Demon Bike of the Witching Hour - This card is so unintentionally poorly designed that it is borderline unplayable, yet still played quite a bit. Especially in the deck it was meant for. You might be thinking, "22k 3 crit?! What's wrong with that?!" Nothing is wrong with that, what's wrong is when you take a look at the numbers behind your units. Are you running 4 perfect guards? Are you running 4 Demon Bikes? Okay, that's 8 grade 1's. How many of those are on the field? 1. The "optimal" situation for this deck, according to its players, would be riding an Alluring Succubus/Yellow Bolt on the first turn, and securing that extra soul charge. So, let's take a look at our booster count for our whole deck. We have 4 nulls we don't really want to call to boost with. We have 1 Bike since the rest go to soul from deck. We just lost an Alluring/Yellow Bolt. So then, if we're running 14 grade 1's, we have 6 boosters left (-4 nulls, -3 Bikes, -1 grade 1 ride). In exchange, we have a 12k booster and 5 other potential boosters. Now, that's all fine and dandy. You can draw into 2 of 5 cards in your deck and fill your backrow and pray you aren't up against Kagero/Narukami/Correctly built Dark Irregulars that can snipe your Bike, because that will be the first target, and then you'll have no backrow short of the 5 cards you get to draw into. But, wait, there's more! In a Reijy deck, you've also soul charged close to 15 cards, which means that you're extremely likely to have soul charged a few more of your grade 1's. So, you're talking about hitting 2-3 of the maybe 4 grade 1's available to you. That's not counting cards that get damage checked. Speaking of that, a damage checked Bike makes running him useless, gives you a -1 to soul (same as soul charging him before using Reijy to put copies of himself in soul), and there's many ways for you to mess up that perfect set-up. Drawing into Demon Bikes is another way to mess up your set-up. Sure, you can ride one, soul charge another, and have two 10k boosters (not bad at all), but that typically won't let you hit any magic numbers over regular Amon and won't help you hit magic numbers over Devil Child.
Dragonic Overlord THE END/Dauntless Drive Dragon - DOtE is an early game pressure card/late game tank. All he needs to cause some form of pressure is to have two face up damage. One of the things that has made the deck dominate for so long was a combination of the deck's cycling abilities to get him out, a potential 13k defense, and Kagero's backrow sniping, making it harder for the opponent to hit over that 13k wall. If you don't crossride DOtE, it is still just as much of an offensive threat, but loses quite a bit of defensive prowess. Dauntless Drive Dragon is an incredible break ride unit. Probably the best in the game. He destroys hands late game and does what he does really well. This combo actually works out pretty well, not because of synergy (they have -5 synergy, tell you the truth), but because break riding Crested Dragon (Kagero vanilla 10k grade 3) over Dauntless Drive Dragon is still insane pressure. On-hit limit break effects suck. There's no mincing words, if your Vanguard hits late game, the game is typically over. Even still, if your opponent is going to let one of DOtE's attacks hit, it's going to be the first one. This leaves you with a choice, activate the persona blast and make DDD's effect non-existant (unsynergy) or activate DDD's effect and have them guard the second swing. They will either guard the second, or guard both. In any event that they can't guard either attack, they would lose to any break ride combination with DDD anyway. This combination quite literally accomplishes nothing short of dragging both cards away from their truest potential since both function better without each other.
Ethics Buster/Stern Blaukluger - While I personally use Ethics as a back-up Vanguard in my Stern deck post set-10, that is his function, a back-up ride that's 11k defense and swings for 13k. Apply everything about on-hit limit breaks being bad from the DOtE/DDD section and apply it to this combo.
Genovious/Benedict and/or Storm Riders - I really love Genovious and Benedict. I have never really been a big Storm Rider fan, though. These cards don't work together nicely. Having a bunch of weak swings, likely 9-10k, doesn't do anything for this deck, especially since half of the Storm Riders (Eugene/Basil/Diamantes) only get the +power and swap on the first attack. If you swap using those three units, you can't use their effects to swap back after the persona blast. This deck is really meant to do 5 boosted attacks at the Vanguard. That being said, you guys are probably wondering why Benedict doesn't fit. Here's the sad answer. When Benedict attacks a Vanguard, he is forced to lose the 5k and restand. Then you are forced to attack the Vanguard again with that -5k. When you restand Benedict, you get neither the 5k back nor the ability to use that effect to restand him. The entire purpose of using Benedict in a critical deck is to swing Vanguard first and if the Vanguard is guarded, pass that power to Benedict since he doubles up on the amount of shield forced from every trigger. Now, there is a way to play around that by attacking a RG with Benedict, but when the purpose of the 5 swing limit break persona blast is to try and finish the opponent, that feels very counterproductive.
Goku/Waterfall/Lawkeeper - I keep hearing this rationale that "Once you have checked a few grade 3's, ride a different unit over Goku." I mean, sure, you can. But math has already proven that your flat odds of hitting a grade 3 on a drive check never change, and your proportion of checking grade 3's to non-grade 3's is most likely going to stick around the flat ratio of grade 3's to non-grade 3's in your deck, so there's little point to it unless you're riding specifically to finish off the opponent. Waterfall is a big Vanguard swing, but they aren't going to be null guarding Goku unless they ran out of 10k shields earlier. There's a good chance you're just riding into a null guard while retaining the same flat odds to check grade 3's. Lawkeeper is a little more justifiable as it is a limit break unit and can eliminate the intercepting factor to push for game, but it's still not a big improvement on the base (only hits for one more stage against non-crossrides) and the null guard issue could still happen. I think that Goku should stay your Vanguard with Dauntless as a back-up ride because, like I mentioned earlier, anything with Dauntless is good and 4 chances to retire grade 1's, even that late in the game, is still relevant. It still keeps goku as that early game pressure card while having a viable back-up option that drains the opponent's hand, and if you want to run extra grade 3's, the Amber Dragon ride chain is great for this deck.
Platina/Gancelot - This combination gives your field +50k for a turn. It comes with a few downsides though. The deck doesn't do anything at any other stage of the game. People who see the breakride combination coming will keep your damage low. All of your 12k beaters work only half the time. Missing the break ride equates to you doing nothing the whole game. You need to run non-counterblasting, weak rear guards, including self-damagers. You are very likely going to create normal rows that only force 5k shield from your opponent because of the RG's you are forced to run. The deck just exudes gimmickiness, and due to all of these weaknesses, isn't likely to be that threatening with a 50k power boost.
Pellinore/Duke or any other main phase/ride phase superior call deck - No. Pellinore is bad. Riding him mid-battlephase is his best case scenario. Dropping 2 cards to ride a vanilla 10k unit that can limit break to sack nearly half of his field for a marginal increase in power is not a good option. Duke is better off with Gancelot (when available) and until then Destroyer. Chrome and Duke both want to be at 4, and I think that having a decent RG is a little too important for this deck, especially since Destroyer is their only out for 21k on the RG without Garmore (who is your real backup ride if you need one).
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