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.