The Strategies of Supreme West Kai

Supreme West Kai is without a doubt the most hated personality in the game. She’s thought of as an MP who takes no skill to build a deck for or play because you don’t have to think about defence and that leaves more room for adding extra cards to the deck. She’s associated as an MP for bad players because they don’t need to have defensive cards in their hand, which gives them more cards to attack with per combat. They always have a chance to defend so can survive for longer, and her shuffling power makes her even stronger. Her victories are brought down to having good luck, because if her defensive power had stopped a few less attacks the game might have had a different result. All of these reasons have made her a personality that’s not fun to play against. And her powers are so different from anything else in the game that many players don’t believe she should be part of the game. She was even banned from the Retro format for this reason.CA1 Supreme West Kai Level 1

I first started playing Supreme West Kai in 2004 just after Baby Saga was released. She became my main deck with Black CS control and I continued using her throughout the rest of the game, improving the deck with each new saga and all the experience I gained with her. After the game ended in 2005 I continued to play with friends for several years. We started playing the Focused Z format again too and I played SWK in Orange MBS and an older form of Black CS. Then I developed the MWS patch and started online tournaments on Toptiergaming where we kept the game alive until 2010. Throughout these 6 years I never stopped playing the deck, gaining more experience with her. All this experience with her has shown me a very different side of Supreme West Kai that I think few people have taken the time to see.
Deck building can be incredibly simple if you want it to be. Don’t worry about defence, add in whatever you want to the deck because there’s extra room, and you’re done. But if you want to play Supreme West Kai at her best, there can be a lot more to it than that. For example, did you know that Orange and Red both have the majority of their good cards as odd numbers? Build the deck without thinking, and you’ll end up with an average of 70% odd cards. If the opponent knows that, they have a 70% chance of getting successful attacks against you. For this reason a good SWK deck should aim to have 50% odd and 50% even cards. The struggle of replacing good cards you want in your deck for something else just to balance the odd and even ratio, while not sacrificing any strength to the deck is not easy to do. At first I found this a lot more difficult than having to make room for defensive cards, something that every player is already used to.

If you want to make things even more complicated you could also think about how many allies and non-combat cards you have that are odd or even. What will be put into play quickly and stay out of the deck for the majority of the game? What cards will be removed from the game when used, and how many odd or even cards on average do you sensei in? Maybe a 50/50 split still isn’t going to stay balanced for long after the game starts.

CA2 Supreme West Kai Level 2

You want this ratio as close to 50/50 as possible, because that’s going to leave you with the most freedom to manipulate it. Supreme West Kai’s regeneration power isn’t just a neat way to recover cards you’ve lost. It’s also a way to stack the deck in your favour. One of the most well-known strategies for dealing with SWK is to keep naming odd, or keep naming even. The thought process behind it is to stop the bad luck factor many people associate with SWK. You perform an attack and name odd, then SWK removes the top card showing even and stops the attack, and you perform another attack naming even just to see an odd card appear and stop 100% of your attacks. If you keep naming odd for the entire game, you’ll at least have 50% of your attacks successful… This is the strategy for people who play with or against SWK with no skill or strategy. If you keep naming odd against a good SWK player, they will shuffle 5 even cards back into their deck every combat. Most players won’t even pay attention to this. Your 50% chance of a successful attack will begin to drop very quickly until you maybe only have one successful attack each combat. In Expanded format, players can even choose what 3 cards will go back on top of their deck and in what order. It’s no surprise then when the opponent keeps naming odd and has their first 3 attacks stopped, while SWK is playing a hand full of odd numbered cards. If you play against SWK, never let them know what you’re going to call because as soon as they know that you’ll have lost the game.

Stacking can also work in your favour if you have too many cards in your remove from game pile, field, and discard pile of the same type of number. If you built your deck to be 50/50 but notice the cards out of your deck aren’t matching that ratio, then the cards in your deck won’t be either. And if the opponent isn’t telling you what they’re going to name before they do it then you need to shuffle back the right cards to keep your ratio balanced. This is the difference between playing Supreme West Kai with luck, and playing her with strategy and skill. You have to keep an eye on small details of the game that normally you would never think about, on top of everything that player’s normally think about. A good Supreme West Kai player will be thinking more about defence than anyone who can actually play defensive cards.
Supreme West Kai’s regen power has strategies of its own. Many just see it as an overpowered ability that allows her to regenerate better than a Namekian. I won’t argue that, especially for Focused Z. In Expanded the amount of cards makes less of a difference, but it’s still good. Other personalities will have attacks that can do more than 5 life cards which could make up the difference, but what makes SWK’s power so great is the ability to choose whatever cards she wants. The strategy you can use with this is something I love about her. The obvious thing to do is regen good cards so you can draw them later and use them again. More skilled player’s will combine SWK’s power with other cards to draw what they want immediately. Having Vegeta’s Quickness Drill in play means you can draw any of the bottom 6 cards of your discard pile. Draw this and Super Saiyan Effect early enough and you can keep recycling it back in your hand every combat so the opponent can’t attack for the entire game. With Heroic Drill, SWK can shuffle Confrontations back into your deck each turn and Heroic Drill will search for them again. Those are just two of my favourite examples. Players who know how to use her power will get so much more advantages out of it than simply recovering 5 cards each combat.

Throughout my time playing with Supreme West Kai I often played against the same people. They would regularly play against Supreme West Kai decks and the strategies against her started to improve as they did. Giving up and wanting her out of the game because she’s stupid and lucky is a one way to deal with her, but there are also a few others. Firstly, everything that I said above that a SWK player needs to think about should also apply to their opponent. You need to watch what cards are being shuffled back into their deck, watch what cards they have in their discard pile, remove from game pile, and on the field. If possible you need to get a look at their deck. Confirm they really do have a 50/50 ratio and keep track of the ratio at all times.

CA3 Supreme West Kai Level 3

Then there’s tech. We had arguments on toptiergaming because some people wanted her banned. We argued they weren’t using tech. You can’t expect to beat something if you don’t use tech. Discard pile removal works incredibly well. For some reason the counter argument was that DP removal wasn’t worth putting in your deck, and no one should have to tech against a personality. Obviously everyone had forgotten about Stunned, but even the argument that discard pile removal isn’t useful against enough decks to be worth running had baffled me. Most decks with strategy will utilize the cards in their discard pile just as much as they do with the cards in their life deck. And if any deck is stopping you from winning, you should work on finding a way to beat it. Complete DP removal works well just to stop SWK’s regeneration, but the opponent can find a way to stack SWK’s deck in their favour too by only removing cards of a certain number. If they aren’t paying close enough attention they may end up shuffling the wrong cards back into their deck and making it easy for you to hit them.

Everything else about Supreme West Kai comes down to personal opinion. I personally don’t feel like there’s much difference between the luck of her defensive power, and the luck of drawing a defensive card. And having only 50% of your attacks successful in a combat isn’t as bad as getting blocked by a stop all and having none of your attacks successful, or a card ending combat before you can even do anything. The main difference is we’re used to the game working a certain kind of way, and Supreme West Kai changes that. It makes the game uncomfortable to play for many people and they don’t enjoy that. Maybe that’s enough of a reason to ban her from the game. Everyone should have fun and enjoy playing, win or lose. She probably should never have been made. But there is no other personality in the game who I could write this much about the strategy and skill involved with them, and that’s only for the MP cards. You still have another 82 cards left to add more strategy to the game.

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