1/25/12

Deck Profile - Inzecter Full Monster

Not even gonna bother with an intro, the deck can drop Naturia Beast and the Inzecter/Wind-Up loop in a single turn.

Monsters - 38

3x Inzecter Dragonfly
3x Inzecter Centipede
3x Inzecter Hornet
1x Inzecter Gigamantis

2x Armageddon Knight
2x Mystic Tomato
1x Plaguespreader Zombie
1x Dark Armed Dragon
1x Gorz the Emissary of Darkness

3x Wind-Up Rat
2x Wind-Up Hunter

3x Gallis the Star Beast
3x Genex Ally Birdman

3x Tour Guide from the Underworld
1x Sangan
2x Tour Bus from the Underworld

2x T.G. Warwolf
2x T.G. Striker

Spells - 2

1x Monster Reborn
1x Pot of Avarice

Extra Deck - 15

3x Wind-Up Zenmaighty
1x Wind-Up Zenmaines
1x Leviair the Sea Dragon
1x Number 17: Leviathan Dragon
1x Lavalval Chain

1x Trishula, Dragon of the Ice Barrier
1x Stardust Dragon
1x Scrap Dragon
1x Black Rose Dragon
1x Underground Arachnid
1x Brionac, Dragon of the Ice Barrier
1x Naturia Beast
1x Ally of Justice Cat Fister

As for the choices, the Inzecter/Wind-Up engines are standard Inzect-Ups. The Tour Guides/Tour Buses add a bit of variety; if you feel like doing just the hand loop instead of the whole shebang, now you can. The real reason I crammed Inzect-Ups into Full Monster is because Gallis lets you pull the first turn loop so much more often, without having to resort to Gilasaurus or Marauding Captain. Everything save for the T.G. engine is basically to help get the loop off, and the T.G.s give it access to Naturia Beast while also providing another easily summoned three-star, Warwolf.

That's all for today, I have an exam tomorrow and I'm totally not prepared so I'll see you all later.

/fugglor

1/22/12

Chaos Dragon Options

One thing I like about Chaos Dragons is how many options you have at your disposal. There are any number of ways to try and run this deck, as with most chaos decks. Here I will name some cards that could help support this deck and some simple combos you can pull off. The purpose of this article is just to give you guys some ideas as to what is possible in this deck.

The first two cards are White Stone of Legend and Blue Eyes White Dragon. Now some of you may (most likely won't) remember how much I love this family. With Cards of Consonance and Trade In, these cards make a very fun engine, where Cards of Consonance with White Stone nets you a plus one, and fetches Blue Eyes to use with Trade In. Whether or not you run the draw cards, the pair may be worth inclusion simply because they are both light attribute dragons, something the deck will definitely need. The plus one that often comes with White Stone can also help bring out Light Pulsar dragon in the grave via his second summoning condition.

Another viable engine involves 2 of the low level Lightsworn monsters, Ryko and Lyla. Both cards have destruction effects that help solve one of the weaknesses I discussed in the last article, and that is the lack of removal. Ryko is famous for his generic removal, and Lyla can create plus ones fairly often. Even besides this, their ability to mill is extremely valuable to this deck, which otherwise lacks reliable methods of filling its graveyard with the needed pieces for its big plays. Combined with Charge of the Light Brigade, this engine can help make a lot of decks more consistent, and here it provides exactly what this deck needed. One more thing to note about these 2 engines so far is that they are both included in the Dragons Collide structure deck, meaning even newcomers could pick up these pieces very cheaply.

Now, while the cards discussed thus far have been light monsters, a good chaos deck needs both light and dark to work. One dark monster that I have mentioned before is Divine Dragon Apocralyph. This card allows you to reuse dragons in the graveyard, particularly Red Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon and Dark Armed Dragon. Another strength of this card is that you can choose what you discard to bring back your dragon, giving you the opportunity to selectively fill your graveyard with chaos food without losing advantage. A dark dragon that hasn't yet come out in TCG is Verz Zahhak, an 1850ATK beater with a fairly useful control effect that allows you to destroy a level 5 or higher monster when Zahhak himself is destroyed. This allows him to hold the field as a deterrent to your opponent's plays, often forcing them to get rid of this before they bring out their biggest monsters. One thing to note is that his effect is mandatory, meaning that if your opponent doesn't have any level 5 or above monsters and you do, you will have to destroy your own. This limits its late game utility, but early game you can use this in combo with Light Pulsar Dragon by targeting Light Pulsar for destruction, ensuring you can get REDM from the grave without missing Light Pulsar's timing. This card holds a lot of synergy in this deck, and is something you should keep an eye out for. The last really viable dark dragon is Vice Dragon, a card often seen as a parallel to Cyber Dragon. While clearly not as powerful, it is likely a better choice in this deck (though Cyber Dragon, as a light monster, is still a possible choice) simply because it is a true dragon. This means you can revive it with REDM, or discard it for Darkflare dragon's effect. If you throw in some tuners (White Stone of Legend for example), he can help you synchro summon, and running multiples can help you go into rank 5 XYZ.

Speaking of XYZ, one card that can help you bring out your XYZ monsters is Rescue Rabbit. In Chaos Dragons, this guy has 2 viable targets for his effect. The first is Alexandrite Dragon, a light attribute, level 4 normal dragon with 2000ATK, tied for the highest ATK of a level 4 normal monster. Besides being a beater, this option gives you access to instant rank 4 XYZ like Utopia and Roach, and being light means that it can serve as food for your hungry chaos monsters. The other option is Hunter Dragon, which tied for the strongest level 3 monster in the game at 1700ATK. He is a dark normal dragon, providing you more chaos food, as well as access to rank 3 XYZ, such as Leviair, Zenmaines, and Leviathan. Leviair in particular would truly shine in this deck, allowing you to reuse banished monsters such as Eclipse Wyvern that are needed for your strongest combos. Of course, nobody is stopping you from running Sabersaurus as well, giving you access to the rank 4 Evolzars Laggia and Dolkka, though this choice would lack synergy with the rest of this deck for obvious reasons.

Because this is a chaos deck, there are a number of light and darks that should be considered for the sake of consistency. Besides the obvious inclusion of BLS and Chaos Sorcerer, Thunder King Raioh and Effect Veiler are 2 of the best control cards in the game, and should likely be included in the side deck at least. For dark monsters, you may want to consider Breaker the Magical Warrior or Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer. Breaker allows you to choose between having a 1900ATK beater or destroying your opponent's backrow for a plus one, While Kycoo lets you control your opponent's grave while protecting your own from your opponent's DD crows or Crevice from the Different Dimensions. If you run enough light monsters, Honest could be thrown in as well, though I wouldn't recommend it. If you choose not to run Chaos Zone or Dragon Ravine, Gorz the Emissary of Darkness can occasionally save your life. Caius the Shadow Monarch could be included in ones or twos for some extra removal.

Hope this helped give you guys some ideas, and sorry if I didn't explain some things well enough. Please comment if you want to ask me a question, argue with me, or give us some of your own ideas of what will work in this deck. I will likely post a few decklists for this soon, as well as my opinions on some upcoming dragon cards.

Have fun, Orgymaster.

1/18/12

Chaos Dragons



So on February 7 the TCG will finally get its hands on Dragons Collide, a structure deck that features some interesting new dragon support. Let me start off by saying that most people should buy this deck regardless of what they think of the dragons in it. The confirmed Lyla reprint and possible Ryko reprint will be reason enough for most normal people, as these cards are not the easiest to come across for the average budget player (I can't say I've ever owned either of them, not that I've tried too hard to get them). More details will emerge as the release date approaches on what other reprints will come out, but there seems to be a lot to look forward to if the OCG reprints are any indication.

For us current or aspiring dragon players, however, this structure deck may mark the beginning of a fairly interesting deck concept, something that I will refer to as Chaos Dragons. There are a few new cards that obviously support this idea. First up is Light Pulsar Dragon, perhaps the most "hyped" card of this deck. It shares the typical chaos summoning condition of removing a light and dark monster to summon it from the hand. This is a good thing; we have seen how easy this is to pull off in any deck that runs a fair amount of lights and darks. As a bonus, if in grave, he can summon himself if you discard a light and dark in hand. While this is initially a minus one, this gives you an out in some possible tight situations, allowing you to bring out a beater and simultaneously load the grave for the requirements of another chaos monster. Clearly, his last effect is where he shines, allowing you to special summon Red Eyes Darkness Metal when Lightpulsar is sent from the field to the graveyard. This is a great effect that could potentially create a loop; your opponent will usually have to find some form of indirect removal (banishing, bouncing, spinning) in order to stop this loop, unless they want to destroy both Lightpulsar and the dragon replacing him. Many decks are ill suited against this level of near instant recursion.

The next card is Darkflare Dragon, a card that shares the same chaos summoning requirement. This guy has decent stats, with an effect that acts like a simultaneous Dragon Ravine and DD Crow. It is nice that it can help fill your grave, and it has clear combo potential alongside Eclipse Wyvern (another new release), essentially allowing you to add a powerful dragon from your deck to the hand at the cost of a dragon already in hand. This combo could be one of the main draws of this deck, being the first consistent way to add stuff like REDM, Galaxy Eyes, or even DAD to your hand.

Chaos Zone is a new field spell (as Konami seems to have a hard-on for field spell support for their past few structure decks) that serves chaos as a whole. It gains a counter every time a monster is banished, and when you have at least 4 counters, you can remove them to bring back a monster with an equal level to the number of counters removed. As I see it, this effect helps alleviate the problem I can see in this deck of inadvertently banishing every card that could be useful later. These new support cards have a lot of nice aspects, but it really is all downhill from there.

I do not believe that Chaos Dragons as I imagine them have much competitive potential. Lightpulsar has the unfortunate problem of having his revival effect be optional. This means that it can easily miss the timing if it is sent to the graveyard in the wrong way. This hurts its potential as a cool combo card, reducing its role to being a fancy floater. Plus, the indirect means of removal that I mentioned earlier are not at all uncommon in today's meta (notably, cards like Caius, the Chaos Monsters, Brionac, etc.), allowing some common decks a way around the loop easily. This reminds me of the LaDD/Leyvaten loop that was hyped a while ago; the problem there was how shallow the loop was, essentially giving you a recurring 2600ATK beater while simultaneously sweeping the rest of your field. A skilled opponent could easily work around it, or even use it against the owner. This REDM loop has the same problems; it is something you can hide behind, but it will rarely get you closer to winning the game.

This deck also has clear consistency issues. While I will admit that the combo involving Eclipse Wyvern and Darkflare Dragon is indeed powerful, how can you consistently get this combo out early game? Darkflare Dragon will be hard to summon without his own effect or with REDM's effect, meaning you will need to set up the grave to get him out easily. This deck lacks draw power, so you can't expect to load your grave with Future Fusion all the time, meaning you will usually need to rely on something like Dragon Ravine to help set up your grave. The fact that you will likely need to run Ravine to simply make this deck work immediately rules out Chaos Zone as a viable choice, as it would be foolish to run 2 different field spells.

Even besides these issues of consistency, we must look at the options available to this deck. Once set up, it is pretty good at filling the field with big beaters that could wreak havoc on an open field, but how often can you expect to come up against an open field without reliable removal? Besides Dark Armed, Dark Hole, BLS, and a few possible Chaos Sorcerers, this deck lacks built in removal. That means you'll have to take out possible combo pieces to make room for other removal, such as Compulsory Evacuation Device or Dimensional Prison. This deck heavily relies on combos to work, so it's hard to tell how this will affect the consistency of the combos.

I could go on forever on the problems this deck has to get over to be tournament viable, but at a certain point I just feel like I'm being overly critical of it. It could definitely be a fun deck to run, what with all its big strong dragons, which is why I will give this deck a try. The thing is, for now, it's not consistent or fast enough to be a great swarm deck, so it would have to incorporate control elements that detract from the funnest parts of the deck. And if I want a good dragon deck that controls, there is no reason why I wouldn't just continue to run Disaster Dragon, which is a deck that would beat this deck in a straight up match-up over 90% of the time anyways, and in the words of Eminem: "Why the fuck would I join them when I beat them?"

Now I want to see what other people think, so please leave your comments below. My next post will probably be about some of the cool combos you could potentially run in this deck.

Order of Chaos Reaction - Da' Fuck, Konami?

So, I ordered a box of Order of Chaos along with Chow's two to save some shipping.  Why?  This set is fucking beautiful.  ORCS gives us a hell of a lot of great cards such as:
Tour Bus from the Underworld
Inzektor Hornet
Inzektor Dragonfly
Wind-Up Rat
Wind-Up Shark (I think it's kind of meh)
Wind-Up Carrier Zenmaighty
Wind-Up Arsenal Zenmaioh
Trance Archfiend
Ninja Grandmaster Hanzo
Number 96: Dark Mist
Royal Prison
Gagaga Girl (Don't laugh at me :D)

I personally think that there are two cards in this set that are greatly overrated, and two that are greatly underrated.  The overrated would be Tour Bus and Wind-Up Shark.  Shark is good, but not great.  There are better Wind-Ups to run and I don't see anybody running pure Wind-Ups.  I only think that people are going to be running the loop.  As for Tour Bus, I believe it is NOT a $75 card as it is now, and just a tech for a build that runs TGU.  I'm definitely not investing in this card, but might if I can pick one up cheap (say, 30$).  The cards I see as underrated would be Trance Archfiend and Gagaga Girl.  Trance Archfiend is a great addition to Dark Worlds, and gives it the extra discarding outlet they "need."  It also allows them to recycle a possibly removed Grapha, which slows the deck down a ton.  Gagaga Girl is going to be good, but ONLY when good Rank 8 XYZ get released.  If or when they do, watch out for Gagaga Girl.

The main point of this post is to point out the reason why this set is fucking retarded.  What changed your mind Konami?  Why are you only giving us ONE good fucking set this entire shitty-ass format?  The past sets have been an extreme disappointment to me, and probably some of your readers as well.  And after seeing Galactic Overload, I realize this isn't something Konami wants to change.  They want us to buy tons and tons of boxes of ORCS.

Anyways, this is a set I love and hate.  Mostly because there needs to be less Secret Rares per set, even if its 4-5.  8 is just WAY too many.

/rant

Good pack is good.

~Epicake~



1/17/12

Disaster Dragon Until the March Banlist



I believe it's been over a year since my last Disaster decklist, so suffice it to say that this has been a long time coming. This format is one of the best to run Disaster in, given the prevalence of tour guide, agents, lightsworn, darkworld, and chaos variants, as well as the popular light and dark synchroes (Catastor, Librarian, Formula, etc.). A field of just Koaki Meiru Drago and a few backrow is often enough to lock down the average opponent's plays early on. Now, with the release of Divine Dragon Apocralyph in Order of Chaos, Disaster can finally try its hand at "reverse toolboxing", reusing dragons in the grave. I firmly believe that Apocralyph is what could really push many dragon decks over the edge; the ability to reuse cards like REDM and Yamata Dragon allows Disaster to set up big swarms and reverse bad situations. Anyways, here's the decklist:

Monsters: 20
3x Koaki Meiru Drago
3x Red Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon
2x Red Eyes Wyvern
3x Masked Dragon
2x Divine Dragon Apocralyph
2x Totem Dragon
2x Delta Flyer
1x Exploder Dragon
1x Yamata Dragon
1x Prime Material Dragon

Spells: 13
3x Pot of Duality
2x Dragon Ravine
1x Future Fusion
1x Monster Reborn
1x Book of Moon
1x Dark Hole
1x Heavy Storm
3x Mystical Space Typhoon

Traps: 7
2x Solemn Warning
2x Bottomless Trap Hole
2x Compulsory Evacuation Device
1x Solemn Judgement

Extra:
1x Five Headed Dragon
1x Chimeratech Fortress Dragon
1x Trident Dragion
1x Number 17: Leviathan Dragon
1x Leviair the Sea Dragon
1x Stardust Dragon
1x Dark End Dragon
1x Scrap Dragon
1x Red Dragon Archfiend
1x Colossal Fighter
1x Black Rose Dragon
1x Ancient Fairy Dragon
1x Exploder Dragonwing
1x Brionac Dragon of the Ice Barrier
1x Orient Dragon

This is the most consistent this deck has ever been. Triple Duality helps to pretty much ensure your hand will always be live. The impact of Apocralyph cannot be understated here. This card is one of the best dragon support cards ever released because it gives us the ability to really weigh our options and choose the best course of action for a given situation. If you need to turn a game around fast you recycle REDM; if you need to set up your lock you recycle Drago; if you need to get rid of a big beater quickly you recycle Exploder Dragon. Plus, it can be searched out by Masked Dragon. There is so much we can do now with just a few cards in hand and a well set up graveyard.

Another big thing for this deck in this format is the new XYZ cards available to us. The new rulings for Totem Dragon say that it isn't removed from play by its own effect if it was used as an XYZ material (like with Plaguespreader). This goes together perfectly with Delta Flyer in making rank 3 XYZ or level 6 synchroes. Now, we can go into Leviathan when we want a beater, Leviair when we want to reuse banished monsters, Brionac when we want to set up an OTK or blow away a menacing field, or Orient Dragon to get rid of annoying synchroes without disrupting future Totem Dragon plays. These options combined with REDM open up this deck as one that can easily abuse the extra deck.

When playing this deck, you should know that you should always focus on control. Your first priority in most cases will be to keep Drago on the field; always wait to start your swarms. I advise that you not play Future Fusion or activate Dragon Ravine when your opponent has a backrow, unless you have a good idea of what this backrow is, as a stray MST or Solemn Warning can really slow you down. Always play conservatively, as this deck can have trouble keeping hand advantage if you commit too much to the field at the wrong times; as a rule, always try and have at least 2 cards in hand. All that being said, use your judgement and you can set up some truly spectacular plays. What I love about this deck is that it requires a lot of thought to run it well, and a different pilot can take a given situation and produce vastly different results.

Some other options for this deck include Galaxy Eyes Photon Dragon, Light and Darkness Dragon, and the upcoming Light Pulsar Dragon. Galaxy is great against XYZ, and gives you an out in a lot of bad situations with its ability to dodge battle phase effects, but I will side it until XYZ become more prevalent than synchroes in the meta. Light and Darkness is a bit of a liability this format with lightsworns and chaos running around and finding ways around it, and should be dropped or replaced with Yamata Dragon, whose massive plus is far easier to pull off this format with triple MST and Heavy Storm. As for Pulsar, I will explain my stance later. Also, while I prefer the all dragon approach, mainly due to the Totem Dragon plays mentioned above, many believe Totem should be ditched or sided to make room for Effect Veilers and Thunder King Raiohs, 2 of the best generic control cards in the game. My problem with this is the consistency issues that come with Koaki Drago and not having enough dragons in your deck, but it is a personal choice, and many have found this more consistent. I would advise you to try this out, as well as the devastating combo of Trap Dustshoot and double Mind Crush, to see what works best for you.

Please leave any questions or comments below, and have fun with your new dragons!

Orgymaster is Back

Sorry guys, it's been a loooooonnnnggg time since my last post, but I guess with all the new dragon shit coming out I should weigh in. Expect an updated Disaster Dragon decklist soon, as well as my opinion on the new dragon structure deck (it's alright).