Part 4: Igloo City

The moment you've probably been waiting for.



Igloo City is an infamous nightmare for most players. A majority of players are likely to have chosen Veemon, meaning they're playing a Red deck, and Igloo City is home to many Blue decks.

The arena has one opponent who can withstand Red's strong offensive, another who hard counters Red in numerous ways, and the third opponent is a bitch in general.



But I can save the complaining for later. We meet Cody at the Battle Café, who tells us the same story Yolei did. What's he doing in Igloo City when Armadillomon is a Yellow card?

Well, when you see the town with the players that uses Yellow cards, you can make up your own theory.



Can I just point out one more time the absurdity of this? "Let's take over the card game world!"



Garurumon is here too. Guess what happened to him!



And finally, Rosemon tells us to go level grind some more.



Oh right, here's the card I got for beating Jungle City's arena again, it's not that great.



Anyhow! Since we're up against Blue decks I've added this card. The current best speedrun of this game actually goes to the Fusion shop to create four copies of D-Otamamon, just for this arena.

This is also D-Otamamon's debut game, oddly enough. No complaints here!



Contestant number 1 uses a deck with lots of recovery cards.



Most recovery cards just so happen to be food items. Have I mentioned most of the Option cards are items from Digimon World?



Red decks may have trouble here, but Frigimon is no problem for a deck with ToyAgumon in it. It's worth taking note that most of the time, the turn player's card effects resolve after his or her opponent's. In this case, it certainly mattered, because that Ice Crystal is a healing card.



Not long before I run into trouble, though. Yellow cards still have the issue of low attack power, so they can't punch through the defenses of Blue Digimon on their own.



I hate that Lucky Mushroom card. Fortunately, I figured out a way to fucking counterfeit it. On this turn, I have O selected, and a support card that forces him to use O, so Lucky Mushroom can't activate. I love SandYanmamon, it's one of the great "swiss army knife" cards of this game. Only 20 DP to evolve to him, decent stats, great support effect.



Let's hope these fortunate circumstances stay that way in the next 3 matches.



Whamon really, REALLY hates Red decks for some reason.



This card, in addition to several that triple his damage against Red Digimon, have stopped many speedruns right here.



But we're gonna outplay him instead. He has Defense Disk O and Defense Disk T in his hand, both of which reduce the power of the respective attack to zero, and his X effect also does this.

What I've got here is one of the three Hitter cards (Triangle and Circle being the other two.) You can see that I pretty much OBLITERATE him if he uses X when I play it, and I had a feeling he would, since combined with Defense Disk T he could negate two of my three attacks - increasing the chances of survival on his next turn since he'd be in danger of being KO'd.



And I'm right! Take that, Whamon!



And I couldn't ask for a better hand here either, my luck is holding pretty well.



Whamon's support effect is to set your Digimon's HP to 700. Seems he doesn't want me to get as much out of Psychemon as I can.



Not much else of interest happened in that game. A Red deck here would have a way more dangerous fight.



Well, here goes. Garurumon yet again had a special song playing in his battle: It's a song from the Digimon Adventure OST.

I'll spoil something right now: They used this song for the final boss and it's SERIOUSLY out of place there.



About time I drew this thing!



One of the things I really hate about Garurumon is his own blasted card. It forces you to use O, kinda like SandYanmamon in fact. But Garurumon's deck is full of cards that negate or even COUNTER O, so he's often forcing you to use O while punishing you for it.



And he's apparently fucking psychic and knew I would play Disrupt Ray, so he picked T, knowing it would get switched to X, while I was using O, and his X effect is O to 0...fuck!

Fucking mind games in a Digimon game!



Okay, I'm angry now. Let's use it.



Ah, the sight of doubled attack power is always fantastic!



How about a lucky draw to go with it?!



And how about...a whiffed Lucky Mushroom...argh, this AI...



So he evolved to Hyogamon and got his second KO. I swear if Digmon doesn't manage two more KOs here I'm taking him out of my deck.



Thing is, I'm starting to run out of cards here. I'm on my last Digimon, so I discarded until I got Armadillomon, and of course he was near the bottom.



Fortunately, he tried to go for the Counter, so I used the Cross Hitter. That's a monster amount of damage!



Hyogamon goes down eventually, and it's now 2-2. Garurumon now has a Cross Hitter, so I absolutely should not use X, otherwise the AI might conveniently select it.



He went for a gamble instead, though, which adds more uncertainty but surely it's not anyth-



Fucking Zudomon card, that halves my attack! Only three cards in my hand now...but he wasted the Cross Hitter!

(In hindsight, I could have selected X and used Attack Disc X to double its power just in case, but whatever)



And he evolved to Hyogamon AGAIN!



FUCK NO! WHY DID THAT HAVE TO SHOW UP NOW?!



...he didn't use it? WHAT THE FUCK! I guess that last card in his deck was no good.



Holy shit though, both of us nearly used up all our cards. Can you believe there's an EXP bonus for having an empty deck and hand at the end?



Him? Him who?



Oh, that guy.



Oh no, Wormmon evolved to Stingmon.

Never mind that this means jack shit in a card game.

I guess his deck is better.



Yeah, that seems like an improvement to me.



Stingmon is just stubborn to me in this fight. Rockmon's support effect came in handy - it discards the top three cards of your opponent's deck. Attacking the deck itself is a valid strategy: You don't lose the instant you hit zero cards, but without a deck, you have very little options for fighting back.



Things don't start perfectly, and I end up taking the first KO.



But I soon KO him back, then he evolves to Devimon. Lucky I'm not playing a Green deck.



I didn't expect the AI to think it could use this to guarantee no damage this turn, but it did.



I get extremely lucky and pull off a counter of my own on this turn!...couldn't he have just used T to avoid that? This AI is really inconsistent.



Due to all of my attacks on his deck, he has so few cards now that he has no choice but to play Saberdramon even though it causes his stats to be halved. However, he also picked up a really dangerous Option card.



He instead goes for Mega Hand, which makes his attack power the same as his HP, at the cost of halving his HP afterwards.



It doesn't take long to finish him after that. Props for getting two KOs on me, though.



Just like before, we get no reward for that, so we head back to the Café where Garurumon decides to rope us into a rematch by pulling the "I wasn't myself let's do that again" card.

This is like fucking salt on the wound honestly. Considering that I still have to re-do the arena AGAIN for the story completion, just like Jungle City. And in Igloo City's case, their arena actually changes a second time in the post-game, so if you haven't done this arena again by that point, you could lose that bit of completion percentage permanently! My memory card has a save stuck at 99.3% because of this!



Anyways. In the Japanese version, the Garurumon rematch is the first to use more anime songs: Butterfly and Brave Heart. Yeah, this isn't just any Garurumon, it's THE Garurumon.

I really hate this PSX rendition of Butterfly, though, so thank goodness I don't get to listen to it!



I also got the bonus you get for taking 2 KOs and then KOing three enemies.



Progress, finally!



Well look at what I got from the second run of the arena.



...WORTH EVERY PAINFUL SECOND.



Also, Cody has a gift for us - our SECOND partner card! You can get up to three over the course of the game. He only offers one of two cards, however, so it's time for another vote!

Your options:



Patamon. You can see that Patamon has a nice support effect and stats already. His first armor isn't that interesting, but his second has a massive amount of raw attack power.



Gatomon doesn't look like much, but she has a VERY interesting second armor - that won't show up until the post game, but I still think it's very much worth the wait.

So, viewers! Which will it be, Gatomon or Gatomon?!

...wait a sec

Patamon or Gatomon?!