The “Shimakaze” Combo + ShimaKai

The Shimakaze combo is an old advantage combo that is a simple reverse combo that grabs you selective hand advantage. At the time of its release, the Shimakaze combo was considered quite revolutionary. It was one of the few combos early in the game that could you net you advantage without costing resource or provide a more limited pool of selection in terms of advantage.

Shimakaze, the namesake of the effect, came out in the first Kantai Collection set back in 2014. Shimakaze was a powerful card for its time where, as stated before, most combos carried some cost or gave you relatively limited choices for hand advantage. Shimakaze did come with a reverse condition, but coupled with the 2000 power, +1 soul climax profile, she would be ideally 7000 power on swing which was a good number during that time. Furthermore, 1/0 2000 powered backups were relatively rare then (and 1/1 2000 powered backups were not popular for stock reasons).

Shimakaze profiles are less common now as of the time of this writing, usually restricted to seeing prints in trial decks mostly, if any at all. Shimakazes have improved over time with more conditional power to help with the reverse condition. The original 2000 power, +1 soul climax was replaced with mostly 1000 power, +1 soul climaxes to facilitate multiple reverses. But the rise of standby combos and higher powered cards have made it much tougher to fulfil the exact reverse conditions.

Furthermore, newer sets have access to combo pieces that have other utility effects attached, or their combo provides more advantage than a single gain in hand. The reverse condition coupled by its low power and lack of other effects outside of the combo have made times hard for Shimakaze to remain in play. Either way, Shimakaze did have its time in the spotlight as one of the early premier costless hand advantage combo options in the game.

KC/S31-015U 島風型駆逐艦 島風改

There is also another profile that shares a close name to the Shimakaze profile. That is none other than the card above named Shimakaze Kai or ShimaKai for short. ShimaKai is essentially a power pump that helps provide power, when it attacks, to one of your chosen characters equal to the number of other characters on stage (excluding itself). The namesake may not be used by all since people may opt to just call it a power pump on swing or something similar.