How My Code Geass Pizza Deck Got Me the Lelouch Winner Card

UNION ARENA’s fourth set focused on Code Geass has been (in many ways) a landmark achievement for the game. A host of rare and valuable cards can leave you opening far more packs than you meant to, while new and powerful strategies have proven they belong at the very top of the UNION ARENA meta.

But another fun and important aspect of the fourth set are the Rare Battles you can attend at game shops in your local area. Unlike regular store tournaments where players can bring decks from their favorite anime and pit them against each other for an ultimate battle, Rare Battles limit players to using only decks from a single anime.

This presents an interesting challenge wherein also lies opportunity: how can you plan for a meta of only a handful of decks from the anime as opposed to the typical pool of all decks?

While I had already attended the BLEACH Rare battle and won, Code Geass just came out less than a week before I attended the Rare Battle for it, giving me way less time to get used to the decks, as well as less time for the Code Geass meta to take shape. This challenge was ultimately not something I could pass up, and so I began delving into some serious deck testing to figure out what deck I would bring with me to what would likely be my one-and-only Code Geass Rare Battle.

My Code Geass Red Pizza deck took some serious fine-tuning to get right

Winning a tournament and going undefeated is very, very difficult regardless of what TCG you are playing. What’s surprising is how much work actually goes into winning one of these things. Of course, I’m absolutely obsessed with this Code Geass set so I probably would have been testing anyways. However, having the Rare Battle to look forward to gave me something of a goal to prepare for: what deck would I play, and how could I make sure it was optimized?

After play testing my way through just about every Code Geass deck imaginable, I landed on making the somewhat rash decision to play Code Geass Red Pizza: a deck most people have written off as something of a gimmick and not a serious contender in the meta.

However, if played with the right mindset and especially in Rare Battles, Pizza can be very, very good.

Making the right meta call

For starters, Pizza doesn’t have any hard counters in the Rare Battle format, and it fares pretty well against both Green and Purple. While I assumed most players would be playing Code Geass Purple at the Rare Battle (it is the strongest deck right now), there were actually a pretty healthy mix of Purple and Green decks, with about three red decks in total as the minority.

However, I didn’t want to spend the evening doing mirror matches despite the fact I already had some solid practice with Code Geass Purple, and Code Geass Green (while a strong deck) feels slightly disadvantaged against the faster Purple deck.

So, naturally, I went with a different deck entirely. After testing my way through a Four Holy Swords deck and even a Britannian Military one, I landed on Pizza as the strongest alternate to the big two. Of course, as the winner card will tell you, I was not disappointed.

Testing and improving Code Geass Red Pizza

Of course, the main goal of the Pizza deck is to just find Pizza and boost up the insanely C.C. However, building the entirety of the deck isn’t necessarily so easy. I went through several renditions of the deck before settling on my final build. The best late addition I made to the deck (at 2am the night before the tournament) was the incredible Suzaku character.

While the Shirley Raid character I had included in my original Pizza build offered some interesting plays, I found she was not as useful as she could be largely due to the fact that she only possessed 3000 BP. I felt like I really needed another strong BP character, and Suzaku fulfilled that role and more.

For only four energy, Suzaku has Impact and a powerful “when attacking” effect that lets you stand a character who has already attacked – provided they have 3000 BP or less. That’s most of the characters in this deck. Using Suzaku I was able to make several aggressive early game plays that seriously dwindled my oponent’s life. What’s more, in the final deciding match Suzaku was the critical piece to scoring me the win.

Despite the big C.C. being pretty critical in my tests, because of how aggressively I play this deck I didn’t actually get to the point of the game where she was necessary. Indeed, most of my matches were over within ten minutes or so simply because of how aggressive this deck plays. If you’re not ready for that, it can be very jarring to deal with.

Other cards that came in clutch during the tournament

While four-cost C.C. didn’t come out to play much, besides Suzaku other powerful cards were the five-cost Lelouch capable of sidelining strong characters like Guren, and the pretty broken Chess Game Special event that lets you sideline 5000 BP and under characters as long as you have just three events in your sideline. With all the Pizza cards you get to play for essentially free, hitting that number happens very, very early on.

Lastly, I should highlight Ganymede. This handy robot worked great in my deck, granting me extra attack power when needed, energy, and even adding incremental draw to my hand by searching out Pizza cards.

Indeed, this deck offers a ton of draw options between your zero-cost C.C. which can be bounced via Rivalz and played again, and your free-to-play Delivery Pizza which lets you draw a card and sideline one.

Aggression is key to winning with this Pizza deck

I wrote that playing this deck is not for the faint of heart and I mean it. You have to be willing to play highly aggressively if you’re going to shoot for winning with this off-meta deck. At the same time, you also have to pay attention to things like the ideal order to place your cards in after searching seven deep for Pizza. You have to balance attacking as often as possible with conserving an energy line. But most of all, you need to be taking life whenever you can.

Pizza simply won’t be able to keep up with other decks if you let them dominate you early on. This means that you will have to be the aggressor. While this doesn’t mean you have no finishing power (four-cost C.C. is arguably the best finisher in the game right now), using C.C. to close out the game when she is played will only work if you’ve efficiently cut down on your opponent’s life first.

Between the need to play quickly, attack early, and cycle through a lot of combos and cards to find what you need to succeed, Pizza is anything but an easy deck to play. While that doesn’t mean it can’t be good, it does mean many will shy away from it in favor of something easier to play out of the box. Manage to master this inanely awesome deck, however, and you could have a leg-up on the competition – especially in the Rare Battle format.