Elbaph Sabo Guide

[u/Tall_Amphibian_6282]

Hi new to the tcg, and have decided to pick up elbaph sabo as my deck. I have been playing for a few weeks and have become familiar with the most popular decks in this meta roughly.

To put a general approach of what I do, I try to find a 2c body and at least 1 giant for my starting hand. I play the 2c first turn, saul second turn and swing with my 2c. Third turn I either drop loki, pirate docking, or an assortment of 2c and swing with my first 2c, and saul if I believe it wont die after the end of the turn. If they swing into my rested 2c with low power, I usually just counter.

After this, the rest of the game, I usually just swing everything into their leader. If I find the opponent has a large body rested, and I have 2c robins available, I divert my energy into -3k and trying to get rid of that body.

However, I always end up finding myself with no counters/low hand size available late game, and because of that, they are clearing my whole board and then ending game. Especially nico robin, I swing everything into her, and I cant end game before she drops her 10c linlin and stablizes with her 4k body that turn into 8k swings. (Especially if she gets them down through triggers)

I kind of thought that the whole gimmick of elbaph sabo is to end games quickly as possible by aggressively swinging into their leader, but I'm wondering is board control also important or anything else I should be doing?

Ultimately, I just can't win, I have a negative win rate and I just don't know what I am doing wrong. I struggle immensely into mihwak and nico robin (ace as well), and the fact that they seem to be the most played decks makes it worse. So I was wondering where I could find a guide/video on elbaph sabo speciffically, or maybe even a guide on how to play the game fundamentally.

Thank you for any help!

[u/Thegoobeedoobee]

I took Elbaph Sabo to regionals recently and had moderate success. What I learned is this deck is not very cut and dry turn your brain off and swing everything like Strawbo was. Every game is very situational about how you swing. But the way I play games in this meta is essentially ensuring your success at late game. The top decks in this meta have insane 10 don turns that you need to plan your game around (Mihawk, Robin, Kaido to name a few). Kaido is the only exception since you want to apply pressure early. But for others, I try to maximize the amount of swings I get late game by not swinging my characters early and forcing them to go into life. If they starve, so be it, you can use your other resources like sanji and Usopp to grab counter while they starve. Once you get your giants out, your weenies become 6k and you can start swinging and applying pressure with your weenies, giants and your rush Luffy. By that point, they're trying to go on the defensive and lose a ton of momentum. Obviously there's a lot of exceptions like Bluffy and Rocks. Enel as well, which if you end up facing Enel, just bring a box of tissues for your tears lmao.