With the arrival of Mystics and Spectres in NA comes Seina ; currently, Seina is the most powerful lead for Fire, as she leads a great variety of builds to clear the hardest endgame dungeons (even the newest one, Alt. Ruler of Hell’s Halls / ASR2) and has the untapped potential to become even stronger in the future given her simplistic playstyle.

However, many have noticed that many of Japan’s top-end teams include several cards from Demon Slayer (DS), most notably Tanjiro , Nezuko , and the equips of Akaza and Inosuke . Accordingly, the most common question right now is, “How do you build a team for Seina without cards from Demon Slayer?”

To help you understand the situation, I will try to walk you through the strengths and weaknesses of Seina, the added value of Demon Slayer, and what you can do if Demon Slayer never comes to NA.

Note: You will not find a team template here.

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Seina

Let’s first take a look at Seina.

Strengths

Seina stands out from her blazing contemporaries with her ability to flat-out deal damage to anyone with her 2 VDP and 3 Enhanced Combos; other cards either rely on killers for potency, which limits their use to a certain type of enemy spawn, or don’t have the valuable VDP which allows cards to pierce through void shields. With high defense spawns in SR2 and ASR2, you will find that stacking Enhanced Combos and Row Enhance is not enough to effectively break through the enemies’ defense, especially when your latents are mostly restricted to SDR due to Floor 1.

Secondly, Seina’s survivability and sustainability is self-maintained by cycling her active if you pair with another copy of herself, which opens up all four sub slots for utility as opposed to dedicating them for orb generation. Compared to passive health conditional shields like Gileon and Rider Saber , Seina is the only leader with a true 3x eHP multiplier along with a matching recovery multiplier. Though you may not need this much tankiness for the majority of content, realize that not even a system of Gileon is sufficient for the newest and deadliest endgame dungeon, Ruler of Hell’s Halls.

Transforming in 25T in exchange for stronger active and leader skills puts her in a very good spot. While the long transform cooldown might sound impractical, keep in mind that most standard transform leads at 18T CD do not have any skill boosts (and even skill bind resist) in their base form. Seina initially provides 3 SB and SBR, which means she requires only 19 SB across four subs and six inherits (assuming dual Seina).

Weaknesses

Though seemingly “overpowered”, Seina has quite a number of weaknesses you need to attend to (as with all leads).

First, resolves. I don’t know when automatic follow-up attack became part of the “essential” checklist, similar to the idea that one needs full hazard resistance to everything; it is a flawed mindset. While Seina indeed does not have the coveted automatic follow-up attack, she can adequately deal with resolves with a FUA due to the constant heart generation from her active loop. With two additional combos from each lead, it is easy to reach seven combos even if you need to match a box and a heart column for simultaneous VDP and FUA. On top of that, an automatic follow-up attack isn’t necessary for the content Seina is designed for. The downside is you have to fit FUA on your team; if you insist to choose an Enhanced Combos SA over a FUA SA, there are a good variety of equips to choose from.

Second, debuffs. Seina’s active does a lot in consistently generating the right amount of orbs to maintain her healing, shield, and attack multiplier; it even removes hazards by generating on top of them. However, Seina’s counterparts usually do a bit more by overwriting recovery debuffs , overwriting time debuffs , and/or overwriting anti-burst debuffs . It wasn’t a huge issue until recently, when the frequency of these debuffs have risen to the point (AA4) where short rebuff actives are necessary (as opposed to forcing your way through with your player skill). While this burden is usually placed on her subs, players have often overlooked the fact that Seina’s active is on a 2T CD, which somewhat opens up more inherit slots that may allow for different solutions (inheriting certain equips may do the trick).

Third, “older” mechanics. Poison and bomb orb spawns are some old mechanics that aren’t prevalent nowadays. With the way teams are built around Seina, it might be hard to build the team with full resistance to every hazard for a normal player. If you decide to run Seina in some older arenas like Alt. Incarnation of Worlds, you will have to think outside the box during team building. (Hint: Seina spawns nine orbs on a board of thirty orbs.)

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The Impact of Demon Slayer

As I previously stated, Seina is designed for endgame dungeons that require hefty survivability. With that in mind, we will mainly focus on endgame dungeons like SR2 and ASR2 (Ruler of Hell’s Halls).

Let’s first take a look at the ubiquitous template seen everywhere on YouTube.

Assist
Team

First of all, Tanjiro. At first glance, he seems like a strong piercing damage dealer for Gilles Legato; however, his real value lies in his fast burst and recovery rebuff active, which counters frequent anti-burst effects and recovery debuffs. Tanjiro’s buff’s multiplier doesn’t matter too much for Seina. The four Fire Orbs his active generates also works very well with Seina’s orb generation active loop to provide an immediate VDP.

Most players think that Nezuko is irreplaceable. Spoiler: She is not. Nezuko is indeed an amazing sub for any Fire Att. team as a cleric who provides five effective skill boosts. Her post-transform active reduces binds, awoken binds and unmatchable orb effects by seven turns (almost like a panacea of sorts) on an amazing four-turn cooldown . On top of that, Nezuko deals a considerable amount of damage through VDP. She also provides , though you should not rely on this in SR2.

Inosuke’s equip provides a solution to Sherias; an attribute absorb void active with SB is very rare. The Team HP it possesses also allows you to shoot for 150K HP with which you can neglect all large hits except from Gilles Legato’s enraged hit at <50% HP.

Akaza’s equip is the answer to Okuninushi’s poison board, and on ASR2, the solution to the Will-O-Wisp’s preemptive heart board. The Team HP on it also contribute to reaching the threshold of 150K HP, while the OE pushes Seina’s piercing damage to the cap with Horus’s orb enhance active. The long duration shield is a useful panic button on Gilles Legato if you dodge all the spawns that require using it.

What If Demon Slayer Never Comes?

First of all, there are quite a few downsides to Tanjiro. First and foremost, he is a bindable transform card with no SB and no SBR. This restriction makes building the rest of the team for Seina really hard in scrounging enough skill boosts via inheritable delays and inheritable hastes . Some common replacements for Tanjiro’s post-transform active are a combination of Gileon and Grandis , Sophie , Kyo Kusanagi from KOF, Pixel NY Horus and more. All of these are good replacements for Tanjiro, even for ASR2.

Although the five effective skill boosts from Nezuko are incredible, she has problems of her own. For ASR2, she is the first sub to go since she has a low health stat, which is important if you are shooting for the benchmark of 150K HP. For direct substitutes for her active, Christmas Gremory and Santa Tamadra are strong candidates. In fact, Christmas Gremory is a better sub than Nezuko especially in other contents because of her follow-up attack super awakening. Equips with similar actives can also be used, but you probably have to shuffle the team a bit and stall or recycle a delay on certain floors; there are a lot of equips that cure at least both awoken binds and unmatchable orb status.

In general content (i.e. not ASR2), Nezuko cannot use her active in the first few floors. Think about AA2; you could die on Fuma Kotaro. For short dungeons you might only need it once, which means that she is no more than a regular damage dealer (as the value of her active’s quick uptime is lost). The and might be useful but are easily replaceable as well.

For Inosuke and Akaza’s equips, sorry; there’s nothing that can replicate what they do. However, by ditching Tanjiro (because he doesn’t exist), there will be a few more skill boosts on your team, and thus you can replace these equips with more commonplace equips that have a multi-turn attribute absorb void or a board and/or backup shield . With Gileon and Grandis , it is still possible go for 150K HP with a higher burst.

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Conclusion

I don’t believe in “the best team”. Everything is replaceable, but you have to get creative and accept some downsides. However, you better start looking at some alternatives and trade or roll for your actual subs instead of pinning all your hopes on a collab that is uncertain to come.