It has been half a year since the last time Gold Paladin received new support and since then, the clan surprisingly kept his role as one of those dangerous rogue decks you always need to be prepared for. Indeed, even through the whole Bermuda Triangle madness, Gold Paladin managed to consistently sneak in a few tops every now and then during those 6 months. Looking at how Gold Paladin is currently faring in the Japanese meta, we can assume that the new support will help them keep up with the meta so it can continue to play its role in it.

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Since they’ve got the new V-BT05 support, Gold Paladin managed to get two major tournament tops in Japan : 4th place at the 1st Omiya VGCS and 3rd place at the Tsekai Tournament II. Unlike with Raven Ezel, the builds used by the topping players were very similar to each other.

Not much has changed since the last build. Using the same old Ezel superior ride variant seems to be the right formula to make Platina Ezel work in the clan. To include him in, the players seem to lean towards cutting a few Blond and Raven haired Ezel from the deck to free some space. Viviane is also completely cut out from the deck for more copies of Platina Ezel and Dindrane. Other than that, when it comes to normal units, everything pretty much stays the same as before.

Kahedin and Hoel, while pretty good, do not see play in successful Gold Paladin builds. The reason may be because including them in by replacing some of the superior ride pieces will hinder the consistency of the deck’s win condition. Furthermore, both Kahedin and Hoel requires each other on the field to gain all the benefits from their abilities; something that can be particularly hard to achieve consistently in a meta where control decks are rampant. I believe this is why players would much rather use the likes of Sagramore and Dindrane instead as they are quick floaters that do not use Ezel’s precious counter blasts to gain advantage.

The most substantial change in the new build is definitely the trigger lineup. Gold Paladin went from favoring playing a full set of critical triggers to now playing a full set of front triggers. With Accel II now in the picture, Accel clans gain access to a lot more hand advantage in exchange for a minor loss of power. Consequently, they can now use that hand power to fill their front row and play front triggers to circumvent Accel II’s drawback. With Platina Ezel being able to superior call up to 2 units from the deck per turn on top of that, we got ourself the perfect deck to fully take advantage of front triggers.