Galdred

Overview

Galdred is a grappler/rushdown hybrid who suffers through a very difficult early game while assembling a nearly unstoppable engine to kill the opponent once it’s online. Basically all other considerations are secondary - either you kill your opponent with your Exceed mode combo, or you lose the game before it’s online.

If Galdred gets all the pieces of his engine together in a timely manner, he almost definitely wins the game, period. This means that more than most characters - and even more than most Seventh Cross characters - Galdred’s attacks aren’t really attacks, but delivery mechanisms for his endgame components. In order to reliably keep this plan online, you’re going to have to contend with some pretty rough consistency problems in the early and mid-game.

Number one on the list of Galdred Problems is his character ability, which actively works against his plan to EX Transform his most important cards. As Galdred, you can draw through your deck as easily as anyone with the Prepare and Change Cards actions (although you might not have the raw material to throw a lot of force at a big Change Cards), but you won’t be able to KEEP much of what you drew. The Prepare action at three or greater cards in hand draws you a card and discards you a card, for example. Hope you didn’t draw into two EX Transforms!

This issue extends over to Galdred’s neutral. If he’s up against a boost-oriented character and needs to hold a Tech, that’s a third of his hand he’s using for the privilege. Outside of literally the first turn of the game, you’re probably never going to have more than three cards in hand. This means you’re strongly incentivized to throw force extremely aggressively, because if you reach ZERO cards in hand without striking (with the Move action, for example), that’s three free cards!

Once Galdred Exceeds (and he will Exceed, hopefully with as many Transforms in play as possible), he gains access to The Beast Within as an attack that can be used on both offense and defense. This attack is immune to Parry, is free to use, and hits like a truck - especially if he uses one of his many force outlets to consistently have zero cards in hand. Every one of Galdred’s Transforms enhances this attack and allows him to use it more flexibly, and it’s not an exaggeration that Exceeding and hitting Beast Within over and over is the entire Galdred gameplan. Folks call it “the blender”.

Economy: Galdred would love nothing more than to sit back and Prepare to draw into his EX Transforms, but his character ability means he really isn’t allowed to do that, because he’d only have room for one pair. While you’re extremely limited in actually holding cards in your hand, your ability also means you functionally have infinite resources as long as you don’t need too many at once. This, combined with your general lack of force costs, gives you a surprisingly easy time affording the few things you DO want to do, like Faster Than The Eye.

Kit Breakdown

Normals

As attacks, your normals are probably higher quality than your specials, but they don’t advance your gameplan by giving you Transforms, so they’re often filler offense or mixups to supplement what you’d really want to be doing. You probably aren’t ever playing normals (or anything else, really) as EX attacks, because you don’t have much ability to actually HOLD for EXes, so you’re playing roulette to get them.

However, your normal boosts are one of your only sources of neutral - all those Transforms you have mean a handful of specials has no boosts to play. Bonus Speed from Light in particular is very valuable to confirm Violent Transgression or Blood Frenzy for their Transforms. You’re not really a breakpoint guy, so your other stat boosts are more likely to be useful on your other normals than they will be on your specials.

Secret Formula and Instinctive Response makes boosting much more valuable for you. Being able to boost from gauge and strike is obviously incredible when you’re Exceeded, but you also certainly won’t say no to playing Focus and still having access to Reading on frontside. Almost all of the boosts you’d want to play using either of these Transforms are on your normals, so don’t disregard them just because they don’t have Transforms of their own on them.

Prioritizing Transforms

In the late game, the plan is pretty obvious: do some combination of moving or boosting to ensure you have zero cards in hand and are both in range and as threatening as possible, and then strike with Beast Within. Next turn, do it again. However, even this doesn’t quite capture how serious a threat you are when your engine is online, because your opponent literally can’t strike into you if they can’t deal with an R1-2, 6 Power, 7 Speed attack - both Faster Than The Eye and Beast Within work just fine on your opponent’s turn. That’s the easy part of Galdred - actually assembling your engine is the challenging part.

Now that you’ve read the kit breakdown, you’ve probably concluded that four of your five Transforms are incredible, and the remaining one is merely pretty great. Now you’re wondering how you’re actually going to land these attacks against an opponent who’s actively playing around them when you can’t reliably EX Transform anything because of your character ability. You don’t have complete freedom over what Transform to prioritize because you’re Galdred, but you can make some judgments based on the matchup.

Most of the time, Faster Than The Eye is an excellent first Transform because it’s relevant in the majority of matchups and can help confirm other Transforms with its bonus Speed. However, if you’re up against the kind of character who’s more interested in trading than outspeeding, you might not need it as anything other than a force outlet to power up Beast Within. Secret Formula and Instinctive Response are essentially always valuable no matter who you’re playing against, so they’re also top contenders.

Your tools for confirming Transforms are Blood Frenzy, Obsessive Research, actually landing mixups, and EX Transforms, the latter of which is really only viable if you luck into it. You can improve your odds by hard mulliganing for an EX, and in that situation basically all advice about which Transforms to prioritize is superseded by what cards you get in your opening hand. Look for things you can do on the first turn, and take basically any Transforms you can get.

If you’re the second player, it’s always important to remember that your opponent can and often will spend their first turn playing Parry to get rid of a crucial Transform. In a complete vacuum, you probably DO have a specific order that you’d like to get your Transforms in a given matchup, but because you sort of want ALL of them, don’t get too hung up on the specifics and just dig for what you can.

In reality, you absolutely can’t rely on choosing what Transforms you get anyway, because your hand size limit and deck composition are factors you really can’t get over. That means you’re probably going to have to actually land some mixups. On-curve Blood Frenzy and Violent Transgression and the extremely safe R1 Eviscerate are usually fine on their own (Cross notwithstanding), but Withering Toxin and Explosive Cocktail sometimes need some help, so they’re often what you’re using Blood Frenzy’s Hit effect or Obsessive Research on.

Speaking of reality, the vast majority of games are going to end with you having well under five Transforms in play, so don’t think you can get your entire combo every time. You’re aiming for three, but two is acceptable if your opponent is pressuring you hard or you just haven’t seen your specials and the game’s starting to end. Get what you can by boosting Obsessive Research, lucking into EX Transforms, and landing Blood Frenzy, but don’t try to have it all - your opponent won’t let you.

Because your Transforms tend to compound each other, they rise and fall in value based on what other Transforms you have access to - Faster Than The Eye is always valuable, but is even more important as a force outlet if you DON’T have Instinctive Response, for example. Meanwhile, Secret Formula really requires Instinctive Response to have much value at all. No Escape is pretty much always amazing, but it’s also on your least-consistent attack.

Neutral and Offense

The puzzle of Galdred is figuring out how to get value out of your three card hand in a way that advances your gameplan QUICKLY - you really don’t have time to play passively and wait around. Your endgame is ridiculous, but at every other stage of the game you’re likely on the backfoot, and if both you and your opponent reach your endgames at the same time you really don’t have a guarantee of winning - you’re not THAT much stronger than them. You want to already be at your endgame when your opponent is still setting up.

What you’re actually fighting in most matchups is that three card limit and your deck order, so Change Cards aggressively despite not being able to keep everything you draw - filter your options and choose the best ones for the current situation. Those will probably be your Transforms, but they could also just be important neutral tools as long as those neutral tools will help you LAND those Transforms.

An opponent who knows how Galdred works isn’t particularly worried about the damage or effects of any particular attack; they frankly don’t care that Violent Transgression has Ignore Armor. They care that it gives you Faster Than The Eye. The upside of individual attacks AS attacks aren’t particularly important to you, and they’re not going to be particularly important to your opponent either. When you put a card down, your opponent is going to look at the Transforms you don’t have yet and play around those. In many cases, that means playing Cross or another above-curve card to dodge you until you have Faster Than The Eye or No Escape in play to shut it down and confirm your hits.

Even aside from Cross, you don’t have the neutral tools to always ensure your on-curve attacks will be played at their best ranges, but you can pretty much always chase your opponent down with the Move action regardless of whether your engine is online as long as you’re not spending anything TOO important to do it. Once you’re in melee range, boost with what you can to confirm your hits, or just throw mixups. You really don’t have the luxury of a risk-free gameplan - sometimes you’re going to just have to throw a Transform in a position where your opponent could dodge it.

You might read Beast Within’s Hit effect and the text on Secret Formula and think you need to specifically use great boosts early so you can get them back into your gauge and boost them, but in reality you’re not so concerned about it because half the cards you’re getting in the early game are things you’ll be discarding anyway, and even if a dud boost lands in your gauge, you’re more than happy to use it as force to afford Violent Transgression. Galdred’s early game is difficult enough without trying to 4D Chess your way to an ordered discard for the endgame, so focus on REACHING endgame instead.

Although your neutral is pretty mediocre even at the best of times, it’s important to note that many of your opponent’s control and neutral tools really aren’t going to do much to you once you’re set up. Parry and Reading don’t matter to you because you don’t have a hand, and you’re unlikely to ever leave a boost in play without striking once you’re in Exceed mode. You’ll have some trouble dealing with your opponent’s stat boosts, but in general you’re pretty hard to rob.

Counterplay

Your opponent’s most important piece of counterplay to you is going to be preventing you from Exceeding. If they’re stopping you from turning into a blender, you probably don’t have much else going on. That can mean playing evasively, slowing the pace down with heavy neutral play to deny your Transforms, but it can also mean pushing the pace even higher than you’re comfortable with and exploiting your mediocre defensive options to rack up damage on you. You have bad neutral even by Seventh Cross standards, so you’re going to struggle until you get your engine running.

Despite what we’ve been saying all guide, the game is NOT lost if you manage to get your engine together, but your opponent is going to have to play very carefully.  If they ever strike into you when you’re Exceeded, it’s with something that beats Beast Within. They know you have it - it’s literally face up on the board, and you’ve hit them with it for the last two turns in a row. Likewise, if they ever boost something, it’s for the purposes of beating Beast Within.

Your opponent will try to beat Beast Within by either outspeeding it with an above-curve option or by trading with a slow, depending on the shape of their kit. If you get a Beast Within stunned out, things are probably pretty bad for you, especially in low-life situations. Likewise, if you’re ever behind when you’ve Exceeded and your opponent has held their Sweeps and Focuses, it’s very possible for you to just trade evenly and die. These situations are where No Escape shines - cut off the cards they’ve been holding so you can hit Beast Within unanswered and uninterrupted.

It’s on you to push the pace as Galdred, especially when you’ve Exceeded. Your opponent is unlikely to strike into you when you have Beast Within online unless they have specific answers to it, but the more turns you give them to boost and turn your guaranteed combat wins into mixups, the less likely you are to close the game out safely. Race your opponent’s life total down as aggressively as you can.

What part of your engine your opponent is most worried about is going to come down to the shape of their kit. Not everyone has fast enough cards that they really need to worry about Faster Than The Eye, because they weren’t planning to outspeed Galdred anyway. This is information you can use: figure out what your opponent’s worst-case scenario is based on what their kit can’t handle, and punish them for it.

Galdred in Modern Exceed

Since Galdred has been tournament legal, the Exceed meta has only gotten faster-paced and more aggressive, moving away from the more defensive play styles that were in vogue during the Seventh Cross days. Galdred is not and has never been a defensive character, so he’d actually be quite comfortable into more recent characters. He’s about enforcing a gamestate on his turn, and his gameplan is the same as it’s always been: kill the opponent fast.

In fact, because Galdred’s meta was so focused on interrupting the opponent’s gameplan, Galdred’s fairly fragile and inconsistent engine made him a difficult character to find success with. If anything, a time-displaced Galdred finding himself up against Under Night or Guilty Gear characters might flourish in ways he never did during his heyday.

Credits and Resources

I wrote this guide after an extensive conversation with ReggiesWarOnEverything on how to run Galdred. You can find that conversation here. D wrote his own “Galdred at a Dead Run” guide that you can find here. Other Galdred players who Probably Have Opinions include Blue, Faust, Moriatti, Poiman, and Polter. There’s plenty more on the Breakfast Club Discord - if they’re not listed here it’s because I don’t regularly talk to them, not because they’re not skilled players.