Hunter Beast (戯狩; gishuu) is a family in the Battle Spirits trading card game debuted in BS02.
Hunter Beast cards are primarily yellow. They are animals in theme, which is very similar to the Imaginary Beast family. Starting from BS58, they also begin to have humanoid animals. It was a major Yellow family along with Dark Artes in the Constellation era, but perhaps because of the existence of Imaginary Beast, the family received almost no attention for a very long time, with only two or three cards from each era after the Constellation era. In True Rebirth era, the family became the support for The Grandwalker Parvati, aesthetically they took on the forms of birds and fishes.
Play Style
Although the family has existed since the beginning of the game, and that there were effects specifically supporting the family, there were simply too little Hunter Beast family cards to form a complete deck. However, there were attempts to build decks with The SacredBeast Barrong, Hipogrifee, and The VenusDragonDeity Venu-Feather as the center pieces, focusing on regaining lives and using the extra lives as costs for advantageous effects.
In BS58 of the True Rebirth era, The Grandwalker Parvati was released, bringing along new Hunter Beast cards, as well as introducing the Mirage keyword to the family. Currently, the deck contains three main Mirage cards, which are The WaterLilyBird Gauri, The WaterlilyBird Sanko, and The WaterlilyBird Shakti. Each of their Mirage effects requires a different cost from the attacking Spirits to activate the effects, shaping the deck into low cost rush and Spirits with higher cost to deal life burns. Since the deck supports Mirage in general, players can also freely add in all kinds of Yellow Mirage cards, such as Oracle III Over Empress or Magical Draw (Revival), to assist with the draw power and provide control.
However, Parvati's deck also contains a lot of flaws, the main one being that the deck requires Mirage cards to keep the pace up. If the player bricks with no Mirage cards, the pace of the deck would be put on a halt. Generally, cards in this deck also do not have immunity, which means a simple field wipe from the opponent can cause massive damage. And being Yellow, there is always the fear against hand-discarding effects, like The Frozen Volcano.
Due to Parvati's designated Brave, The WaterlilyDragonSpear Trishula, having the ability to draw from the bottom of the deck, some players also put in ［Rock My Heart Coord］Sakuraba Rola as an alternative finisher. Rola's effect can return a card with the name either being "Sakuraba Rola" or "Nijino Yume" from the hand or trash to the bottom of the deck. Combining with Trishula's effect to draw from the bottom, the two together can perform infinite attacks. Rola can also give herself immunity to Spirit, Nexus, and Magic effects, meaning most of the time, the only way which the opponent can stop her is through generic defensive cards like Burst Wall or Diamond Wall.
Trivia
- The term 戯狩 is not an actual term in Japanese, but rather a combination between two kanji: 戯 meaning 'joke' by itself, and 狩 meaning 'to hunt'. There can be multiple meanings to the family name, but judging from the aesthetic of the cards in the family, there can be two interpretations: 1) hunted animals, and 2) animals with cartoony appearances.
