side only on the last few days. The general idea is you want to run low cost cards (mana cost 1-3), where at all possible, so that you can maximise every day’s mana. The deck can run out of speed as you go through the game and will likely suffer a lot through Sabotage, Hand discard and against decks with lots of card draw that will likely catch back up later.

     Things that I think will be good in this kind of deck are: -

• Ratatoskr
• Bravos Tracer
• Foundry Armorer (rare)
• Haven Warrior (rare)
• Sun Wukong (rare)
• Helping Hand (common – its good everywhere!)
• Haven (common)

     This is one of the few decks that I recommend running Intimidation as a form of removal to gain that targeted win for a side late on based on a tempo play. Other than this I feel that this style of deck will likely be light on removal and probably wants to play the rare Haven too so as to get the extra early speed to be able to bring the better creatures into play quicker.

     There’s a lot of other bits that can go into this deck like Ozma (to get some card draw), Bravos Vanguard (to get more use out of your Bravos Tracers and other strong cards, common Red,  common Haven Bouncers and some common Physical Trainings. Generally, I like to play more removal than most people, but I think this deck can go light on removal (perhaps just a couple of rare Mana Eruptions) due to the speed and low mana cost of most cards.

     As to Unique cards, I think that the deck wants to play powerful Unique cards I terms of boosts (for the cost) and Unique cards with Card draw. This deck will really suffer without some kind of card draw in it for late game and I think it needs to try and short that up with one or two good Unique cards with draw on them.

2. Big Kojo

     This architype I first saw from fellow Bravosi player KojoMain and its an interesting idea. Here he is playing all the Atsadi ramp to play the large haymakers to win the expeditions. He uses Booda as an early win on expeditions to give him a faster start (hopefully) against other decks that can then pull away by playing big haymakers whilst still having the safety every other turn of a free Booda. The deck uses ramp (Mana Channelling, Tiny Jinn and Mighty Jinn) as well as big creatures (Shenlong, Kaibara), protection (two copies of Spindle) and some removal (Mana Eruption, Intimidation). He has a few other bits in here that I’m a little less keen on, like Issun-boshi. He also plays Ratatoskr, Bravos Tracer, Haven Bouncer, a single Asmodeus and Tomoe Gozen. This deck reminds me a lot of my Atsadi deck with a few minor changes and it had an interesting result in the video.

     Here is a link to KojoMain’s excellent YouTube about the deck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yXC436NdF8

3. Sab-o-Kojo

     The idea behind this architype is to play as much Sabotage as possible to try and starve out the opponent of cards. It’s a kind of strangulation of card flow coming back from reserve. This is particularly effective against heroes who want to use the reserve to play out from to gain lots of benefits. By taking out powerful plays from the reserve you are neutering their deck. You’d be looking at including common Bravos Bouncer, rare Tanuki, rare Tooth Fairy, and rare Ordis Spy. That’s using 9 of your fifteen rare slots.

     The problems around this strategy are four-fold.

• Firstly, the deck plays a lot of 3 cost cards, and this can make awkward hands to play with different levels of mana. This is an issue I’ve seen in other decks where you load too much on the one mana cost and have awkward hands
• Secondly the cost of sabotage is built into you character and therefore the biome values are thus a bit weaker. So, you kick ass Bravos cards are a bit less good in competing for expeditions.
• Thirdly – you are weak to decks that draw lots of cards.
• Most of the sabotage is from other factions, so you will end up using a lot of your rare slots on these.

     You can round this deck out with the usual suspects of good cards, but be warned that you will be tight on rare slots, so you might be restricted with what else you can play here in terms of power cards.

     The plan for this deck for Unique cards would be to look for powerful Unique cards that give you double sabotage or for cards that don’t usually have sabotage on them that actually have sabotage effects.

     I’m not convinced that this will be a winning deck list, but it’s probably going to be one I try out at some point to see how it fares.

4. Reverse Kojo

     This is a topic I first brought up in my reviews that you can actually play a lot of Bravos characters with really good reserve abilities and get these pricy abilities for cheap by playing the Axiom Foundry. Now having multiple Foundries down does not actually work (as Equinox have errata’d the card so that it doesn’t provide multiple instances of the reserve abilities). The Bravos Hatter has put together a sample list of this architype (shown below).

     The problems with this architype was that if you didn’t get the Foundry then it was just a weaker deck and that if you have both Haven and the Foundry in hand the you’ll probably want to play the Haven in preference.

     Obviously here for Unique cards we are looking for cards with powerful reserve abilities and cheap hand costs. Also (since we are playing 6 landmarks) we should be good with playing one or more permanent conditions on our abilities.

      e. Good Stuff Kojo

     This is a kind of mixed build that just looks at playing some of all the best cards of each type to just ‘play good cards’.  The kind of standard is to play Haven (because it is so good) and then play the best of the rest. There are countless different versions of this around with so much variety that it is really hard to make a list or too many suggestions here.

     I will give a few bits of general advice of my opinion around Bravos cards to include in decks.

• Kappa is not a great choice in my view. It always gets clogged in my hand at 4 mana and there’s pretty much always something better to do. Plus, Kappa is 4 mana which is exactly the worst mana cost against removal.
• Tomoe Gozen is on the other hand good, but there are only so many 3 mana cards you can play, and his restrictive play is real. So, I think I might only play 2 and mana orb any you get in your starting hand. There’s a lot of good cards in Bravos at 3 and you need to be careful at including too many of them.
• Generally, I wouldn’t play Three Little Pigs, but it is a valid choice in a landmark heavy Basira build because it has a boost on playing from hand and can be a 5/5/5 for three either when played from Hand or Reserve.
• I like Hua Mulan more than most in my decks because she is card advantage, but its hard to run full sets of her, Hua Mulan and Bravos Bladedancer (rare) because you reserve will get too clogged up and you will end up discarding.
• Axiom Salvager is an option for partial card advantage, but the rare cost for him is painful and I usually pass him up in favour of other rares.
• I’m not a fan of Atlas, but some people like him. The Atlas / Physical Training combo is great if you can get away with it but makes you very sad if they have removal for it.
• Parvati is actually quite good, but I find you can’t afford to have too many in your deck. It does something pretty unique for Bravos that if you have something big out, you can keep around. I might play an odd single one, but probably not more.
• Kitsune is a card draw, but one that is to be used after other options have been exhausted. Its something that you might need to go to though, so you need to consider it. Ozma is the other rare option, but getting two other characters and booth boosted is a real quest and one I think only Basira can actually readily achieve.
• Draecena is weak on stats but has something unique to Bravos (anchored). I’ve just not yet found a good way to use him yet. Maybe a build with three Draecena Unique cards and All-in! (Note this is not a serious suggestion).
• I don’t think I’d ever choose to play with Lyra Navigator, Tanuki (unless you are playing the Sabotage deck), Lady of the Lake, Son of Yggdrasil, Ouroboros Trickster, Mind Apotheosis, The Hatter (rare) or The Council. The Council and The Hatter both fall into the four-cost trap along with Kappa. I used to play Ouroborus Trickster in Basira for her boosts from hand, but she usually underperformed. As more of the card list became available, she got replaced quite quickly.

Next time I’ll share my deck lists for my Atsadi deck, my Basira Deck and a couple of builds for Kojo that I’ve created.