Card Review: Elemental HERO Bubbleman and Blade Armor Ninja

I’ll start off by saying today’s article will be a short one, there’s not a whole lot to say about Elemental Hero Bubbleman, but what there is to say I find very interesting. For a very long time the Hero Beat decklist has been for the most part untouchable, aside form some minor tech choices.  (Hero Beat refers to the stun build of Elemental HEROs revolving mostly around Elemental Hero Neos Alius, Gemini Spark and some other thrown in cards to help utilize Miracle Fusion )The deck really had been brought to its maximum with the current cards we had, and there wasn’t really any thought of there being Elemental HERO support in the future. But, from obscurity came a new decklist involving Elemental Hero Bubbleman having him replace, the seemingly better in every way, Elemental Hero Ocean. Possibly the worst of the original Elemental HEROs, Bubbleman finally gets his debut in the spotlight due to and interesting XYZ monster that only he could bring out so efficiently and effectively.

Bubbleman is extremely simple. When you have no cards in you hand other than him, you can special summon him to your side of the field. (He also has one unspeakably impossible effect to pull off that pretty much only happens if you top deck him in the finest sense of the word, but let’s all hope that situation never arises.) This means he can make some really quick XYZ summoning plays for Rank 4’s by just setting all the cards in your hand. To cater to his ability, you’ll likely want to run less monsters in order to effectively pull this off. (most decks I’ve seen run from 6 to 9 monsters, super low right!?)

The most basic way this works is through Elemental Hero Stratos. (the best of the bunch) Just Summon Stratos and use his effect to add a Bubbleman to your hand, then special summon it for a quick XYZ play. Of course, this isn’t the best way to go about XYZ summoning, I’m sure you’ve seen better things out there like Tour Guide, Rescue Rabbit, etc. etc. so what advantages would this have? Well, this is where Blade Armor Ninja comes in, a new Rank 4 from Order of Chaos. Blade Armor Ninja requires 2 Level 4 Warriors (which Bubbleman happens to be) making him easily accessible in an E-HERO deck and practically un-summonable in almost every other deck. His effect allows him to detach one material to select a Ninja monster and have it attack twice for that turn, and in most cases he’ll probably select himself. He also has a sturdy 2200 ATK which means you can get in a whopping 4400 points of damage into an open field, which can really easily end games, which can be very unexpected in such a stun like deck.

This combo can be furthered by summoning two at the same time to form an OTK, since with two you can do 8800 points of damage. The simplest form of the combo is only two cards: Elemental Hero Stratos and Monster Reborn. This may sound impossible since they’re both limited to one, but the two cards can easily be replaced with other cards that you could easily run like Reinforcements of the Army or E- Emergency Call for Stratos and Call Of The Haunted for Reborn. So here’s how it works. Normal Summon Stratos adding Bubbleman to hand. Set all your cards then Special Bubbleman and XYZ for Blade Armor Ninja. Detach the Stratos so it can attack twice. Reborn Stratos and use his effect to fetch and summon another Bubbleman and XYZ for your second Blade Armor Ninja. Pretty simple! I’m sure you’ll be OTKing people in no time.