(Perona?!) Tokyo 3v3 Championship Preparation and Tournament Report

Hi Again!

Kai (@ikailakai) here with a tournament report. I like to do these articles to talk about why I chose a deck, my meta read, why I teched certain cards, and then how my matches went.

The goal of these kinds of articles is to give some insight into how I prepare for a tournament, and how I play certain awkward positions and don’t get fatigued after 12 games. I would do these more, but there are not many tournaments in Japan. This is my first 3v3 tournament that I’ve been able to get into in over a year, and it’s been around half a year since my last 1v1 tournament. Nonetheless, last time, I went 7-2, and this time I went 7-1.

Both times, I used Perona, but for very different meta reads.

(Also sorry this guide is later than I usually upload my guides. I have 2 in the works at the same time and organizing them is a bit hard, but I’m trying to get them out soon. One is a leader guide, and one is a deck building theory discussion)

This is the list I brought on the day. ‘Samurai Perona,’ is a deck that’s been talked about here and there, but this deck has some huge merits that lead to me taking it over my other 2 choices, Enel, and BY Luffy.

My tweet is in Japanese, but here were my matches on the day.

Lucci 1st ⭕️

BY Luffy 2nd ⭕️

Enel 2nd 🎲❌

BY Luffy 2nd ⭕️

Enel 2nd 🎲⭕️

Perona 1st ⭕️

Lucci 1st ⭕️

Lucci 1st ⭕️

Additionally, in a side event after the tournament for people who finished their tournament run around the same time as us, I went 3-1

Doflamingo 1st ⭕️

Pluffy 1st ❌

BY Luffy 1st 🎲⭕️

RP Law 2nd 🎲⭕️

Over the course of the day, I went 10-2. However, as it’s a 3v3 this doesn’t matter as we could not win it as a team. This means that again, I went x-1, or x-2 and went home with no prizes. But this is normal in Japanese tournament styles so maybe next time boys. 

These are my matchups in the last championship I went to in early OP06.

Moria ❌

Yamato ⭕️

Katakuri ⭕️

Enel ⭕️

Moria ⭕️

Enel ⭕️

Enel ❌

Moria ⭕️

Reiju ⭕️

Last championship I went to, it was a Moria Enel meta. Japan valued Enel over Katakuri for the earlier part of OP06. In this meta, Perona was able to cut through the competition, coupled with the strength that people were not very good at fighting against Perona at the time. The original Perona list, if you read my earlier article you’ll know, is a 10 cost Doflamingo Spam deck. A lot of people hated this playstyle and it didn’t inspire many Perona players.

However, as you’ll see, the new Perona list doesn’t run 10 cost Doflamingo. It doesn’t even run Brannew, Inuppe, or Baby 5, which were the main searcher core in the original deck that I made. 

This new version utilizes the new Otama card very well in a Wano engine. 

Otama

1 cost 0 power
+2000 counter
Land of Wano

[On Play] Look at 5 cards from the top of your deck; reveal up to 1 green {Land of Wano} type card other than [Otama] and add it to your hand. Then, place the rest at the bottom of your deck in any order.

Otama is essentially Buena Festa if the targets were decent. However, decent is the key word here. Although there are many green Wano cards, most of them are almost 2 years old at this point, so they haven’t held up well against power creep. I swept this card under the rug temporarily thinking that eventually when Wano gets new cards, this will be nice.

However, RIKI, one of the best deck builders (and unfortunately banned players) in Japan, spotted potential in this card with the current pool.

He created Samurai Yamato, using this engine, as well as cards like 5 cost Yellow Momonosuke to create a very tanky Yamato.

Off of this Yamato idea, someone (sorry I don’t know who) spotted that Perona could use this engine to access Ryuma more consistently.

This is the core of the deck. Otama and Momonosuke can access Ryuma very consistently, and you use these tools to gain resources, take board, and push through the opponent’s defenses slowly. This feels like a true midrange deck that the game was missing, and is very fun to play.

However, this alone isn’t enough to make a strong and consistent deck. Otama was great for accessing Wano easier, but it also works perfectly with another card.

Anyone remember this OP01 card? At the time it seemed so bad because you’d need to rest attackers such as Okiku or Raizo to draw a card. Now, thanks to Otama, with just 1 other random target, you can draw 2 cards for 1 don. This is so close to being Pot of Greed, and is the true reason why the deck works. Because of this card, as well as Momonosuke, we have a ton of survivability despite being a 4 life leader.

Going into the tournament, our team did a lot of preparation and theory building team comps to try to maximize our chances of winning, and not lose to luck.

First, we tried to make a matchup graph.

This won’t be perfect, and was a rough outline of how we think most of the meta matchups will go.

This is a lot to take in, but the idea for making a consistent 3v3 team is to align the matchups so that it doesn’t matter who hits what. Many people will just bring the 3 strongest deck in the meta, but can lose to luck by simply just hitting the wrong matchups in the wrong seat.

Our 3 players' main decks when we put together our team were Enel (me), RP Law, and RP Law…

There’s a problem here.

We needed to find at least 1 new deck for our teammate to play, and see what matchups we can align.

The blue highlighted decks at the top were the decks that were all possibilities to bring at some point. 

The one deck that we would not change was RP Law, as we had a dedicated RP Law player who was confident in his play with the best deck. This means that we will choose and build our team comp around RP Law.

Just looking at this in isolation, it’s easy to see why this deck is top tier. Aside from a few random lower tier decks, RP Law has great matchups across the board. Recently however, Lucci has become a bit of an issue for the deck.

Our read is that each team would have RP Law, and then either BY Luffy, Lucci, or Enel for the 2nd and 3rd deck. As such, we wanted to focus on these matchups. As RP Law was 50-50 or favorable vs all of these decks except Lucci, our goal was to find 2 decks that were also, 50-50 or favorable vs all decks except Lucci. In this way, even if we do hit Lucci, that means that 2 people wouldn’t have hit Lucci, meaning that we can win the round 2-1 in theory.

These were our 3 choices. The reason why Lucci was not an option in my mind was for this reason.

Lucci loses hard to BY Luffy. If we were to get unlucky and hit BY Luffy with Lucci, and Lucci with RP Law, it’s an extremely uphill battle. We wanted to ensure that at least the Enel, Law, and BY Luffy matchups were always fightable, so that it would come down to us as players, and not the luck of our seating.

As such, Enel, Perona, and BY Luffy were our choices for our 2nd and 3rd deck. All 3 of these decks can contend with Enel, Law, and BY Luffy. So, we tested it out and brought Enel, Law, and BY Luffy to an unofficial 3v3 tournament.

I was Enel, RP Law legend was on RP Law, and deckless man was on BY Luffy.

Enel (Me)

RP Law

BY Luffy

RP Law ⭕️

Moria ⭕️

Yamato ❌

Perona  ❌

Lucci ❌

BY Luffy ❌

RP Law ⭕️

Lucci ❌

BY Luffy ⭕️

It’s a short test tournament, and we went positive in wins over losses, but BY Luffy was certainly a weak point, as the deck was very difficult for someone who’s only played RP Law.

Our solution was that I should be playing BY Luffy. I was very dedicated to playing the deck, but was hooked on Enel for how relaxing it was, and how good I was at the mirror.

Whether it was ego or not, our deckless man did not want to play Enel, and instead put together Lucci against my wishes (lol).

In our next unofficial 3v3 tournament, this was our result

BY Luffy (Me)

RP Law

Lucci

Lucci ⭕️

RP Law ❌

BY Luffy ❌(Overslept)

BY Luffy ⭕️

RP Law ⭕️

Enel ❌

RP Law ⭕️

BY Luffy ❌

Perona  ❌

Moria ❌

Reiju ⭕️

Lucci ❌

Moria ⭕️

BY Luffy ⭕️

Enel ⭕️

Another rough day with the boys. I was suggesting decks like Purple Luffy, or Zoro, but unfortunately, people were not really willing to try it. This left me with no choice but to pull out my trump card.

Enel-pill a man. 

If I can Enel-pill our deckless guy and teach him how to pilot the deck within a week, then our matchups spreads are very clean if we go with BY Luffy, RP Law, and Enel.

Over the course of the week, I explained every situation and logic behind Enel. When to take life, what to mulligan for, when to start hitting. It was truly a rocky training montage as his comments slowly changed from ‘This deck is so cringe’ to ‘This deck is so cringe and strong.’

On the Official Championship Day, these were our matchups:

Perona (Me)

RP Law

Enel

Lucci ⭕️

RP Law ❌(Overslept)

Bonney ⭕️

BY Luffy ⭕️

Lucci ⭕️

RP Law ❌

Enel ❌

Lucci ❌

BY Luffy ⭕️

BY Luffy ⭕️

Hancock ❌

Perona ⭕️

Enel ⭕️

Lucci ❌

Reiju ❌

Perona ⭕️

RP Law ❌

Lucci ⭕️

Lucci ⭕️

RP Luffy ⭕️

BY Luffy ⭕️

Lucci ⭕️

Enel ❌

BY Luffy ❌

We don’t talk about RP Law. He had a rough morning… And why did my team show up so late?

But wait… what happened? Why am I on Perona?

This is what happened.

I had a really bad day where I could not draw the pieces I needed. I usually do fine with the deck, but the entire day I drew horribly game after game to the point that the deck felt cursed. To be honest, I should probably still have stuck with the deck and called it a bad day, but I am weirdly superstitious and didn’t have the time to bring the deck to a temple to purify it. <This is literally one of the reasons I didn’t bring BY Luffy. Feeling is important.

Not only did I have Cross supporting my decision to get off of a cursed deck, I had inspiration from another place.

Clyde(@ClydeTCG) was interested in Perona and made some ideas with me on OP07 Perona lists. His lists were more fortress focused, and while I tried them, the black matchup did not feel stable, and the BY Luffy matchup did not feel stable enough yet either. I feel like that version of the deck still has potential, but given that I only had a week left, I wanted to build off of the core that everyone else was running as it already had results and clear room for improvement.

Through all this talk back and forth with top NA players, I was able to make a mildly unique list that I have 0 regrets about on the day of the tournament.

If we’re talking about NA legends, I also need to shout out Yonas who called it weeks before I knew I was going to play Perona.

As Perona has a very good coordinated spread with RP Law and Enel, we thought it would be a very stable 3rd deck to support the other 2. I made the full switch after completing ‘my special Perona sauce’ 2 days before the championship. We did not anticipate that my deck, tierlist-wise the weakest of the 3 decks we were bringing, would perform the best and go 7-1. 

I believe that this wasn’t a miracle, but that perhaps (and maybe this will change by the time that worldwide gets OP07) Perona might just be a Top 3 Deck alongside RP Law and BY Luffy.

Before I go into some highlights and thoughts from game to game, let’s review some more interesting picks in my deck.

Again, here is my decklist on the day.

For reference, this is a more standard list.

In my opinion, the cards in the deck play the role above.

The Wano package core is very powerful, and cards like Moria and Tsuru help push the game plan to a favorable state, and currently, really have no competition in Perona specifically.

There is actually a world where Moria may not be needed, but for this version, he is.

Of these tech choices, I utilized 8 Sabo, Helmeppo, Ice Age, and Belle-mère.

8 Sabo is a great card at controlling Lucci’s board on any turn where he fails to play Sabo, and also RP Laws board on any turn you can slam it. The card costs 1 card to use the effect, but as Perona has so many resources, this usually is not as heavy of a cost as it would be for other decks. Additionally, with Perona’s leader ability, she can reach a 5 cost and 4 cost, or 6 cost and 3 cost with no extra cost reducers. This makes it very easy for Sabo to take back the board of his opposition, and was an auto-4 of in my mind.

Helmeppo is actually a rarer choice as people tend to prioritize the One-Legged Soldier. However, I disagree with this choice. While One-Legged Soldier is 2000 counter, Helmeppo is 3000 power, stays on the board, and is on play, while still having 1000 counter. The reason why Soldier works with Moria is that you can grab Soldier and Hiyori out of trash, activate soldier, then activate Hiyori and play Ryuma to KO a 7 cost. However, if you don’t have Ryuma in your hand, then you can’t play Soldier and Ryuma off of Moria, as Ryuma’s effect would activate before Soldier is allowed to use the activate main. Helmeppo can be used in this case as it’s on play, and therefore can trigger before Ryuma. He also stays on the board, meaning he’s a ‘You can be my Samurai’ target, or an extra attacker thanks to his solid statline for a 2 cost. I will fight for Helmeppo > One-Legged Soldier even though soldier (coupled with Rebecca) is one of my favorite characters in One Piece.

Ice Age allows me to play a slower game. Perona keeps the board clean, but if she fails to clear the opponent’s top end, then it can get very sour, very fast. 4 Ice Age means that you can play Ice Age + Ryuma to take a rested 9 cost, or active 10 cost, as well as have 5 don left to either play a blocker, or do Samurai things to gain resources and expand your resources advantage. In slower matchups such as Enel and Lucci, Ice Age is the key to fighting the board for control.

Belle-mère is the final, and maybe most unique card in this deck. OP07 is a 5 cost heavy meta. All of BY Luffy’s cards are 5 costs. All black decks use 4 5cost Sabo, RP Law uses Queen, 5 Kid, and also occasionally Miss All-Sunday. Belle-mère allows you to reach 5 cost with your leader ability without using a 2000 counter in Tsuru. Not only this, but the effect is activate main, meaning that if the opponent doesn’t deal with it, it will keep creating value. This fulfills a similar role to Momonosuke in making a roadblock that the opponent really doesn’t want to hit, but is forced to a lot of the time. Perhaps this card doesn’t need to be a 4of, but it was a hero multiple times.

As you can see from my tech choices, I teched very hard to beat RP Law, BY Luffy, and Black. I tested teching for Enel, but it felt a bit inconsistent as it would come down to the opponent’s draws, more than my own. I maximized the potential on all of the matchups that I thought I was likely to hit, and took this deck to the 3v3 Championship.

Matchups and Thoughts

Rather than talking about every detail in every match, I will talk about some points that came up, and what I was thinking about that made a difference, win or loss.

Lucci 1st ⭕️

I lost the dice roll, but my opponent chose second. I would have chosen first anyways. The reason for this is because on 9 Don, with Moria or 8Sabo with Ice Age, I can respond very well to the opponent’s Moria on 8. My plan before the day was to starve Lucci as many of his characters are 4 cost, and push back when he fails to play a boss monster on a late game turn. However, my starting hand had 2 Borsalinos, so I felt like I had enough board staying power to hit him and pressure resources that way. I rested my Borsalinos at awkward timings such as 5don with You Can Be My Samurai (I’ll be referring to this card as Samurai), to try and bait him into hitting it for 8000 so he has nothing left to do with 3 don. He didn’t take the bait, but that allowed me to rest his Sabo with my Belle-mère + Leader Ability, take it with a leader hit, and play another Borsalino. After this point I was permanently ahead on board and won.

BY Luffy 2nd ⭕️

This game was weird because my opponent kept trying to sneak information out of me. He had some fancy Yugioh Championship playmat and kept talking like “hmmmm should I hit with 6000?” and then looks up at my expressionless face, knowing full well I can’t even defend a 6000, praying he doesn’t do it. It was super annoying, and I didn’t draw a single Otama or Momonosuke, and instead, drew 3 Samurai with no targets to use them on. I just survived as best as I could, finding timings to make him cut counter out of his hand. One turn before I would be forced to go for lethal, I rested his Sabo and went face instead of clearing the board. This got 3000 counter out of him, and allowed me to have perfect lethal on the next turn by resting Sabo again, and hitting at 12000 twice with Leader and 8 Sabo. It was lucky that my attack went through, and he would not stop talking about how lucky I was. But I did not draw any of my searchers. Stay mad. Matchup is much more doable for Perona than for other black decks thanks to the ability to rest Sabo.

I only won this game because I delayed him by using Belle-mère, forcing him to swing at it for 7000 with Ace.

Enel 2nd 🎲❌

I won the dice roll, but I only drew 1 Ice Age. I played Moria Sabo Moria, but my opponent answered with 8 Katakuri all 3 times. Enel is the sort of deck where if they have it, they have it. Still, I was trying to make an opening to go for lethal soon by ignoring the board, and hitting his life. I hit with 7000 so that if he cuts counter to clear it, I could hit his board and make him cut more counter. Or, he takes it, and he instead needs to counter a 9000. The first is obviously the better choice, but he took the 7000 hit, and it was ‘You’re the one who should disappear.’ This saved him 5000 counter. This happened TWICE. On another turn a few turns after this, I go for his resources again by hitting his life. His next life was also ‘You’re the one who should disappear.’ And at this point, it was just over. This team actually ended up placing Top 4 in the whole tournament, so it sucks I got Kata Kata Kata Ace Yamato Ace’d and trigger high-rolled. Otherwise, we might have won, and been where they were in Top Cut. Nonetheless, I messed up one of my Moria combos in the late game and failed to leave an extra don for Samurai. This meant that I couldn’t find another to shoot it for another few turns, and may have been the reason that I lost. Although this game felt cosmically doomed, I was not without fault.

This is the 2nd time in 1 week that I’ve been Double ‘You’re the one who should disappear’ triggered in an important game. It had never happened once before that.

BY Luffy 2nd ⭕️

This time, I got the parts that I needed, and kept his board very clean. Any 5 costs that were played were immediately destroyed. Not only this, but they were struggling to take their own life down to 0, which delayed them long enough for me to build a board with 2 Base 9000 power characters. This was a fairly easy win as I got all the parts that I needed. I created a situation at the end where they would need their entire hand to defend my attack, creating a situation where no matter what, I had lethal. If they countered the attack and went to 0 hand, I could 9000 9000 and win. And if they don’t counter the attack, I can 13000 and win. It was a very feelgood moment.

Enel 2nd 🎲⭕️

Unlike the last Enel, this Enel could not draw anything if his life depended on it. He drew 1 Yamato, and 3 Raigo. The Raigo kept him in the game, but he was never in a winning position, so I eventually rolled over him. 

Side Note: He was shook when I starved him

Perona 1st ⭕️

A rare mirror! I think I would have taken first due to my logic in the Lucci matchup. Being able to respond to 8Moria/Sabo with IceAge + 8Moria/Sabo is very nice. However, being able to play 4Borsa on 4 is really really nice, so there is a trade off. My plan if they played Borsa on 4 was to rest it, swing 8 at it and Search / Samurai, so I was fine with first. However, this is the only mirror I’ve done with the deck, so I will need more testing to actually decide which side I prefer. However, this matchup was decided when he failed to play Borsalino on 4. I played my own Sabo on 5, and he didn’t have the tools to rest and swing at it. He let it stick and I played Belle-mère to clear his Sabo. Letting any board stick in the mirror makes a massive difference I remember from OP06, so my Sabo staying on the board from the very beginning was just an infinite advantage from mid to late game where something continuously survived as I was spreading my board with Moria. On top of this, although he drew Moria, he did not draw Sabo despite running 4 (we compared each other’s deck sizes after). This meant that I was able to take 2 of his board, while he was only able to take 1 of mine. Eventually when my big boys stuck to the board, it was over. Rare mirrors are fun when you’re both having fun, and I’m glad my opponent was having fun as we were both failing to draw out Wano pieces the whole game which led to a grueling 25 min struggle of playing on very low resources the whole game.

Lucci 1st ⭕️

I should have lost this game. He was clearing my board very efficiently, playing stage on turn 1. I also failed to clear his Stussy that was played after I cleared his Moria with Sabo. However, as he was comboing pieces with Moria Rebecca Spandain Lucci, he noticed too late that he didn’t have Lucci in his trash. This meant that he failed to clear my Moria once. As we are playing a long resource game, Moria staying on the board when I have a hand advantage of 5 (1 vs 6) was huge as I was able to take back the entire board next turn, and eventually push back for lethal. If he didn’t have this mistake, perhaps I may still win due to the resource advantage I had. But I most certainly would not be able to finish it in time, as we finished with 2 minutes left on the clock. The starve plan that I wanted to do from round 1 worked as planned, but perhaps almost took too long to complete and win back. I’ll need to be careful next time I face Lucci to make sure we’re both capable of finishing in 30 minutes.

Lucci 1st ⭕️

My teammates next to me both already lost before my game finished, but I was sitting comfortably from start to finish, out-clearing his board while gaining resources. At the end of the game, I was sitting at 2 life and no blocker vs the opponent’s board which was 1 stussy, and 1 leader. There was a very small chance that I had lethal, but there was a 0% chance that he had lethal. So instead of clearing the board, I pressured life to put him on a timer. He of course countered out the attack, and set up Borsalino 5Sabo to try and survive, but I put in the 1, 2, punch with Izou, rest Boralino, Belle-mère, -1 cost Sabo, Leader Ability rest Sabo, and finished the game.

Green is so stupid sometimes I love it. 

Our team lost anyway though.

I hope that this article was interesting for those who were curious how I choose and play the decks that I have. This is not a “OP07 Perona Guide” but is rather an introduction to some of the thinking and adaptations that go on in and out of game to prepare the best for tournaments and finding wins from the jaws of defeat. I think one of my strongest points as a player is identifying when I have a slim chance at lethal, and no chance at survival. These plays don’t always work, but when they do, they feel really good. However, they do work occasionally, and is how I squeaked out potentially 2 more wins than I was expecting to.

Thank you for reading this guide, and look out for the next one. They’re both a bit new in style.