The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya – Time Travel [07/14/2021]

Haruhi itself is an anime full of comical fun and all kinds of bizarre forms of strangeness including time travelers. A common favourite from the series, Mikuru Asahina joined Weiss Schwarz along with her friends back in 2009.

This is the core card of the package. Don’t underestimate that cute adorable welcome face of hers and the pose. This card is arguably one of the most annoying cards in the game to deal with. Because of the timing on this card, it ignores most removal due to the fact that effects activate in player order. Meaning, even if there was some kind of effect that would hit this card during its activation phase, this card would prompt first and fire off its effect, thus actively fizzling most effects.

It’s effect is fairly simple. At the start of the player’s encore phase, you may pay the cost, two stock, and choose this card and up to one other card and send them to the memory zone. At the start of the following turn, both cards will return to the field and gain +1000 power for the turn.

What makes this card horrendous is its ability to pay two stock to simply avoid interaction entirely and forcing your opponents to direct attack. There are a number of things that can go wrong for your opponent when this happens since they may overshoot soul damage, forcing you to cancel or their on-reverse effects are negated entirely since no target is available. Of course, the opposite could happen as well with the player taking large amounts of soul damage due to the lack of defenders. But essentially what this card does is let the player recycle resources without having to play their hand since two cards are guaranteed back on board the following turn.

Unless promptly removed through an immediate effect that prompts before the encore phase, such as field removal through say clock bombing or bottom deck bombing, its effect will fire off even if reversed. Same goes for the card it targets to be its friend when they’re both sent to memory.

So how does a player abuse her effect?

The most common way to abuse this effect is by deploying beaters that gain power or abilities based on being alone or having low amounts of stock. Alternatively, you can even bring in beaters with high soul damage just to smash your opponent in the face and then retreat them back into the memory zone.

These two cards were part of the core combo with the right card added after the release of the power up set back in 2016. The left card gives an additional +1000 power to any <SOS Brigade> card that returns from the memory zone. The right card was a core card in terms of helping the deck mill whenever it returned from the memory zone or was played from hand. Also it has the handy effect of flying to memory whenever it reverses another card, letting you potentially send three cards to memory for the turn.

Oh, there are far more evil shenanigans that the little time machine 0/0 Mikuru can abuse. There was old chain where you could transform the 1/0 counter on the left into the center card and then bounce that transformed card into the memory zone. Nowadays, that effect isn’t exactly too flashy and surprising; however, the center card is tied to a combo that negates the activation of any events your opponents possess until the start of your next turn. The climax also possesses a treasure icon, so potentially you can loop this combo potentially every turn until you run out of the climax. Alternatively, you can loop this anti-early play card on the right with the ability to trigger twice when it attacks. Now you can continually double trigger on the enemy without any worry while penalizing any early plays they may have.

And these are just some of the shenanigans and cards you abuse with just the <Time> characters theme. Imagine the potential with cards outside this colour or archetype as well.