Edison Deep Dive: Gladiator Beast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My general siding plan is:

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

Edison Deep Dive: Machina Ancient Gear

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

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

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

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

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

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

Duplication engine

3x Machina Peacekeeper

3x Cyber Valley

2x Machine Duplication

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

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

Machina engine

3x Machina Gearframe

3x Machina Fortress

3x Machina Force

(3x Machina Peacekeeper)

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

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

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

Geartown engine

3x Ancient Gear Gadjiltron

1x Ancient Gear Beast

3x Geartown

3x Terraforming

1x Mausoleum of the Emperor

1x Gaia Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

OTK support

1x Limiter Removal

1x Brain Control

1x Giant Trunade

1x Heavy Storm

1x Mystical Space Typhoon

3x Phoenix Wing Wind Blast

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miscellaneous

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

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

Alternative card choices

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

Edison guide: Frog OTK

A short post today.

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

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

Assert dominance by summoning Lyla and passing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking forward to apply this to more decks!

The oldest post on this blog yet - Edison Format

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next time: let's talk about Frog Monarch!