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Introduction to UVS Retro

  • Oct 11, 2023
  • 22 min read

Hi, I'm Nicholas Ragan, you might know me as DefinitelyABot on Discord. I've played UFS/UVS for a while, I started way back in 2011 with Red Horizon Tides of Vengeance and I've been playing competitively since 2015 at 2015 US Nationals where I got carried to an undeserved second place finish in teams playing Life Fire Man. Once I started playing I never really stopped, my first set was Red Horizon: Tides of Vengeance, the second set Jasco Games had released, as such Retro as a format holds a special place in my heart as it more or less represents my history with the game I've top cut plenty of majors but the only thing I've ever won is the 5th 2020 Retro series event with Water Sheeva. The other thing I'm known for in the community is owning the UVS Cube, which is a collection of (currently) 2616 cards that we play draft with at majors, you may see people walking around chanting "CUBE! CUBE! CUBE!" at major events that's me! (If you are interested in trying it out feel free to ask we are always happy to have more players). Retro as a format celebrates the history of UFS(now UVS) in the time it was owned by Jasco games(now UVS Games). The Retro format contains all sets printed by Jasco games and UVS games, starting with Red Horizon all the way up to the most recent set(as of writing this) My Hero Academia: Undaunted Raid.

My intention with writing this is to share some cool decks that use both old and new cards to enable some very fun combos. But first, as I imagine some people reading this aren’t fully familiar with the format, we should probably go over some mechanics and abilities that you’ll see in these decks that don’t exist currently in MHA Block format.


First off Multiple, Multiple allows you to turn momentum into additional copies of your attack similar to Echo but with some slight differences, you don’t need to play the multiple copies but they also have no text box(IE no Keywords, no effects) and they add to your progressive difficulty as they fill your card pool with face downs.


Multiple X = Enhance Discard X momentum (minimum 1, maximum the Multiple rating): Add X cards from the top of your discard pile to your card pool face down as multiple copies of this attack. Multiple copies have all properties of the attack except the text box. Add the multiple copies to the attack stack. Multiple copies cannot be added to your momentum and are discarded if they would be.


You may have noticed a term in the effect of multiple “the attack stack”, we don’t deal with it really in MHA Block format but the attack stack is basically a list of attacks waiting to resolve, if an attack resolves and there are attacks currently on the attack stack then they start their attack sequence before you return to an open game state and can play more Forms. The attacks on the attack stack clear in the reverse order they are added so the most recent card added to the stack will be the next attack to happen. It is also used by the Reversals keyword, speaking of


Reversal = Response [Hand] Play this attack: After your rival's blocked attack resolves, add this card to the attack stack. Only 1 reversal can be played per response window.


Reversals are fairly simple; they allow you to attack with them on your rival’s turn after you block their attack with another card. The upside you can maybe get some damage in on your rival’s turn or maybe some disruption of their turn by forcing out a block. The downside is playing a reversal takes 1 more card out of your hand leaving you with 1 less block with and adds 1 more card to your card pool for when you next try to block again. However there is a way to not get reversaled, and that brings us to Safe.


Safe = Static effect, “Your rival may not play a reversal to this attack”


It’s as simple as it sounds, if your attack has Safe your rival isn’t allowed to play a reversal to it after it resolves. Ok I don’t really have a smooth transition for the rest of these, let move on to desperation.


Desperation is a bit weird as it’s 2 different mechanics, both of which require you to be at less than half health. First desperation as a keyword


Desperation: X = Static effect "While you are at less than half health, this card's difficulty becomes X. X equals the keyword rating of this ability."


So when you are at low health the card becomes easier. Desperation can also appear before an ability, similar to deadlock. When it does it adds the following condition to the ability.


Desperation = “This ability is only playable if you are at less than half your max health”


Next up, check costs. You might see a cost with parentheses surrounding a number followed by a plus, that means


(X+) = You must pass a check with a difficulty of X as cost to play this ability


So, if you see (4+) in the cost you need to pass a check of difficulty 4 as a cost to play the effect, there’s no progressive difficulty added to this check and you can commit cards to pass it just like any other check. Ok I know this has been a lot but we only have 1 more set of mechanics to cover then we can get to the deck lists and that’s character stacking.


In Retro(and Standard for that matter) if a character card that shares a name with your starting character would enter your stage it will attach to your starting character even if it has a different version. When a character attaches to your starting character, your starting character gains all the abilities and symbols of the attached character, max 1 per version. So if you have 2 copies of the same version attached you only get 1 copy of the abilities. There’s 1 keyword tied to the character stacking mechanic and that’s Gauge.


Gauge:X = Enhance: If this attack deals X or more damage, you may search your deck and discard pile for a character card that shares a name with your starting character and add it to your staging area. X equals the keyword rating of this ability


And that should just about cover the additional mechanics of the Retro format. Now we can move on to the deck lists, I've picked out 1 character from each set in the retro format and built a retro deck for them, so let's start off with the oldest set:

Red Horizon



Have you ever wanted to play both Mydoria and Asui in the same deck? Well Reese is that deck, you get to keep just as clean a card pool as Asui does while at the same time getting access to all those sweet punches from Mydoria’s kit. With cards like Future Charge and Back Alley Haymaker mitigating his discard cost he can put out long strings of attacks that can easily run your rival out of blocks with little stress on your build.



Using Public Support we can even turn his discard cost into a bonus enabling us to add +1 speed and +1 damage while keeping our card pool nice and tidy. Add to that cards like Let’s Cut Loose to retrieve Public Support from our discard pile while drawing an additional card allows us to find our gas and give stats to our current attack.




Red Horizon: Tides of Vengeance



Super Skull Man 33 is our first character stacker we are going to be looking at, he has a fairly unique ability increasing his maximum hand size by 1 for every copy of him in both stages(which can lead to some very funny games in the mirror match). As such we want to find our other character cards soon so we can maximize the advantage we can get off the extra card draw. For that we are running Uraraka's Encouragement to add our characters straight from our deck to our hand.



Our Form lets us add 1 of our foundations to the top of our deck as cost in order to selectively remove a card from our rival’s stage. This will help us slow the game down a bit to give us time to build the stage we need to push for game, but in addition we can take advantage of being able to stack our deck with cards like Hero's Inspiration and A Hero's Training to give massive stat buffs to one of our attacks!



Now you might think that with our plan to stack our characters thus increasing our hand size we might be planning on going heavy on the Gauge keyword, and if we had built off the Good symbol that’s likely what we would have done, however by building off the Life symbol we get access to Repeated 100% Smash with none of our cards counting towards progressive difficult thanks to Super Skull Man 33s Enhance we can easily play Repeated 100% Smash at the end of our attack string with little to no progressive difficulty and use it’s Enhance to refund all of the commit costs we had to pay for our character’s Enhance.




King of Fighters XIII



With Clark we have a character who does an interesting combination of damage buff and committal. To get the most out of our damage buff we want to play a throw package to confirm the damage gets through(as we don’t have a great way to consistently give speed) and as the damage is based on the number of cards in our hand we want to draw a good number of cards. The best card to tick both those boxes it likely Reverse Throw from the Mydoria starter deck, if we play it as our first attack we can give it +4 damage with our character ability, which gets it up to that important 9 damage guaranteeing the draw effect on a block, and that draw insures that we will still have 4 card in our hand on our next attack to keep maxing out that damage bonus.



Artificer Avarice was almost ubiquitous back in the day on its symbol, with its strong draw effect on check and it being widely available due to being in a starter deck it was often seen even if you couldn;t play its effect. Here we are milking out maximum value, with our character ability making checks even when we can’t block we can sometime luck into a random draw to help us survive our rival’s attack stings.



Clark’s character ability is really nice giving us a sizable damage bonus to all our attacks, however it does come with a fairly steep cost of having to commit 1 foundation each time we use it. But with Partners in Crimefighting we can greatly mitigate that cost with its static re-readying itself the first time it’s committed for a cost. Add to that as a 5 hand size character we can make use of its response allowing us to stack our checks(and maybe even a few draws) at the start of our turn!




King of Fighters XIII: Ruler of Time



King of Fighters’ Raiden(not to be confused with Mortal Kombat’s Raiden) is an interesting take on the big dumb throws deck in that he plays little to no printed throws. Instead he can make any 4 difficulty attack into a throw for the incredibly low cost of showing a random card in his hand. To capitalize on this we are running attack like Hardened Barrage and Rapid Punches, after making them throws we can now all but guarantee those powerful responses will trigger every time.



While Raiden’s second enhance gives damage it can be a bit unreliable as it turns off his top enhance so it basically telegraphs that it’ll be your last attack of the turn so we want other ways to push through damage. And as many MHA players will know, few things push out damage like Brute Strength, even with the larger selection of cards in retro few card give a repeatable +2 damage. Couple that with the massive damage buff from Servant of Ares’ +4 damage we can make our throws very very scary.




King of Fighters XIII: Neo Max




Robert was a character that struggled back in the day to find an attack line. Outside his own attacks he had very few kicks on his symbols though his life in standard. But now thanks to MHA’s speedy boy Tenya Iida, Robert’s got all the kicks he could ask for. Using Recipro Extend and High Engine Kick you can filter through your deck looking for those attacks you need to perform the long string that Robert wants to play.



In order to close out his games Robert is going to want a long string of attacks in his card pool but you still gotta pass that check. That is unless you play The Future is Now! In order to make all those attacks you need in your card pool not matter, and what better attack to end on then Iida 1’s finisher Recipro Burst, with it’s Ex:3 and the Powerful off Robert you can spend you momentum wherever you feel you need it based on your rival’s build.




Mega Man




Guts Man comes with an interesting gimmick of putting foundations into our card pool face down to give our attacks damage and stun, the downside is this can cause our progressive difficulty to sky rocket. Luckily he’s not the only character with such a gimmick, and he can pull from the other characters in order to improve his game play. First up we have Toya Setsuno’s “Borrowed” Goods, while not helping us with our progressive difficulty problem it does help us get those lovely stats we are giving it get through to our rival’s health by stripping a card from their hand and secondly we have Gyro Man’s card’s like Gyro Blade which not only clears that pesky face down from our card pool it also draws us 1 card along the way.



One of my favorite interactions in this deck is with Guts Man’s response, it gives us an attack in our hand, unfortunately it does require us to check an attack, but that’s what we are running Advice For Winners for. Once we check the attack we use Guts Man to add it to our hand then follow that up with Advice For Winners to recheck hopefully hitting a foundation this time. Finally we now have the face down Advice For Winners in our stage which having done its job is now the perfect target to push up into our card pool for Guts Man’s enhance.




Darkstalkers



Victor’s got an interesting game plan, he rewards us for playing our turns backwards, starting with our lowest difficulty attacks and then ending with our highest difficult attacks. I’d like to highlight a short little 2 attack sting to show just how effective this can be in him. Let's say we open up our turn with a Jirashin, I love this card it’s either going to deal damage or draw us a card(most of the time it’ll deal damage if we are being honest but hey Victor’s giving it +1 damage off it’s stun so free 3 damage is nothing to shake a stick at), then we follow it up with Indiscriminate Shock 1,300,000 Volts. Between just these 2 cards we are throwing out effectively Stun 5 and 17 damage.



Now Victor’s biggest weakness is that he plays all his attacks at much higher difficulty than most other decks due to having to play his high difficulty attack cards later in his turn. To mitigate this we have a are playing a larger number of cards to add to our control checks. Such as True Identity which gives us a flat +1 to all our checks to play attacks this turn, and God of War which we can use to give that little boost to our next check we need to push through our later attack.




Mega Man: Rise of the Masters



Metal Man is the original king of playing with face downs. His first enhance allows him to build as he goes, if your rival isn’t fully blocking your attacks they will come back to haunt them later. He gained a ton of new tools to use with Kirishima and Tetsutetsu’s support like Hardened Jab and Tetsutetsu Thrashing giving him even more options for ways to get face downs into his stage.



One of the most interesting cards in Metal Man is Hardened Frenzy, if they completely block it it will build face down then you just pick it up on your next attack then play it again and if they don’t block it it will build during the end phase and you just pick it up next turn to start all over again.




Darkstalkers: Warriors of the Night




Felica was an all star top tier deck in her heyday, her ability to guarantee momentum on every attack let her build up an overwhelming advantage. Now using some of Tamaki Amajiki’s attacks she can build up even more advantage by not just getting a pile of free momentum but having effects on those momentum as well. Cards like Claw Stopper enable her to filter for a better hand and Seafood Slugger lets her turn off a foundation that might cause her some problems that turn.



An interesting thing regarding Felica’s bottom enhance is that the check bonus is not conditional on her having the 2 or more momentum, it only cares that the card is a punch, kick,or slam attack. So as long as we deal damage the top enhance on Training With Gunhead is live on our next attack, and as a 7 hand size with only 20 health the ability to reduce a big throw to 2 damage can do a lot of work to keep us in the game.




World of Indines



Shekhtur’s game plan is generally to end the game in one big turn. To that end we want cards that can help us push through as much damage as possible while at the same time help us build a large stage quickly for us to blow up on that turn. Flurry of Punches is one such attack, Shekhtur’s enhance reducing the difficulty of the next mid attack by 1 counter acts part of the difficulty increase from Flurry of Punches Enhance netting us +3 speed and +5 damage with only an increase in difficulty of 1. Lust for battle’s 1 difficulty is great for helping us build out a large stage early and it’s response on entering discard can be triggered off Shekhtur’s enhance effectively netting use +1 speed on top of everything else.



To get the most bang for our buck out of Shekhtur’s destroy cost we are running both Grenadier Bracers and Claw of Malephase. Together they give use an extra 3 damage on each attack just for doing what we were going to be doing anyway.




Mega Man: Battle for Power



For Yamato Man I put together an entire deck based around Focused Attack. We have a cool little 3 card combo for Reduction into Life Force Thread into Focused attack, this ends up being a 4 mid 2 into a 9 mid 11 into a 14 mid 16 unless your rival has a way to stop you or some very good defense this will win quite a few games on it’s own.






Red Horizon: Blood Omens



The first thing you might notice about this deck is the size, Eva2 decks tend to sit well north of 100 cards due to the cost of her Enhance removing the top 8 cards of your deck from the game and we will be doing that a lot. With Kurubushi Kick and Gore Fest we get stats based on how many cards we have removed from play we will be using Eva's enhance even during our rivals attacks just to get more cards out of play.



Eva's game plan pairs really well with Dabi 2s support. Cards like Firestarter and Ignite are trivial to get online and have powerful effects that can help us find the cards we need and pass our checks.



Now while Eva's effects are powerful she does lose out on consistency due to her having to play such a large deck. To make up for this we have Technical Sphere, with its effect to copy the abilities of any attack in our remove pile; it acts like an additional 4 copies of any attack in our deck due to how easy we can fill the removed pile.




Street Fighter



Sagat never really saw play in his time despite his ability to target commit his rival’s best defensive foundations, this was likely due to how limiting his Commit cost is, disabling his ability to continue to commit other cards. However with a few tools from retro we can fix that, M3C Devastator Plasma Cannon will instantly re-ready Sagot once he commits to discard it from the card pool and Hand of a Tyrant can just destroy to ready him. Together they allow him to keep playing attacks even late into a turn.



We can also use Dancing Blades and Cunning and Prideful to sudo draw cards by adding face downs to our card pool with Sagat’s enhance then adding them to our hand with their effects. Hopefully getting us the gas we need.




Cowboy Bebop



Cowboy Bebop as a set was a big change in UFS’s design, the overall power level of the cards started to rise a lot higher then it had been in previous sets. Spike 2 was no exception, the ability to give any attack Multiple 1 and clear 2 cards from his card pool every turn made him a strong contender, his main win condition was generally Swordfish Plasma Cannon but even back then he often struggled to get full advantage out of it early in a game, his character ability would give him one of the momentum to multiple it but in order to get full advantage of the card you’d need a second momentum to for the second multiple ability his character ability gave it. For that we now have Dual Needle Lunge, it being a Tech attack itself means if we need to we can multiple it as well in a pinch but in most cases we will be using it’s enhance to add it to momentum after it resolves giving us all the gas we need to go into a fully charged Swordfish Plasma Cannon.



As a life deck we also have access to one of the most famous 2 card combos in the game’s history. Hand Cannon is a card that can lock a lot of decks out of the game by preventing your opponent from discarding cards from the card pool combine that with Insect Puppeteer’s effect to add a 4 damage Life attack to your card pool we can get the effect of Hand Cannon on line anytime we want.




Mortal Kombat



Here we have a mono zone deck, in this case Erron Black as a mono Low overload deck. Our game plan in this deck is to get as much momentum as we can while using Erron Black’s response(which it’s important to note does trigger off our rival’s Low attacks too) to commit any foundations that might disrupt our win condition. To that end we are playing Wealthy Aspirations and Swordfish Gunfire both of which can net us an extra momentum off our once per turn enhance.



But what are we doing with all that momentum you might ask? We are pumping it all into the Powerful: 6 on Fu-Ma Seal, Fatal Violet. Our overall plan is to play 3 attacks on the third put the first 2 in momentum with Erron Black then as our fourth attack of the turn we are going to play Fu-Ma Seal and add the last remaining attack to out momentum, then we are going to discard all of that momentum for powerful, this will generally end most matches.



Street Fighter vs Darkstalkers



3 damage maters is not a new archetype with MHA, for example there’s both versions of Lilith from Darkstalkers. To take advantage of this we are playing a few powerful 3 damage combos. To start with we have Piercing Barrage, normally this attack has trouble pulling off it's non Combo enhance but with the help of Lilith if we have met the combo it's being sent out as a minimum as a 5 speed 8 damage attack. Swallow Your Soul is arguably Lilith's best attack, it doubles up on her damage buff and almost always nets us 2 momentum which we can use for defensive abilities on our foundations.



One issue we are going to be running into is we don't have a ton of draw power available to us, but as we already what to play long strings of attacks to capitalize on Lilith's enhance we can safely play The Big 3 and be fairly sure it will be live on any turn we are planning to play our attacks.



Soul Calibur 6



Ivy's enhance let's us swap out the top card of our discard pile with the top card of our deck, with the aid of Heroic Icon and Revel at His Masterpiece we can change out the top card of our discard until we find the card we are looking for, then with a little bit of draw we can sculpt whatever we want to our hand.



Speaking of draw, Cryokinetic Assassination' s enhance may look a little familiar, it's the same effect but the opposite trigger of Ivy's response. It's amazing how often people just won't block this attack knowing you will get the effect no matter what, and if they are foolish enough to partially block it we get both effects!





Seventh Cross



You might be wondering why there are 2 character cards for this one, well Seventh Cross was a set designed entirely around stacking a second version of your starting character. Many of the characters had a clear best character to start as but Celinka is one of the characters that either character works fine as your starting character, a lot of players in fact prefer starting as Celinka 2 to be more aggressive. In this case we are starting with version 1 as I find it leads to more consistent but less explosive games.


A lot of our plans in this deck revolve around Celinka 2s static which makes her count as 2 cards for effects that count characters, effects like Agile Drop and ZAAAAP!!! which if we get all our characters in play will get whooping +9s from their effects.



To help keep us alive we are running a pair of foundations that scale a speed reduction based on characters in our stage. With only 1 additional character in play both Frame of Mind and Kirin Soul will reduce the speed of our rival's attacks by 3 and it only gets better the more characters we can get into our stage.



Yu-Yu Hakusho



Hiei's static lets us play with our momentum like a second hand, let's take advantage of some of those great face up momentum effects we got with the MHA block, mainly Jolt. On our rival’s turn we can flip Jolt to hamper their aggression, then when it comes back to our turn we just play if from momentum to guarantee some damage and get it face up in momentum again.



We also have a few cards that let us sculpt cards into our momentum, Blue Flame Palm Strike might as well read reveal top 3 and add 1 to hand in Hiei. Even better, Forced Quick Activation lets us add any card from our discard pile to our hand, sorry I mean momentum, it's so easy to get those confused in this deck.




Soul Calibur 6: Libra of Souls



If you look through UVS Ultra you might notice that there are 2 Maxi's with identical art but different but similar effects, that's because the original Maxi from the first Soul Calibur set got banned and a new version got printed as a box topper promo in Libra of Souls. Fear not though even though he's weaker than he was before his reprint he's still plenty strong. And few characters can make use of Staff Strike quite as well as him. With his ability to put his foundations into his card pool he can increase the amount he draws off Staff Strikes enhance and thanks to Staff Strikes Combo he won't have to deal with that pesky extra progressive difficulty they would add.



With the wider selection of cards available to us we don't even need to worry about finding weapon foundations to make the most out of our Staff Strikes with, we can have pretty much every foundation in our deck be a weapon foundation. And quite a few of them work great alongside our Staff Strike combo by rewarding us for playing a lot of attacks.




My Hero Academia



Just like that we've reached the MHA block, but fear not we have plenty of cool old toys these newer characters can use to polish up their game plans. Let's start with everyone's favorite frog Tsuyu Asui, in set 1 MHA format she was a monster tearing up the competitive events until several of her cards got banned to bring her more into line with the rest of the format, well it may be banned in MHA Block but Crow and Frog Takedown is still legal in retro(and standard for that matter) so time to dig em back out and put em back to work. Combine that with the old killer kick Nivose, which tore up the 2016 meta and Asui can get back up to her old tricks of playing a truly absurd number of attacks in a turn.



But what if I need something massive, something that will just end the game. Well do I have a card for you, Sovereign's Glory has that all important ranged keyword for Asui and gives itself speed and damage for every attack you've cleared from your card pool this turn making it a great way to close out a long string of attacks.




My Hero Academia: Crimson Rampage



How well Ibara synergies with the reversal keyword can't be understated, she's probably the best pure reversal deck in standard and up there amongst the best it retro. You can play her top enhance on your rival's attacks to reduce their damage and the +3 damage to her next attack will keep stacking up until she plays a reversal. If your rival plays 2 attacks before you play your reversal it will be coming in with +6 damage, that's not the kind of thing your rival can ignore on their turn forcing them to block on their own turn there by disrupting their attempts to attack you. There isn't much more to say about her. She's a bit of a one trick pony but that trick is very very good.







My Hero Academia: Heroes Clash



Nezu is so much fun, the ability to toolbox anything and draw when your rival draws. The big issue is finding ways to make your rival draw so you can get those sweet sweet free cards, but most of his ways in MHA Block are 1 use and that's not as fun. But we got new toys to play with(well old toys but it's like they're new!). Let me introduce you to Mop Stike, in Nezu this card is a discard 1 draw 3! With our entire attack line being 4 difficulty we can easily swap out any attack for a Mop Strike and get the card to our hand. And that's not all we also get access to Voice of Reason, which we can use every turn to discard 1 and draw 2 cards.



But what good are all those cards in our hand if we can't defend ourselves? Well with Omega Sword and Elk Shield we have a solid almost Omni block, and as a 1 difficulty we can just discard one of our spam foundations to add this back to our hand on our rivals turn.




My Hero Academia: League of Villains



With this deck we are going to be attempting to abuse some game mechanics, in UVS when a card loses then regains abilities it resets things like once per turn abilities, most of the time we do this by flipping and unflipping a foundation but Shoot 3 gives a new avenue to do this. By attaching Shoto 2 playing all his enhances then detaching him with Shoto 3 and then re-attaching him again we gain the ability to play Shoto 2's once per turn enhances multiple times in a turn.



How are we going to reattach our Shoto 2 though? Well the Gauge keyword that's how, and luckily for us Order has a handful of ranged gauge attacks that can carry the once per turns from Shoto 2 well in Rouge Signet and Lightning Shot.





My Hero Academia: Undaunted Raid



With his foundation, Food Tabe can generate a lot of value out of keeping his rival's card pool empty, but what if we could double down on that or even triple down on it! With The Human Weapon and The Hungry Wolf he can do just that, giving more and more stats to his attacks as long as their card pool remains empty, which it will with Tabe’s character ability.



Even then we still want to be able to use Tabe's enhance often to keep our cards in hand up. What do we do if our rival refuses to oblige us by putting cards in their card pool? Well that's why we have cards like Shoryuu Dan and Ancient Knowledge to put cards into our rival's card pool ourselves so we can eat them up with Tabe.




Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this recap and history of the Retro format. There are plenty of decks and Ideas that I did not explore in this article, but one of the beautiful things about this format is how much there is to explore and how to make your favorite character shine. Retro is a deck builder's paradise. There is something for everyone, and I can't wait for you to show me and the world what you can come up with at the upcoming Retro Events!


 
 
 

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