In a distant universe, humanity has divided itself into two populations. One-half lives on Mars, an impoverished colonial war-torn wasteland whose people compete for scraps of resources. The other half presides on the rich Earth, harvesting materials from Mars as the oligarchs rejoice in their suffering. To keep them in line, military squadrons are sent to govern and observe the spatial colony… Wait, this is the wrong story.
Ahh, German steel, a powerful, quality melded material, capable of piercing even the hardiest of armour. Protective and reliable, the German fleet sails the oceans, fearless and brave. Supporting the fleet from the depths are the notorious U-boats, ready to emerge when ready to send stealth torpedoes to any unfortunate lone-stranded units.
Frederich de Grosse is the flagship of this fleet. She’s a healer with a modular finishing ability to either shuffle cards back into your opponent’s deck or pay a cost to deal four damage to your opponent when she attacks with her climax. Do keep in mind that she needs a hefty eight experience to be able to perform her climax abilities.
The luscious Prinz Eugen blesses us with her presence. Prinz is a filter combo that lets you discard a card to salvage a character to hand when she attacks with her climax in play. Furthermore, she gains the ability to protect herself from being reversed until the end of your opponent’s next turn. Keep in mind, she, like many of the other cards in this deck, will require at least two experience to perform their abilities.
Ulrich von Hitten is a nice way to replenish hand, either a character or an event, albeit at your opponent’s discretion. U-556 is a cheap filter on-reverse, letting you draw and discard a card.
To help us ensure we have the experience requirement needed for Frederich to get her combo off, we have both Roon and Aegir above. Roon can act as a secondary combo that possesses a minus soul ability that you can apply to one of your opponent’s characters if you pay her costs at the start of your opponent’s attack phase. Aegir has a modular ability to let you either salvage a climax on-play and give her cross-turn power or to give minus two soul in front of her until the end of your opponent’s next turn.
Because of the hard requirement of experience for both Frederich and the vast majority of our cards, with at minimum two for level one, we need a consistent way to ensure that we are able to get those cards into our level zone. Thankfully, U-110 above provides exactly that, letting us rest a character to perform a level swap. Furthermore, she’s a spammable salvage brainstorm, helping us with hand-fixing and paying out stock.
The elegant Graf Zeppelin steps in the spotlight as her adoring fans turn over for a glance. If you’d like, you can consider Graf as a tertiary combo. Considering that Prinz herself doesn’t generate you hand, simply returning value through ideally retaining field cross-turn, Graf can be a way in the early game to grab more pieces to hand instead of just filtering as Prinz does. When Graf attacks, you send the top card of your deck to the waiting room and salvage a character whose level is equal or less than the card sent.
Running three climax combos is quite feasible thanks to U-96 and her climax swap ability. Additionally, the Iron Blood event lets you discard an Iron Blood (鉄血) character to salvage a climax to hand while giving one of your Iron Blood characters a large power pump. Combined with Aegir, the deck has quite a few options to gather climaxes to hand.
No backups are suggested considering that Prinz herself is ideally indestructible anyways. If possible, having Prinz stick out for a couple of turns allows us to cheaply maintain board and slowly gather resources while not having to worry about field at all. In the early game, Z23 is a very powerful clean cut profile that is attached to a level 0 reverser. Z46 has an on-play level-down ability, letting you cheat sneaky reversals with Z23 on unsuspecting targets. Furthermore, combining Z23 with Nuremberg can sneak you both a swinger that can be sent into the backrow later for her secondary sacrifice, check four, and add a character ability.
Prinz is indomitable. Maintain field with her and remind your opponent what “Iron” truly means in Iron Blood.