Chamber Chat: My Thoughts on Nats 2023!

Survivorship Bias: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

[@Damdiel]

My Tokoyami was built opposite to how you described him. He was built to play defense and draw attacks while checking on defense with Knife Throw.

[@TheChamberMHA]

While that’s very true, I still think my description of how Bird usually gets played is accurate.

[@Damdiel]

@@TheChamberMHA Tokoyami is a defensive powerhouse, he's a ninehander if you play him on defense, he picks up a card that effectively can give an attack -2 speed on defense, and the -1 damage over a string is really strong as well. Add that to incidental lifegain from manifest blocking, nejire-chan lifegain, all of the chaos defensive tricks like release/encouraging training partner/ice storm etc. and he's very hard to kill. You can still go all in with an aggro fire list like JJ/Byron, but even on fire he has really nice defensive tricks like breaker 4ing with barrier shield. I think a big reason why only a handful of people seem to consistently do well with bird is that people push the narrative that he's an aggro roulette deck, when imo he has the strongest defense of any of the aggro characters in the game. It's kind of like saying you play Nomu by never blocking when I guarantee all of the consistently topping Nomus are making good blocking decisions.