Budget Kairi (D-LBT03)

This is aimed primarily at people who want to upgrade their Kairi Trial Decks, but don't have access to more expensive cards like Live Kairi, Yuika, Melty or Eileen.

You should be under no illusion that Live Kairi is the better build if you have access to it, but this G3-oriented list does possess distinct advantages over Live Kairi that make it a real and legitimate alternative deck.

The advantages are as follows:

(1) You are now able to use Brilliance and Elegance, Aerith, who is not usable in Live Kairi as she specifically requires G3 Kairi for her effect. This allows you to do fully boosted quad attacks on turn 3, which Live Kairi is not capable of. This gives a considerable edge against slower decks as you have the very real potential to outright end the game before your opponent can ride to G4 or even G3.

(2) Persona Ride and Favorite One, Fleurety will give you a high power quintuple attack turn that will be competitive with Live Kairi's turn 4. Fleurety conveniently replaces herself with Kinkee (or Kairi in a pinch), and also gives you a card for your troubles. In the column you clear with Kairi, you can call Next Step, Laplume and swing in with Astesice, Kiyora who will be clocking in at 33,000 power due to the persona ride. The Bashful Striver, Kinkee you call with Fleurety will be clocking in at a whopping 48,000 power if called to a Conspicuous Anxiety, Kaadya column. This means your Persona Ride turns will frequently clear important power thresholds.

(3) Elementaria Sanctitude and (future) effect Heal Triggers. Foregoing G4 allows you to utilise Elementaria Sanctitude and the inevitable anti-grade effect heals, which will make the deck's ability to respond to oppressive decks like Chronojet quite a lot better, especially factoring the additional speed the deck has.

(4) Grade 2 Gaming: If you are instilled with deep hatred for Chronojet (as you should be), refusing to ride to Grade 3 to deny stride becomes considerably more appealing when

(5) If you happen to have access to it, you can use Gratias Gradale as a 4th persona copy in your main deck. This will make your chance of seeing Persona the same as it would have been seeing Live Kairi. Ivetta or Kaadya can be reduced to accomodate this.

There are obvious downsides to a build like this as well, which is why Live Kairi continues to be dominant. Namely, the fix-it-all nature of Live Kairi offers considerably more flexible deck building options, allowing you more space to run things like Yuika, Eileen, or the Friends package. G3 Kairi, while being much faster, will also run out of steam as it chugs its SB and CB effects, so it really is imperative that you take advantage of the extra speed this list grants you. Also the loss of triple drive and more awkward attack sequencing means you will benefit less from triggers and have a worse grind game, even SB and CB nonwithstanding.

Laplume has been consistently dipping in price as people have pivoted away from using it in Live Kairi in favour of Yuika or other G1 units, so I would recommend picking up a play set now as she is likely to rise again in the future. There are no other cards in this list which should cost more than €0.50 at most, other than effect crits/draws, which can be replaced with their vanilla counterparts if needed.

Overall though, I think people who try this list will be fairly impressed by how competent it is. Even without her G4, Kairi still remains as one of the better Lyrical decks, and I give her a solid B+ rating. There is also high likelihood that we receive a new G3 alt Kairi that is incompatible with G4 Kairi, so it is worth having the cards for it on standby.