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K′ (pronounced "K Dash" or "K Prime") is a character in SNK Playmore's The King of Fighters[1] fighting game series. He stars as the protagonist in the NESTS saga of SNK Playmore's KOF series.wikipedia K' page

FNG028

Rare K'


Overview[]

SNK2P 06 17 K 1

Promotional release *K'*

K's overall strategy relies primarily on his first ability of discarding momentum to create negative control check 'hacks' thus forcing the opponent to commit large amounts of foundation or end their turn.

He was given a 9 card support set in SNK set Fortune and Glory:

He also has one promotional release card *K'*.

Deckbuilding and Strategy[]

Many K' decks use his promotional incarnation and typically are stocked with chaos and fire cards. Typically his damage enhancement abilities, while useful take secondary importance to his ability to inflict massive penalties to the opponent's control checks. His Rare ** incarnation is useful for its larger hand size and tends to focus on a more aggressive attack strategy than promotional K' which focuses on active resource denial.

As such the objective of most K' players is to open extremely quickly in order to generate as much momentum as possible in the opening turns. This will provide a base with which to prevent the opponent from playing high difficulty/high reward cards during their turns. Preventing foundation cards from entering play early in the game, in particular can be rewarding for a K' player as this resource denial can lead to prematurely ending an opponent's turn.

Every one of his support cards with the exception of his knee strike attack contains a bonus allowing for negative check hacks. These bonuses typically come with the cost of momentum discards. The problem inherent with this is that it forces you as the player to open with a predictable and counterable opening strategy. It also means that you won't have much momentum to use for anything else like K's secondary ability, powerful Es, or counter cards like Tsunami Saber. Use of the chaos resource can alleviate this problem somewhat. The Merchant's Message, and Meaning in Mastery are useful since they can be used on your opponent's turn and attacks. Pirate Raid can completely mitigate the first momentum required during use by taking it from your deck instead.

When attacking with K', it is useful to make even small attacks unblockable due to the ability of many of his support cards, allowing damage buffs to weaker attacks. A useful combo is to unload for example a Quick Elbow increase its damage to 2 with cold and Haughty, then by two more if it is the second or greater attack in the card pool with Mysterious past. If you have a card like Too Fast to See, discarding two cards will make this unblockable. A more advanced strategy is to use You're the Best Around to reduce an attack's speed and increase its damage, then discard using Too Fast to See at the reduced speed number and dealing higher unblockable damage. Doing this also guarantees at least one momentum going into the following turn.

K' experiences particlar difficulty with Super Rare Vega who can erode a K' player's momentum while building his own. Cancel this using Pieces or Eight or another card that cancels E effects and or commits the opponent's character on their turn.

Battling Against[]

K's opening strategy is predictably, fast and relentless. On the first turn one might even employ a throw or a quick elbow for the singular purpose of generating quick momentum. The solution to all this of course is blocks. A lot of them. Unless it's guaranteed to deal damage, EVERY one of K's attacks that comes at you is worth blocking no matter how insignificant the actual vitality loss. An aggro heavy K' deck which uses discards to gain bonuses can be depleted of its card advantage by forcing the K' player to play more cards to gain the momentum they need. This is more imperative than forcing K' himself to commit since many of his support cards have analogous control hacks that require a momentum discard. Card advantage is also important to the K' player in that K's ability is not a stand alone/ self sustaining power that takes effect requiring just your character to work like Promo Sakura's abilities/ Starter Ken's draw ability/ etc. As such he lives off the perks of his card support and momentum.

While his start up is fast, when well established, a K' player can middle out, and use stall tactics of resource denial to keep players from gaining much needed foundations. Players early in the game should focus more on gaining foundations and blocking than attacks because of cards like Merchant's message that can be used to gain momentum off your attacks. Also most K decks will be aggro heavy to function properly.

Allowed to gain too much momentum and K's resource denial penalties will snowball. Making the start of the game extremely fast and the middle and end groulingly slow for his opponent; exemplifying the live fast/ die hard qualities of this type of play. Keeping play fast for the opponent means eroding K's momentum. Absurd Strength, Demon Elbow, Soul Reprisal as well as SR Vega's ability come to mind. Also tricking the opposing K' player into committing K' early in your turn to where you will be unnafected by his penalties while playing cards later can work well. Fuh Ma Training works on this level among other cards.

Miscellaneous[]

  • There exist tournament caliber K' decks that function without running a single attack card. (need citation)
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