EX-14, and "fixing" the two worst Demon Lords

With the announcement of Ex-14, we have no idea if it's going to be support for Ogudomon/Gate of Deadly Sins, or take the Ex-13 route and support individual decks.

That being said, I wanted to discuss how Bandai could go about "fixing" two oddball Demon Lords in the TCG: Lilithmon and Barbamon.

All Demon Lords have their respective decks now, and have their own flavors that I think mostly suit them. My favorites for gameplay purposes being Lucemon and Beelzemon. But to this day, Lilithmon and especially Barbamon stick out to me, like they were afterthoughts, or Bandai just didn't care enough for them.

Starting with Lilithmon, I am aware she was a menace at the very start of the game six years ago. I wasn't around for that, and I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about her Ex06/07 "deck." It has a few issues. First is that it is incredibly memory inefficient. There are 0 ways in her intended cards (Tsukaimon, Witchmon, Ladydevimon X, etc.) to gain memory. So you're just left with using the Dog Engine so you can actually play the game and not pass to your opponent after 1 Digivolution. At that point, just play Leviamon. But the dog engine has been gutted (good riddance), and I do think that there is an IDEA with Lilithmon's digivolution cards. They all center around ending attacks by deleting other Digimon, and gaining effects when Digimon are deleted during an opponent's turn, with Lilithmon herself basically offering other Digimon as a sacrifice to keep herself alive. Cool lore flavor--the Queen of lust makes other Digimon bewitched by her beauty off themselves.

One thing I think a deck like this, if they go in this direction, needs for certain, is a Taunt. It almost feels like an oversight that there are so many effects interacting with an opponent's Digimon attacking, and yet none of them 'force' it. The closest being Phantom Pain deleting an opponent's unsuspended Digimon at the end of their turn if you have a Lilithmon. Even by Ex06 standards, this is slooooooow. I also think it's silly that a deck with inherits that end attacks also play cards with blocker and retaliation.

Bt-03 Lilithmon also presents another direction: using option cards. With the invention of Dual Cards, I can see a new Lilithmon being able to use option cards with Lilithmon in their text in trash without paying the cost (to prevent abuse for generic options). Phantom Pain for free, or a dual card Seventh Fascination that immediately goes into Lilith X. Having more cards with Lilithmon in their text would also go a long way to making Tsukaimon actually useful. Right now it is one of the worst rookie searchers in the game. Its only search targets are: itself, Lilithmon and Lilith X, and its two option cards. You cannot grab a level 4 or 5 with a deck's level 3 searcher. Woof.

And then there's Barbamon. I had a lot of ideas and feedback on Lilithmon, but for this guy... I have no idea. His strategy is hand ripping, something incredibly toxic and unfun in almost any card game. Bandai "balanced" this by making it borderline unusable; in a game where players will have 10+ cards in their hand easily, all of his cards just trash 1. The exception to this was the jumpscare of ST-22 Barbamon, essentially forcing your opponent to go down to 5 cards in hand after he hits the board. This, I think, is what the strategy SHOULD have been if they really wanted to commit to hand-ripping. Rather than trying to get your opponent to go down to 0, make them keep the hand size low and force them to make rough decisions. The issue is that because cards such as Ex05 Octomon exist, which means that St-22 Barbamon gets the hand size low, and other cards finish off the last 5 cards in hand. Not fun.

Someone mentioned to me before that Barbamon also has a lore flavor of playing a lot of Fallen Angel Digimon, so I suppose a 'swarm' strategy for Fallen Angel Digimon could be in order, but at that point, I'd rather just play Creepy X.

Curious to hear all of your thoughts, as well as ideas for the other 5. I think they could all use improvements in some way or another, but these two stick out to me as needing it desperately. I like talking about them because they are my favorite Digimon, and I still love the Megazoo deck dearly, despite it being powercrept out of the game (for now).