tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28042520051454436742024-03-27T07:35:00.878+01:00So Til Win ReturnsA cringy teenager's YGO blog, now turned into a blog about retro formatsLeodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.comBlogger203125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-38591494947931657682023-10-02T23:51:00.003+02:002023-10-02T23:51:43.899+02:00Edison Deep Dive: Gladiator Beast<p>To no one's surprise, here is my build of <b>Gladiator Beast</b>. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhM4nr8Q6nEi3aUDM6toFUPzXuWqAe6lEcB8FxWWSUwKDUhsd07BVN3biQOyx6gGO_S0--EcfAqYNG35uB_e9hR_8fMgzX0bWGeztMls-ys4rHh7KIVHtW5ay4k19T8szu9zeYlXBHaJrxeXscnkJ-E6vH_bkYvmJEL13e0CHTtlkB9Sapnk_zrgC_2AOqv" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="1024" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhM4nr8Q6nEi3aUDM6toFUPzXuWqAe6lEcB8FxWWSUwKDUhsd07BVN3biQOyx6gGO_S0--EcfAqYNG35uB_e9hR_8fMgzX0bWGeztMls-ys4rHh7KIVHtW5ay4k19T8szu9zeYlXBHaJrxeXscnkJ-E6vH_bkYvmJEL13e0CHTtlkB9Sapnk_zrgC_2AOqv" width="320" /></a></div>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.<p></p><p>Those post-work sessions let me build a deck I'm proud of. I already <a href="Edison Blabber: my two cents on Gladiator Beast" target="_blank">talked quite extensively</a> about some thoughts I have about GB, so this post will be mostly about this specific build.</p><p>Let's first start by addressing the elephant in the room: 3 Dark Bribe and no Starlight Road to be seen anywhere.</p><p>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.)</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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?</p><p>My general siding plan is:</p><p></p><ul><li>Keep Upstarts in if siding something that cripples the opponent's deck (Light-Imprisoning Mirror, Mask of Restrict, Cyber Dragon against machine decks).</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>Morphing Jar is sided out against most trap-heavy decks.</li></ul><div>Some other cards I was thinking about playing in the side are:</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li></ul><h3 style="text-align: left;">Conclusions</h3></div><div>I dunno, go play the deck I guess? It's fun, I love it. You're going to get a lot of ragequits though.</div><div></div><p></p>Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-52676720335078143262023-10-01T12:14:00.001+02:002023-10-01T12:14:15.223+02:00Edison Blabber: my two cents on Gladiator Beast<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">The Gameplan</h3><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">The Good</h3><p style="text-align: left;">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:</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Bestiari pops an S/T, but does so mandatorily so you are forced to destroy one of yours if the opponent has none;</li><li>Murmillo pops a face-up monster, but again mandatorily;</li><li>Darius summons a GB from grave with its effects negated and goes back in deck if anything happens to Darius;</li><li>Equeste adds back a GB card from grave, most importantly Chariot;</li><li>Retiari can banish a card from the opponent's graveyard;</li><li>Laquari becomes a 2100/400 beater;</li><li>Hoplomus becomes a 700/2400 wall.</li></ul><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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:</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>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;</li><li>Heraklinos can negate any S/T by discarding one card, but can't tag.</li></ul><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">The Bad</h3><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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).</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Finally, the deck just dies to Royal Oppression, no questions asked.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">What we can do</h3><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">WIth those things out of the way, here are some considerations I keep in mind when building GBs:</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Morphing Jar is crazy. You generally benefit more from drawing 5 than the opponent, and you want to set your whole hand either way.</li><li>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.</li><li>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:</li><ul><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li></ul></ul><h3 style="text-align: left;">Conclusions</h3><p style="text-align: left;">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 ;)</p><p></p><p></p><p></p>Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-28952923019062363552023-09-19T21:28:00.004+02:002023-09-19T21:28:32.675+02:00Edison Deep Dive: Machina Ancient Gear<p>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.</p><p>Let's go back to my roots with <b>Machina Ancient Gear</b>! </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.imgur.com/kS86eZr.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="800" height="250" src="https://i.imgur.com/kS86eZr.png" width="400" /></a></div>Machina Ancient Gear is a Machina deck with the usual <b>Geartown </b>engine. The problem with Geartown decks is that they have finite resources. On the other hand, <b>Machina Fortress</b> 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.<p></p><p>What if, instead, we went a bit <b>more... extreme route</b>?</p><p>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 <b>run out of resources before the opponent</b> does, since summoning Fortress has a relatively hefty cost.</p><p>But eh, enough of an intro, let's review the decklist piece-by-piece.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Duplication engine</h3><div>3x Machina Peacekeeper</div><div>3x Cyber Valley</div><div>2x Machine Duplication</div><p style="text-align: left;"><b>Machine Duplication</b> is a card that does a lot of heavy lifting for the deck in the early game. <b>Cyber Valley</b>+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 <b>Peacekeeper</b> lets you search <b>Gearframe </b>to get your offense started, but can also put up quite the wall in the mean time. If you don't suspect <b>Cyber Dragon</b>, 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 <b>even in case Cyber Dragon comes up</b>.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Machina engine</h3><div>3x Machina Gearframe</div><div>3x Machina Fortress</div><div>3x Machina Force</div><div>(3x Machina Peacekeeper)</div><p style="text-align: left;">This is the consistency engine of the deck. 3 <b>Force </b>is my stance on Machina decks in almost any build. <b>Summoning Fortress from the hand sucks</b>, 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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The only "exception" to this rule is <b>summoning Fortress by discarding Fortress</b>. This sets up a Fortress in grave to summon by discarding Force or Gadjiltron, so it's generally fine.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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).</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Geartown engine</h3><div>3x Ancient Gear Gadjiltron</div><div>1x Ancient Gear Beast</div><div>3x Geartown</div><div>3x Terraforming</div><div>1x Mausoleum of the Emperor</div><div>1x Gaia Power</div><p style="text-align: left;">The Geartown engine is relatively "standard". I went 3 <b>Gadjiltron</b> 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. <b>Ancient Gear Beast </b>is an awesome card that can deal with a lot of annoying threats, from <b>Ryko</b> to battle recruiters, and can be NS with no tributes under Geartown (although that requires actually activating Geartown, making you susceptible to MST).</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>Mausoleum</b> 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.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>Gaia Power</b> 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 <b>Mystic Plasma Zone</b>), 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 <b>run over opposing Tytannials with Fortress</b> and lets you <b>play around Gorz and Tragoedia</b> in many occasions.</p><p style="text-align: left;">One of my pet peeves of the deck is that <b>Gearframe+1 any machine+Limiter Removal</b> 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. </p><p style="text-align: left;">In G2, <b>Zombie World</b> often makes the cut into the deck. Zombie World makes your machines immune to <b>Chimeratech Fortress Dragon</b>, and very often can be super-annoying to opposing decks (fairies, frogs, etc...).</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">OTK support</h3><div>1x Limiter Removal</div><div>1x Brain Control</div><div>1x Giant Trunade</div><div>1x Heavy Storm</div><div>1x Mystical Space Typhoon</div><div>3x Phoenix Wing Wind Blast</div><p style="text-align: left;">Those cards enable your OTKs through opponent's backrow and, in general, "obstacles".</p><p style="text-align: left;">If you draw <b>Limiter Removal</b>, 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 <b>Gorz/Trag/Fader</b>, but in general you can build your strategy around the card once you draw into it.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>Trunade</b> is the favourite cleaner, of course, but <b>Heavy</b> 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).</p><p style="text-align: left;">Because of the sheer speed of this deck, it's not uncommon to setup an OTK on turn 2, so <b>MST </b>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.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>Brain Control</b> 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 <b>Icarus </b>(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 (<b>Catastor </b>is one of the most relevant ones, but also <b>Colossal Fighter</b> and similar).</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>PWWB</b> 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.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Miscellaneous</h3><p style="text-align: left;"></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>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.</li><li>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.</li></ul><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Alternative card choices</h3><p style="text-align: left;">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". <b>Mirror Force</b> and <b>Torrential</b> 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. </p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>Ancient Gear Golem</b> 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.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>Future Fusion</b> 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 <b>Ultimate Ancient Gear Golem</b>, 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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The <b>Black Salvo</b> engine fits the deck very well: having access to <b>BRD </b>to nuke the field (and, in a pinch, trigger Geartown) or <b>AFD</b> 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 <b>3 Dekoichi and 2 Salvo</b> (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.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>Scrap Recycler</b> 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 <b>Foolish Burial</b>. 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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Conclusions</h3><div>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.</div><p></p>Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-69556470143321157672023-09-05T20:03:00.004+02:002023-09-05T20:03:43.509+02:00Edison guide: Frog OTKA short post today.<div><div>I recently found out about Frog OTK (or Combo Frogs), a combo deck characterized by VERY long combos to set up crazy OTK boards.</div><div>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 <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pubPDy2nJy3PMOf8zMmhjn-r5qo4i-9nY4RjNQAfZ4s/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">this link</a>.</div></div>Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-29866979039463888792023-08-27T13:46:00.003+02:002023-08-27T13:46:41.993+02:00Edison Deep Dive: Amaryllis<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhp2ZmkoY2dGjFuZEyHGAoIi8-FOBwBcz-RTYdnVMtaNjYBuKBpFeg_WQDd5F-21ZPTLarjT-FCOtcSXnRJG_TZ6uQAv7b_fgR-Ot-LjyaReQHXv3L1f0ACh3Rz0bEvY_9zE9PYHNUAf2Sy98MzbUbd58o96xVgxqr6KkiIqRTm-DeLW4eJ2ceTUZG_zXdn" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="1024" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhp2ZmkoY2dGjFuZEyHGAoIi8-FOBwBcz-RTYdnVMtaNjYBuKBpFeg_WQDd5F-21ZPTLarjT-FCOtcSXnRJG_TZ6uQAv7b_fgR-Ot-LjyaReQHXv3L1f0ACh3Rz0bEvY_9zE9PYHNUAf2Sy98MzbUbd58o96xVgxqr6KkiIqRTm-DeLW4eJ2ceTUZG_zXdn" width="320" /></a></div>Here's my second Edison Deep Dive, this time with Amaryllis.<p></p><p>In Edison, plants have a lot of burst power, being able to summon a strong boss monster in <b>Tytannial, Princess of Camellias</b> off a normal summon with <b>Lonefire Blossom</b>. <b>Gigaplant</b> is also a strong addition to plants, giving them some power in the mid and late game.</p><p>However, <b>Spore</b> and <b>Glow-Up Bulb</b>, 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. </p><p><b>Phoenixian Cluster Amaryllis</b> is a card that went under the radar forever. Personally, it's because I always thought that it required to be summoned via <b>Phoenixian Seed</b> 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:</p><p><i>This card cannot be Special Summoned except with its own effect or with "Phoenixian Seed".</i></p><p>You see how I was confused about this? This is exactly the same as <b>Vennominaga the Deity of Poisonous Snakes</b>, but since Vennominaga activates when destroyed (and as such must be summoned first somehow), there's no way to bypass using <b>Rise of the Snake Deity</b> for the first summon.</p><p><i>If this card attacks, it is destroyed after damage calculation.</i></p><p>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.</p><p><i>If this card you control is destroyed and sent to the Graveyard, inflict 800 damage to your opponent.</i></p><p><b>Ookazi </b>on destruction is not a bad effect per se, but it gets much bettter.</p><p><i>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.</i></p><p>And THIS is why we play the card. Amaryllis, at the very cheap cost of banishing one plant from grave, can <b>summon itself back from the grave</b> 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.</p><p>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 <b>Colossal Fighter</b> or <b>Red Dragon Archfiend</b>. 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.</p><p>By playing plants, you also get access to <b>Mark of the Rose</b>, and since you are banishing a lot with Amaryllis you also get access to <b>D.D.R.</b> into Tytannial (or Lonefire->Tytannial and, more occasionally, just Dandylion for extra tribute fodder for Tytannial).</p><p>The mills are provided by the milling engine I discussed in <a href="https://blogygo.blogspot.com/2023/08/assert-dominance-by-summoning-lyla-and.html">my latest post</a>, and the <b>protect Lyla minigame</b> here is super effective since you have both <b>Phoenix Wing Wind Blast</b> and <b>Raigeki Break</b>, on top of the much more occasional <b>Necro Gardna</b>.</p><p>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 <b>incredibly strong early play</b> whch lets you position yourself in a much better position to win.</p><p>The deck is fairly straightforward to play, so rather than discussing strategy, I want to discuss some specific card choices:</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">The plants</h4><p style="text-align: left;">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<b> 76% probability of milling at least 1, 23% of milling 2 or more</b>.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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 <b>Burial from a Different Dimension</b>), for a grand total of 8000 damage if it gets destroyed every time.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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:</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Botanical Lion</b>: 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.</li><li><b>Lord Poison</b>: floats into Tytannial (or, as usual, Lonefire->Tytannial or occasionally Dandy), but a bit slow IMHO.</li><li><b>Koa'Ki Meiru Gravirose</b>: 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.</li><li><b>Cactus Bouncer</b>: 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 <b>Red-Eyes Wyvern</b>, on top of requiring more setup than <b>Fossil Dyna Pachycephalo</b> or even <b>Vanity's Fiend</b>.</li><li><b>Mystic Tomato</b>: just a floater that you can play up to 3 of and float into Gardna/Plague, but outclassed by Lord Poison in this deck.</li><li><b>Rafflesia Seduction</b>: 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.</li><li><b>Neo-Spacian Glow Moss</b>: I desperately wanted to play a Neo-Spacian engine (draw power with <br /><b>Convert Contact</b>, access to <b>Grand Mole</b>, pluses from <b>Cross Porter</b> on a mill), but <i style="font-weight: bold;">of course</i> the plant Neo-Spacian is the one who sucks the most.</li><li><b>Puppet Plant</b>: 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.</li><li><b>Grass Phantom</b>: 1000 ATK, but gains 500 ATK for every Grass Phantom in grave. Okay, it's bad, but wouldn't it be fun?</li></ul><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">The Lightsworn package</h4><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">The mills</h4><p style="text-align: left;">The good mills for the deck are the aforementioned 11 plants and <b>Necro Gardna</b>. You might have noticed the lack of <b>Plaguespreader Zombie</b>, which was in the decklist until recently.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Another common mill target is <b>Volcanic Counter</b>, which helps with the burn part of the deck. It's not a bad card per se, but it is worse than <b>Magic Cylinder</b> 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.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">The traps</h4><p style="text-align: left;">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<b> incredibly flexible</b> and can deal with a lot of issues, besides <b>Thought Ruler Archfiend</b> specifically (or Tytannial with other plants on field?).</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I was considering <b>Karma Cut</b>, as well, since it offers permanent removal at the same cost, although limited to monsters. Hitting a <b>Treeborn Frog</b> 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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Finally, another option is <b>Divine Wrath</b>. 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 <b>not chainable</b>, losing some flexibility. It is, on the other hand, a perfectly valid option that I'm playing with from time to time.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">The side</h4><p style="text-align: left;">As always, my siding abilities completely suck.</p><p style="text-align: left;">I've been liking <b>Prohibition </b>lately and I've come to prefer <b>Soul Release</b> to D.D. Crow. The deck can in theory play <b>Royal Oppression</b> as well, with the good old logic of "play big monster, make the opponent suffer" and by draining them of LPs with multiple Amaryllis.</p><p style="text-align: left;">That aside, some honourable mentions in the side are Book of Moon and Card Destruction.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>Book of Moon</b> 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 <b>forever</b>, so there's that.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The other mention is <b>Card Destruction</b>. 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.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">The fails</h4><p style="text-align: left;">I really wanted to play <b>Debris Dragon</b> in here. Trooper and Dandy are top-notch targets, Lonefire is great and Ryko is okay. However, the <b>Black Rose Dragon</b> bombs are not too useful in this deck in particular, and Debris was very often a dead draw.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>Magic Cylinder</b> 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.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>Magical Stone Excavation</b> is something that I adore from a theory point of view in this deck. Reusing <b>Heavy Storm</b> 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.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><b>Needle Ceiling</b> 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.</p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Conclusions</h2><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">See you to the next Deep Dive, although I still have no idea what it will be about.</p><p></p><p></p>Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-59843429588809862892023-08-26T17:47:00.005+02:002023-08-26T17:47:44.305+02:00Assert dominance by summoning Lyla and passing<p>This will be a short blogpost as an ode to one of my favourite plays in modern day Edison: <b>summon Lyla pass</b>.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjnZhoIvC31VJFD3D-7fY-5cM1sIspJtnY-eiHjFhN77p_J3s4fkGaUrNiWdiWjKwt0ji9J7gtJv3GSlNO_cIXTQUSbbmAUMwIUTWCYQEuCntHpkZXF7_ZzJ1XCXAEMAj334INnXbpUCSjD3-r5FV5xPdJiIr73ANNTLfWKwno5yXgmC9TcSAYqIETEwa6u" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="297" data-original-width="717" height="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjnZhoIvC31VJFD3D-7fY-5cM1sIspJtnY-eiHjFhN77p_J3s4fkGaUrNiWdiWjKwt0ji9J7gtJv3GSlNO_cIXTQUSbbmAUMwIUTWCYQEuCntHpkZXF7_ZzJ1XCXAEMAj334INnXbpUCSjD3-r5FV5xPdJiIr73ANNTLfWKwno5yXgmC9TcSAYqIETEwa6u=w400-h166" title="The ideal endboard" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p>When I picked up Edison again recently, everyone was playing a <b>very grindy game</b>, and 3 Rykos were the norm. Nowadays, it feels like everyone (at least on DB) has been pushing for <b>faster decks</b>, 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.</p><p>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 <b>feels somewhat nostalgic</b>.</p><p>I've been recently playing a deck very reliant on milling, and I was playing your usual package of 1 <b>Card Trooper</b>, 3 <b>Ryko</b>, 1 <b>Lyla</b>, 1 <b>Charge of the Light Brigade</b> and 0-3 <b>Solar Recharge</b>. <b>Charge+Trooper</b> 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.</p><p>However, what do you do when Trooper is <b>not an option on turn 1</b>? 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 <b>interact with your mill</b>, 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.</p><p>On the other hand, summoning Lyla <b>guarantees</b> 3 mills on turn 1 and threatens a backrow pop on next turn and additional 3 mills if she survives. This is <b>very threatening</b> for the opponent, and will influence their turn as they will be forced to try to address Lyla.</p><p>This <b>starts a minigame</b> around protecting and killing Lyla in the early turns, which you can win by playing enough traps (depending on the deck, <b>Dimensional Prison</b>, <b>Book of Moon</b>, <b>Raigeki Break</b>, or <b>Phoenix Wing Wind Blast</b> 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.</p><p>As such, lately my milling package has gone to 1 <b>Trooper</b>, 3 <b>Lyla</b>, 1-3 <b>Ryko</b>, 1 <b>Charge</b>, 0-3 <b>Solar Recharge</b>, 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.</p><p>Looking forward to apply this to more decks!</p>Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-40266516958040353902023-07-30T15:12:00.002+02:002023-07-30T15:12:58.248+02:00Edison Deep Dive: Frog Monarch<p>Writing a blog is so nostalgic nowadays, let's see what I can do... </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.imgur.com/eJGAXej.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="800" height="200" src="https://i.imgur.com/eJGAXej.png" width="320" /></a></div>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.<p></p><p>First of all, the payoff of the deck: the monarchs. Monarchs are very strong cards:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Caius is the old days Gagaga Cowboy, but it's also generic spot removal which punishes DARK decks;</li><li>Raiza is generally worse than Caius IMHO, but it really reinforces advantage states by locking the opponent out of their draw phase;</li><li>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.</li></ul><p style="text-align: left;">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).</p><p style="text-align: left;">To enable the Monarchs, a Frog engine is used. The Frog engine is usually made of:</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>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";</li><li>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;</li><li>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;</li><li>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).</li></ul><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">However, pure Frog Monarch has two main flaws:</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>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.</li><li>"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.</li></ul><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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?</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">As for dealing with it, there are 3 main ways to deal with LaDD:</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li></ul><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Finally, when discussing G2 onwards, there are 5 cards we need to talk about:</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Mask of Restrict</li><li>Dimensional Fissure/Macro Cosmos</li><li>D.D. Crow</li><li>Fossil Dyna Pachycephalo/Vanity's Fiend</li><li>Pulling the Rug</li></ul><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-37386879557472523372023-07-26T01:02:00.008+02:002023-07-30T13:54:34.123+02:00The oldest post on this blog yet - Edison Format<p> 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? 😱😱😱)</p><p><b>YGO is a drug</b>, 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...</p><p>As you could guess from the title, this post is about my latest relapse into YGO. <b>Edison format</b> is the format played at <b>YCS Edison</b> 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 <a href="http://edisonformat.com" target="_blank">edisonformat.com</a>.</p><p>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:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Frog Monarch</b>: a Monarch deck based on a frog engine for tributes;</li><li><b>Quickdraw Dandywarrior</b> (QDDW): a deck which is VERY good at generating advantage with Drill Warrior;</li><li><b>Jinzo OTK</b>: 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;</li><li><b>Flamvell</b>: 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.</li></ul><p style="text-align: left;">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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">For this reason, I was thinking of doing <b>deep dives</b> 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.</p><p style="text-align: left;">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!</p><p style="text-align: left;">Next time: let's talk about <b>Frog Monarch</b>!</p><div><br /></div><p></p>Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-28210620587130426672014-07-06T16:27:00.002+02:002014-07-06T16:27:51.449+02:0049-Cards Yang Zings ||| Every Now and Then a Post Doesn't Hurt, Does It?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Won't bother writing the list, but, well, if you don't know a card, chances are that is a Yang Zing card.<br />
This time, I'm in for a bit of math: why 49 cards? Because I dropped Soul Charge. [/sarcasm]<br />
Yang Zings are essentially recruiters and as such, it's bad to have too many of them in your starting hand, but it is bad to play too few having only a couple of them to loop with. I then decided to raise the deck count (if you're familiar with old Gadget decks, you might know the concept).<br />
So, first of all, how many Yang Zings (I'm not counting Chameleon, having it in the first 6 cards or not changes a bit of the play style, but neither annoys us, nor gets us a crazy ass advantage) do we have in our first hand, in average?<br />
0.166248182899432 of the cases, we'll have 0<br />
0.374058411523721 of the cases, we'll have 1<br />
0.311715342936434 of the cases, we'll have 2<br />
0.122241310955464 of the cases, we'll have 3<br />
0.0235751099699824 of the cases, we'll have 4<br />
0.00209556533066511 of the cases, we'll have 5<br />
Having 6 is so unlikely that it is irrelevant.<br />
This means that, averagely, we'll have 1.46899129677 Yang Zings, which is just about right, given that you'd want 1, generally, or 2 at most.<br />
However, the problem lies in the about 17% of the cases in which we don't have any, but do we really?<br />
Let's see in how many of these cases we can get a Yang Zing with Pot of Duality. I'll spare you the math, but when you don't have any Yang Zing there's a 33% probability that you'll get at least 1 with a Pot of Duality.<br />
Also, another valid start is Chameleon+Incarnation. Although it isn't accurate, it is about the 12% or something like that (didn't want to run this much math for no reason).<br />
This all, put together measn that only the 8% of the total hands has no way to start right away the game, but it also means that they'll be packed with Traps which can slow down the opponent's game so much that it'll give you just enough time to start your own game.(for example, having at least 4 traps has a 80% of happening, while having is 99.something%, which is almost 100%).<br />
In closure, the deck is simply crazy consistent in singles, and can afford Skill Drain, but incredibly suffers Macro Cosmos, and siding with this might not be easy, due to high deck count which makes searching a card much harder.<br />
<br />Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-27498301545134970162014-04-27T09:56:00.000+02:002014-04-27T09:56:22.202+02:00Fun Idea: Box of Friends LV1 ChaosJust in case I want to build this or go further with the explanation, I'll leave here this post.<br />
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Box of Friend LV1 targets are White Duston and Thousand-Eyes Idol, which happen to be LIGHT and DARK. I'll write more later.Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-36184481929620310042014-04-22T23:31:00.001+02:002014-04-22T23:31:59.974+02:00Dragonstars/Cosmic DragonsCosmic Dragons are an archetype with, currently, 5 monsters (+a synchro) of different attribute and they all share a new type: Genryu.<br />
They all are recruiters which work under Skill Drain and work even when destroyed by card effects (even yours), but don't if they are Swapped.<br />
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Nice cards:<br />
Supply Unit: +1s everywhere.<br />
Soul Charge: happy synchro.<br />
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Ideas:<br />
<b>Skill Drain Cosmic Dragons</b><br />
Skill Drain destroys a lot of decks, gives some headache to other. The downside is not being able to use a Synchro Monster's effect, however you can play around this by (1) going into Stardust or similar monsters who work in the grave or (2) by using Bixi as a material (it makes the synchro unaffected by traps, and Skill Drain is a trap). Most likely, will be the build I'll play around with.<br />
It may play Ice+Fire Hand.<br />
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<b>Cosmic T.G.</b><br />
Cosmic Dragons are basically faster TGs, but they really do work nicely together. Most notably, Striker+Bian=Naturia Beast which cannot be destroyed in battle. Looks nice, but I cannot say I really like it.<br />
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<b>Cosmic *something* (Naturia Beast)</b><br />
Naturia Beast with Bian is really awesome, so one may like playing it. Nice EARTH Tuners LV2 are:<br />
-Esper Girl/Psychic Jumper: maybe a Psychic Build? (most likely only a couple of Psychics thrown in, Serene, Esper and Commander may be some nice picks.)<br />
-Naturia Cosmobeet/Nettles: plants are a nice trend recently, expecially with Soul Charge's Hype (which this deck already uses more than decently). They may look nice, although I don't think I'll be playing this.<br />
-Kagemusha: it's an option for a Six Sam build, but I don't think this'll be decent enough.<br />
-Striker/Pashuul: Reinforce Truth was an awesome card some time ago, I wonder if it can be good again, dunno.Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-10696237829925387342014-04-22T23:15:00.002+02:002014-04-22T23:15:36.909+02:00Reforming the BlogMost YGO Blogs are dead. For one reason or another, most are.<br />
I understand that I can't continue writing "I'll try to write more", it just gets in the way, rises the hopes of the readers (if there are any, anymore) and then let them down.<br />
This means I'm changing the meaning of the blog or, more precisely, return it to what it was meant for at the start: I'll be writing for myself.<br />
Writing here means I can practice my English, for what's needed, and practice writing in general, but, most of all, I can gather ideas. Being a creative mind, I generally have times when I cannot think of anything, and days when ideas are blasted one after another, not even giving me time to make them real. This blog will, more or less, work as a notebook.<br />
I may not explain the idea as thoroughly as I tried to, but it'll be, at least, useful for me.<br />
<br />
And while the blog will be written for myself, this doesn't mean you cannot read it. Instead, reading it will be like taking a look at my mind, with the rough ideas. This also means, you shouldn't expect regular updates. I won't talk about the banlist unless it means some serious change in my decks or something I will build; I won't talk about releases unless there's some card I look forward to; I won't talk about tournaments (I never did to start with) unless there's a deck I found interesting of which I want to take an idea from.<br />
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Hope it'll work. If it won't, at least I tried.Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-15817227577460523362014-03-11T22:54:00.000+01:002014-03-11T22:54:17.111+01:00Lo Shogun non Guerriero: Wildheart Garden<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">Monster: [9]</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">3x Carcar D</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">3x Elemental HERO Wildheart</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">3x Tenkabito Shien (not a warrior!)</span></div>
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<span style="color: #38761d;">Spells: [17]</span></div>
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<span style="color: #38761d;">3x Black Garden</span></div>
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<span style="color: #38761d;">2x E - Emergency Call</span></div>
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<span style="color: #38761d;">3x Mage Power</span></div>
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<span style="color: #38761d;">3x Pot of Duality</span></div>
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<span style="color: #38761d;">1x Reinforcement of the Army</span></div>
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<span style="color: #38761d;">2x Terraforming</span></div>
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<span style="color: #38761d;">3x Upstart (Hoban) Goblin</span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47;">Traps: [14]</span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47;">1x Bottomless Trap Hole</span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47;">3x Compulsory Escape Device</span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47;">1x Compulsory Evacuation Device</span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47;">2x Dimensional Prison</span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47;">2x Mirror Force</span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47;">2x Needle Ceiling</span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47;">2x Pollinosis</span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47;">1x Torrential Tribute</span></div>
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Yeah, Tenkabito is not a Warrior. I would really want to know WHAT made Konami think in a person being clearly a soldier (edo era, maybe?), with a katana (I guess) on an horse that it wasn't a Warrior. Oh well, I just lost the second Target for RotA.</div>
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Let's get to deck, shall we?</div>
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The deck is, let me say it, a watered-down version of Chain Beat. I don't generally like decks which do exactly the same thing another one does, but worse, so I struggled to find something which made it somewhat better at least in some field, and I managed: the deck can actually use Torrential Tribute and Needle Ceiling, alongside Compulsory Escape Device better than Chain Beat, due to being totally unaffected by traps. Also, no chain, unless it has a spell in it, can kill us, which is one of the things I feared the most with Chain Beat (Compulsory Escape Device, chain my stuff, opponent then uses troll card). Although pretty forced, the deck can manage a better use of pollinosis, too, and can afford using Mage Power for incredble ATK boosts (Field Spell+5 S/Ts=3000 ATK boost on a 1500 body).</div>
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The deck isn't hard to play, instead, it's pretty easy, but differently from PACMAN or other decks like those, it doesn't plus (aside from opponent's -1s), so management resource is actually a problem. Shouldn't be if you manage it good.</div>
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Let's get to a couple of the main rules: (this being a control deck means it won't REALLY have power plays, they're more like something you should keep in mind and cards you could activate at given points)</div>
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-Manage your cards, don't, don't, don't waste them. I did a couple of time when I was in a pinch, but I lost the game. If you're not losing, don't waste resources. While you can take a risk if you're losing and that's the only way out, try to play your cards at the best.</div>
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-Search, then Draw, then PoD. Although not always like this, generally you should first activate Emergency, RotA and/or Terraforming, then go with Upstarts, if you have them, lastly PoDs. That's to increase the probaiblity of adding what you need with PoD. Cases in which you could disregard this are when (1) you necessarily need a bluff, which is actually believable in game two or (2) when you need boosts for Mage Power, in which case you would rather not search.</div>
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-Your monsters are important! That's one of the main flaws of the deck. For this one, protecting the monsters is way harder than with Chain Beat. Although I said way harder, it's still pretty easy, and we do play a lot of them (before adding Tenkabito, I used to play only Wildheart and CCD, this meant that when the third Wildheart was killed, I could have admitted defeat at any time, I think you can manage the game if one or two of your monsters are destroyed). Try not to reduce damage by setting a monster unless you really need the reduction.</div>
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-Smokescreen. IF you're playing a match, hiding your deck is a nice option from time to time. If you see your opponent is a dead bad Match-up (you'll learn them playing), you may want to try a smokescreen, unless your hand is really good. Fake a Masked HERO deck by searching Wildheart and setting only a couple of backrow (not, not, not Needle Ceiling, Pollinosis, or Escape Device). Don't use PoD, too.</div>
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-Two Monsters and Garden are all you need for a Needle Ceiling trigger. You'll be using this a lot. Although your opponent won't summon face-up most of the times while you have Garden, if he is going for a power play he'll HAVE to do that. That's the right time. If you can use Needle Ceiling without accounting for the Token, go ahead and activate it in chain to Black Garden's effect, so that you can kill monsters and keep a Token.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
-Use CCD. Late game it usually is Torrential Fodder. After the first turn you won't really use CCD (I'll talk about this later), and it'll sit in your hand most of the times. Remember that it is valid Torrential Tribute fodder (but also remember to use it on the Token's summon, we wouldn't want to give the opponent a free token, would we?). Also, early game it draws Solemn Warning way and your opponent LPs while doing so. Being a magnet for Veiler is also nice (and, you won't believe me, many players never think about veilering your wildheart and using a trap on him during my turn). Believe me or not, it is also additional damage here and now, and fuels Needle Ceiling, expecially with Garden, when your field isn't awesome.</div>
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-Sometimes you may prefer not using Mage Powers on first turn. If you have a Wildheart and some traps to protect him and you went first, no point in activating Mage Power. Dark Hole which kills Wildheart AND resourcers is no good.<br />
<br />
Something you may want to change:<br />
I'd recommend you to try this build first, instead of just going into some fixes for your personal one (I wouldn't count that as netdecking, it's more like play-testing), after that, go ahead and think about the following cards:<br />
You may want to remove CCD. No point in dropping it to two or one copies. If you play it, it is in three copies. It's much more useful early game than late, this means you would want as many copies as possible to draw it sooner, but if you come not to like it (I'm pretty undecided), feel free to drop it.<br />
You may want to add Forbidden Dress. Forbidden Dress is actually amazing, but I just personally don't like it. It's more protection against spells and monsters, a 600 ATK drop on your opponent (1200 under Garden). I'm pretty biased because I tried this in the garden-less build, most likely has way more potential in the garden build. I'll try it again.<br />
You may want to add Fiendish Chain. Fiendish Chain was actually in the original decklist, but I dropped them for slots. Wouldn't recommend this if you choose to play Forbidden Dress.<br />
You may want to remove Pollinosis. As good as the card can be, it has one flaw, tributing the monster, and your opponent will try to give you as few tokens as possible. I'd recommend Dark Bribe in its place but, as I said, managing resources is really important here, you wouldn't want a +1 on the opponent. You'd better run some Dresses in their place.<br />
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What's more, I don't know if I'm going to build a side deck, but if I am, I'll definitely try making it a change-deck side. I'll first have to see what kind of cards may be sided against it, and I definitely don't have enough knowing about current side decks to judge on that.<br />
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Hope you have fun with Chain B- Wildheart Garden.<br />
See Ya<br />
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<br />
Usual Trivia: I came to be shocked that Tenkabito wasn't a warrior, that's just unbelievable. This also shows in the title which says "The Shougun is not a Warrior". Supposedly, Tenkabito Shien is young Great Shogun Shien (and, of course, the Shi En). How can a Shogun not be a warrior?</div>
Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-84852840956842559952014-03-04T12:11:00.001+01:002019-07-19T21:13:51.943+02:00Cancello Feniceo: Gate Material HEROes<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">Monsters: [12]</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #b45f06;">1x Elemental HERO Avian</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #b45f06;">1x Elemental HERO Burstinatrix</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">1x Elemental HERO Clayman</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">2x Cardcar D</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">2x Elemental HERO Bubbleman</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">1x Elemental HERO Heat</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">1x Elemental HERO Alius</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">1x Elemental HERO Ocean</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">2x Elemental HERO Voltic</span></div>
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<span style="color: #38761d;">Spells: [17]</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #38761d;">1x Dark Hole</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #38761d;">3x E - Emergency Call</span></div>
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<span style="color: #38761d;">3x Fusion Gate</span></div>
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<span style="color: #38761d;">2x Mystical Space Typhoon</span></div>
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<span style="color: #38761d;">3x Pot of Duality</span></div>
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<span style="color: #38761d;">1x Reinforcement of the Army</span></div>
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<span style="color: #38761d;">2x Super Polymerization</span></div>
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<span style="color: #38761d;">2x Terraforming</span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47;">Traps: [11]</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #741b47;">1x Bottomless Trap Hole</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #741b47;">3x Chain Material</span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47;">2x Dimensional Prison</span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47;">2x Fiendish Chain</span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47;">2x Mirror Force</span></div>
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<span style="color: #741b47;">1x Solemn Warning</span></div>
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<span style="color: #666666;">Extra Deck: [15]</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #666666;">1x </span><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666;">Blaze Fenix, the Burning Bombardment Bird</span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666;">2x Elemental HERO Electrum</span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666;">1x Elemental HERO Nova Master</span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666;">2x Elemental HERO Shining</span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #666666;">Other cards up to you (my extra decks suck, you know that)</span></span></div>
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What's this? I named a lot of times in my two years of blogging (actually, 2 years, a month and some days), but never really posted a build. I don't know why I didn't post it, so I thought I should have fixed that posting one, although after Stratos' ban. As I said in "Gate Material's Versatility", at this point of the game, HEROes get more consistent by adding an engine known for being the base for tons of OTKs but not really consistent.</div>
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So, what is this really? It's Gate HEROes Fenix, a Gate HEROes deck that uses Chain Material as another win condition. The synergy is born by the fact that both Gate HEROes and Gate Material decks play HEROes (although not the same ones) and Fusion Gate. This means that by adding the Gate Material engine into a Gate HEROes we'd have more discard fodder for Super Polymerization, more material for fusions (even with Gate, if you manage to take back the materials you banished via Shining) and draw power due to Cardcar D, other than the obvious OTK from Gate Material.</div>
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Shall we see the cards one by one?</div>
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-Avian, Burstinatrix, Clayman, Bubbleman and Chain Material are packed together. Although Veiler kills this loop if shot on Electrum because of only one copy of Avian, Burstinatrix and Clayman, if you know how to play the deck, you should be able to make the opponent waste their veilers on a Blackship of Corn or something like that. Playing doubles isn't worth it. Bubbleman, on the other hand, is quite a good card and works nicely in 2 copies because he is an AZ material to freely use and easy XYZ material unless you have 2 Fusion Gates in your hand.<br />
-Cardcar D and Elemental HERO Heat are needed for the loop too. You could attempt one without playing them, but it'd require an even worse extra, so I decided to go for the Blaze Fenix one. What's more, I generally play either Heat or Lady Heat, so it's not like that is a burden on me, and Cardcar D is a great card first turn for consistency.<br />
-Alius, Ocean and Voltic are my go-to HEROes, generally. Although I used to play one Ocean and one Ice Edge, I may be more into only 1 Ice Edge as of now. Ocean has a nice body, though, and is LV4. Your pick. Alius is a nice beater and LIGHT for Shining spam, while Voltic has always been one of my favourite cards in Gate HEROes. I even played builds focused on him with Thunder Sea Horse, but when they banned Stratos it wasn't worth it anymore. 2 is nice, though, because it even lets you recycle Electrum's materials or Heat if they got banished, other than going for burst damage at one point, expecially if you have Voltic banished.<br />
-Emergency Call and RotA are for consistency once again. Also, being able to choose which HERO you want, most of the times it'll let you go into the AZ-Shining combo. Also, it thins the deck a lot, giving you earlier access to Chain Material.<br />
-Fusion Gate (supported by Terraforming) is the backbone of the deck.<br />
-2 MSTs are for dealing with nasty backrow when you get into the loop. I used not to play them, but they came to my liking once I tried them. Also, if you're not aiming to the loop, they can be used to protect your field by chaining it to the activation of a Field. Also, smart MSTs can take care of pretty much anything, Fiendish Chain on Electrum is one of the easiest examples, but you may see while playing that it kind of hurts when you hit their field which was resolving or other cards which need to stay face-up. Hitting stuff is good.<br />
-Pot of Duality is awesome in here. Although it most of the times lets your opponent guess what you're playing, some of the times you'll be so fast thanks to this that even if he wanted to counter you he cannot because he doesn't have the cards he needs to do so. I'd generally use it after thinning the deck with Emergency Call and RotA, but some of the times it's better to keep them in your hand until it's time to look for the monster you need.<br />
-Super Polymerization is what solves your first turn. With this deck, most of the times you feel no nee to summon on first turn, because it may lead to losing resources without Stratos. With this card, instead, summoning an HERO means having a raigeki break on your opponent's monsters always ready which gives you a nice monsters in exchange (just today I won two games out of 4 thanks to this). I wouldn't max it out, though, because it leads to dead draws and lose too much advantage due to the discard.<br />
-Aside Chain Material, the traps are all for control, to slow down the game a bit. Also, most of the times you'd want to kill shi en or other monsters with nasty effects if you're going for the loop.<br />
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You may have noticed that this deck lacks Miracle Fusion. To be honest, I don't feel it's needed since they banned Stratos. Maybe you could play it in Bubble Beat, but that's only because it tends to send to the graveyard a lot and you generally don't recycle them. Here we wouldn't want to banish HEROes, even the one not needed for the loop, because we'd rather keep them if we went into a Shining and we need another one for the loop. With extra HEROes, used fusion monsters are recyclable, but if you banish them just for one extra Fusion which doesn't give you any real advantage, you'll be digging your own grave.<br />
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As for the deck, there aren't many tips I'd give you, mainly because the deck got a lot simpler since Stratos' ban. The only things I can write your are:<br />
-The Loop. I used to think everyone knew it but, apparently, given my games in rated and the fact that almost everyone asked me time to read Chain Material, not everyone does. In a tournament, though, I believe everyone will know that. The loop goes as follow: you need two Electrums in the Extra (or one banished and one in the extra), 1 Blaze Fenix, 2 Shinings (or banished) and 1 Nova Master (or banished). If you don't have them like this (maybe you used Shining), banish them from where they are and put them back into the extra via Electrum. Then start the loop. Summon Blaze Fenix, then Electrum, use Fenix's effect and deal damage. Electrum+Fenix into Nova Master, then Electrum again, Electrum+Nova=Shining, then ||Fenix, then Electrum, Fenix's effect, Electrum+Fenix into Nova, Nova+Shining into Shining, then Electrum, Electrum+Shining into Shining||<br />
Loop the part between the "||" until your opponent dies. A problem you may have is Veiler on Electrum, avoidable chaining Super Polymerization on Electrum, but you'll need to banish it later.<br />
<br />
-When not looping, the combo you'll be using a lot is AZ-Shining. Basically, you can wipe your opponent's monsters by using Gate+3 HEROes of which two need to be WATER and LIGHT. Basically, fuse the WATER HERO and another HERO into AZ, then AZ+LIGHT HERO into Shining, wipe the field, and beat with a Shining with at least 3800 ATK. This works best if you have, other than those monsters, 1 Voltic. If you have two, one Voltic could be used as the LIGHT HERO. If you do this, after wiping the field, you should beat with Shining, then Voltic which SSs Voltic, which SSs another HERO, dealing at least 5800 damages withouot considering last monster's beat. I OTK'd a lot by using Heat as the other monster, because it means 8000 damages.<br />
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<br />
Also, there are some cards you may want to consider adding:<br />
-Ice Edge, the main reason I don't play it is that my teammate hates him, but I'd generally use it, although he cannot be used for XYZs. I don't really XYZ summon, so it's ok.<br />
-Macro Cosmos and/or Dimensional Fissure. Although they damage Shining's retrieving effect, they usually make him a better beatstick, other than acting as Antimeta cards by themselves. What's more, it helps against Veiler.<br />
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That's All, Folks!<br />
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<i>Usual Trivia: "Cancello Feniceo" means Phoenixian Gate. Other than being a nice name, it is also, visually speaking, what the deck does with Fenix. Fusion Gate is the only thing which connects the Extra Deck to the Field, letting Fenix go in and out freely, by looping.</i></div>
Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-34267619735289936502014-02-26T16:57:00.001+01:002014-02-26T16:57:30.290+01:00Chain Beat Rulings (and Black Garden)So, yeah, I'm playing Chain Beat recently and I'm pretty tired of explaining in almost each and every game rulings for the deck. A couple of time it happened that if I linked them to Pojo's Guide they'd just say "I don't trust a random forum's post" and if I link Wikia "Wikia's editable by anyone, ya know...". Also, I don't expect them to really believe a blog's post either, so let's just start by saying:<br />
<b><u>Everything I'm writing here is OFFICIAL.</u></b><br />
It will always be taken by somewhere, sometimes I may not write the source, but everything is for sure.<br />
<br />
So, let's start:<br />
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<a href="http://yugioh.wikia.com/wiki/Wind-Up_Rabbit" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaEEm4bPHBwyjJeJ2OoZa5gzyiBzx_p5q9rX0nycAy1M0aKpM9u0wgrtJzcIpFw5tVfow4NK_QagYciepTn50ZI_zMzMQPO5tGitgyqnebdliMAyDEfICQhOPji4RQKBYIhH0pIpUyRi5e/s1600/Wind-UpRabbit.png" height="200" width="200" /></a></div>
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Wind-up Rabbit is one of the backbones of the deck, but has one hell of a tricky effect. Let's see what bothers up:</div>
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1.Wind-Up Rabbit's effect which banishes a monster isn't a cost and cannot then banish under Skill Drain;</div>
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2.When Wind-Up Rabbit returns on the field, it isn't considered a Special Summon, it is considered "returning on the field" and does not start a chain;</div>
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3.Wind-Up Rabbit's effect cannot be used in Damage Step.</div>
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First part is based on <a href="https://yugiohblog.konami.com/articles/?p=2947" target="_blank">Problem Solving Card Text</a>. Reading Rabbit's effect clearly explains that it is an effect, nothing to say here.</div>
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Second part will need one of PSCT's main rules: nothing's left unsaid in cards written with PSCT and nothing says one thing while it means something else. This means that if the card doesn't say that it is a Special Summon it means that it isn't, and if no method of summoning is explained it means there is none. The card simply is banished until then, this means that it'll "return" your next Stand-by Phase.</div>
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Third part should be obvious given that the only cards that can activate in Damage Step are counter traps, cards which directly modify ATK/DEF of a monster and cards which need to be chained directly to a card.</div>
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<a href="http://yugioh.wikia.com/wiki/Evilswarm_Thunderbird" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-CuissO1u6dDS6hQ8grfZFL-6mNObephv-FdbCr4LiDPY0wHC_vOMqfEzVGZOtxtkZzzf46fnH7no4jFVarysyAJA8wURS1DHxfd-QP12DUH1K5EyZnmTT3rq_puhNJ0DeGQtOHzK6oCg/s1600/EvilswarmThunderbird.png" height="200" width="200" /></a></div>
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Evilswarm Thunderbird is our second and last floater, and, while it's mostly like Rabbit, it is worth writing about it:<br />
1.Evilswarm Thunderbird's cannot be activated if Skill Drain is active;<br />
2.When Evilswarm Thunderbird returns on the field, it's not considered a summon and it doesn't start a chain.<br />
Basically, the same rulings from Rabbit, with the only difference that part 3 doesn't exist because it's explicitly written in the card text that it cannot be activated during damage step.<br />
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<a href="http://yugioh.wikia.com/wiki/Black_Garden" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY3FTqoKd-4LawKlrNqgjXoqk8cYqRp2LGGDIX6irMo0ILsx68BqeKi4IP2QWVTFN3aChjCqNEnK8T9ij5c0c_1tbgMdIPYi8jp3xwrQsQlBkbcLP7ZvEaWaCcCilmBHs_01HY0xcBJ4SP/s1600/BlackGarden.png" height="200" width="200" /></a><span id="goog_1178593661"></span><span id="goog_1178593662"></span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/"></a></div>
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Black Garden is a difficult card. With PSCT. Without it it'd have been pure hell. Thank you, guy-who-proposed-PSCT-at-Konami-TCG:<br />
1.If you summon a monster while Black Garden is active, but one of the two effects of Black Garden cannot be used (halving the ATK and Special Summoning a Token), the other works as it should;<br />
2.Black Garden's effect upon summon starts a chain;<br />
3.Once a monster's ATK is halved via Black Garden, its ATK is set on that value and won't change if a card which gave the monster that ATK doesn't apply its effect anymore;<br />
4.If a monster is removed from the field and later returns, it won't have its ATK halved.<br />
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I decided to write only the most important ones, so to lighten the charge of the post, not making it too heavy of a read for it to be linked fast.<br />
The first part is given by this article about <a href="https://yugiohblog.konami.com/articles/?p=4514" target="_blank">PSCT</a>, as you can see, Black Garden uses "also", meaning that neither is needed for the other.<br />
The second part is purely obvious given the card, it being a trigger effect it must start a chain.<br />
Third Part is, instead, the trickiest part. Based on the rulings of other cards which halve monster's ATK we can say that if there's Tenki on the field and then Rabbit is summoned while Black Garden is on the field, Rabbit's ATK will go to (1400+100)/2=750 ATK. If Tenki is then removed, Rabbit's ATK will stay at 750. This is pretty important if a monster gets an ATK boost in chain with Black Garden. Let's assume the following situation: there's Black Garden on the field, your opponent uses Call of the Haunter and summons Traptrix Myrmeleo. The chain will go as following:<br />
Chain Link 1: Black Garden<br />
Chain Link 2: Myrmeleo<br />
If you did nothing now, Myrm would just go ahead and destroy your garden, leaving you open against a 1600 ATK Myrmeleo. Ahh, it would be nice if you could stop her effect so that you can just crash onto it with a Token gotten from her summon or something like that. Oh, but you can! You have that Forbidden Chalice, so you decide to chain it.<br />
Chain Link 3: Forbidden Chalice.<br />
The chain is then resolved:<br />
Chalice boosts Myrm's ATK making her 2000 ATK and negates her effect; Myrm does nothing because her effect is negated; Black Garden goes ahead and halves Myrm's ATK making her ATK 1000 and summoning a token on your side of the field. All's well, your opponent will just destroy your token and deal you damage, BUT even after the End Phase, Chalice's boost won't go away, keeping her at 1000 ATK, which kind of hurts, but still doable by Rabbits and Thunderbirds.<br />
Back at the rulings, part four is, instead, more obvious than everything else, but I got this as a question, too, so I figured I should have written that. If the monster isn't on the field anymore, its ATK goes back at the original value and when it returns the field it won't be halved (unless it is Summoned).<br />
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Hope it was a nice read, if I get other problems like those, I'll try and write them here. If you have something you'd want me to write, go ahead and say so.<br />
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See Ya.Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-26102751009857553262014-02-25T20:19:00.002+01:002014-02-25T20:24:13.104+01:00Gate Material's VersatilityInspired by <a href="http://forum.duelingnetwork.com/index.php?/topic/99712-gate-material-decks-the-ultimate-comprehensive-guide/" target="_blank">AEtherchild's Guide</a> on Gate Material, I decided I'd get back at building something by starting with this kind of easy decks. The first thing I built, although not for real use, was the <b>Sparks FTK</b><br />
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<a href="http://i.imgur.com/rGIFg5a.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/rGIFg5a.png" height="200" width="320" /></a></div>
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As you can see, it's a nice deck, not really the best Chain Material deck because of the lot of space needed for the combo and searching, thus not a lot of Draw Power was affordable.<br />
If you want to try this, let's start by saying that if you only want to damage with Sparks you'll need about 2 hours, if you do this without using Upstarts. Of course, given the extra deck space I went ahead and played a couple of Gustav Max so that, after you've shown how cool your combo is, you can end the game much faster.<br />
The combo is to draw looping Worm Zero until you draw into Sparks, use it, then banish Gustaph and bring it back by making Leviair with two Fusionists, banish Spark with it so that Electrum can put it back into the deck later.<br />
As long as you remember to correctly reset the field (read AEtherchild's Guide, it's a good read), this should keep going. When you get bored, go with Gustav Max and all's well.<br />
<br />
I got quite the fun building this (but I played it only once, and only to try out the combo), so I decided I'd try other stuff.<br />
I then built Hit Da Jackpot! (aka. JAKKUPOTTO SEBUN!)<br />
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<a href="http://i.imgur.com/xbZvsEi.png%20" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/xbZvsEi.png%20" height="200" width="320" /></a></div>
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Once again, the Worm Zero loop gets you all of the cards you need for the combo. Once you have 3 Jackpot 7, Morphing Jar, Book of Eclipse and Shien's Spy (and Double Summon, if you already summoned once this turn) you can go for the win.<br />
Basically, you just summon Morphing Jar with 3 Jackpots in hand, use Shien's Spy on it and then Book of Eclipse. During the End Phase, Morphing Jar will flip and will just discards your Jackpots, giving you the win.<br />
I don't know whether Jackpot 7 gives you the win before or after (I'll guess after) Morphing Jar resolves, so you'll need 5 cards in the deck in order not to lose. It's not hard at all, though, as long as you remember to play a last Electrum to bring back Worm Zero's materials accounting for 6 cards, more than enough.<br />
This one was just for the sake of it and with a much more simple combo, I just wanted a more or less reliable way to use a new win condition, and so it was.<br />
<br />
I then gave a look to some new cards, and a card which reminded me of one of my all-time favourite decks, Coelacanth FTK Infinite Trishulas, showed: Mirage Fortress Entereprisenir.<br />
Needless to say, I built it: Deck Out Enterprise<br />
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<a href="http://i.imgur.com/IRsAjwW.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/IRsAjwW.png" height="200" width="320" /></a></div>
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This is, most likely, the most consistent amongst the three decks I posted because it has much draw power. I went for Double Lazuli+Zirconia just because. If you wanted the combo easier while still featuring Gem-Knights, 3 random Gem-Knights work, and you can do that by removing one Emergency Call which is, by the way, not that useful. Other options include Big Koala+Des Kangaroo or Summoned Skull+Red Eyes B. Dragon. I just went for them for a reminder (I will talk about that next).<br />
The combo here is just going into double Master Diamond and then Enterprisenir, use its effect and repeat.<br />
It'll leave the opponent with no cards in the deck left to draw for when you pass the turn, meaning they'll lose by deckout.<br />
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Although I said this deck is the most consistent of the three, it doesn't mean it's a competitive deck or the best Gate Material out there. Instead, those are most likely the worse ones, considering that they all pack a way to win, already (Gustav Max), so the cards are only extra cards for the show.<br />
One of the best way to build a Gate Material deck is not building a Gate Material. This means that the best way is to de-centralize the deck from the combo and include other win conditions.<br />
For example, consider the following engine:<br />
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<a href="http://i.imgur.com/zxBCtrA.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/zxBCtrA.png" height="200" width="320" /></a></div>
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As you can see, it only includes 10 cards (and only because 2 were maxed out for consistency, would become 14 cards if you used 2 copies of each EH to counter a single veiler) and 7 cards in the extra deck. An easier combo can be done while playing one less card in the extra deck and two more on the main deck by using Blaze Fenix. I will use <a href="http://i.imgur.com/wJClEEy.png" target="_blank">this engine</a> for my deck because I will be playing a machine monster for sure and Heat.<br />
With this kind of engine, it shouldn't be hard to build a wannabe competitive deck. For example, I recently wanted to get back my HERO deck, but Stratos went ahead and got banned, killing my deck altogether. Considering how luck-based Gate Material decks generally are, the following phrase should sound strange to your ears: I played a Gate Material engine to make it more consistent.<br />
But that's what I thought. Luckily, my HERO deck was a Gate HEROes, this means that Heat is already in my decklist, I'm interested in searching Fusion gate and my opponent will rather use his MSTs on Gate than on random face-downs hoping they are Chain Materials, because he has no real reason to fear a Chain Material.<br />
This is what I came up with:<br />
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<a href="http://i.imgur.com/pQWoXS2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/pQWoXS2.png" height="200" width="320" /></a></div>
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As you can see, this is a rough build, that's because I haven't gotten back into the game, yet, much less knowing the current meta, so I wouldn't really know how to properly counter it. This is, however, a generic build based off an old one. Probably the number of HEROes must be fixed, but this is the general idea. Also consider that if you happen to draw into Avian, Burstinatrix and Bubbleman, you can go into Electrum to recycle banished monsters or to retrieve, maybe, the two Cardcar D which got banished somehow or stuff like that.<br />
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I think I'll try to improve the deck, I'll post it back when it'll be finished. See Ya.
Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-29816740508546298632013-10-20T11:38:00.000+02:002013-10-20T11:38:08.986+02:0060k... Just got there<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/5qhF54n.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="223" src="http://i.imgur.com/5qhF54n.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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Well, it's kind of sad, and at the same time, kind of funny.<br />
Reaching 60000 visits (+3, at the moment of the screenshot) in a period in which I'm neither writing nor playing much for a couple of reasons means that the visits are on old posts, which also means that my old work is appreciated (and newer ones, like Traptrix and CEM).<br />
ATM, you may have noticed, I'm from Ubuntu. That's because I had a couple of troubles with my pc (long story short, my 7 years old cousin managed to format my pc right when I was about to create a dual boot for ubuntu and win7 in the 30 seconds I was in the bathroom), and lost most of my works (not YGO related). This means I'm currently trying to rewrite all I had written (was working on a visual novel), retrieve my music (hell, only from Lucky Star I had 4 GB of stuff), GIMP Brushes, textures, .XCFs, C4Ds and so on.<br />
Luckily, I watch anime in streaming, if I had it on my PC, and lost all of that, it'd be an incredibly stunning shock.<br />
(On a side note, this season's anime is pretty nice, I'm loving what I'm seeing.)<br />
What's more, I wasn't liking the meta that much. It's surely better than the one before, but I was probably expecting too much from it, and it disappointed me right away.<br />
I'm kinda sucked in by school, too, I'm on the third year of High School, meaning I've got 5 teachers out of 7 changed, and this is pretty tiring.<br />
What's more, I wanted to start studying Kanjis, too, but I couldn't work that in my week's schedule.<br />
My parents aren't home this week, and I've got to care for my brother (and help him with homeworks, other tiring stuff), I'm at my grandma's home, which doesn't allow me to do all of my things as I'd always do.<br />
Looking forward I see a stressful week, hope that doesn't turn out to be as stressful as I thought...<br />
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Seeing as you shouldn't expect posts for the 60k visits, the special this time is the full screenshot, uncut, uncensored. Usually I'd turn off the bookmarks, or altogether cut the upper bar of the browser.<br />
Not that awesome of a special, but deal with it, better off than nothing, uh?<br />
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Have a Nice Day ^^Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-4775334632929813112013-10-06T12:27:00.001+02:002013-10-06T13:26:39.670+02:00...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheVCfnaVFSF9mDGcFEv6Ap_Vq-SbaWToQYkmWrTgufEt9ve4bREEK-RW9cJbRqIHBiW7vsT84yicSiK0mUTSj5R7iy4VfciIIRztm0yKAA-X5Xii9R74ufwXd7w35C1tBqO_BgwRUYssjE/s1600/SixthSense.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="312" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheVCfnaVFSF9mDGcFEv6Ap_Vq-SbaWToQYkmWrTgufEt9ve4bREEK-RW9cJbRqIHBiW7vsT84yicSiK0mUTSj5R7iy4VfciIIRztm0yKAA-X5Xii9R74ufwXd7w35C1tBqO_BgwRUYssjE/s320/SixthSense.png" width="320" /></a></div>
I believe that, if not all, most of you have heard of Sixth Sense being printed in TCG in Joey's World and being emergency limited, right?<br />
I don't have anything against the emergency banlist for it, aside from it being at 1 instead of being banned. Ya know, a totally lucksack card that could be a +4 or +5, or that at the cost of a -1 mills from 1 to 4 cards.<br />
Decks that can use this: ALL<br />
Decks that can abuse this: everything that likes to mill, ED, LS, Zombie, DAD decks, Roids, Meda-Bat...<br />
Basically, everything.<br />
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Yeah, I know, maybe this is too much hate for a card that will be gone on december, but still...<br />
Oh well, good side is that, unless your opponent plays cards to retrieve exodia pieces from grave, this card isn't THAT good in Exodia (it needs you to take a not so indifferent risk). However, a variant that uses Swift Scarecrows and a Piper engine may easily use some cards to recycle monsters, too. Alongside Where arf thou? and stuff, this may be the strongest non-FTK Exodia deck available.<br />
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Oh, well, I'll be playing this card somewhere, somehow, just to be able to finally use it after 10 years of wait, and then will be more than happy to ditch it for the banlist.<br />
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GGLeodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-50510621616456699332013-09-23T16:06:00.000+02:002013-09-23T19:58:04.019+02:00Fiddling Around with: Chaos-End Master<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6FLvEFcFwhx8mS33daP8sjckZj0fJxSHZLC6ZpfXqiVtjmwr-quAUTzVKV2EpPVUa3f7XCR95jTYUhe1VEP5qJ6cHovTfdvAQZVLCGMtnR6ygK-AWsHuV8N-OSppEp7oorfkxvEnCNRUv/s1600/Chaos-EndMaster.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="312" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6FLvEFcFwhx8mS33daP8sjckZj0fJxSHZLC6ZpfXqiVtjmwr-quAUTzVKV2EpPVUa3f7XCR95jTYUhe1VEP5qJ6cHovTfdvAQZVLCGMtnR6ygK-AWsHuV8N-OSppEp7oorfkxvEnCNRUv/s320/Chaos-EndMaster.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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I was playing around with the new Dododos, thinking of how nice they were, and I was brainstorming for more options on how to search Gasser to the hand and summon Witch to get him face-down, instead of relying on a searcher+Tsukuyomi (which was, for those who want to try it, probably the most efficient way to play it). One of those searchers was Chaos-End Master (CEM for short). CEM special summons a LV5+ monster with 1600- ATK when he destroys a monster by battle.You may think that this card is a +1 (assuming you used a card to boost his 1500 ATK) but pretty hard to pull off and without any real result, but that's not it. Start by considering that it is a LV3 LIGHT Warrior Tuner, pretty nice set. Let's first see a couple of possible synchros to go into:</div>
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<span style="color: red; font-size: large;"><b>Star's Path</b></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhipy1JG9JSpRFCtE8PCVAmISkzyYeVFT79OBoNLNG4qI05Io50V8Y8h7HM4xNXbz3Pb3Xin3DmVRvk9WGk5xhEQ7OvZhMjFB2w7CvRLqYCjX5fDInxPHscbJfY7WOMbTML2OLgZ0rc9nyG/s1600/StarEater.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="312" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhipy1JG9JSpRFCtE8PCVAmISkzyYeVFT79OBoNLNG4qI05Io50V8Y8h7HM4xNXbz3Pb3Xin3DmVRvk9WGk5xhEQ7OvZhMjFB2w7CvRLqYCjX5fDInxPHscbJfY7WOMbTML2OLgZ0rc9nyG/s320/StarEater.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Star Eater is an innovative Synchro Monster, being LV11 and only requiring one tuner and one or more non-tuners. What you can easily notice is that CEM+LV8 goes pretty easily into this.</div>
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Let's see some nice CEM targets to go into Star Eater:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcZ2lJYdOTXAtfv9W4E_JhnezH8HQy0ZkDOZNZtsTttiobBZmMtq0AKEMQO097YvwPMI162eLyNxjvNgOJ5s2dsXQmB7jrE1-cD8jI3WemlZhJOKNplO8gO0qO8rWxYbUYiXbHIT0Rzpz1/s1600/DododoGasser.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcZ2lJYdOTXAtfv9W4E_JhnezH8HQy0ZkDOZNZtsTttiobBZmMtq0AKEMQO097YvwPMI162eLyNxjvNgOJ5s2dsXQmB7jrE1-cD8jI3WemlZhJOKNplO8gO0qO8rWxYbUYiXbHIT0Rzpz1/s200/DododoGasser.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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Dododo Gasser has a pretty good body (0/3000), LV8, EARTH Warrior, being target for various things, and has an awesome effect: whenever the card is flipped face-up, you can destroy up to 2 face-up monsters on the field. When it is Flip Summoned, on the other hand, it gets 3500 ATK, getting to a stunning 35000/3000.</div>
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However, if you want to use its effect, it may require some major set-up and will rarely be used for Star Eater, with two main exceptions:</div>
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-As game winner, you may go into Star Eater, or just when Gasser is totally useless;</div>
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-If you're playing The Shallow Grave.</div>
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Going into Star Eater with Gasser and Chaos-End Master is a 0 (or +1, if you didn't use anything on CEM to destroy the opponent's monster), getting Gasser on the field with shallow grave is a -1, but using Gasser's effect at full power results in a +2 and a 3500 Beater.</div>
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Even though this card is pretty awesome and is what it started the whole situation, drawing into it is absolutely horrid, unless you have a Trade-In or Dododo Witch (or Reinforcement of the Army, for that matter, which is, nicely, a synergy with CEM).</div>
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Result: Dododo Gasser is nice, but may require some set-up and can lead to bad hands. Even then, comboes nice with Redox (we'll talk about it laVater) or with other LV8 for Trade-In.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjk9urKjXqXF8R2jMcs_mMGsKMFy_3GSeWUp8YghcKCzeAce7JUpCLqOgksVl1zhbakeRCoi5NHnEtowqn2-Q84XHEA6kqtwP1TyNp3A_2zOhAVl3oQUy77qU-V2Nck2mVrywLNNvfy1WT/s1600/HieraticSealOfTheSunDragonOverlord.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjk9urKjXqXF8R2jMcs_mMGsKMFy_3GSeWUp8YghcKCzeAce7JUpCLqOgksVl1zhbakeRCoi5NHnEtowqn2-Q84XHEA6kqtwP1TyNp3A_2zOhAVl3oQUy77qU-V2Nck2mVrywLNNvfy1WT/s200/HieraticSealOfTheSunDragonOverlord.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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Hieratic Seal of the Sun Dragon Overlord is a 0/0 Dragon LIGHT LV8 monster, apparently usless, but has tons of supports at his back from both the Hieratic archetype, Dragon supports and the Normal Monsters (and some Gemini) supports.</div>
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Champion's Vigilance acts as a costless Judgment, Hieratic Seal of Reflection tributes one of your hieratics to negate a spell, trap or monster's effect and you will find tons of cards like these.</div>
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Essentially, what could make it pretty nice is:</div>
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Lance, both Gebeb and CEM make nice use of Lance, so that's another reason to max them out;</div>
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Honest, they all being light, you can use Honest pretty much the same you'd use Lance to destroy opponent's monsters;</div>
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Variety of levels, Hieratic Syncro isn't that bad of an idea, expecially if you can search the level 6 seal to go into LV9 Synchros;</div>
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Sphere of Chaos, the card meant to work with CEM (I'll talk specifically about it later). You can freely tribute summon it and plus.</div>
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Result: may be pretty nice, but I didn't brainstorm on it as much as it was needed, mainly because I don't like anything Hieratic-related.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioVrPyJn-8guQ5V9B826WxqeKp8MxFyQyVMxuunkOwLkFb2nftfhUvjZl1-5eOw1pA91tWOYjQjJsIOsc2WA-h7bDraPNt-y7s7CDA9VsIVAcRwpeHhGYezhmotr05ECFA9aXI781SOiHi/s1600/ParsecTheInterstellarDragon.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioVrPyJn-8guQ5V9B826WxqeKp8MxFyQyVMxuunkOwLkFb2nftfhUvjZl1-5eOw1pA91tWOYjQjJsIOsc2WA-h7bDraPNt-y7s7CDA9VsIVAcRwpeHhGYezhmotr05ECFA9aXI781SOiHi/s200/ParsecTheInterstellarDragon.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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Uhmmm, well, mainly naming Parsec, the Interstellar Dragon because you can easily summon it from your hand, so that it won't be that much of a bother drawing into it. Still, you won't always have both a LV8 AND a normal summon at hand. As for the rest, LIGHT/Dragon 800/800, nothing worth mentioning aside the usual Wingbeat.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO2HCsuehEsEcGpHSSWcaq6wP53ZcCKU5IeVIEjUNKBavw-f_n22QSJntqpSucM5dxvswUJhu8idhZK-ROT1gqz5FGP6Ok2JT2Tojy2mari9aDGmECkpLTHbra8oSD6m1AjTxRFDenn_fL/s1600/SwordsmanOfRevealingLight.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO2HCsuehEsEcGpHSSWcaq6wP53ZcCKU5IeVIEjUNKBavw-f_n22QSJntqpSucM5dxvswUJhu8idhZK-ROT1gqz5FGP6Ok2JT2Tojy2mari9aDGmECkpLTHbra8oSD6m1AjTxRFDenn_fL/s200/SwordsmanOfRevealingLight.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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Swordsman of Revealing Light is a card coming out in Duelist Pack 14 alongside the Dododos. It is a 0/2400 LIGHT/Warrior monster which special summons himself from the hand when a direct attack is declared. If that wasn't enough, it destroys the opponent monster if the monster he attacked with has less ATK than Swordsman's DEF. It has another effect, but here it'll be pretty rare to pull it off: when it is used as an xyz material, the XYZ summoned cannot be destroyed by battle once per turn.</div>
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This works awesomely with Felgrand Dragon (the XYZ), going into a monster that works as veiler, lance and cannot be destroyed once per turn by battle. Just awesome.</div>
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Result: I think of it as a Staple in 3x in each deck playing CEM and at least 1 or two Star Eaters in the extra.</div>
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Side Ideas:</div>
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-Gimmick Puppet: I'm not familiar with them, and I don't intend to. However, they make nice Chaos fodder with CEM and have nice effect when in the grave, meaning they work pretty nice when synchroed.</div>
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-Ironhammer the Giant: using the effect on the turn you summon him is pretty much useless, but keeping him on the field makes a decent play. Still, maybe too slow.</div>
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Overall Result: Star Eater makes lots of nice possibilities, combining Synchros and XYZs with lots of good supports. Probably, one of the best ways to play the deck.</div>
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<span style="color: red; font-size: large;"><b>Ascending to the Dragons</b></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnWo772d3Zizs-5DgBMGB2pkSA_bL4DwQ81pUQGtBXf421m2ESCTKFNEXqt0AX1E5F-6wKDLY7U2Jf_1Nv1uiAyvWYoV_BQ1MFK6IndoBFW6LH40_hicEyjZFf6PPe1LK_jd3Dob-oBQTC/s1600/DrascensionTheSupremeSkyDragon.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="312" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnWo772d3Zizs-5DgBMGB2pkSA_bL4DwQ81pUQGtBXf421m2ESCTKFNEXqt0AX1E5F-6wKDLY7U2Jf_1Nv1uiAyvWYoV_BQ1MFK6IndoBFW6LH40_hicEyjZFf6PPe1LK_jd3Dob-oBQTC/s320/DrascensionTheSupremeSkyDragon.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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Drascension the Supreme Sky Dragon is a LV10 Synchro summonable with just 1 tuner and 1 or more non-tuners. Boasting 3000 DEF, it has a nice effect that may result in nice ATK. Basically, when it is summoned, its ATK becomes 800xTheNumberOfCardsInYourHand, Tragoedia-like. However, another nice effect this thing has is summoning back the monsters used for the synchro summon, with their effects negated, when it is destroyed and sent to the graveyard by the opponent. Considering that Prison is semi-limited and CED is limited, this card may have gotten a nice boost of power. Let's see a couple of cards to use this with:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8iyFRCgNT7ZL4ntM5n2n1EXeeslw6tODiykd0dAVDN5RbOBJlFOtLYn1TeUmyXexIlsaV0Cj_x9818fPJto62lEMoMua2tZ4HrW5I21gJve5Wmt6qndewkmPRXjGmFQnS6hY5FIqrBlSs/s1600/DarkblazeDragon.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8iyFRCgNT7ZL4ntM5n2n1EXeeslw6tODiykd0dAVDN5RbOBJlFOtLYn1TeUmyXexIlsaV0Cj_x9818fPJto62lEMoMua2tZ4HrW5I21gJve5Wmt6qndewkmPRXjGmFQnS6hY5FIqrBlSs/s200/DarkblazeDragon.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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Darkblaze Dragon is a 1200/1000 FIRE/Dragon monster. What's nice about it, aside being able to go into Drascension, is its second effect. When it destroys a monster by battle, it inflicts damage equal to the original ATK of the destroyed monster. Considering you may play cards to destroy monsters with CEM, it isn't impossible to have boosts to use with Darkblaze. Pretty dead in hand, though, unless you have the Sacred Swords.</div>
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Result: nice, nothing special, there are probably better choices. Though, it pairs nice with Redox.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDeyRjoQ19hVbwp6RKg_LWK7ZnG6Ew7b35fiqSvWubaMZ9vm0hpcIZHCDlaJVCgyXMfZkoSlWF7ttquGk4Yd7Q94ibWIbmVdH-3mLwRRJbIcdMXop8YP9RLmocNrZzgi1828LWzR5Lu20c/s1600/FogKing.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDeyRjoQ19hVbwp6RKg_LWK7ZnG6Ew7b35fiqSvWubaMZ9vm0hpcIZHCDlaJVCgyXMfZkoSlWF7ttquGk4Yd7Q94ibWIbmVdH-3mLwRRJbIcdMXop8YP9RLmocNrZzgi1828LWzR5Lu20c/s200/FogKing.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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Fog King is a 0/0 WATER/Spellcaster which can be normal summoned without tributes. It has a nice effect that may work as a little counter against Hieratic and Monarch.</div>
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Result: one of the best LV7 choices, probably.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimui4_4cjFqgVkc4Pbc_8T1t7tvrKAIVqNTqkZnDvz-13Ivs3NTV7nRSoQvSvHc_H_ZIAUey_FW66vg8yoWRXo86L54wqiPQRA6uuGKKHrlcIOhGx7CTn8COO3vYTxic9t83u4T6UocmeL/s1600/RedoxDragonRulerOfBoulders.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimui4_4cjFqgVkc4Pbc_8T1t7tvrKAIVqNTqkZnDvz-13Ivs3NTV7nRSoQvSvHc_H_ZIAUey_FW66vg8yoWRXo86L54wqiPQRA6uuGKKHrlcIOhGx7CTn8COO3vYTxic9t83u4T6UocmeL/s320/RedoxDragonRulerOfBoulders.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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Redox is a nice target for CEM for a couple of reasons, one of them being able to drop Redox directly to the grave and summon it back, get it to the hand, and whatever you want. It may require you to play some more EARTH and Dragons, though. Could be nice with Gasser and it triggers Darkblaze's first effect. Sadly (or luckily), this is the only ED which is a target for CEM.</div>
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Result: if played in the right deck, it is the best choice as LV7.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8FJhyphenhyphenPxg15XAL4TUAdEvKhfyPoexG8wqk1St3dt798IwJnuI8dB7yr2RXk4zPmboM5qftbLFiInesQGc9XIBO2Q_qJMEOHqEhg-zcDWuYsLTq98u6a-v8FLh6WGZhx_0XKz2AxaPsXqjE/s1600/RegeneratingRose.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8FJhyphenhyphenPxg15XAL4TUAdEvKhfyPoexG8wqk1St3dt798IwJnuI8dB7yr2RXk4zPmboM5qftbLFiInesQGc9XIBO2Q_qJMEOHqEhg-zcDWuYsLTq98u6a-v8FLh6WGZhx_0XKz2AxaPsXqjE/s200/RegeneratingRose.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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Regenerating Rose has poor stats and a pretty much useless type (unless you're playing it with more plants, making it possible to summon a LV8 spore), but is DARK. Being DARK means you have possible Chaos fodder, but it is, sadly, totally dead once in hand. Sacred Swords and Allure is a possible solution, but banished it doesn't accomplish anything.</div>
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Still, the cardis pretty nice, and still better than Allure Queen LV7 for what it does.</div>
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Result: meh, if you really want to go Chaos, either this or not focus on Drascension.</div>
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Overall Result: Drascension is pretty nice, but has few decent targets, even though it shows off some power.</div>
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<b><span style="color: red; font-size: large;">TTT: The Terrible Trio</span></b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiymN1RSdDYU2NbuwSTCUOtw6xyuYTuvTZYUenqOEtpBu4QYWF8vBdzhkj6B_ZUnkrPiLT_rNU3Il2uZSGKGf4Xv4a6wG_NAellRLtd5RORAYmKXNiFS1zlbOXz47YfmzKiUMvVl23soLS6/s1600/AzureEyesSilverDragon.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiymN1RSdDYU2NbuwSTCUOtw6xyuYTuvTZYUenqOEtpBu4QYWF8vBdzhkj6B_ZUnkrPiLT_rNU3Il2uZSGKGf4Xv4a6wG_NAellRLtd5RORAYmKXNiFS1zlbOXz47YfmzKiUMvVl23soLS6/s200/AzureEyesSilverDragon.png" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8LdNC0WC4HkLKr215Im6wqnDIfLUUljwC9Kn8dpQOf-zp371Jso6hOAcThvGE0ykzQIXg1ziVF7kjGeyCpx8CUmHJU55X5dIzEFJ3l7gKEt8t6Fm0qBdfakId83NlKQKx8KMFQ1csUcbA/s1600/XX-SaberGottoms.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8LdNC0WC4HkLKr215Im6wqnDIfLUUljwC9Kn8dpQOf-zp371Jso6hOAcThvGE0ykzQIXg1ziVF7kjGeyCpx8CUmHJU55X5dIzEFJ3l7gKEt8t6Fm0qBdfakId83NlKQKx8KMFQ1csUcbA/s200/XX-SaberGottoms.png" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYm7ZrlIIQ8-ghPVaBoQYHhefVw60ztYRhesSHTNuaKfZ1ksJ8Yz8-XYJHRZF9pq0EVS_bs-i5O39o4MznfRmVpB35LmBNov6SzwEfE_Gpb5d_0o0pt9RCPxHnr3Sy11jle-MDZgcex_lw/s1600/Kiganjou.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYm7ZrlIIQ8-ghPVaBoQYHhefVw60ztYRhesSHTNuaKfZ1ksJ8Yz8-XYJHRZF9pq0EVS_bs-i5O39o4MznfRmVpB35LmBNov6SzwEfE_Gpb5d_0o0pt9RCPxHnr3Sy11jle-MDZgcex_lw/s200/Kiganjou.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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Those are Azure-Eyes Silver Dragon, Kiganjou and XX-Saber Gottoms, three monsters doable with 1 CEM and one other monster, even though AESD and Gottoms are a little more specific: AESD requires the monster to be Normal, Gottoms requires it to be EARTH.<br />
Gottoms is naturally the one with more ATK in the trio, but Kiganjou will always have at least 3100 (like Gottoms) when has its effect, making it virtually the strongest.<br />
Let's see some choices:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9rZJb57Q7dt5_qJstKr3vpkfVDmewyh-8zWKnP0FEFn-YaQ4W84cDnYKkJqGvH3Q_2TWHllfkIO4aIk0vlxoZ1q0SWw3xeF7753rR8vjGtVBlc_sbiIJ97nWDNsp6hL4hrhR7yvfaUdRd/s1600/CastleGate.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9rZJb57Q7dt5_qJstKr3vpkfVDmewyh-8zWKnP0FEFn-YaQ4W84cDnYKkJqGvH3Q_2TWHllfkIO4aIk0vlxoZ1q0SWw3xeF7753rR8vjGtVBlc_sbiIJ97nWDNsp6hL4hrhR7yvfaUdRd/s200/CastleGate.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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Kiganjou/Gottoms</div>
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Castle Gate's stats are something nice, EARTH/Rock, 0/2400 and not destroyable by battle. This means that, if you are in a pinch, you can easily summon this with CEM and stall a bit while you rebuild your resurces. This works best with Redox, though, because when in hand you have no decent way to get rid of it, unless normal summoning, which you'll try to avoid.</div>
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Result: nice choice, but there's better. May be a tech in one copy.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqg_I1w0IXNojX9KZ_MDAwxcjoUfSPVwDSFOxv4fJfeBDtc_Y3KjtBuTnMFZ-wPWJZvS5ox1qfrArsoEjAETjpVtK_IQNKqWayyFxcghSXByu2vytX2sDaIyUarh_m9TjNsH2725z9GKkG/s1600/DestinyHERO-Malicious.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqg_I1w0IXNojX9KZ_MDAwxcjoUfSPVwDSFOxv4fJfeBDtc_Y3KjtBuTnMFZ-wPWJZvS5ox1qfrArsoEjAETjpVtK_IQNKqWayyFxcghSXByu2vytX2sDaIyUarh_m9TjNsH2725z9GKkG/s200/DestinyHERO-Malicious.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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Kiganjou</div>
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I don't think it'd be an exxaggeration to say that Malicious is probably one of the most known cards in the game, and here it fits just well. However, in order to abuse this, you may need more easily summoned tuners and go into Synchro Spam. Of course, it is Chaos fodder. If you want to get rid of it while in your hand, playing a D-HERO engine with Destiny Draws may be pretty nice, considering that dude is another warrior for RotA.</div>
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Result: nice, but may need some supports in order to be played. Probably CEM is unneeded when playing this card.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLIAqu8xAlIhfiesafaam3uWSqYbrIjmNwTlVlnZYeiWvxl-fN_K3GGV_Muz3YPKdD9RIib3IRJ-2RroQFvhIw-11-BOvAFLWXhTuuDWPXUYwpzIPTdNRRYlc1jBcfsEZYVmVbFUPCXpcA/s1600/HieraticSealOfTheDragonKing.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLIAqu8xAlIhfiesafaam3uWSqYbrIjmNwTlVlnZYeiWvxl-fN_K3GGV_Muz3YPKdD9RIib3IRJ-2RroQFvhIw-11-BOvAFLWXhTuuDWPXUYwpzIPTdNRRYlc1jBcfsEZYVmVbFUPCXpcA/s200/HieraticSealOfTheDragonKing.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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Azure/Kiganjou</div>
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This card comboes pretty well. Read Hieratic Seal of the Sun Dragon Overlord for most of the thoughts.</div>
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This card, however, boasts something more: being able to go into Azure and then be summoned back by it and be able to use its effect after re-normal summoning it.</div>
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Result: again, may be quite nice, but I won't test it ever (probably).</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdK9AanRaDYzaDPzG63xP3-BDYXBLMUn2oGb5yRSFAiEJDn_mrrIMGn0iDHKxFXHOsJoPXjHAP7niBnJMPKUGWXaMWo528JxJvTRLh_TroxT6QANHQHeE4mc3wiIEDNFGB76NuuFbiGaTk/s1600/LatinumExarchOfTheDarkWorld.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdK9AanRaDYzaDPzG63xP3-BDYXBLMUn2oGb5yRSFAiEJDn_mrrIMGn0iDHKxFXHOsJoPXjHAP7niBnJMPKUGWXaMWo528JxJvTRLh_TroxT6QANHQHeE4mc3wiIEDNFGB76NuuFbiGaTk/s200/LatinumExarchOfTheDarkWorld.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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Kiganjou</div>
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Latinum, Exarch of Dark World is a nice target being, primarly, Chaos fodder, and secondarly doesn't make you jump to -1s to get rid of this card, summoning itself back when discarded.</div>
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Result: nice, nothing special, just wanted to point this out.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdzKAHBihrpgz8fEFkhIrWJJgHpqVoB0uLvvYHHP9kC-YAhn_PWlrKYBGIusReRafIXNjvLf5ce3UDOR_lICt2xV0VrlaD2p-l_svyCqN0zDwR8yFCOUol9DJHfe3TQYDkRzUrWT7wR-a3/s1600/MindOnAir.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdzKAHBihrpgz8fEFkhIrWJJgHpqVoB0uLvvYHHP9kC-YAhn_PWlrKYBGIusReRafIXNjvLf5ce3UDOR_lICt2xV0VrlaD2p-l_svyCqN0zDwR8yFCOUol9DJHfe3TQYDkRzUrWT7wR-a3/s200/MindOnAir.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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Kiganjou</div>
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Nice tech, removable with Allure from the hand and gives you a glimpse of your opponent's hand when summoned. May combo nice with Aoi and Mind Crush. Chaos fodder and if you have, by any chance, veiler or another LV1 tuner, you may even go into Arcanite.</div>
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Result: mainly a tech, unless you want to abuse Mind Crush and Aoi.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibyKIORoLIoETj9pWqwctvyB0_8yA9319PA8-yJva-JBCvGaDKIPqEHVMpOuI7PsgiyQXGbUePU7kXD-SLH3Ma-ko9tWZ5v2Cy2osa6j0rAhRbAMZ-KnZHj9x4RCw-6lPwpbl5a4AsZ_6S/s1600/NeoAquaMadoor.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibyKIORoLIoETj9pWqwctvyB0_8yA9319PA8-yJva-JBCvGaDKIPqEHVMpOuI7PsgiyQXGbUePU7kXD-SLH3Ma-ko9tWZ5v2Cy2osa6j0rAhRbAMZ-KnZHj9x4RCw-6lPwpbl5a4AsZ_6S/s200/NeoAquaMadoor.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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Azure/Kiganjou</div>
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Nice to go with into Azure, being a 3000 DEF. Neo Aqua Madoor presents some strenght being normal and all, but has no way out of the hand, regularly, unless you use something to summon or discard her, which is, generally, a -1</div>
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For those who like it, there's Lightray Madoor, but you can't go into Azure, this card's main strenght.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghXX7wmNMfyL2CB6VVEyWUQgGctHBAIk80mXKj_2pRIBzKyGmVlf2UATEcVygZuifdC82WSUEWH0hey2YF9e7UPFMc_TGZRrM078abSXCfWckphZsGPeVCMA-zVwnhyAkkBLVcMgdn5LwH/s1600/TotalDefenseShougun.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghXX7wmNMfyL2CB6VVEyWUQgGctHBAIk80mXKj_2pRIBzKyGmVlf2UATEcVygZuifdC82WSUEWH0hey2YF9e7UPFMc_TGZRrM078abSXCfWckphZsGPeVCMA-zVwnhyAkkBLVcMgdn5LwH/s200/TotalDefenseShougun.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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Kiganjou</div>
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Total Defense Shougun is Chaos fodder and Allure target, boasts 2500 DEF with 1550 ATK, but has an effect that lets him attack while in defense, calculating his ATK as ATK for the attack (sorry for the play on words).</div>
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Result: nice, nothing special, though.</div>
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Kiganjou</div>
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Trifortressops is arguably the best LV6 CEM target, because of it being able to get itself off the hand when the opponent abuses with his summons.</div>
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If I were to go with a LV9 build, or wanted to insert some LV9 synchros, this'd be my go to in 2/3 copies, being even Chaos fodder.</div>
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Result: the best one, IMHO.</div>
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Overall Result: the worst possible, probably, even though it has some nice beatsticks. The best ones would be Hieratic and Trifotressops, surely.</div>
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<b><span style="color: red; font-size: large;">The Variety</span></b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmit1vqWW67Yn2V27hriUpTz-zICZnQkVDUHiTT79CFBDLRAIjU_8PO0FHYEMsFp5CXSFcnF-ibOv7lPXPZg4_FKUNBGs8RyH_A2Ucsy3OXOsOQBTgQXUXvPiJsUwPcYhHjWFwcIAeC5Wh/s1600/DarkEndDragon.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmit1vqWW67Yn2V27hriUpTz-zICZnQkVDUHiTT79CFBDLRAIjU_8PO0FHYEMsFp5CXSFcnF-ibOv7lPXPZg4_FKUNBGs8RyH_A2Ucsy3OXOsOQBTgQXUXvPiJsUwPcYhHjWFwcIAeC5Wh/s200/DarkEndDragon.png" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglr6h4aC4A4_BJq6ait0EO9fNLaMKXrgWed29L44g_1hyZNhc_3_LApovUMvvnufN-XREXfDa1wlDWeRStogHvvXWsLCPJZ_YvBnD58Qcsn06TXEcd8-r3VRb9YMv5H1PUzHqrlH3tWLPP/s1600/LightEndDragon.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglr6h4aC4A4_BJq6ait0EO9fNLaMKXrgWed29L44g_1hyZNhc_3_LApovUMvvnufN-XREXfDa1wlDWeRStogHvvXWsLCPJZ_YvBnD58Qcsn06TXEcd8-r3VRb9YMv5H1PUzHqrlH3tWLPP/s200/LightEndDragon.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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The most versatile of them, boasts cards like Light End Dragon, Dark End Dragon, Avenging Knight Parshat and Bureido and the more generic ones.</div>
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Make your choice, or play them all:</div>
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Junk Collector has an interesting effect you'd better look for, because you may as well build something around CEM searching Junk Collector and then summoning him back and do stuff. This card is one of Return from the Different Dimension's best friends, just think of it.</div>
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As for being synchrable, it lets you go into Light End Dragon and Parshat.</div>
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Result: awesome, absolutely. If you want to tech it, make sure to play a couple of traps that boost ATK or something like that. Remember that you don't have to pay the cost for the trap you try to activate. If you want to, build something centered on it playing 3 copies.</div>
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Solar Wind Jammer makes for a great target because it isn't dead while in hand, and can let you go into Bureido if you want to play a Karakuri engine alongside the rest, or into LED and Parshat. The only trouble you may have with it is 1200 DEF and variable LV if you leave it alone for a bit. I may see why someone would like Oracle of the Sun over this, but I definitely don't agree.</div>
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Result: choose between this and Oracle, but I definitely advise one of them in at least 2 copies.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTfMJaeCL81xtfBXPtR1DCOGptTMf8FlHS0KXkZIZS0M7Pq5kZfDMM_NlV9j4u5gLY6FqNEx5Fd7CrfDZ8kfB_6syxv42KjRRC5uQki6VL1ZVLtsFoti26rrQpU2QloUCEd44-mOHH8dBu/s1600/ByserShock.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTfMJaeCL81xtfBXPtR1DCOGptTMf8FlHS0KXkZIZS0M7Pq5kZfDMM_NlV9j4u5gLY6FqNEx5Fd7CrfDZ8kfB_6syxv42KjRRC5uQki6VL1ZVLtsFoti26rrQpU2QloUCEd44-mOHH8dBu/s200/ByserShock.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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Byser Shock is an awesome card, being able to totally reset some fields, expecially backrows, often making your opponent wasting a card on it. If not, congratulations, you can now easily summon a good LV8 Synchro and crush their ass...</div>
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BUT, this would have been metas ago when I used to play it, as of now, I don't believe it'd do anything special, and is way too frail. If you want, though, give it a try.</div>
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Result: outdated, otherwise good.</div>
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Elemental HERO Necroshade is one of the most interesting cards I posted here, probably. I remember having a nice Necroshade deck, if I happen to find it, I'll try to play CEM in it and adapt it to this banlist.</div>
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However, the card is Chaos fodder and lets you go into DED.</div>
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Result: I'm pretty sure the card can be awesome if played in the right deck. It's just a matter of time till I can really be sure whether it will or not.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZofbL_Q6zs8YGmvt5AqK6AFRfB8r9tb-mTU3-yPeRDMsxTXaZDK7BGUhrLRbMFNcobmoHMjnv4D-aLla11d5tEw9627CYA0UFMIcinpJ4mnaUf68v1-_PHNUJ55vKaryjn1wgWttYiI59/s1600/GarbageLord.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZofbL_Q6zs8YGmvt5AqK6AFRfB8r9tb-mTU3-yPeRDMsxTXaZDK7BGUhrLRbMFNcobmoHMjnv4D-aLla11d5tEw9627CYA0UFMIcinpJ4mnaUf68v1-_PHNUJ55vKaryjn1wgWttYiI59/s200/GarbageLord.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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Garbage Lord is another DARK monster, mainly for DED, which is able to SS himself from the hand paying 2000 LPs. The cost may seem huge, and maybe it really will be huge, but the card is lots of fun.</div>
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Result: I'll have to try how this works, because the cost really seems exxaggerated.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD7DjS0plpoW1wImemrYMgUy2FSCt2srerh10PqeVhqIx2FKMv2FCOLsKRLnaEnLqGYqCtnoHee9DxvoC0y32kHHe2Iuc11OdHTx_ndnsHaJRy2KfLEm6Ds8a-kl2AhnOAhz2an8HarOJa/s1600/InterplanetarypurplythornyBeast.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD7DjS0plpoW1wImemrYMgUy2FSCt2srerh10PqeVhqIx2FKMv2FCOLsKRLnaEnLqGYqCtnoHee9DxvoC0y32kHHe2Iuc11OdHTx_ndnsHaJRy2KfLEm6Ds8a-kl2AhnOAhz2an8HarOJa/s200/InterplanetarypurplythornyBeast.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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Internplanetarypurplythorny Beast (hella long name) is another DARK monster. It can SS itself whenever it is in the grave when a monster of yours is destroyed by battle. However, you have no efficient way (allure, but it banishes him) to get rid of it while in your hand, so I'd play it in 1 copy as a tech. It comboes nicely with Garbage Lord</div>
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Result: nice, but drawing into it is plain bad.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxAy2I5sSsi_rsUO1zPt6W6iIGm4DqEgAzWv3C4UWArfYKo6O62UUYXT29QSx9cUij1jJHPmv-6l-tr91x1x9Po22iRYdRgFTJI4vLXjMzW9quFKxMQQIEZ-fEYUHR0LcUcGgnX2ZGh3Vv/s1600/SphereOfChaos.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxAy2I5sSsi_rsUO1zPt6W6iIGm4DqEgAzWv3C4UWArfYKo6O62UUYXT29QSx9cUij1jJHPmv-6l-tr91x1x9Po22iRYdRgFTJI4vLXjMzW9quFKxMQQIEZ-fEYUHR0LcUcGgnX2ZGh3Vv/s200/SphereOfChaos.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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Sphere of Chaos is the card which had to be paired with CEM since the start, being what Konami wanted: it can let you go into LED, DED, Parshat and Bureido. What's more, when it is tribute summoned, it gets you CEM on the field, ready for a synchro summon. It is Chaos fodder too.</div>
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Result: drawing into it is pretty bad, but if you want to, you could play a little engine that generates some tributes when needed in order to search CEM and abuse some synchroes. To do so, you could pair it with the next one.</div>
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Sea Lancer is one of the littlest bosses over there, and still, one of the most badass- Here I'm going to show ya the many synergies it has with CEM:</div>
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-Sea Lancer is searchable with CEM;</div>
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-Sea Lancer plays a tribute engine for Sphere of Chaos;</div>
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-Sphere of Chaos searches CEM;</div>
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-Gachi Gachi boosts CEM;</div>
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-CEM gives some more win conditions to Sea Lancer, speeding it up;</div>
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-CEM doesn't particularly need traps, and Sea Lancer doesn't want them.</div>
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Is that enough? This needs its own version, but still, it will probably be one of the most consistent.</div>
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Overall Result: LV8 shows off as the most powerful version, but has more DDs compared to LV11.</div>
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Overall-ier Result: LV8 and 11 fight for the first place, 10 and 9 can go die of starvation, for that matters. Of course, remember you don't have to focus on one level, instead, you should go for a nice toolbox, therefore I think LV8+11 should be the best one alongside pure LV11 and 8. Try what you want, as you want, and let me know. I'm itching to try this, if only I had some time and stable internet connection to do so. I'll keep you updated.</div>
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Stay Tuned.</div>
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P.s. my fingers!!! They hurt!!!</div>
Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-64464025908669783352013-09-09T16:38:00.002+02:002013-09-09T16:38:45.447+02:00Ipocrisia: Traptrix Antimeta<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">Monsters: [14]</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">2 Maxx "C"</span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06;">1 Neo-Spacian Grand Mole</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">2 Summoner Monk</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">3 Traptrix Atrax</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">3 Traptrix Myrmeleo</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;">3 Traptrix Nepenthes</span></div>
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<span style="color: #38761d;">Spells: [11]</span></div>
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<span style="color: #38761d;">2 Forbidden Dress</span></div>
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<span style="color: #38761d;">3 Forbidden Lance</span></div>
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<span style="color: #38761d;">3 Pot of Duality</span></div>
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<span style="color: #38761d;">2 Terraforming</span></div>
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<span style="color: #38761d;">1 Seal of Orichalcos</span></div>
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<span style="color: #a64d79;">Traps: [15]</span></div>
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<span style="color: #a64d79;">1 Bottomless Trap HOLE</span></div>
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<span style="color: #a64d79;">1 Compulsory Escape Device</span></div>
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<span style="color: #a64d79;">2 Dimensional Prison</span></div>
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<span style="color: #a64d79;">1 Macro Cosmos</span></div>
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<span style="color: #a64d79;">2 Mirror Force</span></div>
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<span style="color: #a64d79;">1 Solemn Warning</span></div>
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<span style="color: #a64d79;">2 Trap HOLE</span></div>
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<span style="color: #a64d79;">2 Traptrix Trap HOLE Nightmare</span></div>
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<span style="color: #a64d79;">3 Void Trap HOLE</span></div>
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I promised, didn't I? That I would post this after the meta defined down a bit. Well, this is it, full of meta calls.</div>
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First of all, let's start saying that the Extra matters little to nothing, but on a second though, I'd add 1 catastor in place, maybe, of Utopia Ray or something else. The side is there, not really studied and tested, but that's the concept and should, approximatively, work.</div>
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As of the main, if I weren't to play that kind of side, I would have rather played 1 Terraforming and 2 Orichalcos, but I'd have to side two terras each game in which I used those fields.</div>
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Well, let's start:<br />
As I already said in the previous post, the Sisters' strenght relies on +1s whenever you use a card, mainly because when you use that card, your opponent already wasted a couple of resources in order to summon the monster you've destroyed. To this, you can add Nepenthes' and Myrmeleo's searches, resulting in some effective +1.<br />
It has some great control, that's for sure, and the monsters are relatively big under Orichalcos. Sure, they don't compete with >2300 ATK monsters, but still, Dress and Lance help there respectively against 2900 or less and 3100 or less, when paired with orichalcos and Atrax.<br />
The deck can effectively main Macro Cosmos, and, if willing, even Dimensional Fissure (probably in place of a Void Trap Hole).<br />
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Maxx "C" is there for EDs (predominant deck, most likely, of the format) and as draw power. They're, indeed, substituting CCDs. If you don't like it, you can freely go back to Cardcar D.<br />
Grand Mole here tries to solve one of the two main problems this deck has: big monsters. If the opponent manages to summon a big monster like Maestroke (which isn't hard at all to summon and we have pretty much no way to counter with our traps) or Gachi (which is slightly easier because of Atrax+Orichalcos) or other stuff like that and they keep it in defense, we have no way to kill them and, thus, killing the opponent. Grand Mole bounces the monster and, if they attempt to summon it again (assuming it is one of those we can counter) even though they went through our traps the first time, they won't be able to do so a second time. If they succeed to, oh well, we can just bounce it again, hopefully.<br />
Summoner Monk brings more Sisters for some more consistence. Summoning Nepenthes this way is even more awesome than drawing into it, too.<br />
Atrax, Myrm and Nep deserve no explanation, aside from Nep being in three copies. I didn't really like it that way, but it happens often to draw into no monsters (Yeah, DN hates us, I know) and this tries to extablish a better field alongside Monk. Keep in mind that Nep+Trap Hole is generally a good or decent start. Even BTH is okay, but someone may dodge it. You never know. After Nep activates her effect once, she's gone for good most of the times. When she survives, though, she will give you many pluses. However, by no mean protect her unless you need to kill the opponent's monster or you didn't manage to use her effect yet and have no other monsters.<br />
<br />
As for the spells, you may see alot of them, compared to how many you'd expect, but that's because most of them act as traps but are, at the same time, monk fodder.<br />
Dress+Lance acts as main protection, alongside Mirror, Prison and so on for our Atrax. I managed to kill a couple of comboes, too, hitting a monster with Lance so that nothing could be equipped to it. I even saw one of the biggest suicides ever of a monster that had 5000 ATK and dropped to 1700, crushing against my 2300 Atrax. Dress is mainly protection against BRD, whom may be lots of troubles if you don't manage to have a void or a nightmare.<br />
3 Dualities are for consistency, and most of the times I wished I could play more.<br />
2 Terra and 1 Orichalcos. I would have liked the opposite, so that the Terra was pretty much always live, and to reduce the DDs. What's more, if you extremely needed to XYZ, you could set one orichalcos over the other, even though you couldn't use it. With my side, though, it's needed to main 2 Terras. If you won't play that kind of side, I'd say 2 Orichalcos and 1 Terra.<br />
<br />
The Traps are quite a lot, uh? Still, sometimes you may lack them if you don't play accordingly to your hand. The deck isn't that skilled, but still, it isn't totally skilless. Just think before activating something and it's all good.<br />
CED, Prison and Mirror act as main counter to monsters once they are on the field. If they maanged to summon something big before you could set your traps, without those and mole, you'd have lost. This way, instead, you have some kind of counter.<br />
Warning is the only trap that activates on the summon that isn't a hole trap, and thus not searchable. Though, it is too awesome to not be played.<br />
As for the Holes, I chose this exact set after a little meta breakdown. I think this is one of the best combinations. BTH is must at 1. Void Trap Hole should be the one with more copies of itself and Trap Hole and Nightmare are to be played accordingly to the player in a total of 3/4 copies.<br />
<br />
<br />
Let's see the PROs and the CONs of the deck, instead:<br />
PRO: has counters that vary from nice to awesome for pretty much every deck;<br />
CON: there are a couple of DDs, expecially some Holes against some decks;<br />
PRO: can summon some nice beater with ease;<br />
CON: being nice beater doesn't mean good/awesome beater, and we can't drop stronger than 2300, usually:<br />
PRO: has lots of monster removal;<br />
CON: not always it is effective and sometimes the opponent may just summon the boss before we can drop our traps on them;<br />
PRO: the monsters are usually well protected;<br />
CON: when they aren't, them being killed is most of the times a great loss because of the lack of recycling and reviving power;<br />
PRO: when you manage to effectively control the opponent, most of the times it results in a lock;<br />
CON: when you don't, you are probably going to have your ass kicked;<br />
PRO: it manages to destroy pretty much everything if you play it right;<br />
CON: control cards from the opponent are game-killer for you.<br />
<br />
Resuming the advantages and disadvantages of the deck, it has some great control over the opponent with crazily good match-ups against other decks, but it basically loses to traps and big undestroyable monsters.<br />
<br />
I've had some nice results with it, against most meta decks. I won to some Antimeta, but surely I lost more than won against them. Being able to side Decree is awesome (Atrax lets your traps activate even if decree is on the field). The rest of the side is awesome when it comes to certain decks, but it may be totally useless against others. I already said, that's mostly the concept of the side, not the real side itself.<br />
<br />
Try it, you won't be disappointed.<br />
<br />
See Ya.<br />
<br />
P.s. Usual Lore, "Ipocrisia" means "Hypocrisy". That's to point out how traptrix work with their traps, they say they're able to dodge them (they all dodge Hole trap cards) but in the end, they suffer from them, not being able to practice what they preach.<br />
<br /></div>
Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-32416248925326418582013-08-30T17:24:00.001+02:002013-08-30T17:24:53.171+02:00Traptrix and (Anti)Meta<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFiIFs52JTwkVvu4MCu51D0Ls1Ca6OC-TqewiZWdS0fnPMKk-PgeFMCyBJ4znMF4sOsXh1oa0VYtoDZm5aw2fRuxD5_H17ZIrE1pr8yKQRcGUxF-M8DQQZhuHKrgJxPEvNeDhIQaPM80ie/s1600/TraptrixNepenthes.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFiIFs52JTwkVvu4MCu51D0Ls1Ca6OC-TqewiZWdS0fnPMKk-PgeFMCyBJ4znMF4sOsXh1oa0VYtoDZm5aw2fRuxD5_H17ZIrE1pr8yKQRcGUxF-M8DQQZhuHKrgJxPEvNeDhIQaPM80ie/s200/TraptrixNepenthes.png" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU2-IKBd_2-eeIu1IwKtUmfVQQjs2hXxK652Nsa5GNOVF0aK1KAIL2puRLnBUefeG3qY9b3EE9QHWozXjhnMFxwXRou7SXbd5hNQyR108PfY1A20W3-v2WCG-VJRXljt0q9-RNuxHkA7-M/s1600/TraptrixMyrmeleo.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU2-IKBd_2-eeIu1IwKtUmfVQQjs2hXxK652Nsa5GNOVF0aK1KAIL2puRLnBUefeG3qY9b3EE9QHWozXjhnMFxwXRou7SXbd5hNQyR108PfY1A20W3-v2WCG-VJRXljt0q9-RNuxHkA7-M/s200/TraptrixMyrmeleo.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">You know them, don't you?</span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Traptrix</b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
a.k.a.</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>dem lolis</b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>(IT'S A TRAP!)</b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3DGqJTN32A67e-sQMQ_YB47ag1QNKPcYg8z4Bd4BhQ8zJj7duBniVOPHS1_3YzrFCmwB4VlpmyP9UNuht3FRmqp3EhKTJ8kTJPR8HMJX3oqFQtKsNJkS7zazhk7Kxnw8Jwo2U5ISUdrqv/s1600/TraptrixAtrax.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3DGqJTN32A67e-sQMQ_YB47ag1QNKPcYg8z4Bd4BhQ8zJj7duBniVOPHS1_3YzrFCmwB4VlpmyP9UNuht3FRmqp3EhKTJ8kTJPR8HMJX3oqFQtKsNJkS7zazhk7Kxnw8Jwo2U5ISUdrqv/s200/TraptrixAtrax.png" width="200" /></a></div>
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Traptrix, Lolis or Traps, no matter how you want to call them, this is what they are: Trappers. They do whatever is possible to lure and trap you and your monsters in one of their many traps. They have a pretty nice lore, too, but I won't stop on it and focus on their utility. If you want to read the lore (I suggest you to do so), read it from <a href="http://yugioh.tcgplayer.com/db/article.asp?ID=3271" target="_blank">this</a> beautiful article on tcgplayer.</div>
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Staying on our topic, instead, you know I won't start a review without giving some proper explanations on why I'm trying them and on them themselves, and this time my reason for playing them is that I wanted to find some underdog antimeta that could flip tables. Traptrix (you may find discussion of them under the name of Kowakuma or Mesmerizing Maneater, too) are an unique archetype that works with the "Hole" normal traps. Let's see them singularly:</div>
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All of them have an effect that lets them dodge Hole cards, making those little things totally unaffected by them. They all are LV4 EARTH.</div>
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-Traptrix Nepenthes, the one on top left is the only Plant-type Traptrix. What it does is Special Summoning or Searching a Traptrix monster, excluding other copies of herself, from your deck, making her the recruiter of the archetype. When does this effect trigger? When a Hole normal trap is activated. Of course, it has the usual "you can only use the effect of "Traptrix Nepenthes" once per turn". Well, this was to be expected. With her 800/2000, she has the biggest defensive body among the Sisters (not that they really are sisters, but let's call them like this, as of now).</div>
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-Traptrix Atrax, the bottom one, is the Beater of the archetype, with 1800/1000. She is, like Myrmeleo, an Insect, and has two effects: one lets you activate Hole normal traps from your hand, this means that you can, theorically speaking, activate them on your first turn; the other effect gives all of your normal traps immunity from negation and makes their activation not prevent-able, basically, Decree and Trap Stun do nothing.</div>
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-Traptrix Myrmeleo, the one on the top right, is our official searcher for traps. It is usually summoned only to activate her effect or rarely to Xyz, because of her body not really special in anything, with 1600/1200. Still, this body means nothing compared to her effects: the first one activates upon Normal Summon, and lets you search a Hole normal trap from your deck; the second one activates upon Special Summon and (mandatory) makes you destroy a Spell or Trap on the field. Myrmeleo, for the first effect, is the most splashed one, creating a little engine that yet has to be well-defined.</div>
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Now that we have those, what do we do? Well, you probably noticed how they tend to be against the meta, because of their nice searching of Traps, but how can we use it?</div>
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In order to answer this, let's see what we can grab, mainly:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJR3L623NMEurnYEpjjcuaxMyyeXajuPV6L-kjskmJN3Mz3blUt9OkEQ3YxHr-F7KBl6KOsPST84VwoGYeNDIa9m92oI9-xLyRSMjDEWojCdSZbzun6v6tFLbRFqE2gRxX3uxQnlUUJW3W/s1600/RelevantTrapHoles.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJR3L623NMEurnYEpjjcuaxMyyeXajuPV6L-kjskmJN3Mz3blUt9OkEQ3YxHr-F7KBl6KOsPST84VwoGYeNDIa9m92oI9-xLyRSMjDEWojCdSZbzun6v6tFLbRFqE2gRxX3uxQnlUUJW3W/s400/RelevantTrapHoles.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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There are some others, but I didn't bother putting them here, because they are not relevant now and they won't, probably, for the near future.</div>
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Those are:</div>
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-Bottomless Trap Hole, the most known and generic one. Most likely, the best one, too. Triggers on normal and special summon and only needs the monster to be the opponent's one and to be 1500 ATK or more. As of the new banlist, you are only allowed to play one, sadly.</div>
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-Trap Hole, the oldest one. Only triggers on normal summons, and kills them if they are 1000 ATK or more, not that bad, at least. Given that we can search it and that it can potentially hit some meta decks coming, it deserves some spots.</div>
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-Void Trap Hole still follows the Bottomless and Trap Hole series, needing the monster to be special summoned and have 2000 ATK or more. What's good is that it negates the effect of the monster right before destroying it. Basically, if the opponent special summons Kuraz, even though that's a trigger effect upon special summon, you are able to kill it right away and avoid his effect.</div>
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-Deep Dark Hole is a little different. The "deep" part at the start of the name was to differentiate it from "Dark Trap Hole", but in Japan it had a different name, and with the Lolis being able to search them, they decided to change Dark Trap Hole's name to Darkfall to avoid ruling problems and not using the usual "except 'Dark Trap Hole'" part. What's good with Deep Dark Trap Hole is that it can stop all of the big Synchros from ED Plant, but has the ability to stop T.G. Wonder Magician against some T.G. decks and other options. However, what makes it good is that it doesn't neither target, nor destroy, it simply banishes. Stardust cannot negate it and all of the monsters which activate their effects upon destruction won't get anything from it.</div>
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-Traptrix Trap Hole Nightmare is the themed Trap Hole for Traptrix. What it does is hitting the monster when he thinks he is safe (basically what Franco Ferrara said). Let's say your opponent goes into Hyper Librarian, he then goes into Stardust with a Dragon and Spore, he attempts to draw with Librarian, but he won't be able to. Nightmare is on constant fight with Void Trap Hole, because the range of things they hit is pretty much the same, with few differences. Void can destroy the monster right upon summon, but it has the requirement of it having 2000 or more ATK, while nightmare doesn't have this last restriction, but needing the monster to effectively activate its effects. I consider Void better just because a skilled player would simply go into beatdown with the monster he summons and then wait the turn after to use the effect, unless it is mandatory. If the opponent knows we have Void he'll as simply avoid going into some bosses until he is sure he can drop two.</div>
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Yeah, you probably noticed: we theorically have answers to everything the meta may offer, that may be the main strenght of those Sisters.</div>
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This everything has a flaw, though, what is it? Consistency. Yeah, theorically speaking, they have lots of consistency, Nepenthes searches the Sisters and Myrmeleo searches the Traps, so where is the problem? Ya know, I tried them, 3 PoDs (which are, currently, staples for me) and even 3 CCDs, but it's not like I could fix the problem of having enough monsters in hand. Even if I did have those monsters in hand, I probably lacked the Traps to work with, I as simply, can't happen to balance them. The more I try to balance them, it changes build:</div>
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Most of the times it becomes a Rogue with Pachys and stuff with an engine made of 3 Myrms, 1 BTH, 2 Void Trap Hole and 2 Trap Holes;</div>
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Some other times it becomes a Ninja deck with some of the Sisters' engine which slows the deck down;</div>
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Other times it becomes a semi-lockdown which is way too inconsistent and has tons of negative match-ups.</div>
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However, those problems can all be solved with the right build, the real problem is defining the build itself. This is because the next meta yet has to form, and being this an Antimeta, you have to know what to counter while building. If you don't know that, you're building against something that won't see play.</div>
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This was a fast review of the principal cards, but I'll be explaining more when the meta settles down, with a couple of techs I already know.</div>
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See Ya</div>
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P.s. as you've seen, this is the first time I'm using those icons for the cards. I worked on them a little bit, and they'll be standards from now on. What I noticed before was that the posts were too plain. I don't like them to be too full of stuff which is not something of matters, but I guess this won't hurt. What's more, I developed them in a way that they are easy to work on and create, and I'll be slowly building a library with those cards so that I won't have to create an icon again of a card I already used.</div>
Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-31135095749916968312013-08-25T01:13:00.001+02:002013-08-25T01:13:58.798+02:00My New MetaLet's start saying that I only tested decks I intend to play either IRL or on DN, but mostly IRL. Here are the results:<div>
Faced tons of Infernities, some Chain Beats, no Karakuris (yet), a little bit of GBs, some rogues, less Hieratics than I expected and then the usual random decks that you could encounter in the other meta, too.</div>
<div>
I tested: Chain Beat, Legacy and Garden, with and without the Traptrix engine; Infernity, only Monk build; Gladiator Beast, not too much, though; my teammate is testing T.G. Antimeta, but I didn't hear the results yet; I'm going to test GKs and Malefic whenever I have time.</div>
<div>
-As of now, I'm really loving Chain Beat, with the Garden build. With the right hand it can deal with all of them, only suffering Wingbeat of a Giant Dragon, but we can deal with it, pollinosis and the cards that deal with their monster that they'll target for Wingbeat itself, waiting for the moment when you draw into pollinosis to directly deal with that Wingbeat. Garden makes it possible to easily kill big creatures, and you can escape Master Key Beetle+Safe Zone with Compulsory Escape Device, assuming you played it correctly. If you're playing the traptrix build, you have access to more destruction power and control. Macro and fissure are pretty awesome, expecially against Infernity, and they're even easier to access in the Legacy build than in the Garden build because of the drawing power.</div>
<div>
-Infernity, on the other side, has the potential to kill EVERY deck, assuming you started right and first. With the monk build, I may even say that 4 times on 5 you start decently, with 1 of them being awesome, 2 of them being pretty good, and one being decent. However, you may have your games killed by your opponent if he goes first, it's pretty easy for him to block you, assuming he got a decent hand. With Hieratic not having much (or any) backrow, it is a pretty easy match-up, and GB isn't too big a problem, because most of the control cards they have are battle related (at least, they aren't heavy on traps on the summon), but still, can have a couple of counters. Macro can kill Infernities BUT we now have a good counter. Aside the 3 regular MSTs, we can pretty easily summon Diamond Dire Wolf.</div>
<div>
-From the few tests I did with Gladiator Beast, I realized it has a couple of possibilities, but it's not THAT strong as many are saying recently (I'm not confusing it with the OCG). However, it has a recyclable MST (bestiari), a focused DH (Murmillo), continuous monster's effect negation (Equeste+Chariot), easy to summon beatsticks (Essedarii and XYZs), a more feasible Icarus' Attack (Gyzaurus) and Icarus itself. It is an awesome deck for what it does (toolboxing). The bad side is: it hasn't got the speed Infernity has, and cannot instantly go into +1s and extreme control like Chain Beat.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The results are: I'm probably going with Chain Beat Garden IRL and Infernities on DN (maybe I'll even build them, sooner or later, but that's pretty costy), while I'm testing other stuff.</div>
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Sorry for the short post, but it was just a little overview.</div>
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<br /></div>
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See Ya.</div>
Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-45994086749961164382013-08-21T12:29:00.002+02:002013-08-21T12:29:46.510+02:00Oi, oi, New TCG Banlist: IT sucks (or not?)<b><span style="color: red;">Banned:</span></b><br />
Little Dragon of Fire<br />
Little Dragon of Win<br />
Little Dragon of Earth<br />
Little Dragon of Water<br />
Damned Stratos<br />
<br />
Card Destruction<br />
Gateway of the Six<br />
Heavy Storm<br />
Monster Reborn<br />
Pot of Avarice<br />
Spellbook of Judgment<br />
Super Rejuvenation<br />
<br />
Solemn Judgmnet<br />
Ultimate Offering<br />
<br />
Shock Master<br />
<br />
<b><span style="color: red;">Limited:</span></b><br />
Atlantean Dragoons<br />
Fire Fist - Spirit<br />
Deep Sea Diva<br />
Genex Ally Birdman<br />
Rescue Rabbit<br />
Thunder King Rai-Oh<br />
<br />
Evigishiki Mind Augus<br />
<br />
Dewloren, Tiger King of the Ice Barrier<br />
<br />
Constellar Ptolemys M7<br />
<br />
Dimensional Fissure<br />
Gold Sarcophagus<br />
Royal Tribute<br />
<br />
Bottomless Trap Hole<br />
Compulsory Evacuation Device<br />
Eradicator Epidemic Virus<br />
Macro Cosmos<br />
Soul Drain<br />
Torrential Tribute<br />
<br />
<b><span style="color: red;">Semi-limited:</span></b><br />
Mezuki<br />
Plaguespreader Zobmie<br />
T.G. Striker<br />
<br />
Fire Formation - Tenki<br />
<br />
Dimensional Prison<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;"><b>Freed</b></span><br />
DH - Malicious<br />
The Agent of Mystery - Earth<br />
Tsukuyomi<br />
<br />
A Hero Lives<br />
Black Whirlwind<br />
E - Emergency Call<br />
Hieratic Seal of Convocation<br />
Pot of Duality<br />
Scapegoat<br />
<br />
<br />
NOPE, NOPE, NOPE, NOPE, NOPE, NOPE, NOPE, NOPE, NOPE, NOPE, NOPE, NOPE, NOPE, NOPE, NOPE, NOPE, NOPE, NOPE, NOPE, NOPE, NOPE, NOPE, NOPE, and NOPE.<br />
<br />
Oh, come on, konami! Why'd you do that?<br />
Before starting complaining about the 99% of this Banlist, let's start saying that, differently from the OCG one, this is from September to December, and a new one will be on January.<br />
Oh well, let's read the banned list and decide whether to continue playing YGO or not:<br />
<br />
Banned:<br />
Little dragons, thanks god.<br />
Stratos, fuck yourself<br />
Card Destruction...? Would have hurt that much leaving it there?<br />
Gateway, ohw, darn it. Konami HATES warriors.<br />
Heavy Storm, I'd be okay with this IF they put that damned Trunade at 1.<br />
Reborn, I'm about to cry with this one, really.<br />
Pot of Avarice, was it really helping any deck that could have been top meta?<br />
Judgment&Reju, thanks god.<br />
Solemn Judgment...okay, I know it may be related to Heavy, but I wanted it.<br />
Ultimate Offering, again, was it helping any top meta?<br />
Shock Master...Wind-up....I guess. But still, I wanted it to stay.<br />
<br />
Limited:<br />
Dragoons&Spirit are regular hits for FF e Mermail.<br />
Deep Sea Diva is an hit for Mermail, again.<br />
Birdamn ,well, was on the other banlist too, and, while I would have preferred it at three, I won't rage over this one.<br />
Rai-Oh-Oh-Oh, leaving some space for SB, uh?<br />
Mind Augus...yeah? What's that? Another hit for Gishki FTK?<br />
Dewloren...oh, come on.<br />
Ptolemys, while hitting more Gishkis, this was probably meant for constellar themselves.<br />
Fissure, darn it.<br />
Sarcophagus...ED, I guess.<br />
Royal Tribute, they thought of GK as broken. Luckily, I saw many players not even maining it.<br />
BTH, CED and TT, various hits due to Heavy Storm. Reasonable.<br />
EEV...looks like it is in the same condition as Ray-Oh.<br />
Macro, going the Fissure path.<br />
Soul Drain, probably similarly to BTH, CED and TT.<br />
<br />
Semi-Limited: (at least, this is short)<br />
Mezuki&Plaguespreader, boosts for Zombie. I don't really see the point, but these two are pretty nice. expecially plague (for my decks, I mean).<br />
T.G. Striker. Uhm...Well, I kind of like it.<br />
Prison, not like more than 2 were played, anyway, but this is to prevent them at three after the limiting of the other traps.<br />
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Freed:<br />
Malicious, I like it, expecially alongside Plaguespreader.<br />
Earth, not that it really matters, but alongside Striker, it may mean the return of TGAgent.<br />
Tsukuyomi, simply, it was useless on the banlist.<br />
Lives&Call, after having slaughtered HERO with Stratos banned, at least they power it up a little bit.<br />
Whirlwind, they're slowly making BW stand back on its feet. I have never been a fan of BW, though (I hate it, TBH).<br />
Seal of Convocation, they're indeed powering Hieratic to their best. Right now, it is one of the candidates to the top decks, alongside SB.<br />
Scapegoat, I already liked it with the OCG banlist.<br />
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Overall: Well, I started by hating it, but in two hours of time, my opinion radically changed. From "I definitely hate it" to "hmm, well, I've got a couple of things to do". I started writing this at 10 am, and the time I finished it at about 12.30, in 2 hours and thirty minutes, we know that anyone can change their mind.<br />
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By the way, if you want to read a less long, more generic, meta-towarded and balanced review, read LFN's one, mine was more an outburst than anything.<br />
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Well, See Ya.Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-81253016696280400842013-08-19T15:30:00.001+02:002013-08-19T15:30:07.929+02:00New Banlist: I SuckMaybe it's a little late to talk about the new banlist? Oh well.<br />
As you most probably know, the banlist aims to take back most of the old decks and put them on the same level of the current ones who got hit. That's, possibly, to make more and more decks playable in the meta.<br />
I won't comment the Banned, you can read of that everywhere, and most probably all of the other reviews are better than the one I would have written if I attempted to, so, go ahead and read the other ones.<br />
As for the meta itself, instead: I suck. I just noticed, I suck. I was definitely overjoyed for that ban, it brought the meta to the best I could expect, but still, I suck. After that break, when I came back, I started to suck. I can't build anything decent, I can't foresee what could be in the next meta and prepare to counter that and since I didn't follow much the latest sets, I probably don't know more than you readers about new decks and comboes and even if I did, I wouldn't be able to build something decent around that.<br />
What will happen, then? I won't quit YGO, not definitely. I'll stick with my decks I have IRL and try to get them to their best (this is still doable, since I have the basic list), them being GK, GB and HERO, mainly, but even Malefic and some Rogue or stuff like that.<br />
Sadly, I'll probably have to netdeck for the first period, as long as I have enough willpower to continue playing actively on DN, hoping I can ditch that soon enough.<br />
As for the blog, I'll try not to disappoint the few readers left, and still post some ideas and use it like a way to store nice ideas and share them with you.<br />
Said this: I suck.<br />
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Stay Tuned.<br />
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(if you're thinking that, no, I'm not depressed, don't worry)Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2804252005145443674.post-51325172523248645412013-08-04T21:21:00.000+02:002013-08-04T21:21:00.130+02:00Felt like it: I'm back, guys!///The Theory behind PlussesHey guys, how have you been? It's been a long time, hasn't it? Yeah, yeah, I know, I said I had no interest in the current meta, but I'm not taking back my word, I still have no interest in it. So, why am I writing? Well, I felt like it. What's more, the Banlist is a Ray of Hope for me, it'll hopefully crush or enormously hurt ED and SB, "hopefully"... Let's just hope it is like that.<br />
Then, then, what's moving and exciting me right now? If, let's say, ED and SB get injured so hard that they can't be played anymore, what will be left? Everything! As of now the meta is:<br />
Tier 1: ED and SB;<br />
Tier 2: Everything else aside 4funs.<br />
You do realize that if the Tier 1 gets crushed, we'll have a various meta, at least for the first part of the september-march period?<br />
If you follow the upcoming sets, you probably noticed that all (most) of the new cards form decks that aim to control. This simply means that the next meta will probably see lots of old decks reborned through the beautiful art of Heavy-Trap decks, a couple of fast decks, and brand-new decks whom, as said, aim to control, leading to a slow format.<br />
Ahhh, this brings back memories, in a meta where if I couldn't play a deck because the idea behind it wasn't consistent enough, I could simply add those 11-12 traps and be happy.<br />
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Well, let's get to the point of the post: after having explained why I'm slowly getting back at the game, here's some little theory-oh.<br />
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<span style="color: red;"><b>Card Advantage Theory</b></span><br />
Most of you, if not all, have used or read/heard this thing at least once and, most probably, you know what it means: the Card Advantage Theory (CAT, from now on) says that in this game, msot of the time, the player who's winning is the one with most cards on the field and viceversa. "Why's that?" you may (or may not, I don't care, lol) ask. It is as simple as that: the player with most cards is more likely the one who has more possible counters to the opponent's moves. If I have 10 cards and my opponent 8, we could balance it out saying that 8 of my card nullifies my opponent ones, and I'm in +2. This supports CAT, indeed. This means that the CAT takes into consideration your opponent's plusses and minuses, inverting them. For Example, if you both have no cards in hand and you have a One Day of Peace set and you activate it, you lose one card (-1), you draw one (+1), your opponent draws one (-1)=-1. So, yes, One Day of Peace is a -1.<br />
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<b>CAT applied to cards</b><br />
Even cards follow CAT's rules, let's use the very example of +1: Thunder Dragon<br />
You have one card in your hand, Thunder Dragon, activating it, you lost 1 card, but you added other two. 2-1=1. Congrats, you just went +1.<br />
But, let's talk about a +0 (well, mathematically speaking, 0 doesn't have a symbol before it, but usually you'll see it with either a + or a -, so let's keep it): Upstart Goblin.<br />
Activating it, you lost one card, but drew one. 1-1=0.<br />
This was a +0, nothing to be really proud of, but nothing bad, either.<br />
Let's talk, then, of the infamous -1s: Spellbook of Power.<br />
Activating it you lost 1 card, and just gave 1000 ATK to a monster, without other income. 0-1=-1. Damn, you went negative, that's no good, is it?<br />
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<b>Exceptions and whatnots</b><br />
What we saw in the last paragraph, mathematically speaking, is that Thunder Dragon is good, Upstart is meh, Foolish is bad, but is that right? Well, not. You mustn't forget that there are variables and that sometime card quality is what matters. Unless you have something that needs discard fodder, are you really having some use for those Thunder Dragons? I believe not, that's why Thunder Dragon is under-used, seeing use only in FTKs or similar thingies, because it thins the deck, lets you go +1 and provides discard fodder for Dark World Dealing.<br />
What about Upstart? If what you did didn't provide you any advantage but just made the opponent gain 1000 LPs, what was its use? Again, deck thinning. Playing Upstarts basically lets you go under the 40 card limit. Playing 3 in a 40 card deck will make it like you're using 37 cards, which improves your deck. Let's just say you can bypass the 3-card limit, how would a deck made up of 35 Upstarts and 5 pieces of exodia be? Simply unarrestable, whoever goes first without the opponent reacting with a droll and lock bird wins.<br />
And then, what about Spellbook of Power? It's an inconfutable -1, so it's bad, right? Damn no. This is one of the whatnots I was talking about, it has a "side effect". When it destroys a monster in battle, you get a Spellbook spell from your deck. This means that you lose the card you activate (-1), search one (+1) and destroy an opponent's monster (+1). All in all, it becomes a +1. You happy now, SB player?<br />
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<b>Applications</b><br />
Why is this rule so important in YGO? As said before, the player who has more cards is most likely the one winning, but why does it matter if there are cards that are -1, -2, -3 or +1, +2, +3? First of all, let's just say that we're speaking of an at least semi-competitive game-scene, where no one plays plain -1s aside from Foolish Burial, SB of Power and similar (because, in the end, they aren't really -1s or have a real purpose). Considering that you start with 6 cards, you shouldn't waste them, but use them to produce more cards. What an ED player does is a combo on first turn that usually takes him to about +6 (+6 from the original number, resulting in about 12 cards). Do you realize why EDs are so strong right now?<br />
What about SBs, why are they so strong? That's because they have +1s of about +3/4 but that they do repeteatedly, plus eventual stuff from Power and such.<br />
This means that Card Advantage can easily vary. If you keep on using 1 for 1 (you lose one card in exchange for another from the opponent, like MST) you'll eventually lose because the opponent will plus if you don't have a consistent plus engine. What's behind Antimeta is exactly that, it doesn't use simple 1 for 1, but uses cards (even though they are mostly one for ones in the end) that won't let the opponent plus. The example I use the most is "Veiler that Stratos". Of course locking their pluses isn't that helpful if you don't have a way to plus yourself, but what if the way to plus yourself is minusing the opponent? That is a legit way of plusing, I said before, an opponent's -1 is a +1 for you. Let's say, then, that you are playing a control deck, you have a 1200 ATK Dyna and a Garden on the field. You'll instantaneously notice that the opponent isn't able to SS big monsters while it is needed to have an AT LEAST 2400 ATK monster to ram into Dyna, as of now. You don't leave him ways to ATK you and to damage you (you're locking Garden's summons with Dyna) and when you summon you don't plus him. Given that you have a big monster, you're free to set your monsters and then flip them if you want them at full force.<br />
Doing so, you'll either keep the opponent at your same number but with less useful cards or you'll be minusing him always.<br />
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<b>Decks</b><br />
The kind of decks that work with this mindset are mainly Control, Stun and Antimeta, Stun being the one who uses is the best. I named Chaos Stun a couple of times, my favourite Stun deck ever I'm renewing. Either in the next or the one after the next post I'll write about it and the renewed list I'm working on.<br />
Control has the option I named up there of Garden+Pachy, for example, while Antimeta lives off that, with Pachy on the field and several backrows.<br />
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Well, well, liked getting back at writing a lil bit, hope I can fully return blogging.<br />
Stay Tuned.<br />
<br />Leodiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09060348961181053651noreply@blogger.com0