Readers!

I’m not going to beat around the bush here, this is an article about specs that I think could come out of people building with the Secret Lair Street Fighter cards. I usually like the have some more copy “above the fold” so to speak but there isn’t much to say here. They made a Secret Lair that has Street Fighter 2 characters and it’s going to be pretty popular and we should get the stuff that goes in the decks now. It’s going to be… I actually don’t know how long until we get our sets in the mail and people will wait until then to build. That said, we don’t have EDHREC data because no one has built yet but, and I don’t think I’m out of line saying this, as someone who has written a column about building EDH decks for 8 years, I think I understand how the format works to an extent and I’d be delighted to make some predictions based on the cards and how they work. I’m going to show each Street Fighter and a couple of cards I like in that deck and call it an article. This is for you, guy who always asks “Did this need to be a whole hour” in the comment section of every Brainstorm Brewery episode. It does NOT need to be an hour.

Zangief is a beast, as you might expect of a guy who wrestles bears. Unfortunately for spec purposes, a creature with Lure on it isn’t super new, but making them sac stuff when you kill a creature they were forced to block with is pretty new and I have some ideas about how I’d build.

This is basically the floor on Augmenter, a card with a very clear corollary.

I don’t think Augmenter hits the dizzying heights Protector got to, nor is Hexproof quite as good as Indestructible, but I think we are still good buying in at $2.

A lot of the other stuff I like for Zangief is uncommon – pull Nemesis Mask and Tempting Licid out of your bulk, I guess? I don’t know, we have spent too much time here.

The big butt Doran decks have a decent amount of tech for this, but Reach tribal is a new one.

This guy seems way too fair to me.

Of the 104 cards that reference Charge Counters, only Coretapper can put them on Guile and only if he’s an Artifact creature at the time. I bet this gets built like a really dumb “attack with creatures” deck. You can’t even combo off by removing a lot of charge counters at once – it’s only when they’re removed the slow, one-at-a-time way. I hate this card. That doesn’t mean one of the most popular Street Fighter 2 characters won’t get played at all.

TCG Market is literally half of what they’re charging on Card Kingdom, this is already a good spec.

Samesies.

Ryu seems really weak and being stuck in Boros is not ideal. That said, if you want a Training-based deck, there are ways to make it OK.

‘member these were $10 and I wondered what was taking so long for it to go up? It went up. It took 2 and a half years, but it got there.

Stacking a lot of counters on him is sort of boring, but the deck is sort of boring, honestly. They don’t all have to be gems, I’m sure someone will build a very good version of this despite my evaluation and I’m sure I am OK with that.

We have a second toughness-based deck. I think this goes in the 99 of Dhalsim, making it potentially a bit more playable but not much.

This card is worse than you think – all of the stuff from the Doran toughness deck like Assault Formation is Green and you can’t play it in a Honda deck. It also doesn’t let creatures with defender, your best big-butt creatures, attack, something a real toughness commander would do. This is just a really bad Arcades with less than 1/3 of the relevant cards. You don’t have to spec on this.

This card is money, but it also lends itself to a really generic goodcombostuff build. That’s fine, but it really makes it tough to narrow down what to speculate on. I also think Chun Li is likely… basically exactly the stock Taigam list.

When this is what the High Synergy section looks like, you know you’re in for a bad time. Dovescape and Seek the Truth are the only remotely synergistic cards and I don’t think they’re as good in Chun Li. Yikes. You’re not on your own, but you’re going to find it’s tough to spec on a card that is just basically “control deck.” The real question is do you play Snap alongside Frantic Search or just Frantic Search? Riveting stuff.

I’ll keep an eye on this because the most popular deck (and this will be) can drive stuff the lesser decks can’t, but I don’t see anything unique to Chun Li online yet and I can’t think of anything. Can you?

Ken is better than Ryu, I guess, but it’s also a Boros Commander and it doesn’t partner with Ryu which is basically the only way I’d play either. Ken is an extra turn spells commander that seems clunky to use until you realize he doesn’t need to hit the opponent, just deal damage. That’s pretty useful and the spell you cast for free may change depending on how they block. I’d build a Sunforger deck, personally, but I write articles rather than make YouTube videos so no one knows any of my opinions.

Other than extra turns cards, it’s all pretty standard stuff. Here is an example list. I don’t see much here, but you might.

Now THIS I can get into. Of the cards in the set, Blanka is the one I have the most potential specs for. “Target yourself tribal” is a mechanic that can give us a ton of cards from the old Infect days, starting with this one.

Lash got so cheap, most sites stopped tracking its price because it was bulk. Even Card Kingdom wants under 50 cents for it. The foils are spicier.

I am so ready for the bottom on this one, which might be now – stock is drying up.

The lack of a blue line means this has never been on a buylist ever. The red Wisps is $5, I’ll let you decide if these are worth pulling out of bulk. Check out Zada’s page for more ideas.

That does it for me, nerds. Thanks for reading and keep your eyes peeled for more Street Fighter tech weeks before the cards sell out. It may be too late for Will Byers (or Deb, yikes) but there is some M Bison money to be had for sure. Until next time!