Edison Deep Dive: Gladiator Beast

To no one's surprise, here is my build of Gladiator Beast. 

First of all: I love this deck. I almost literally dream about it, and sometimes when I'm outside doing irl stuff (most likely working) I get this strong urge to play GB. Little can I do about that, until when I get back home.

Those post-work sessions let me build a deck I'm proud of. I already talked quite extensively about some thoughts I have about GB, so this post will be mostly about this specific build.

Let's first start by addressing the elephant in the room: 3 Dark Bribe and no Starlight Road to be seen anywhere.

I already mentioned in my previous post how good Dark Bribe is. GB has no problems generating advantage states such that a comeback is unlikely, so Dark Bribe is just a strong negate to allow your plays to go through and reach that fabled board, no matter if your opponent goes +1 in the while (or not, if you are negating Icarus Attack, Gemini Spark, etc...). (On that note, that's the exact same reasoning behind Upstart. If I can deal 8000 damage, then I can also deal 11000.)

Trap Stun is the common alternative to Dark Bribe in GB, and I agree it's generally better for the purpose of making your plays go through (although it does miss Book of Moon, which is quite bad, as well as Solemn Judgment). However, Dark Bribe is also the (worse) alternative to Starlight Road to protect your traps, the alternative to Typhoon to beat continuous spells/traps, as well as additional Judgments to negate key spells.

This incredible flexibility is what drove me to play 3 Dark Bribe and entirely neglect S/T hate. It's SO BAD to draw Trap Stun and then get hit by Heavy, or draw Starlight Road and get hit by a trap. Having one card which can replace both depending on what's needed on the spot is the core of this build, allowing the rest of the deck to function overall better. To be honest, I think most lost games are just the games in which I drew no Dark Bribe, so there's that.

Moving on from Bribe, another key value of the deck is going first vs. going second. GB is, in general, really bad going second. Tempo is a big issue for GBs, and not having anything to protect your summon, or Chariot to protect against flip monsters (notably, Ryko and Snowman Eater) is super bad.

A decklist that minimizes the disadvantages of going second would max out on Book of Moon and Shrink, both acting as protection for your GBs as well as battle tricks, as both let you go around BTH, and BoM also lets you avoid tempo loss against battle traps. Another going second card is My Body as a Shield, which is the only protection against Torrential, but also works against BTH and Mirror Force. However, not being a battle trick and not being able to negate Ryko/Snowman in damage step made it side deck material for me to play when you know you are going second and you need the early tempo.

This build accepts the risk of losing tempo by not playing My Body in the main, but tries to minimize the risk of going second by playing 2 Hoplomus (and considering a third). Hoplomus is a great going second card as it is generally relatively low value (i.e., you don't mind losing it), cannot be BTH'd, and can either attack into a defense position monster or be summoned as a wall against an attack position monster. Also, it's the only GB that you don't really mind activating Book of Moon on to avoid a battle trap, since defense position is its default status.

Going first, however, is the real shit this deck is able to do. With 3 Bribe and 1 Judgment, chances you can set your whole hand without even caring about Heavy are high, and any GB set 4 is incredibly strong, because chances are you can protect it and tag it later, do some Gyza plays and whatever. Being able to be given the chance to set Chariot to use both offensively and defensively, then tag as soon as possible into Equeste to recycle it represents many of the steps on the road to winning the game.

Before moving onto the side, the next notable thing about the main deck is, IMHO, the inclusion of Icarus Attack and Call of the Haunted. I debated a lot on Icarus, before deciding I wanted to play 2. A relevant note is that I actually started out with a 3 Icarus build, wanting to do something to abuse it, and eventually went all the way to 0, just recently playing 2 again.

The idea behind Icarus is that it acts as "pseudo-protection" for Bestiari (i.e., can chain it to BTH, Prison, Caius, etc...) to safeguard it, while also popping 2 opponent's cards. I originally dropped the card because there are plenty of situations in which you don't plus off of it, or your opponent doesn't have enough cards making it awkward, but the inclusion of double Darius and Call of the Haunted allowed me to go back to 2. Call of the Haunted is great to steal some tempo, allowing for unexpected Gyza. Also, speaking about Gyzarus, you can actually summon it with Call and triger its effect, which is crazy, since it is functionally a +2 Icarus Attack (-1 for Call, +1 from Gyza summon, +2 from Gyza's effect). Darius, as well, allows you to recycle Bestiari for 1-battle Gyza plays, and summon back random Icarus targets.

In general, Icarus is one of the most shaky cards of the deck, alongside the second copy of Darius, but they tandem pretty well and allow for some great recovery plays. Icarus sadly leaves the main deck most of the times from G2 onwards because of Starlight Road against trap decks (which is where, IMHO, Icarus shines brightest), but in G1 it can be very unexpected, and plants the seed of doubt from G2 onwards whenever you raw summon an Equeste or Bestiari.

The side is the least polished part of the deck, and subject to a lot of changes. One especially notable card is Ancient Forest. It's for all intents and purposes Nobleman of Crossout, but with the added bonus of also offering some stalling. Also, it turns your Book of Moons into Sakuretsu Armor, which is fine I guess?

My general siding plan is:

• Keep Upstarts in if siding something that cripples the opponent's deck (Light-Imprisoning Mirror, Mask of Restrict, Cyber Dragon against machine decks).
• Max out S/T hate against decks that can play Oppression. This works especially well since most decks that play Oppression also play other traps, so you get to have more S/T hate even if they do not draw into Oppression.
• My Body as a Shield against almost anyone going second (maybe not Frogs?). Most destruction will target your monsters as tempo is huge for GB, so My Body can deal with almost anything.
• Morphing Jar is sided out against most trap-heavy decks.

Some other cards I was thinking about playing in the side are:

• Trap Eater: I don't really like the card, but in this deck it gets rid of floodgates and summons a body (and possibly enables synchro plays). I might consider 1 copy over 1 Dust Tornado.
• Imperial Iron Wall: I think main deck Imperial Iron Wall is actually a possibility in today's meta, as most decks are outright crippled from it, and here it also acts as protection from BTH, Prison, Caius, and so on. However, allowing for Iron Wall means shaping your traps line-up to allow for it, by at the very least removing Prisons for Sakuretsu.
• Secutor: Secutor is incredibly strong when it pops off. Most of the times, you can go Heraklinos and outright win the game. However, it does require some setup and drawing into Secutor makes it almost impossible to recycle it. I believe that bricks G2 onwards are especially bad because your opponent's deck is already routed to make you perform worse.

Conclusions

I dunno, go play the deck I guess? It's fun, I love it. You're going to get a lot of ragequits though.

Edison Blabber: my two cents on Gladiator Beast

I'm playing some GB recently, and experimenting a lot with it. I love the deck despite the stigma it has (and despite the fact that I got far far more rage quits playing GB than I did in the rest of my Edison experience), but I can't hide it has its flaws.

I'll probably do an Edison Deep Dive in the near future, but for now I just wanted to blabber about what makes GB good, what makes it bad, and what we can do to fix it.

The Gameplan

The GB archetype was conceptualized to be a toolbox archetype built around monsters which can tag into each other upon surviving battle depending on the situation supported by equip spells which can be passed from one GB to the other. Let's just say that the monster part was much better than the equip part.

As such, the way the deck shaped up to be was a control deck where each won battle netted you some sort of advantage, while keeping the opponent in check with traps and the incredibly strong Gladiator Beast War Chariot. This makes a lot of sense, and to the best of my knowledge even more combo-oriented builds (namely, Prisma builds) are still quite control by nature.

As such, the deck namely has issues getting the engine started, but once it gets started it can keep on piling up the pressure until it's too much for the opponent to handle through it's incredibly powerful boss monsters, Gyzarus and Heraklinos.

The Good

The toolbox nature of GB is a plus in my book, being able to search out whichever option you need. The effects themselves are good, namely:

• Bestiari pops an S/T, but does so mandatorily so you are forced to destroy one of yours if the opponent has none;
• Murmillo pops a face-up monster, but again mandatorily;
• Darius summons a GB from grave with its effects negated and goes back in deck if anything happens to Darius;
• Equeste adds back a GB card from grave, most importantly Chariot;
• Retiari can banish a card from the opponent's graveyard;
• Laquari becomes a 2100/400 beater;
• Hoplomus becomes a 700/2400 wall.

If everything is well, the first 4 net advantage, Retiari disrupts the opponent's plays and Laquari/Hoplomus are used to have better field presence (in Laquari's case, possibly netting a +1 in battle), since all the others are quite frail.

However, the effects aren't as good as they'd need to be to warrant a pure GB deck, but that's where the fusions come into play:

• Gyzarus can be contact summoned with Bestiari and any other GB and destroys up to 2 cards on summon, tagging into two GBs after battle;
• Heraklinos can negate any S/T by discarding one card, but can't tag.

Gyzarus is an advantage machine, popping 2 cards on summon and then tagging into potentially two other cards which can plus again (or, with a GB in grave, into Heraklinos). As such, most games are won without even summoning Heraklinos. On the other hand, you win all the games in which you summon Heraklinos (with good sense, summoning it at the cost of all your resources is a big no-no), so there's that.

When listing the good things about GB, you can't not mention War Chariot. Having a +0 monster effect negation is super strong, but recurring it even once with Equeste puts you in a great advantage position.

The Bad

The deck is very NS reliant, meaning you will only be able, at best, to commit 1 monster per turn to your field. Edison is moderately slow-paced, but if the opponent has 1 piece of removal per turn you are left with no monsters to play with. More specifically, every monster you lose puts you back one turn, while the opponent might be setting their grave or hand up in the meantime.

The deck is very battle-reliant, as well, meaning you get even more opportunities to suffer your weakness to monster removal in the form of battle traps. At the same time, you suffer 1800+ ATK monsters in the early game (when you likely don't have a 2100 Laquari), and still suffer from CyDra in the late game (since you need to sacrifice your Laquari for it).

Similarly to Monarchs, you want to have 1 monster in hand every turn to summon. Unlike Monarchs, you also want to draw into as many traps as possible, making the balance of the deck very shaky, risking to be either trap-flooded (which is the best worst-case scenario, since you can just stall a bit hoping to draw into a monster) or monster-flooded (which is the worst worst-case scenario, since you won't be able to set a field of traps any time soon). If you are familiar with Magic the Gathering, you can just think of GBs as lands.

Setting a lot of traps makes you very susceptible to BRD and Heavy Storm, so you need to either strongly underpower your field by not committing too much (in which case they can still blow your field up and set you back 1 turn and some advantage) or commit and protect it. The deck can struggle to come back from disadvantage because the engine is so slow to get started, so a successful bomb strikes twice as hard.

Finally, the deck just dies to Royal Oppression, no questions asked.

What we can do

First things first, I want to address the Prisma + Test Tiger + Rescue Cat build. I don't like it. The deck is already a mess of card balance, adding more potential bricks. It ups the ceiling, but I don't think the problem with the deck is the ceiling but rather the floor.

You want to draw Chariot. Maybe you don't know you do, but you do. I'm playing 3 Upstarts and not looking back. Heck, it's even rare that I side them out.

Samnite (if tagged in, searches a GB card when it destroys a monster by battle) and Secutor (if tagged in, doesn't tag out on battle but summons 2 additional GBs from deck) are great, but they only ever shine in Test Tiger builds, which come at the cost of worse balance. Again, we want to lower the floor, not increase the ceiling.

WIth those things out of the way, here are some considerations I keep in mind when building GBs:

• Morphing Jar is crazy. You generally benefit more from drawing 5 than the opponent, and you want to set your whole hand either way.
• Hoplomus enables a great mixup with Morphing Jar and keeps in check a lot of stray monsters you'd normally have problems with while you draw the outs.
• Since the balance of the deck is shaky, IMHO the name of the game is "flexibility". A card needs to be flexible and have multiple applications to work in the deck. Here is a subset of considerations that stem from the flexibility requirement:
• Starlight in the main is bad. You need to draw it before the opponent draws Heavy Storm, and is otherwise a dead card. It is live against Icarus Attack, BRD, and JD, but if you ask me that just means it is a good side deck card, not a good main deck card.
• You want protection from Heavy Storm and from battle traps, and Dark Bribe is my go-to card for that. Yes, it's a -1, but if your attack goes through you will reset the advantage to 0 or to +1 and advance your engine, so it's 100% worth it. Dark Bribe also negates a lot of power cards in a way that the opponent wouldn't expect, such as Miracle Fusion, Soul Exchange, etc..., so it is one of the most flexible cards in the deck, and I'm maining it at 3 with very little doubts on whether to go down to 2.
• Book of Moon and Shrink are both protection for your monsters and ways to win battles. BoM is the most generic one, allowing to dodge BTH and battle traps, as well as stopping your opponent's synchro plays (especially mind/brain control synchros) and turn off a lot of monster effects. Shrink is usually better in battle and lets you go above very strong threats such as Tytannial (forcing the negate), Kristya and others, but also gives you BTH protection. I'm on 3 for both.
• Smashing Ground is the weakest form of 1 for 1 removal because it doesn't help protecting your monsters during your opponent's turn. I'll always favor more copies of Dimensional Prison or BTH over Smashing Ground. I'd rather wait a turn or stall out until I draw the actual out than lack protection.
• Call of the Haunted helps both with comebacks and, in a sense, with monster protection (i.e., you can summon the same monster that was destroyed, but that's stretching it a bit). In general, it's a bad card when you are in an advantage position, but it's a good card when you are back, especially if you summon Gyza with it.
• Icarus Attack is a great card on paper. It avoids your Bestiari from getting banished in the case of a BTH or Prison, and offers chainable 2 for 2 removal, which is great, especially if it baited out a different trap (letting you go +1). In reality, it performs a bit worse than that because it requires your opponent committing to the field, and drawing multiples really sucks because you can't keep the tempo up. I'd think of using 2 or 1, especially with 1 Call of the Haunted.

Conclusions

GB is a super fun deck to play, perhaps a little less fun to play against, but it's something I want to make work. Expect an Edison Deep Dive in the near future ;)

Edison Deep Dive: Machina Ancient Gear

I used to be into flashy, do-or-die OTK decks back when I played advanced format, but nowadays I'm more into the grindy decks, taking resources little by little and balancing your commital.

Let's go back to my roots with Machina Ancient Gear! 

Machina Ancient Gear is a Machina deck with the usual Geartown engine. The problem with Geartown decks is that they have finite resources. On the other hand, Machina Fortress is a recurring boss monster which can be summoned many times over the course of a game if the opponent doesn't banish it. In theory, their mish-mash should make for a deck with the ability to put a lot of damage on board without depleting all of the resources. In theory.

What if, instead, we went a bit more... extreme route?

This build has a lot of damage potential, and is very often able to close out games in the very first turns of the game. It can also, in theory, play the grind game with Fortress, but the lack of traps to support that playstyle means that more often than not you'll either run out of resources before the opponent does, since summoning Fortress has a relatively hefty cost.

But eh, enough of an intro, let's review the decklist piece-by-piece.

Duplication engine

3x Machina Peacekeeper

3x Cyber Valley

2x Machine Duplication

Machine Duplication is a card that does a lot of heavy lifting for the deck in the early game. Cyber Valley+Duplication gives you 3 extra draws (I usually do 2xValley to draw 2 and the last Valley to block an attack and draw off that) letting you dig quite deep into the deck, while Peacekeeper lets you search Gearframe to get your offense started, but can also put up quite the wall in the mean time. If you don't suspect Cyber Dragon, equipping the ATK position Peacekeeper to one of the other two leaves you with 2 Peacekeepers in defense of which one is also protected. If you do suspect Cyber Dragon, you can equip the peacekeepers one to the other to forcefully destroy one and trigger it, so that you still get at least one search even in case Cyber Dragon comes up.

At first, I had 3 Duplications, but I eventually removed 1 because drawing into Peacekeeper or Valley without Dupe is fine (they are usually the only okay discards to summon Fortress from the hand), but drawing Duplication without the targets is one more brick in a deck fundamentally made of bricks.

Machina engine

3x Machina Gearframe

3x Machina Fortress

3x Machina Force

(3x Machina Peacekeeper)

This is the consistency engine of the deck. 3 Force is my stance on Machina decks in almost any build. Summoning Fortress from the hand sucks, so the best way around that is having an efficient way to summon it from GY. It's fine if your hand is swaped with normal summons (i.e., Valley and Peacekeeper), but even then I rarely ever summon Fortress from the hand unless it's for a lethal push.

The only "exception" to this rule is summoning Fortress by discarding Fortress. This sets up a Fortress in grave to summon by discarding Force or Gadjiltron, so it's generally fine.

Drawing into Force is great if you have already setted Fortress up, so it's only ever a problem if the opponent keeps banishing your Fortress or if you just don't draw Fortress (which basically means not finding any of 3 Fortress, 3 Gearframe or 3 Peacekeepers).

Geartown engine

3x Ancient Gear Gadjiltron

1x Ancient Gear Beast

3x Geartown

3x Terraforming

1x Mausoleum of the Emperor

1x Gaia Power

The Geartown engine is relatively "standard". I went 3 Gadjiltron instead of the more common 2 for the same reasons why I play 3 Force (although the third Gadjiltron can often be sided out) and I'm playing 2 additional field spells instead of just one. Ancient Gear Beast is an awesome card that can deal with a lot of annoying threats, from Ryko to battle recruiters, and can be NS with no tributes under Geartown (although that requires actually activating Geartown, making you susceptible to MST).

The choice I'm the most content with is the 2 extra Fields. First of all, playing 8 total fields means that getting double Gadjiltron is actually relatively realistic. But, that aside, the two spells are also great on their own.

Mausoleum is more of an utility to get out of brick hands with multiple Gadjiltrons in hand, but can also NS Fortress in a pinch and set up a lot of goodies. Great card, but is often sided out G2 if playing against decks that can use it.

Gaia Power is part of a series of field spells for each attribute that increase that attribute's ATK by 500 and reduces the DEF by 400. I have always loved those cards (and, recently, I've been messing with a deck built around Mystic Plasma Zone), and having a deck in which one of them is finally really good is a win in my book. Gaia Power makes a lot of non-lethals into lethals, lets you run over opposing Tytannials with Fortress and lets you play around Gorz and Tragoedia in many occasions.

One of my pet peeves of the deck is that Gearframe+1 any machine+Limiter Removal is not an OTK through Gorz and Trag and doesn't let you play around them. 3600+5000=8600, so Limiter Removal should make it an OTK. However, dropping Gorz after the Gearframe attack means that you'll need to run over the token with Fortress and then in M2 equip Gearframe to Fortress to save it from destruction, leaving your Fortress against Gorz. However, if you wait for the Fortress attack to use Limiter, it's only 1800+5000=6800 damage. With Gaia Power, on the other hand, you can do 2300+6000=8300, and wait to see if the opponent drops gorz/trag to activate Limiter. 

In G2, Zombie World often makes the cut into the deck. Zombie World makes your machines immune to Chimeratech Fortress Dragon, and very often can be super-annoying to opposing decks (fairies, frogs, etc...).

OTK support

1x Limiter Removal

1x Brain Control

1x Giant Trunade

1x Heavy Storm

1x Mystical Space Typhoon

3x Phoenix Wing Wind Blast

Those cards enable your OTKs through opponent's backrow and, in general, "obstacles".

If you draw Limiter Removal, you more often than not have won the game. It's usually better to play a bit more conservatively with it, and figure out if you have a way to lethal without running into Gorz/Trag/Fader, but in general you can build your strategy around the card once you draw into it.

Trunade is the favourite cleaner, of course, but Heavy can also trigger your own Geartown in case you need it, although more often than not to effectively OTK the opponent you will need additional fields, so it might not be too useful (the notable exception is Gadjiltron+2 Fortress, which is not as unreasonable as it sounds).

Because of the sheer speed of this deck, it's not uncommon to setup an OTK on turn 2, so MST can often destroy the only S/T the opponent set to fully clear the road ahead. That aside, MST is often used to trigger a second (or third) Geartown for lethal pushes.

Brain Control is incredibly strong in this deck. Removing your opponent's (usually) only monster, makes it much easier to go for OTKs, often without even needing complex setups. Also, against BW, stealing your opponent's monster to turn off Icarus (or forcing it early, but to be honest you often have zero cards on field when activating Brain Control, so they might not have targets at all) is a great enabler, and with the tributes to support it you can get rid of threats for good (Catastor is one of the most relevant ones, but also Colossal Fighter and similar).

PWWB is a love of mine. As mentioned earlier, in this deck, costs that allow you to discard Fortress are pretty much free, and having chainable generic spot removal which also steals your opponent's draw phase in the deck is incredibly good both when playing offense and when playing defense.

Miscellaneous

• 2x Cyber Dragon: CyDra is great against the thousands of hero beat decks swarming DB recently, but can also provide the extra push to OTK sometimes (usually, CyDra takes care of an opponent monster, while the rest of the field actually pushes for the OTK). That aside, CyDra is also one more out to Catastor which usually completely shuts off the deck, since you can go into Chimeratech Fortress with it without even wasting your NS.
• Gorz: to prepare for OTK pushes it's very common to keep your field completely open, so Gorz acts both as defense and as offense.

As you can see, the deck is mostly 3 engines mashed together, and all 3 of them link with each other very well, so it's much more consistent than it actually looks.

Alternative card choices

One of the most common comments I get is "shouldn't you be playing more traps?". The answer is "probably? I don't wanna tho". Mirror Force and Torrential would definitely fit the deck to a T, but also Book of Moon for some protection. On the other hand, I wanted to go an all-in build, and chances are that the opponent is still going to play around Mirror and Torrential. Sure, this is the deck I'm bringing to locals, so this will definitely bite back in the near future, but eh, I didn't want to take anything away from the main engine and as you can see space is tight. 

Ancient Gear Golem is, weirdly, a valid card to play. It's an additional LV8 for Fortress, but it also lets you get around annoying defense position monsters or tokens. I eventually preferred Beast because it's easier to summon and to have some way to win against a set ryko.

Future Fusion is a card I wanted to play here. Chimeratech Overdragon with Future Fusion lets you dump all 3 Fortress and extra cards you don't want to draw (generally, all Peacekeepers and Cyber Valley, often also Ancient Gear Beast and depending on what else you have the Gadjiltrons can also go), wildly improving the average deck quality. Another target is Ultimate Ancient Gear Golem, but it doesn't help your gameplan if not by just summoning a stupidly big beatstick in 2 turns. I found that in general, Future Fusion turned out to be a win-more card, so I didn't include it.

The Black Salvo engine fits the deck very well: having access to BRD to nuke the field (and, in a pinch, trigger Geartown) or AFD for field spells shenaningans is very strong. On the other hand, the only way this could possibly fit the deck without clashing too much with the NS is substituting the Dupe engine with 3 Dekoichi and 2 Salvo (and 3 more cards). However, the Dekoichi early game is not as good as the Dupe early game, and even with Future Fusion (which meshes very well with the Salvo engine, since you can send Dekoichi from deck to grave directly) it turned out to be less consistent.

Scrap Recycler is a card I always wanted to like, but never made it into the deck in a stable manner. Setting up Fortress instantly is strong, but you aren't realistically going to use the draw effect (unless you have Future Fusion, in which case you don't need Recycler), so it's functionally a -1, so that you'd be better off using Foolish Burial. The only build it made sense in was in the Black Salvo build to send Dekoichi setting up for Salvo, but even then it was quite low-power in general.

I eventually settled on this build, but if you are interested in trying the Salvo build you can go -2 Dupe, -3 Valley, -3 Peacekeeper, +1 Future Fusion, +2 Salvo, +3 Dekoichi, +2 Recycler.

Conclusions

Machina AG is a cool deck to play. The combos aren't anything crazy, but you dropping beatsticks at a moment's notice is incredibly fun, and sometimes planning against opponent retaliation requires an unexpected amount of brain power. It's my first Edison deck IRL, and really happy with it.

Edison guide: Frog OTK

A short post today.

I recently found out about Frog OTK (or Combo Frogs), a combo deck characterized by VERY long combos to set up crazy OTK boards.

I spent some time studying it up, but since the only sources you could learn from are youtube videos, I made my own (written) guide. You can find it at this link.

Edison Deep Dive: Amaryllis

 

Here's my second Edison Deep Dive, this time with Amaryllis.

In Edison, plants have a lot of burst power, being able to summon a strong boss monster in Tytannial, Princess of Camellias off a normal summon with Lonefire Blossom. Gigaplant is also a strong addition to plants, giving them some power in the mid and late game.

However, Spore and Glow-Up Bulb, despite being absolutely iconic plant cards, are not legal in Edison as they were not printed yet, and this reduces the effectiveness of their payoffs. 

Phoenixian Cluster Amaryllis is a card that went under the radar forever. Personally, it's because I always thought that it required to be summoned via Phoenixian Seed to be able to use its effect, but it turns out that it can be summoned from the grave no matter how it found itself there. So let's read its effect carefully before getting started:

This card cannot be Special Summoned except with its own effect or with "Phoenixian Seed".

You see how I was confused about this? This is exactly the same as Vennominaga the Deity of Poisonous Snakes, but since Vennominaga activates when destroyed (and as such must be summoned first somehow), there's no way to bypass using Rise of the Snake Deity for the first summon.

If this card attacks, it is destroyed after damage calculation.

Konami perfectly engeneered this card's text to fit this short line among two longer, and much more relevant, lines, perfectly hiding it from my every opponent on DB who misreads the card every single time.

If this card you control is destroyed and sent to the Graveyard, inflict 800 damage to your opponent.

Ookazi on destruction is not a bad effect per se, but it gets much bettter.

During your End Phase, you can remove from play 1 Plant-Type monster from your Graveyard to Special Summon this card from your Graveyard in Defense Position.

And THIS is why we play the card. Amaryllis, at the very cheap cost of banishing one plant from grave, can summon itself back from the grave no matter how it was sent there. Ookazi on destruction is looking much hotter now, isn't it? Heck, even self-destroying on attack is a positive for this card, since it basically is able to deal 3000 damage by itself on a direct attack.

Amaryllis decks aim to abuse this: you already have access to Tytannial, which is a huge card by itself, but when paired with Amaryllis burn you have a gameplan even in front of Colossal Fighter or Red Dragon Archfiend. The opponent NEEDS to address Amaryllis after you summon it, because if they don't you get access to a 2200 ATK beater for free, and they will get the 800 damage either way.

By playing plants, you also get access to Mark of the Rose, and since you are banishing a lot with Amaryllis you also get access to D.D.R. into Tytannial (or Lonefire->Tytannial and, more occasionally, just Dandylion for extra tribute fodder for Tytannial).

The mills are provided by the milling engine I discussed in my latest post, and the protect Lyla minigame here is super effective since you have both Phoenix Wing Wind Blast and Raigeki Break, on top of the much more occasional Necro Gardna.

One note is that, as I mentioned, both Lyla and Amaryllis are cards the opponent needs to address as fast as possible. Most of the times that will happen with just an attack, but when both Lyla and Amaryllis are on field, this turns into a tough choice for the opponent if they only have one monster. Usually, they will pick Lyla, as it is generally much more threatening, but this also means that they will lose their beater to Amaryllis on the next turn and get a lot of damage. This is an incredibly strong early play whch lets you position yourself in a much better position to win.

The deck is fairly straightforward to play, so rather than discussing strategy, I want to discuss some specific card choices:

The plants

Amaryllis needs plants to summon itself back, and if you go and count you will see that there are a total of 11 plants. This is neat for a couple of reasons: first of all, a Lyla mill with 34 cards in the deck, of which 11 are plants, has a 76% probability of milling at least 1, 23% of milling 2 or more.

Secondly, if push comes to shove and you go for a grindy game, 11 plants means that you can summon Amaryllis 10 times (13 with Burial from a Different Dimension), for a grand total of 8000 damage if it gets destroyed every time.

Sadly, the plants card pool kinda sucks in Edison. Gigaplant is good, but it's another brick on top of 3 Amaryllis and 3 Tytannials. As such, aside from Lonefire and Dandylion, the other options are:

• Botanical Lion: a good beater, 1900 by itself (1600+300) with a great 2000 DEF, making it able to face HERO decks. With a Dandy activation, it goes to 2500, which is definitely nothing to scoff at.
• Lord Poison: floats into Tytannial (or, as usual, Lonefire->Tytannial or occasionally Dandy), but a bit slow IMHO.
• Koa'Ki Meiru Gravirose: 1900 beater that can send Dandy and Lonefire (and Necro Gardna and Plague, if you are playing it) to the grave on command. Sadly, it's not guaranteed to survive a turn, and it's just slightly better than Lyla's random mills in the early game.
• Cactus Bouncer: a great card, and I'm mostly considering siding it to be honest, but in the main deck it loses to all the HERO decks and even Dragons can crash into it with Red-Eyes Wyvern, on top of requiring more setup than Fossil Dyna Pachycephalo or even Vanity's Fiend.
• Mystic Tomato: just a floater that you can play up to 3 of and float into Gardna/Plague, but outclassed by Lord Poison in this deck.
• Rafflesia Seduction: a card I never heard of until searching for cards to put in the deck, a flip monster which lets you take control of an opponent's monster for one turn. I would have loved to play that, but it's DEFINITELY too slow for the deck.
• Neo-Spacian Glow Moss: I desperately wanted to play a Neo-Spacian engine (draw power with
  Convert Contact, access to Grand Mole, pluses from Cross Porter on a mill), but of course the plant Neo-Spacian is the one who sucks the most.
• Puppet Plant: I was considering playing this, but IMHO the card is not TOO useful even against actual targets, so it was no better than a random vanilla plant.
• Grass Phantom: 1000 ATK, but gains 500 ATK for every Grass Phantom in grave. Okay, it's bad, but wouldn't it be fun?

I was playing 1 Botanical Lion and 1 Lord Poison for a while, but I ended up removing Lord Poison to get some space for a larger Lightsworn package.

The Lightsworn package

As I mentioned earlier, summon Lyla pass is a a very strong play, and at a point I was playing 3 Lyla, 1 Ryko, 1 Charge and 0 Solar Recharge. However, Solar Recharge is incredibly strong, especially in this deck, so I expanded the engine to 3 Lyla, 3 Ryko, 1 Charge and 3 Solar Recharge. I am currently testing 2 Ryko and 1 Lumina instead, just to get access to mid game Lumina->Lyla to mill 6 and discard dead cards in hand.

The mills

The good mills for the deck are the aforementioned 11 plants and Necro Gardna. You might have noticed the lack of Plaguespreader Zombie, which was in the decklist until recently.

Plague is mostly useful in the late game, where usually you don't have access either to monsters to synchro with (since Tytannial and Amaryllis are LV8) or an extra card in hand to pay for Plague's cost. I recently decided to cut it, and happy since.

Another common mill target is Volcanic Counter, which helps with the burn part of the deck. It's not a bad card per se, but it is worse than Magic Cylinder under ANY point of view except that it becomes available by milling it instead of drawing (which, on the other hand, means that it is more dead in hand?), and it's quite easy to play against, as well as dying to the same side deck cards as the whole deck.

The traps

At first I was debating whether to play 3 PWWB or 3 Raigeki Break, so I settled for 2 and 2, but those proved so strong that I went to 3 and 3. PWWB and Raigeki Break are incredibly flexible and can deal with a lot of issues, besides Thought Ruler Archfiend specifically (or Tytannial with other plants on field?).

In general, Raigeki Break is less risky but offers a smaller payback, while PWWB really sucks against some cards (I'm not using PWWB against Stratos if it's going to beat over Lyla unless I'm desperate), but lets you capitalize on slow starts on the opponent or lock them down into a bad draw to gain an extra turn.

I was considering Karma Cut, as well, since it offers permanent removal at the same cost, although limited to monsters. Hitting a Treeborn Frog with Karma Cut feels great, though. I might test it some and consider it in the side, or go for the fabled 2 RB, 2 PWWB, 2 KC, but eh.

Finally, another option is Divine Wrath. Divine Wrath is in general a great card in Edison IMHO, and in this deck it deals with Caius, Stratos (denying them the +1, and still protecting your Lyla), and Brionac among others. The main problem with Divine Wrath is that it is not chainable, losing some flexibility. It is, on the other hand, a perfectly valid option that I'm playing with from time to time.

The side

As always, my siding abilities completely suck.

I've been liking Prohibition lately and I've come to prefer Soul Release to D.D. Crow. The deck can in theory play Royal Oppression as well, with the good old logic of "play big monster, make the opponent suffer" and by draining them of LPs with multiple Amaryllis.

That aside, some honourable mentions in the side are Book of Moon and Card Destruction.

Book of Moon is a good card in general, helps the "protect the Lyla" gameplan, and can wreck havoc in some matchups. That aside, there's one more utility in the deck, which any Goat Format player knows: permanently stealing monsters with Mark of the Rose. If you Book a monster stolen with Mark of the Rose it stays with you forever, so there's that.

The other mention is Card Destruction. The card is very common in Amaryllis decks, but to be honest I don't see the appeal. A lot of decks profit from a +0 Card Destruction when you play it against them, so why should I play it as a -1 effect in the main deck when there are plenty of more profitable ways to discard plants from hand? I'm considering dropping this altogether, but when it goes off and the opponent doesn't profit off it it's a good card, so for now it's stuck in the side and brought in only against specific matchups.

The fails

I really wanted to play Debris Dragon in here. Trooper and Dandy are top-notch targets, Lonefire is great and Ryko is okay. However, the Black Rose Dragon bombs are not too useful in this deck in particular, and Debris was very often a dead draw.

Magic Cylinder is another card I wanted to make work. In the early game it can protect Lyla, while in the late game it can help finishing games. And mind you, it works. When the opponent knows you are playing PWWB and RB, having backrow without any cards in hand makes them go for the push, and you can punish them for that with Cylinder. However, the only good amount of Cylinders you can play is 1, since the instant the opponent sees it they will play around that, and 1 Cylinder isn't as good at closing games, nor at being drawn in the early game. I might try it out again sometime somewhen, but my hopes are low.

Magical Stone Excavation is something that I adore from a theory point of view in this deck. Reusing Heavy Storm when the opponent has stopped playing around it, or recycling your power spells in general is incredibly powerful. However, the cost is very steep, and it's another early game brick which might prevent you from actually going off.

Needle Ceiling is in theory another card that could work. Having access to chainable field blows when your monsters aren't worth much (Amaryllis and Dandy tokens, mostly) is great. However, I found that in the games in which I could enable Needle Ceiling I was winning already, making it a mostly win more card. It could be a side deck card against specific decks, though.

Conclusions

Welp, this was quite the write up for an overall "simple" deck. This has come to be one of my favourite decks recently, as it is plenty of fun to play, and leads to grindier games in general, but is also able to punish slow starts from the opponent by putting a lot of damage on board very quickly.

See you to the next Deep Dive, although I still have no idea what it will be about.

Assert dominance by summoning Lyla and passing

This will be a short blogpost as an ode to one of my favourite plays in modern day Edison: summon Lyla pass.

When I picked up Edison again recently, everyone was playing a very grindy game, and 3 Rykos were the norm. Nowadays, it feels like everyone (at least on DB) has been pushing for faster decks, able to put up pressure very quickly. I think the reason for that is that there has been a Dragon Turbo surge recently, and probably people had to adapt their decks to avoid losing on turn 2.

This is not a bad thing, mind you. Rather, it's fascinating seeing how quickly the meta changes in a game which is not receiving any new cards, rules, or banlists of sort. But for this reason, seeing a Ryko recently, or God forbid, a Super-Nimble Mega Hamster feels somewhat nostalgic.

I've been recently playing a deck very reliant on milling, and I was playing your usual package of 1 Card Trooper, 3 Ryko, 1 Lyla, 1 Charge of the Light Brigade and 0-3 Solar Recharge. Charge+Trooper is of course the ideal milling play on turn 1: you mill 3 from Charge and pick up whoever, probably Lyla to address backrow without having to wait a turn, and then play Trooper to mill an additional 3 cards.

However, what do you do when Trooper is not an option on turn 1? The standard Edison play would have been to set Ryko to avoid going negative if destroyed by battle, but this means that you are giving the opponent an opportunity to interact with your mill, and if your deck is dependent on those mills you are risking a one-turn setback, and in this fast-paced meta being set back by one turn, especially if your deck isn't super fast, can be lethal.

On the other hand, summoning Lyla guarantees 3 mills on turn 1 and threatens a backrow pop on next turn and additional 3 mills if she survives. This is very threatening for the opponent, and will influence their turn as they will be forced to try to address Lyla.

This starts a minigame around protecting and killing Lyla in the early turns, which you can win by playing enough traps (depending on the deck, Dimensional Prison, Book of Moon, Raigeki Break, or Phoenix Wing Wind Blast are the major contenders). That said, you don't even need traps often. 1700 ATK is nothing to scoff at, although there are tons of HERO decks around recently with their 1800 ATK Stratos and 1900 ATK Alius, so the no-traps gameplan has been a little less effective recently.

As such, lately my milling package has gone to 1 Trooper, 3 Lyla, 1-3 Ryko, 1 Charge, 0-3 Solar Recharge, alongside the inclusion of some defensive traps, and I'm super happy with the results. This is a much more forward gameplan than the passive set Ryko and pass, and it really is rewarded in milling-dependent decks.

Looking forward to apply this to more decks!

Edison Deep Dive: Frog Monarch

Writing a blog is so nostalgic nowadays, let's see what I can do... 

This list above is what I've been playing in the past days. Before discussing the list, let's discuss Frog Monarchs in and of themselves.

First of all, the payoff of the deck: the monarchs. Monarchs are very strong cards:

• Caius is the old days Gagaga Cowboy, but it's also generic spot removal which punishes DARK decks;
• Raiza is generally worse than Caius IMHO, but it really reinforces advantage states by locking the opponent out of their draw phase;
• Thestalos is the third part of the main trio, allowing you to deal with players purposefully leaving empty fields against your monarchs, and getting rid of powerful cards such as Gorz.

In this deck, the Monarchs are treated as big bodies and advantage machines. In fact, if we neglect the monster tributed for the summon, all of them strip the opponent away of one card. For this reason, it's common for Raiza and Caius to avoid targeting face-down S/Ts because if it is chained to the effect then usually you go neutral (e.g., Bottomless Trap Hole would destroy your Caius, nullifying the advantage).

To enable the Monarchs, a Frog engine is used. The Frog engine is usually made of:

• Treeborn Frog: the reason why the Frog engine is used with Monarchs, it's a recurring summon that you can tribute for your Monarch, making the summon "free";
• Swap Frog: a super-versatile card that sends a Frog monster (or Substitoad) from deck to grave and can bounce an own monster to the hand to get an extra NS for a Frog monster;
• Substitoad: basically additional copies of Swap Frog, it can tribute a monster (including itself) to summon a Frog monster from the deck, but it shines when another monster is already on field since it basically lets you clear your deck of all the Frogs and set-up the Dupe lock;
• Dupe Frog: a 2000DEF body which lets you add from deck or grave a Frog monster, generally Swap, when sent from field to the grave, on top of an effect that prevents any monster except itself to be attacked (which, when paired with another Dupe Frog, it stops all attacks from the opponent).

The Frog engine is great in Monarchs for two reasons, the first of which is getting constant tribute fodder with Treeborn. However, whenever Substitoad goes off, it also allows you to thin your deck a great amount to vastly improve your draws.

In fact, generally speaking, after getting 1 Treeborn Frog to the grave, ideally you want to draw only Monarchs every single turn. Substitoad really helps in doing that by thinning the whole deck.

The Dupe lock is quite frail, but being able to easily set it up and, on top of that, recover some Frogs when the Dupes making the lock are sent to the grave is a great asset to have in almost any deck.

However, pure Frog Monarch has two main flaws:

• Empty field syndrome: more often than not, you will have nothing on field. You want to bounce Swap Frog back to the hand to reuse it later, and if a trap removes a Monarch you usually are left with nothing since you tributed the Treeborn for it. As such, you tend to get punched in the face a lot, and even though you have a great inevitability, being able of an almost constant power output for the whole game, sometimes your games are cut short by an OTK or big pushes for a couple of turns coupled with some traps.
• "Where's my other half of the deck?" syndrome: although statistically speaking not very likely, it happens many times that you just either don't draw the payoff (Monarchs) in the early game or you don't draw the enablers (Frogs), sitting with a hand of bricks.

To fight empty field syndrome, most decks play 1 Gorz and 1 Tragoedia, although 2 cards in the whole deck are not just enough to deal with that. Phoenix Wing Wind Blast and Raigeki Break can also help dealing with threats on turns in which you leave nothing on field, but they are also mildly predictable if the opponent knows the match-up well.

In my case, I decided to go with 3 Battle Faders. Battle Faders are great because they deal with both syndromes at the same time: you get protection on empty fields, but you also get tribute fodder in case you haven't drawn into your Frog engine. Sadly, they do get worse game 2 onwards when Fossil Dyna Pachycephalo or Vanity's Fiend come into play, but they are incredibly useful in G1 and sometimes also kept in in G2 and G3.

The hardest games are games in which you don't draw the payoffs, since the Frogs are too puny to do anything by themselves except attempting a Dupe lock. And this opens up another issue: what happens when you only draw into 1 Monarch?

While Frogs are very synergetic and set-up recurrent plays, Monarchs are one-off and don't help you get more Monarchs into play, so if you play Caius and it gets Bottomless'd or Dimensional Prison'd, what do you do? Yeah, you got your +1, but without survivability you are still leaving your field open and ready to be attacked.

In general, another big problem of Frog Monarchs, which can still fall into the "where's my other half of the deck?" syndrome, is the Monarch's survivability. Sadly, there's little you can do about this. The only reasonable option is My Body as a Shield, but it doesn't help against D-Prison or attacking into Ryko and 1500LPs is still a relatively hefty cost for the deck. As such, instead of adding survivability to existing Monarchs, I just threw more survivable monsters.

Light and Darkness Dragon is seen as a old card in the Edison community: it was considered extremely strong back in 2010, but nowadays the two tributes and the relative ease of getting around it make it feel like a bad option.

The two-tributes part is not really a problem for the deck: Enemy Controller, Soul Exchange, Brain Control and Battle Fader are all enablers when coupled with a Treeborn. It's not as cheap as just tributing Treeborn, but we often use opponent's cards to summon it (or Battle Fader, which generally just sits on the field doing nothing after literally saving your ass), so the summon is quite often a +0.

As for dealing with it, there are 3 main ways to deal with LaDD:

• Cheese: cards that can activate multiple times per turn without any cost can take all 4 negates of LaDD without any cost. These include Treeborn Frog, Quickdraw and Vayu. Of those, only Vayu is very common in today's metagame, with Quickdraw and Treeborn being relatively more occasional.
• Chains: LaDD can only negate once per chain, so activating a card, waiting for LaDD to chain its effect, and then play something that destroys LaDD lets both cards go through. This is relatively uncommon, but when it happens it really hurts.
• Negate and beat: the most common way to out a LaDD is by baiting 2 negates and then beating over it with a 1900 monster or 3 negates and beat it over with a 1400+ ATK monster. However, you still get to use LaDD's effect to summon from grave, usually a 2400 ATK monarch, and you still negated 2 or 3 cards from your opponent.

LaDD is usually sided out in match-ups with a Cheese option, but IMHO Vayu Turbo is a already a bad MU in G1 because of being able to both play the grind game and get OTK boards, as well as not suffering Thestalos. On the other hand, it's great against a lot of other stuff, so I tend to like it in main deck and just siding it out where unneeded, solving the survivability problem in other MUs.

Finally, when discussing G2 onwards, there are 5 cards we need to talk about:

• Mask of Restrict
• Dimensional Fissure/Macro Cosmos
• D.D. Crow
• Fossil Dyna Pachycephalo/Vanity's Fiend
• Pulling the Rug

Mask of Restrict is probably the harshest side card for us since not only it stops Monarchs, but it also doesn't let you do Substitoad stuff, which usually can be used to set-up Dupe locks while waiting to draw the out. Luckily, it's not too common anymore since Monarch decks have been on the fall, and it's a very specific side deck card. We play Dust Tornado and MST in the side deck for this card, as well as Raigeki Break in the main. Generally speaking, I don't side S/T hate in until I know that they actually have Mask of Restrict (so G2) or if they have other S/Ts I want to hit anyways since the card is not too common nowadays.

Dimensional Fissure and Macro Cosmos prevent you from setting up. While not as bad as Mask of Restrict, not being able to setup Treeborn is very bad for us, and even if they get them after we set it up, tributing Treeborn to summon Caius to get rid of them will still get the Treeborn banished. Luckily, they are more frail since they falls to Caius as well, and it's easy to know when an opponent will side deck them, since they doesn't fit all decks (it's mostly Gladiator Beasts and Six Samurais). Dust Tornado and MST will deal with them.

D.D. Crow is pretty much in all side decks, and at 3 copies in each. This is really bad news for us since 2 Crows will kill your whole tribute engine. There's little you can do against D.D. Crows, sadly. In general, you want to get both your Treeborns in grave so that 1 D.D. Crow doesn't do anything, but it's a race to win before they draw the second Crow.

Pachycephalo and Vanity's Fiend are similar. They both prevent you from summoning Treeborn and thus getting access to your big monsters. Pachy is the most common one of the two, since it's a NS, but we play Junk Synchron in the main since it's able to beat over ATK position Pachy. Both fall to Raigeki Break and Soul Exchange (reason why I'm considering siding the third Soul Exchange) or to Junk Synchron + Enemy Controller, but in games in which you don't draw either of these you need to get creative with summoning a monster and trying to protect it, which is why a lot of builds play Threatening Roars instead of Faders. Pachy in particular is very common, so it's something to pay attention to, but you can also side Sirocco against Pachy decks to have a large NS.

Finally, Pulling the Rug. It hurts a lot. Instead of plusing, you go neutral AND are left with an empty field. If the opponent feels gutsy, they can also negate Swap and prevent you from setting up at all. S/T hate helps with this, but since it's face-down you can't know if they have it and which one of the sets it is, especially against trap-heavy decks. My workarounds to this are LaDD, Jinzo and Vanity's Fiend, since they don't have any activated effect on summon, and Jinzo in particular helps sealing other traps against trap-heavy decks to let your other Monarchs enter the field easier.

Some other cards that hurt, but are somewhat less common, are Kycoo (which is easily dealt with as long as you don't get the attack go through) and Soul Release (quite uncommon, except in Fairy decks, but played around by avoiding having 2 Treeborns in the grave at the same time), but they are far less worrying if you know your opponent is on them and can plan around.

Welp, this was a wall of text, but hopefully it helps in having an idea of how my decklist is built and why it is as it is. Frog Monarch is a very fun deck to play, IMHO, and teaches a lot of fundamentals of hand, field and graveyard management.

I still misplay with it often, mostly when misjudging when to set S/Ts without clashing with my own Treeborn, and I also sometimes attempt some big pushes without having a fallback plan to rely onto in case of Gorz or Fader. However, all in all, I think I'm satisfied with the way the deck plays, and this might be, with minor changes, my main build of the deck.

The oldest post on this blog yet - Edison Format

 Hello to the exactly 0 people who are still reading YGO blogs, much less the one blog that has been dead for 10 years now. (Also, how did it get to 126k views? 😱😱😱)

YGO is a drug, there's no denying that. I've been in and out of the game for years, but I definitely gave up on modern YGO something around 3 or 4 years ago. Since then, all the time I relapsed back into YGO were for Goat format, or the occasional DS/GBA game run. I even played through the entire Forbidden Memories game, if that says anything...

As you could guess from the title, this post is about my latest relapse into YGO. Edison format is the format played at YCS Edison in 2010, and has recently seen a revival, with a great community and a lot of focus on the competitive aspect, which is something I eventually came to like better than just playing any random for fun deck that came across my hands. If you want to know more about Edison format, the main resource for pretty much everything is edisonformat.com.

After playing too many different decks for too little time each, I found a couple of decks that I really like and that I want to hone. Namely, and in order:

• Frog Monarch: a Monarch deck based on a frog engine for tributes;
• Quickdraw Dandywarrior (QDDW): a deck which is VERY good at generating advantage with Drill Warrior;
• Jinzo OTK: an OTK deck using Future Fusion to send Jinzo and Jinzo - Returners to the grave to summon back Jinzos and Machina Fortress to push for game;
• Flamvell: Flamvell Firedog + Flamvell Magician is a small engine able to pump out LV8 synchros and to have a lot of reversal opportunities thanks to Rekindling.

However, hopping across those decks, as well as other random stuff, is really not helping me figure out the best way to play a deck, and to actually get the satisfaction of properly playing a deck with as few mistakes as possible.

For this reason, I was thinking of doing deep dives into a specific deck by playing only that deck for a (relatively) long time frame, actually analyze my replays and actively try to get better and find a good deck build that works for me.

Since I'm analyzing replays, making tons of deckbuilding choices and so on, having a diary to write stuff on, for example a cringe-y blog made by teen me, could be really useful, so let's see if I can revive this blog for a little longer!

Next time: let's talk about Frog Monarch!