I'd like to welcome everyone back to the third installment of Character "Gems" Corner, this is your host Nathan "NJBrock22" Spade and I have found a character that has floated under the radars for a while now that actually has some potential, but the fun comes with how i plan to build the deck for you guys to try out later.  That character is Chae Lim, now most would ask... "why would you pick her, her abilities are VERY reliant on your opponent" in a way they are right but with the vitality she has and the access to a lot of good life gain cards through [All] and [Earth] she can last a long time against non-one-shot decks.  Also she is one of my big three that i usually play on KOF06 the others being Yuri Sakizaki and Athena Asamiya.  More people would say, "but she's sideboard material against momentum rush" maybe, maybe not, i would run her main decked but I'm a little crazy like that anyway, ask most everyone who knows me.  Lets take a look at the character in question:





Well first we see that she is a 6 hander and as i said in a previous article this is not as much of a detriment as most people think it is.  The 27 vitality also is a good thing as against pure balls-out aggro it can last a little longer than your average 7 or 8 hander can.  Let us look at this symbol spread, [All] [Earth] and [Fire], well i can say this much individually all 3 of those symbols are excellent to run off of in all formats, laugh as you will about fire but just watch till set 12 hits then tell me who's laughing then.  Earth has many great damage reduction abilites, some discard and good amounts of life gain thanks to Yuri and Maxima.  All has a little bit of everything, and some good high speed average damage attacks.  Fire has in legacy amazing pumps and small amounts of control, but in block 2/3 it has a little bit of a road block to go through when it comes to the amazing pumps it used to have.  The symbols can be dual-symboled but it will be hard to do i will say that much, there are [All][Earth] and [Earth][Fire] cards that will work with this deck(outside of her set) but it may be a challange to get them to work very well together.

Let us take a look at the abilites, the first one reads as follows:  "E:  Commit 1 foundation:  Your attack gets +X Damage.  X equals your opponent's momentum minus the control of your attack (min 0)."  The ability at first looks awful but when you see the rise of a good amount of momentum hungry characters you can see where this ability can help you.  Say your opponent is playing the new promo Blanka(Blanka4) and your opponent has played 2 attacks that dealt damage to you and has other effects that add momentum during his turn, he also then announces using his form to gain 3 momentum then must end his turn, you stare at a hand of 2-3 attacks all 2cc attacks, you count your opponents momentum and lets say they have 7 you decide to open up a can that turn, you throw all of your attacks that turn and depending on if they are throws or not your opponent should be staring at average at 3 attacks of at LEAST 8 damage each coming at them, this ability can help punish your opponent for being too greedy with momentum generation.  The ability also as spoke in an earlier article can help deal with characters like Fio and Felicia4 who LOVE to gain momentum as early as possible and use it on either that or the next turn, by useing this built in ability you will start hitting them hard and maybe make them waste the attack they were gonna throw at you next turn as a block or try too early for the kill with a reversal (in Felicia's case a Feline Spike) and it will set them back a couple turns.

Her next ability reads as follows:  "E:  Discard 1 momentum:  If your attack deals damage gain X vitality.X equals 6 minus the control of your attack."  Say it with me HOLY CRAP, built in life gain to deal with the onslaught a weenie rush deck can throw at you in one turn, and with a 3cc attack you're gaining 3 vitality or 4 with a 2cc or if you feel lucky 5 with a 1cc attack.  Why is this ability important some might ask especially with those symbols.  Because prior to The King of Fighters 2006 set hitting the 3 symbols had limited amounts of decent life gain tricks and this character and her support helped IMENSELY with those symbols.  Lets go back to my example in the last paragraph to understand how this can really be helpful.  Your opponent it Fio and fails to kill you after activating her form you have 5 momentum your opponent still has 5 momentum herself.  You draw a hand full of attacks and your opponent has 1 card left in her hand, you decide to be ballsy and go for the kill or die trying, you then read your ability very carefully and proceed to start gaining life back off of all your attacks and are back to a very good position of if you had all 2cc attacks somewhere around 20 vitality if you pitched all your momentum which should help you survive any onslaught that your opponent throws at you again and you are comboing with your first ability at this time building those attacks to being bigger with each attack so your opponent should either be dead or hurting.  Let us move onto the deck i have built for this character and i will outside of her character set keep it as in-expensive as possible.

Character:  Chae Lim [All, Earth, Fire]

Actions(4)
Siberian Training x4 [All, Earth]  1/4  +1L

Assets(2)
Treasured Gift x2 [All, Earth, Fire]  2/3/4  [3M3  Pow: 1]  +1M

Attacks(24)
Furious Feet of the Phoenix x4 [All, Earth, Fire]  5/3  4M5  +1M
High Plasma Beam x4 [Earth]  4/3  3H3  Ranged  +1H
Hip Buster x4 [Earth]  5/2  2H5  Reversal  Throw
Kim's Neck Crunch Drop x4 [Earth]  5/3  3M4  Throw  +4M
Mirror Drop x4 [Earth, Fire]  4/2  2M5  Throw  +3M
Rising Conquering Crunch x4 [Earth]  8/3  3M8  Ranged  +1M

Foundations(34)
Altered Mind and Body x4 [All, Earth]  1/5  +3M
Battle Prowess x3 [Earth]  1/4
Big Dreams x3 [Earth]  3/5  +2H
Honor Your Dojo x4 [All, Earth, Fire]  2/5  +2M
Inhuman Perception x4 [Earth]  2/5  +1H
More Machine than Woman x4  [Earth]  2/5/1  +2H
Origins Unknown x4 [Earth, Fire]  1/5  +1H
Speak the Truth x4 [All, Earth, Fire]  2/6  +2H
The Tae Kwon Do Zephyr x4 [All, Earth, Fire]  0/5  +2L


Sideboards(8)
Tag Along x4 [All, Earth]  5/4
Will for the Fight x4 [Earth]  2/5  +3M

64 cards in this deck and your first thing will be to probably asking why tun the 8 2-control cards in the deck.  The answer is simple, you want to abuse your abilites whenever possible and having lower control cards can sometimes help you in more ways than you would ever know, now to explain my choices as they will probably confuse you.

Actions and Assets:  Only action i chose for this deck was 4 Siberian Training, this card has 2 purposes, one it has a +1L block which is always very nice; the other ability is that it can if your opponent over-extends reduce their attack to 0 damage and make them have to work HARDER to get that damage to go through on you.  The lone asset i chose was her Ultra Rare split asset-attack, this asset has 2 uses it can if you have 6 ready foundations destroy it and give your attack +X damage.  X equals your vitality minus the total of you and your opponent's momentum (min 0).  If you time that Enhance right you will be giving an attack a HUGE damage pump from your character enhance and also give a good damage pump from this enhance also.  The other ability on this card is basically a second use of Chae Lim's second ability except it requires a commit instead of a momentum and it gives you 1 extra vitality, not a bad card at all, the only downside is the 3 that it rolls.

Attacks:  First i shall explain the two choices of the 2 control attacks.  First i chose a favorite of mine Hip Buster, this little gem is a throw AND reversal, and it gets bigger for each card in your card pool so this at the end of an attack string or as a reversal is gonna leave a mark on your opponent.  The other choice was Mirror Drop, i chose this simpy because its a 4 difficulty throw for 4 damage and has a block, there is probably something better to go in here but i couldnt find much that didn't lead to a misleading ability acidentally being activated (looking at you Negative Strain).  The other attacks first Furious Feet of the Phoenix; this attack is nice as it is 4 Mid for 5 damage and can easily get a good damage bonus if you've played it at the right time.  Kim's Neck Crunch Drop is a good throw attack of decient damage and it can get bigger if preceded by a kick attack.  High Plasma Beam(or Fweeeeeem to most people), this is one of the 2 kill conditions in this deck, it can get ridiculously huge if your opponent has over commited to help block what they THOUGHT was a life threatening attack only to see this attack come after it and you having a near commited board, I've personaly seen this attack win tournaments not games.  Finally Rising Conquering Crunch[FFG this should be Hoah-shoku-Ken but i digress] this attack is a nice addition to the deck as it is 3 mid for 8 damage, can gain you a large chunk of life if you've been hit hard plus your ability, the only downside to the attack is the 8 difficulty but by the time you start throwing this, even checking one of your 8 twos should NOT matter.

Foundations:  The meat of the deck as far as I am concerned, let us look first at her 3 foundations Honor Your Dojo, Speak the Truth & The Tae Kwon Do Zephyr.  Tae Kwon Do Zephyr is a good card as it is a 0/5 with a nice anti damage redux ability, which resets your attack if it's below printed damage to its printed damge, if not it gets +1 damage anyway, not a bad card at all.  Honor Your Dojo works excedingly well with the 2cc attacks as it will by commiting 2 foundations gain you 2 vitality and give your attack a +2 damage pump, not bad.  Speak the Truth is the only card in her set that kinda goes against the grain of her abilites, this puppy is kinda a reset button for if you get hit VERY hard and you don't have any attacks in your hand, by commiting it as a form you can gain X vitality, where X equals your opponent's momentum minus yours (min 0), really good against heavy momentum decks especially since there are very few abilties you need momentum for outside of your character's built in life gain.  Big Dreams, next time anyone can look through their collection pull this puppy out and read it, yes a 3/5 is not always what you want for a foundation slot but for that ability i would say it is justifed as it gives your attacks very sufficent damage pumps if you are throwing reversals late game.  Altered Mind and Body, what can i say about this that hasn't been said before, just a great all around card.  Battle Prowess, some people want this card banned but as far as i am concerned it is ballanced for 2 reasons, 1 the lack of a block will NORMALLY turn someone off of it and it's a 4 control, not many decks run 4 control foundations any more unless they are themed or character specific and this puppy will help you out more often than not and save you having to use your second character enhance if need be.  More Machine than Woman, I played this card in Water Donovan3 before the injury assets got banned and let's just say this, this card was the MVP of the deck, it caused so many good things to happen by blocking or getting a lot of actions into my card pool then just start reducing down the damage of their attacks with the action side of this card, as a foundation it gives this character a little bit of selective control by chosing to commit a card in your opponent's staging area as long as you commit one of your own foundations, not bad at all i must say.  Origins Unknown, well I run this in my ((Leona Heidern** deck and lets just say this card is absolutely nuts if you build a good deck around it, as it will give a speed bonus equal to the number of [Earth, Fire] cards in your staging area, and if you count through the deck there is a possiblilty if the game lasts that long of giving one of your attacks +16 speed for each of this card you have in play.  Inhuman Perception, this card is a tech against annoying responses and will help you more often than you will ever know.

Sideboard:  Not much to say here really as i chose 2 very simple cards to put in here, Tag Along is an amazing card and it's a common that cancels character abilities and can allow you to fetch a card you lost to your discard pile during your turn, the only downside to the card that most have noticed is that it doesn't have a block, but trust me if this had a block i think people would be asking for an errata like no tomorrow.  Now for Will of the Fight, this card is what Defender of the Empire should have been before it met its demise a year and a half ago this allows you to re-draw whatever you were forced to discard +1 after your opponent plays an ability that makes you discard any cards from your hand, the only restriction is once per turn (per copy), which is still very good.  It also gives +2 damage to a non-weapon attack which I don't see any of in this deck unless i somehow missed one.

Well I would like to thank everyone for reading this and especially Brian "Antigoth" Mitchell for allowing me to do this every couple days for you hungry rookies and you grizzled veterans out there to see character's from a different angle and i will hopefully have a couple more for you guys over the next couple weeks, until then this is Nathan "NJBrock22" Spade saying "good night".