Edison Deep Dive: Gladiator Beast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My general siding plan is:

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

My New Meta

Let's start saying that I only tested decks I intend to play either IRL or on DN, but mostly IRL. Here are the results:

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.

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.

-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.

-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.

-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.

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.

Sorry for the short post, but it was just a little overview.

See Ya.

Card of the Week #11: Forbidden Lance

Target 1 face-up monster on the field; until the End Phase, it loses 800 ATK, but is unaffected by the effects of other Spell/Trap Cards.

Random Rulings:

1.This card targets.

2.You can use this card in the Damage Step.

3.You can use this card on a monster with less than 800 ATK and make him 0 ATK with protection from spells and traps.

Explanation:

Fist is clear enough.

Second is because during the damage step you can activate only cards that change ATK values and Counter Traps.

Third doesn't need explanations.

Fast close look, then to the real review:

Quick-Play Spell, quick-play is surely the best kind of spell card, probably even better of trap cards.
Activable in damage step, less counterable and more versatile.

As always, being a spell card, it's hard to write more in the close look, however, let'sgo to the real review.

Forbidden Lance is a card of the forbidden brigade (Forbidden Chalice, Forbidden Lance and Forbidden Garment. UPDATE: Dueling Days did a post about the entire trio, however I was planning on reviewing this card and had the review written from the last week, so I posted it however).
All of the cards from the forbidden brigade have a thing in common, they modify the ATK while doing some modifies to the monster, making possible to use their effect during damage step. For example, forbidden chalice on snowman eater.

Returning on our card, why am I reviewing this? It's a great card, it initially shined in GBs, lowers opponent's monsters ATK to destroy them with GBs or protect them from nasty spells/traps.
However this card gradually took place in lots of decks. Actually I'm playing this in madolches, basically the same thing of GBs, protect them both from attacks and spells/traps, not bad.
Still, this card became played in lots of places for the second effect mainly, protect some monsters from Bottomless in no matter the deck, on dollka to protect his summon, can stop nasty dimensional prisons or fiendish chains.
However, this card wouldn't have been played if it hadn't the other lowering-ATK effect, I believe. Yeah, it would've been way more broken for some decks, but wouldn't have seen play in other decks that needed that loss of ATK. Just consider again GBs and Madolches, it would have been bad for them. But consider Rabbit Laggia, yeah, happiness wouldn't stop so easily.

Back again to the real card, since you can use it against opponent's monster that wouldn't just result in a loss of 800 points of ATK and spell/trap invulnerability. Just consider I faced a vylon deck, he went into a giant monster, photon thrasher while I had Tiara without chateau. Thrasher itself wasn't enough, so he summoned cube, synchroed into sigma, equipped from the hand double mage power, vylon segment (protection from my set down, just in case it was a d-prison/mirror force), vylon material and while he attacked he equipped with sigma's effect another mage power. The ATK was 1800+2500+2500+2500+600=9900, I had 6000 LPs, it would have been enough.
When I activated lance on his sigma I was like "Sorry, I didn't intend to hurt your feelings", LOL.
It was game since he had only 700 LPs left. Well, rage quit before admitting defeat.

This card is basically used because of its versatility as I said, so it's not intended for closed-minded persons. You should always consider all of the situations while playing with or against this. When you're against GBs, consider always the half of your monster's ATK via shrink or 800 ATK less via forbidden lance, but don't forget that your monster could be affected with other S/Ts and that could make your maths go crazy.
Just consider all of the conditions of the field while using this. That's what you need to know while playing. I know this could seem obvious, but lots of peoples I know lost games because of that.
Example: My friend had lance face-down and shura, few in hand that didn't matter and 4000 lps. While opponent had hanzo and super-transformation setted (know because he searched that having no hand and then set) and 2100 lps.
Opponent used super-transformation on his turn, my friend used lance on his shura, opponent tribued then his hanzo and went into Jurrac Guaiba, attacked shura and went into laggia, subsequently won game because he stopped my friend's main move.
Of course my friend said that it was bad luck, I stopped him and said what he did wrongly.
He could have done Lance on hanzo, making him tribute his shura and going into random guaiba that couldn't have done nothing, at least going into Utopia/Maestroke after attacking. Then summon blizzard, revive Shura, go into brio, discard 2, attack and win.
Of course he said "Oh, I didn't think about it", with a Poker Face. He lost an online tournament for that, with real prizes. If he won that game he would have taken a set of tour guides and sangan (not that sangan costs something, but it's to make it effective and play-ready).

Well, this was all for today, hope you enjoyed it, since the card is one I like a lot.
Some anticipations: Madolches (tomorrow or the day after tomorrow I'll post a build of it), working on some random decks, and some ninja things. I've already decided the card for the next cotw, I believe you'll like it.

Stay Tuned.