Rookie Rush returns to winning ways in Digimon TCG events

Esports News

January 10, 2024

Andrew Ogunnaike

All Organized Play Events (OPE) ran their last BT14 Ultimate Cups before EX5 format releases in English. They used the unique ruleset of a limited card pool, and ditched the mono-color format.

Greymon engine was the meta favorite, providing just enough support to maintain viability. Rookie Rush, one of the original styles of play when the game launched, was also predicted to return.

The Commandramon rush strategy evolved to a stack and swarm based playstyle with BT14’s additions. Some good timing on some Winner’s pack promos granted DBrigade 8 Commandramon to make the deck playable in the limited card set alongside its new support. 3/4 of the top spots in LATAM and North America’s Ultimate Cups were taken by the Digi Police deck.

Winner Yaw's 4 cards that he thinks are most important to new Rookie Rush

YouTube | @AgitoSwiftlyGaming

Rookie Rush is high speed low to the ground gameplay was somewhat written off, as its matchup into DBrigade was dire at the best of times, and with Brigadramon running around everywhere, you’d need some good fortune to make top cut.

Here’s Rookie Rush with a nice complex gameplan

Despite its appalling matchup into Commandramon, Rookie Rush players, making use of the Movie Pack Ukkomon, did show up. Making some waves in North America, rather than the Red base that has seen success in the east, western players in the limited card pool took a Blue base. After 6 rounds of Swiss, Euros caster Yaw emerged undefeated on the Blue Rookie Rush. Over in LATAM, the Digimon Ultimate Cup was won by DBrigade.

The game plan, as the name implies, revolves around playing low cost rookies to aggro down your opponent. New Promos, Lui Ohwada and Ukkomon help up the tempo by printing memory as cards move from raising. This helps it keep up with the much faster meta of 2024. The deck struggles with blockers that can keep up with the number of little attacks. As such, Brigadramon, that spawns bodies every turn that are all blockers thwarts the deck.

To get around this, Yaw utilised BT14 Gomamon to become unblockable. Then evolve into the game’s first Secret rare – Veedramon, to have 2 unblockable attacks per turn. And Zudomon ACE to help get rid of problem cards that would slow him down.

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