Guide to a Deck: Iona

Iona is waifu for many people, making her preety popular. Aside from being waifu material, Iona is a decent deck to use. Her level 5, Ultima/Maiden, is the best lockdown button the game had ever offered us, limiting your field to only 1 SIGNI and letting you only draw once per turn, it's preety easy to out-resource your opponent as well as making them unable to do anything. It just completely and throughly kills off Resona decks, makes Hanare's purpose of living poof away, and helps in nerfing Ulith's Enigma Aura even harder than it already is. Plus, if you're fighting against Eldora or other decks that uses card comboes as their main playstyle, Ultima can make their lives miserable using that "Can only draw one card per turn" clause, making their comboes, while maybe not impossible if you trash over them, limited since you can run out of resources preety easily in this matchup. While all these problems apply to you too, you have Dark Matter and Quinn to work with, unlike your opponent, which can make a world's difference.

Outside of Ultima, another variant of Iona is the Yuki build. Yuki, unlike the traditional Iona, is a pure White Iona build (that can still use Blacks if she wants to) that mainly supports the Labyrinth class, who were never used in a pure white deck before Yuki. Yuki's main playstyle consists of fucking up with you and your opponent's fields for defense, while using either "Return to hand" or "Return to deck" effects to push in the damage slowly. Yuki is overall a more passive version of what Iona is.

To follow up with Yuki's pure White shenanigance, a pure Black Iona build was introduced to us just recently with WX14 in the form of Ancient/Maiden, who threw away Poison Fangs that Hanare stole away from her and started focusing on Ancient Weapons. Ancient/Maiden is a good card that has a ridiculously amazing Exceed 2 and a great Constant that triggers whenever you revive something, which, in combination with the Exceed 1, can make a really consistent skill that is both defensive and offensive (when combined with the Texahammer family). Ancient/Maiden overall has quite quality support.

Overall, with the lockdown that Iona could do that basically completely fucked up with anything your opponents try to do and auto-winning, Iona used to be meta. Nowadays, Ultima isn't as effective, but through the form of Pure Black and Pure White builds, Iona lives through being valid in the metagame.

Iona, Traditional/Maiden

The traditional Iona build has two main variants; the Poison fang build and the Ancient Weapon build.

The Poison Fang build used things such as Vier=Rikabuto, Drei=Capsule and slapped on a little Violence Splash onto the mix and had a mix of offense and defense with Ultima's lockdown. I never liked this combination personally, due to Vier=Rikabuto's first Constant skill not being able to banish a lot of things, even with her full potential, since it's still only a -6k total. While this can be made more doable if you use Drei=Capsule and other things to reduce your opponent's SIGNI's power beforehand, if Rikabuto got blocked by an ARTS you were fucked either way (especially if you used a Violence Splash that turn), which wasn't common when Iona first came out but then became later on.

On the other hand, the Ancient Weapon version used Code Anti Vimana's shenanigance to do their shit, consisting of the On-Play skill, which can help Iona's offense, and that Constant, which is godly when used with Quinn and Full/Maiden's Constant skills (albeit easy to play around). Code Anti Mage is also a really good card for Iona to use since with Ultima, you have only 4 ARTS but your opponent has 5, which can be really problematic in some cases, and Mage can act as fodder for Vimana. Overall, Vimana makes a great card, and even moreso when combined with the fact that she remains useful even with Ultima, utilizing that On-Play skill.

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Overall, however, whichever focus you chose, once you Ultima, your plan is preety straightforward. Annoy the fuck out of your opponent using Dark Matter and Quinn and outlast them till victory. That's basically it.

Iona is, remember, a mix between Black and White, so she obviously runs some White SIGNIs (usually consisted of Triumph and Quinn). This lets her use a couple of White ARTS and do so without any big problems, namely, Baroque. Baroque is extremely flexible as an ARTS, helping you block off things such as Samsara and Enigma. Alternatively, Last Select works, but remember the Samsara/Enigma block off bonus, as well as the fact that Baroque can be used early on when necessary. Finally, Byzant is a thing, which, when combined with Iona's "forced to attack" clause, can be annoying as hell to deal with. I never liked the idea of Byzant in Iona though, although I do like the idea of Byzant in a lot of other decks.

... Traditional Iona's a preety straightforward deck. I don't have a lot to say about her.

Iona, ServantLancerSack/Maiden

Servant Iona was extremely popular at one point of time. The reason on why this was so is mainly consisted of the fact that Storm Warning was an amazing card to work with Ultima, completely blocking any attacks your opponent could launch at you. Finding Green fodders to run for Storm was too big of a hassle and would probably get in the way of growing, so people thought up of the Servant Iona build. Gathering Protection is also a thing, so when combined with access to Storm Warning, Servant Iona immediately became popular and effective, helping Iona be offensive too instead of just banging on lockdown. You still run the key cards, namely Quinn and Vimana since Full/Maiden's skills require them, but overall you do Servants, and it works completely fine.

With Servants, you get a lot more flexibility on options, namely Three Swords and THREE OUT.

... again, not much to say.

Yuki, Miko of Waifu

Now we get into the more complex part of Iona.

Yuki is a defensive deck more than anything tbh, due to her SIGNIs being more defense oriented. And she can do that well, using things such as Gojuu and Pishato + Kinkaku, or Gojuu + 4CM + Towerb. Louvre and Yuki's Exceed 1 combined is annoying and really hard to play past. Quinn is always a thing for you to fucklove, especially moreso with Summon Labyrinth (which is an amazing card).

Yuki, with her first Constant skill, helps you gain a ridiculous ramp of ener, which you can spend in a couple of ways. The first most notable way of doing so is Labyrinth Romance.

Labyrinth Romance is broken as fuck. You'll rarely see anything that can reliably field nuke this easily (since White 3 isn't big whatsoever in Yuki), without giving your opponent Ener, nor even hand. This is fucking bullshit. If Labyrinth Romance was in a deck that could do a lot of offense... holy shit

Anyways, aside from Labyrinth Romance, another option for clearing way your massive ener is through Victorian Boundary. Victorian is an ARTS, which makes it more consistent compared to Labyrinth Romance, which is a spell. Aside from Victorian, you do have Xeno Entrance, but I personally feel like Yuki has enough consistency as she is. It is in the end up to preference though. Get Nostalgia is the counterpart of Xeno Entrance as a spell, which is yet another way to spend the ener.

Yuki liked running True Mayu, which made running neither Victorian nor Xeno Entrance easy, since all Pinch, Miasma and Summon Labyrinth were too good to pass by. However, with WX14, Yuki got a whole new level 5 for her to hug, which didn't need an extra ARTS slot to run, so now you could run either one of those. Sure, Yuki 5 didn't recycle your ARTS, but this was Yuki, and she was defensive. You hardly ever used any of your ARTS before growing into Mayu either, so it wasn't a big problem. Plus, Yuki 5 has a defensive Exceed 1 which can serve extremely useful against Attack Phase banishers and Double Crushers, namely Daihouika, Diabolos, and Bolshack. That offensive Exceed 1 is extremely useful too. Overall, I'd use Yuki 5 over Mayu any time, any day.

... This is coming up a little too late into the party, but Yuki also has 2 main builds; the "move around" build and the "rob skill" build. Or a mix between the two. Up till now, I've mainly been talking about the "move around" build, since that was the build with more of a clear way to build. On the contrary, the "rob skill" build is extremely uncommon. This is mainly because while Yuki does have a lot of SIGNIs that can make your opponent's SIGNIs textless, the SIGNIs that gain benefits from them aren't as good as they can be. For example, Kremlin would be good, but there isn't a way to reliably remove your opponent's text early on in the game, and late game would be Louvre, but your field must always be the perfect ideal field during late game for Yuki. Ekarite gives you even more ener than you already have, while Sapidu is... well, a Cerberun, but even Cerberun isn't used that often nowadays anymore. Sparancra is... well, mildly decent, actually, but not sure if I'd run her that much.

Iona, Torture/Maiden

Iona, Ancient/Maiden is the pure black variant of what Iona is, using Ancient Weapons. What she mainly does is forcing out banishes using that Exceed 2, which is fantastic, and annoying the living unholy hell out of your opponent by using that Exceed 1 and checking out either a Texahammer, Hammerfake, Maigiri or a Zekofun to loop into Kaizuka to fuck up hard with your opponent while fucking with Jomodoki during early game.

Ancient Iona is an extremely offensive deck in general, albeit with quite a few defensive options. With Aztec triggering off the -5k skill, and using Marsface, you can utilize Aztec preety well too.

... There's really little on this corner, mainly due to my lack of experience with Ancient/Maiden right now.