The “Fumio” Profile / Stock Flush Profile

The “Fumio”, which is so aptly named for the character card from which it is derived from, is an effect by which you force your opponent to refresh while removing a number of climaxes from their waiting room, thereby reducing their number of cancels in their freshly refreshed deck. Keep in mind that the effect forces your opponent to specifically place cards from their waiting room on top of their deck, thereby mitigating the refresh damage point.

Fumio originally appeared in her the form above in the Girl Friend Beta Vol. 1 set back in 2014. Her primary effect, the main reason for her use, lets you pay her cost and choose two cards in your opponent’s waiting room. Those cards are set aside as your opponent places their waiting room on top of their deck and shuffles. Keep in mind that any card can be chosen, including climaxes.

Fumio, as shown above, had such a powerful effect where her climax combo could be considered completely secondary to her first ability. The power of this effect meant that, given the circumstances, you could potentially force your opponent to refresh at an inopportune time to potentially stick large amounts of damage into their clock while taking away up to two of their climaxes. As such, a refresh when your opponent has several climaxes in hand or stock or when their deck is in too much of a compressed state may turn the tide of the game in your favour.

Modern Fumio profiles generally come in an array of forms with slightly altered effects. Newer Fumio profiles can be seen to be ironically, more fair than the original Fumio in some sense. Some of these effects let your opponents pick the climaxes they choose to reshuffle without rather than having the effect be the player’s choice. Other effects may simply allow your opponent to reshuffle with one less card rather than the original two.

To make matters worse for your opponent, another effect is commonly chained to the Fumio profile shown above. The reason I’ve chosen to combine both of these profiles is due to the common attempt to combine both of these effects. The aforementioned effect above is called the “Stock Flush”. Essentially, when this effect is used, your opponent replaces all their stock and adds back stock from the top of their deck, potentially forcing climaxes into that zone. Combined with Fumio, this can be a devastating combo depending on the order, forcing your opponent to be in a potentially naked state in their deck with little to no climaxes for cancels.

The original stock flush effect comes from the Idolm@ster card shown above. Arriving into the game in the original Idolm@ster set back in 2009, the effect was on an event that simply replaced your opponent stock. Considered a very powerful effect in modern day plays, the stock flush was relatively unused initially and a rather niche effect. This was due to the original cards and sets in the game where stock was considered a difficult resource to attain and maintain a hold of. Sets had a harder time retaining stock due the expensive effects and their costs back then.

But now, with the advent of more powerful free-costed cards and more stock-gaining card profiles, stock can be more easily garnered with many decks creating a large stockpile entering the level three endgame. As such, given proper care and consideration, much of that stock could be considered as compression if few to no climaxes are hidden underneath the pile. This causes decks to carry an ideal or beneficial ratio to cancelling, considering many non-climax cards are removed from the deck zone. Stock flush acts as pseudo solution to this problem by “punishing” a clean stock pile and potentially flooding the stock with climaxes.

For the most part, the effect text has largely remained the same. Many of the effects are still tied to events, but many character versions have spawned as well. Considering stock flush as a compression tool while adding a means to input large amounts of soul damage makes it a powerful weapon capable of ending games quickly.

Combining the Fumio and the stock flush is considered a nightmare for your opponent. Multiple stock flushes can even be employed in order to force your opponent closer to refresh to take refresh damage. By layering these effects, you can ideally minimize the amount of climaxes your opponent refreshes and then force a reshuffle with a large stack of non-cancels. It is rare, if any, to find a set that carries both of these effects together, which is likely a good thing seeing how strong this two card combo can be.