Nihil Tiphereth strat ?

[Percussigant]

Is it viable ? It looks really strong on paper but in practice it seems way too impractical to set up to be relevant.

-you have to reliably farm enough negative emotion coins fast enough before your nuggets collapse
-you have to refrain from killing enemies too fast to avoid getting positive coins
-you have to pray that you do not get Blessing instead of Despair
-you have to hope you can bridge the gap between Wrath and Nihil before you finish yourself off

It would be fine if you could use Nihil as a last resort panic button, but then you probably could have prevented that by not playing towards Nihil in the first place. Also I don't see anyone in their right mind picking Wrath if you're not going specifically for Nihil, so that kind of rules out the "extreme measure" aspect of Nihil.

It would make more sense if you had the option to pick Wrath as the last E.G.O. page, with Nihil being an inactive pick until then.

I don't know. It might just be me who needs to git gud, but imo either this strat was indirectly nerfed through some changes to the emotion system, or it was always meant to be a meme. Which is a shame, because once you unlock Red Mist & Binah there isn't much incentive to keep using the other floors (apart from very niche situations).

So is there something I'm missing to make this loli of doom build work ? Or is it just plain bad ?

[Starakira]

It is viable (and it's really strong). This might come as a surprise to you, but I found it not that hard at all to set up, but you need to use a durable Keypage on Tiphereth (or the nugget you want to use for Exodia) for her to not die when setting up Exodia. You want your other nuggets to die, but not too fast so don't just use the default Keypages for them (I use the Rhino Keypages). You want to wait until Tiphereth get to emotion level 4 or 5 before letting them die. You also want to lose clashes for the sacrificial nuggets so just use the default cards (or unequip all cards). Tiph can clash normally. Out of 40+ times I just got unlucky once because somehow the sacrificial nugget won too many clashes. However, when you get to Nihil, you can't really lose.

[Percussigant]

Originally posted by Starakira:

It is viable (and it's really strong). This might come as a surprise to you, but I found it not that hard at all to set up, but you need to use a durable Keypage on Tiphereth (or the nugget you want to use for Exodia) for her to not die when setting up Exodia. You want your other nuggets to die, but not too fast so don't just use the default Keypages for them (I use the Rhino Keypages). You want to wait until Tiphereth get to emotion level 4 or 5 before letting them die. You also want to lose clashes for the sacrificial nuggets so just use the default cards (or unequip all cards). Tiph can clash normally. Out of 40+ times I just got unlucky once because somehow the sacrificial nugget won too many clashes. However, when you get to Nihil, you can't really lose.

Thanks for the answer ! I was actually about to answer my own post : I just beat Prescripts and then Purple Tear with a Nihil build and clearly I was just doing stuff wrong before and ranted before trying to put some effort in it. I did something a little bit different than you did though, and since I'm rather happy with it I'm going to shamelessly indulge myself a bit and explain it for future reference :

The core of my team was Tiph using Xiao as a key page and more or less full burn pages (and a bit of sustain) in it, and two of my nuggets were built as tanks (an Udjat and Boris). I was absolutely baffled at how resilient the Udjat in particular was, on a side note. I mostly equipped them with low-value defense pages, and that one 0-cost that has two low dice and a light regen function. Also I had 3 Stigmatize pages in the team.

All that fire from Xiao really helped a lot accelerating the fights. I could keep losing a ton of clashes while still dealing a lot of damage, and I had the high damage cards of Xiao as a panic button if I really needed someone staggered/defeated/burning *now*. The emotion build also synergises decently with the Xiao E.G.O.. I think Purple died to about 50+ burn damage, although the first scene of the last act had me worried a bit since Xiao(page) is not that tanky, but boy oh boy she really hits hard and Purple just melted once the debuffs kicked in.

https://imgur.com/a/Df64Lzy

[SmallGespenst]

worth noting: deaths aren't a problem. once you hit full power the rest of your team is useless anyway and ally deaths are a big dose of red emotion to help you on your way.

[The Knowledgeseeker's]

What I like is to have a Boris with no draw and Discipiline.

No draw mean you can use Nihil to give the enemy -9 to all stats for 2 turns.
And discipline allow you to have a card that ignore the -5 to clash with.

[Percussigant]

Originally posted by Einii:

What I like is to have a Boris with no draw and Discipiline.

No draw mean you can use Nihil to give the enemy -9 to all stats for 2 turns.
And discipline allow you to have a card that ignore the -5 to clash with.

Didn't think of that ! My thoughts for the E.G.O. Nihil were to use it in combination with Void and a draw-heavy deck : use the All Returns to the Void page once you have enough pages in hand, and use the Nihil mass attack in the same turn. The idea is that All Returns to the Void procs on combat start, and so it should in theory exhaust your hand before the Nihil mass attack procs its "no-card-in-hand" effect, all in the same scene for a very reasonable 6 light cost.

Since Tiphereth only has 3 tier III Abno pages this could make for a completely different build than the Nix strategy since we don't need any Breakdown Abno pages to set it up. I'll give it a try !

[Makeight]

Don't use Tiphereth Floor lol

[The Knowledgeseeker's]

Originally posted by Makem:

Don't use Tiphereth Floor lol

Why ? It's like a really good floor if you know what you are doing with it.

[Minh]

You can use it. It needs setup which can be bad. It's better to set up before Receptions then fight in Receptions than spending Scenes setting up.

[The Knowledgeseeker's]

Originally posted by Minh:

You can use it. It needs setup which can be bad. It's better to set up before Receptions then fight in Receptions than spending Scenes setting up.

So are we gonna Ignore Love, Hate, Road to Hapiness, Greed, Companion and Void ?
As all of theses cards are good. And some of the ohters aren't bad.

[Minh]

Originally posted by Einii:

Originally posted by Minh:

You can use it. It needs setup which can be bad. It's better to set up before Receptions then fight in Receptions than spending Scenes setting up.

So are we gonna Ignore Love, Hate, Road to Hapiness, Greed, Companion and Void ?
As all of theses cards are good. And some of the ohters aren't bad.

No. What I meant is don't always rely on Abnormality Pages to win because some might not occur if you need. It's still good to use.

[The Knowledgeseeker's]

Originally posted by Minh:

]
No. What I meant is don't always rely on Abnormality Pages to win because some might not occur if you need. It's still good to use.

You just need to learn to manipulate emotion better then.

[Minh]

Originally posted by Einii:

Originally posted by Minh:

]
No. What I meant is don't always rely on Abnormality Pages to win because some might not occur if you need. It's still good to use.

You just need to learn to manipulate emotion better then.

Defense & healing are needed until you get Breakdown Abnormality Pages you want but it'll win the whole Reception if you succeed.

[Ekimmak]

Has anybody ever gotten to see the Magical Girls abno page do anything?

I've not even gotten a chance to draw it after they changed it from "Have 4 combat pages you aren't allowed to use". If I fail to draw the negative pages early on, I swap to going full in for the positive pages, and make a slightly less overpowered but still very strong single target clasher (temperance feeds itself quite nicely)

[SmallGespenst]

Originally posted by Minh:

Originally posted by Einii:

You just need to learn to manipulate emotion better then.

Defense & healing are needed until you get Breakdown Abnormality Pages you want but it'll win the whole Reception if you succeed.

the thing about healing is that it's not the most important thing, losing librarians gets you a significant infusion of negative emotion coins, which can help you get the pages you need. Nix makes all of your non tiphzodia librarians garbage anyway, so it's not much of a loss anyway

[Percussigant]

Originally posted by SmallGespenst:

Nix makes all of your non tiphzodia librarians garbage anyway, so it's not much of a loss anyway

This is true, but I think there can be a bigger picture yet.

Once you get a good grasp on how to reliably obtain a lot of negative coins, the critical moment of the strat becomes bridging the gap between obtaining Wrath and obtaining Nix. So having one or two assistants who have cards & passives to efficiently clash with Tiph herself when she goes berserk can really turn up the strat to 11.

This is why I love the Udjat page so much when it's equipped on one or two of Tiph's assistants. Not only can you equip cards who give global protection (!) for your team, you also have team-wide protection generation in your passives AND your Udjat recovers some Stagger resist after a scene. Combined with Wrath, this means you essentially get maximum possible negative coins generation out of your clashes while ensuring Tiph gets where she must in good enough shape.

Basically, you can easily bring Tiphereth to godmode while still having another nugget alive (and in relatively good shape) to redirect some heat away from her and give her protection, just by mixing one (or even two if you're confident you can lose enough clashes to make up for the 1 less death) "loses clashes but never dies" pseudo-tank nugget in the mix along with the rest of your sacrifices.