White Hare of the Moon’s Shadow, Pellinore is one of those cards that made a lot of noise in the community when it got spoiled and fell into obscurity the moment the next set of spoilers got revealed. Because people quickly realized that Pellinore wouldn’t really be able to work with the star of the clan, Ezel, he got overlooked as being another one of those budget deck options for the clan. However, a small portion of the community decided to take Pellinore and build a deck centered around him and his abilities.

While many players struggled to make an Ezel centered deck have a positive record for weeks, a Gold Paladin player from Japan appeared out of nowhere and managed to top the Nakajima VGCS team tournament with Pellinore. Along with his teammates, this Gold Paladin player managed to take 2nd place (out of 19 teams) and, with a record of 5-2, be part of the reason why his team got so far. How was that possible, though?

Well, as we already know, Accel clans’ main problem as of right now is their inability to get enough card advantage to apply their strategy consistently and/or to defend against opposing assaults. They have to manually draw the right units at the right time and commit on the board before even knowing if it’ll actually be worth it in the end.

Pellinore’s ability to make a Rearguard bounce back to the hand after its attack solves that problem. Whether it’s a grade 0 or a grade 1 unit, with an Accel circle available, Pellinore makes it so that any units we draw can be used as an attacker without the drawback of losing shield value or card advantage in the end. Pair that with the few others pluses the clan can generate and this create a deck that has a decent amount of sustaining power!

Another good thing about Pellinore’s bounce ability is that it frees up space on the field for “mid-battle callers” (units that calls themselves or another unit during the battle phase) to do their thing without having to replace another unit. As long as we have the counter blasts available for both Pellinore’s bounce and mid-battle caller’s abilities, we can chain more than 3 attacks per turn without losing anything in the end.

While the Pellinore variant is not as aggressive as the Ezel variant, it is much more stable. Because of the prevalence of Force clans and how defensive triggers works in this game, consistency and stability seems to be what Accel clans needs to be successful. It is probably too early to completely write off Ezel from being in the optimal Gold Paladin deck, though. Although the top from Pellinore was impressive, it is only a team tournament and that one good result is way too low of a sample to conclude anything about the clan. I will be looking forward to future results to see which of my boy is at the top of the Gold Paladin hierarchy but in the meantime, please enjoy some good Pellinore action from the man, Livingproof :