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