Gougi

What Are Gougi?

Gougi is the most recognizable unique mechanic for Fighting Ex Layer. When you pick your character, you also choose a deck of Gougi. Gougi is a set of 5 powerups that activate when certain conditions are met and give passive or active effects for the rest of the match (not just the round, the whole match!)

How does Gougi work?

For the sake of example, let's take a look at Aggro:

The Trigger is the condition you need to fill for the Gougi's Effect to activate. So, with Grab Up, once you land 2 non-command throws, you get a nice 20% increase to your grab range for the rest of the match. Erase Blow also has a simple Trigger with a simple but useful effect.

You'll notice these less impactful Gougi are in blue, blue signifying that they are easy to get but not massively powerful.

Yellow Gougi on the other hand are much more difficult to Trigger, often requiring more than one round to Trigger. They make up for this with extremely powerful effects that are often the centerpiece of the deck. Illusion requires taking 300 damage (For reference, characters have 200 health, meaning this will always take at least one round to Trigger.) but give you an automatic free escape from 1 highly damaging combo per round.

Rampage is what makes Aggro the Aggro deck as its Effect increases your damage as you hit the opponent up to a max of 30 stacks (1% damage increase per stack???) while having a fairly reasonable Trigger to activate early in the match.

Essentially, Blue Gougi are nice bonuses while Yellow Gougi are the powerful effects that you build up to in a match. These will also affect your character's playstyle, allowing them to play up their strengths or cover their weaknesses. Allen Snider loves Infinity as he wants meter, is good at building it up and constantly being topped up with the Rage Effect allows him to consistently do full Triple Break Loops to finish off matches. A Darun Mister on the other hand can take Thunderbolt, allowing him to use the Teleport Gougi to warp on top of the opponent, negating his poor mobility.

What should I base my Gougi Deck choices on?

While there will be "best" Decks for characters, if you want to mess around with the Decks, first consider what the character wants to do. Grab Master probably won't get much mileage on Kairi and his lack of command grabs for example. Doctrine Dark has excellent mixup but not an amazing approach so Shinobi with its Ghost Gougi covers his weakness and allows his strength to excel.

Also, do you want to enjoy the effects of your Gougi as soon as possible or are you okay being relatively weaker than your opponent for the beginning of the match? Some Decks require completely changing the way you play to Trigger the Gougi such as Miracle or Super Nova. Shinobi has very good effects especially considering how easy the Triggers are, but compared to a fully activated Juggernaut is arguably less powerful.

Most characters thankfully have more than one optimal deck in any case, so you'll still be able to mess around and not hamper yourself. See the character pages for recommendations.

List of Decks

Deck	Gougi Used	Recommended Characters	Notes
Aggro	Rampage, Illusion , Chip Up, Grab Up, Erase Blow	Allen Snider	This deck is probably the most solid deck to pick if you're not quite sure what to take. All the effects are decently powerful and intuitive and can be used by the whole cast.
Juggernaut	Hades, Guard Break, Meter Up, Speed Up	Darun Mister	Another pretty decent beginner Deck, Hades will completely destroy anyone who doesn't understand how to beat super armour, and the blue Gougi are all easy to activate with good effects.
Shinobi	Ghost, Guard Cancel, Guard Break, Speed Up, Attack Up	Doctrine Dark	One of the best decks in the game, Ghost's fantastic Effect for offense and Guard Cancel, one of the best Gougi, for defense makes for a incredibly versatile deck.
Infinity	Rage, Guard Cancel, Meter Up, Meter Up, Meter Up	Allen Snider, Jack, Shirase	Specially good for meter dependant characters. Loop characters heavily benefit from this deck because of the meter ups.
Miracle	Rage, Guard Cancel, Meter Up, Meter Up, Meter Up	Allen Snider	Notes
Stealth Raptor	Hunting Dash, Utsusemi, Grab Up, Speed Up, Speed Up	Doctrine Dark	Notes
Berserker	6 Chain, Pierce, Grab Up, Meter Up, Erase	Shadow Geist	Focused on chip damage. 6chain and pierce heavily synergize with each other for that purpose. Since you're focused on making your opponent block, you can also sneak throws more easily thanks to the Grab Up gougi too.
Double Face	Heads or Tails, Guard Cancel, Illusion, Grab Up, Speed Up	No one in particular	Notes
Sky Dancer	EX Arrow, Guard Break, Illusion, Chip Up, Frenzy	Doctrine Dark, Garuda	Notes
Nightmare	Energy Drain, Soul Drain, Ghost, Speed Up, Speed Up	Shadow Geist, Blair Dame, Skullomania	Steal resources from your opponent, which is a possible counterpick for infinity decks. Ghost gougi also helps with mixups and characters that have trouble in approaching
Babel	Desperation, Guard Cancel, Attack Up, Speed Up, Meter Up	Blair Dame	Notes
Thunderbolt	Teleport, Critical, Attack Up, Meter Up, Frenzy	Darun Mister	Notes
Fantasista	Meter Gross, Power Reversal, Disrupt, Attack Up, Meter Up	???	Notes
Supernova	Overload, Rage, Guard Break, Disrupt, Meter Power	???	Notes
Grab Master	Kraken Power, Kraken Grab, Grab Up, Speed Up, Erase Blow	Darun Mister	Notes

List of Gougi

Gougi		Used in Decks	Trigger	Effect	Notes
	Rampage	Aggro	Deal over 40 Damage in a single Combo.	Damage increase the more you attack.	As you attack the opponent, you build up stacks (up to 30) that increase your damage by 0.75%(?). You will lose these stacks if the opponent hasn't been hit or forced to blocked for 5 consecutive seconds. Landing hits will build up far more stacks than hits that are blocked.
	Illusion	Aggro, Double Face, Sky Dancer	Receive over 300 points of Damage.	Become able to escape combos once per round.	A pretty excellent Yellow Gougi that does take at least 1 round to activate, this allows you to escape combos once a round. This activates once a combo hits at least 50 damage (25% Health.)
	Hades	Juggernaut, Miracle	Get knocked down 12 times	Gain Super Armour	Super Armour means that your character doesn't recoil from most hits. You will still take damage, but you will be able to fully act. This means your character can get full punishes on BEING hit by an opponent, walk through projectiles and consistently win trades. However, being knocked down, juggled or launched will still work as normal against Super Armour. Damage that is Super Armour'd through will be unscaled, so notably multihit moves and supers will actually do more damage than normal (For example, Allen Snider's Fire Force.)
	Guard Break	Juggernaut, Shinobi, Sky Dancer, Supernova	Attack your opponent with 4 Hard Attacks.	Hard Attacks become Guard Breaks.	Harkening back to Guard Breaks from Street Fighter EX2, your Hard Attacks will become Guard Breaks for 1 bar of meter. Guard Breaks are flashy unblockable attacks that if they land will cause the opponent to reel for a very long time. You should be able to get full punishes each time with this, and some characters have extremely good setups to make sure the Guard Break lands such as Doctrine Dark. They're also just useful as a mixup tool regardless. If you don't have a bar of meter, a normal Hard Attack comes out instead.
	Ghost	Shinobi, Nightmare	Avoid your opponent for 12 seconds	Turn invisible during Forward Dashes.	A fantastic Yellow Gougi that makes any character's approach incredibly scary. The camera does still track, so midscreen this can be used to judge where the Ghosted character is. No such luck in the corner. You are invisible for 2 seconds after dashing or until you make an attack.
	Guard Cancel	Shinobi, Infinity, Double Face, Babel	Guard 30 attacks.	Become able to cancel Guards into Special Attack/Super Combos.	As it says on the tin, while blocking, input a Special or Super and your character will flash green and throw out the Special/Super Move. Excellent defensive Gougi and any deck with it is probably a winner.
	Rage	Infinity, Supernova	Spend 10 Blocks of Super Meter	Gain the ability to recover Super Meter.	The Effect is a little deceptive. If you aren't gaining meter for 4 seconds (ie. not attacking or throwing out specials), you'll start to rapidly gain meter. It takes about 5 seconds to get the full 150 meter. A late-game Gougi but has a suitably strong effect.
	Overload	Miracle, Supernova	While having MAX Super Meter, attack 25 Special Attacks.	Activate all other Gougi.	Is basically the intended way for you to Trigger your deck with Miracle and Supernova. Despite being easier to do than triggering each individual Gougi, this is still probably too difficult and is very much a win-more gougi (If you're managing to stay alive long enough that you can get the 25 Special Attacks off and have no Gougi to use until then, you would probably be winning regardless.)
	Mammoth	Miracle	Spend 20 blocks of Super Meter.	Increase Damage by 35%.	A Miracle-only Effect that's just out-and-out strong, the real limit here is that its Trigger is unreasonably difficult to activate and even the Overload Gougi designed to Trigger these difficult Gougi is arguably too difficult anyway.
	Hunting Dash	Stealth Raptor	Attack your opponent with an Attack out of a Dash 15 times.	Input Down, Up to perform a Short Hop. (This uses Meter)	This uses 25 Meter (Half a bar, shown with a small notch on each bar of Meter. This lets you go for crazy instant overheads that lead to full jump-in overheads. Anyone who has played King Of Fighters knows how good these can be and enables every character to have a very strong Low/High mixup.
	Utsusemi	Miracle, Stealth Raptor	Perform a Recovery 5 times.	Turn invisible during Recoveries.	To Recover, press a button as you land on the ground from a juggle or knockdown. The invisibility lasts less than a second, but does make it much harder for the opponent to chase you down from a knockdown. A solid defensive Gougi.
	6 Chain	Berserker	Perform 15 Chain Combos.	Chain Combos becomes 6 Chains.	One of two Berserker exclusive Yellow Gougi, 6 Chains mean that the usual chain system to lower strength to higher strength gets the addition that you can go to a punch to a same strength kick (ie. MP > MK becomes a chain, not a link) before going to the higher Strength. This lets you do something like LP > LK > MP > MK > HP > HK. Allows you to pull off some ridiculous blockstrings/strings (mostly from dash ins, getting full 6 chains is impossible without some momentum) and combines very well with Pierce.
	Pierce	Berserker	Attack your opponents 30 times.	Normal Attacks deal Chip Damage.	The second Berserker exclusive Yellow Gougi, this lets your normals do actual Chip Damage, Mortal Kombat style. Light attacks deal 1 Chip Damage, Medium Attacks deal 2, and Heavies deal 3. In combination with 6 Chain, this allows for your blockstrings to deal some serious chip even before you get to your specials. A full 6 Chain does a whopping 12 chip damage (For reference, Fire Force deals 5, 10 with Chip Up.)
	Heads or Tails	Double Face	Complete 1 Round.	Win: Activate 6 Chain Lose: Health 50% -> Hades will activate.	See the Hades and 6 Chain Gougi for more info. Unfortunately, neither Effect here is amazingly good. 6 Chain without the support of Pierce is not as good, and Hades only activating at half health on a round loss means it can very easily be too late for Hades to be useful. This Gougi does let you access these Effects quicker than their respective Decks and Triggers, but especially after the nerf isn't as much of a no-brainer.
	EX Arrow	Sky Dancer	Block an Aerial Attack 4 times.	By inputting Down > Up, you can jump directly to your opponent.	A free tracking super jump makes this excellent for mobility and allows for jump-in combos from full screen. Can unfortunately not crossup.
	Energy Drain	Nightmare	Knock your opponent down 4 times.	Drain Super Meter from a downed opponent.	The cornerstone of the Nightmare Deck, this not only gets you meter but also steals it from the opponent. If the opponent doesn't have meterless reversals, Nightmare can very easily force them to completely respect you as they wake up without any chance of using their supers..
	Soul Drain	Miracle, Nightmare	Drain a total of 99 Super Meter from your opponent.	Drain Super Meter and Health by getting near your opponent.	Similar to Energy Drain except this works just by staying close to the opponent. This means this is active while standing next to them, even on block, and also in any combos that keep you close enough. Many Supers will also keep you close enough to have it active, and throws are especially good for getting the full use of Soul Drain. The health loss can never kill but will leave the opponent at 1 Health. A very difficult Gougi to activate but well worth it.
	Desperation	Babel	Perform Special Attacks or Super Combos 8 times.	Damage increases the more you land Special Attacks/Super Combos	Each individual Special or Super move hit builds a stack (Must hit, can't be blocked, maxes out at 99 stacks), increases the damage of Specials or Supers by roughly 7.5% per stack. Is a genuinely solid increase in damage for special moves with a reasonable Trigger to pull off. However, it suffers from a really major downside in that all stacks are lost if the move is blocked or whiffed, making it actually a fairly underwhelming Gougi overall. Is still good for characters that can hit-confirm into specials and don't need to throw them out constantly .
	Meter Power	Supernova	Build 5 bars of Super Meter	Gain a Damage boost depending on how much Super Meter you have.	Each bar gives you a 3.33% damage increase for a max of 10%. Not too bad especially as the Trigger is very reasonable. Unfortunately stuck on Supernova where it's fairly underwhelming.
	Critical	Thunderbolt	Avoid your opponent for 12 seconds.	Gain a large Damage boost for a limited time.	When the timer fills up (takes 8 seconds), the next attack that lands deal 50% more damage. A bit underwhelming as if it lands during a combo, it'd do 50% of the scaled damage.
	Meter Gross	Fantasista	Perform 2 Reversals	Gain Meter when performing Reversals	Increases the amount of meter gained by 50% (the base 10 meter for reversals going to 15.) A decent reward but given that reversals are pretty dangerous if blocked most of the time, this makes this Gougi not very useful and worthless if you're not getting knocked down.
	Power Reversal	Fantasista	Attack 5 Reversals.	Reversals gain a Damage boost.	If the reversal logo comes out (IE. you got the move to come out as soon as you got up), you get a pretty major 50% damage increase to the move. Suffers from the same problem as Meter Gross where making use of the reversal effect is dangerous and not applicable if you're not getting knocked down.
	Disrupt	Fantasista, Supernova	Perform a Super Cancel from a Super Combo 2 times.	Spend all Super Meter to perform a powerful Super Combo.	This Gougi is often outright bad. It offers roughly a 33% damage increase on the super at the expense of your entire meter and will provide less of a damage boost the less meter you have. For example, D.Dark's EX-Prominence goes from a base 34 to 51 with 3 bars which is pretty pathetic. Spending the same amount of meter to do Dark Shackle > Dark Knife > Dark Shackle does 49 damage and that's with a very poor Super sequence. Any supers that relaunch naturally become much worse as they can no longer loop. If your character can only have 1 super in a combo it may be slightly better, It's usually always better to do 3 separate supers in 3 combos or strings than do slightly more damage in one.
	Kraken Power	Grab Master	Perform a Special Throw or Throw Super Combo 5 times.	Increase Special Throw and Throw Super Combo Damage by 20%.	Does exactly what it says on the tin. Excellent for characters with high damage command grabs like Darun or grab supers in general (ie. Skullomania, Shadowgeist).
	Kraken Grab	Grab Master	Spend a total of 10 seconds close to your opponent.	Special/Super Throw Range 30% UP. (Some exceptions.)	A pretty disgusting range increase, turns Darun's command grab to full-on Super Turbo Zangief SPD range.
	Chip Up	Aggro, Sky Dancer	Deal 40 points of Chip Damage.	Increase Chip Damage by 1.	A surprisingly effective Gougi. Using Allen as an example, his Soul Force deals 2 chip damage, so Chip Up adds 50% damage. Fire Force deals 1 chip damage 5 times, meaning that Chip Up adds 100% damage. Basically, the more hits something has, the more effective Chip Up becomes making it superb on characters with many-hit blockstrings that use specials or supers (For example, Shadowgeist.).
	Grab Up	Aggro, Stealh Raptor, Berserker, Double Face, Grab Master	Land 2 Normal Throws.	Increase Normal Throw range by 20%.	Another pretty excellent Effect with a reasonably easy Trigger, this makes shimmies and your general grab game better which every character can make use of.
	Erase Blow	Aggro, Berserker, Grab Master	Attack your opponent with Heavy Attacks 3 times.	Gain the ability to negate projectiles with Heavy Attacks.	The use of Erase isn't immediately obvious. If someone is playing their fireball game to chip you out, Erase can shut it down completely, but is otherwise fairly underwhelming on most characters as most heavy attacks are slow and horrible to whiff.
	Meter Up	Juggernaut, Infinity, Berserker, Babel, Thunderbolt, Fantasista	Attack your opponent 10 times.	Increase Super Meter Gain by 10%.	Probably one of the best Blue gougi and is very easy to activate. One solid blockstring or combo will be enough to activate it and every character wants meter.
	Speed Up	Juggernaut, Shinobi, Stealth Raptor, Double Face, Nightmare, Babel, Grab Master	Allow 10 Seconds to pass in game.	Increase Movement Speed by 10%.	By far the easiest Gougi to activate in the game and has a pretty nice effect to boot, increasing both your walk AND run speed. Excellent for approaching and fine movement (IE. shimmies.)
	Attack Up	Juggernaut, Shinobi, Babel, Thunderbolt, Fantasista	Build 1 Bar of Super Meter.	Increase Damage by 5%.	A decent enough effect and easy enough to Trigger.
	Frenzy	Sky Dancer, Thunderbolt	Remain, below 50 Health for 6 seconds.	Increase Damage as your Health is lowered.	50 Health is 25% of your max Health and the damage increase is 10%. A pretty decent Effect with a reasonable Trigger.

Resources

A overview of all the gougi decks in the game by PB Geki.