Teleport Zombies

Hello, Yu-Gi-Oh! Blogosphere. As promised, here's the Zombie deck list. The ban list gave Zombies a lot to play with this format. For starters, E-Tele to 2. E-Tele gives Zombies the speed they've been craving for quite some time. We can now summon Brionac fairly quickly and have out grave set up within a few turns. Secondly we were given CotH at 3. Given all the floaters the deck can run, CotH works out very nicely.

Deck List:

Screenshot from DN, for those who prefer visual deck lists

Monsters: 22

[1] Black Luster Soldier - Envoy of the Beginning

[1] Card Trooper

[1] Dark Armed Dragon

[2] Effect Veiler

[3] Goblin Zombie

[1] Gorz the Emissary of Darkness

[2] Krebons

[1] Mezuki

[1] Mystic Tomato

[1] Plaguespreader Zombie

[2] Ryko, Lightsworn Hunter

[1] Sangan

[1] Spirit Reaper

[3] Tour Guide from the Underworld

[1] Zombie Master

Spells: 13

[1] Allure of Darkness

[1] Book of Life

[1] Charge of the Light Brigade

[1] Dark Hole

[2] Emergency Teleport

[1] Foolish Burial

[1] Heavy Storm

[1] Mind Control

[1] Monster Reborn

[2] Mystical Space Typhoon

[1] Pot of Avarice

Traps: 5

[3] Call of the Haunted

[2] Torrential Tribute

Synchros: 9

[1] Ally of Justice Catastor

[1] Black Rose Dragon

[1] Brionac, Dragon of the Ice Barrier

[1] Orient Dragon

[2] Revived King Ha Des

[1] Scrap Dragon

[1] Stardust Dragon

[1] T.G. Hyper Librarian

Exceeds: 6

[1] Daigusto Emeral

[2] Leviair the Sea Dragon

[1] Number 17: Leviathan Dragon

[1] Number 39: Utopia

[1] Wind-Up Zenmaines

Review:


This particular build focuses more on abusing floaters than it does Synchro/Exceed swarming. With Mezuki at 1, I find that aggressive builds suffer some consistency issues, so this is more of a control build that works by generating advantage, and then using that advantage to fuel plays. As always, the deck relies heavily on Brionac, mainly for the discard. Solemn Warning can cause Brionac a headache, but fortunately we have Emeral and Avarice to recycle it back to the Extra Deck and get a free draw too.

The E-Tele engine essentially allows one to summon Brionac (long with other synchros) a lot more easily. In the past cards like Deep Sea Diva were used, but I've found Diva to be inefficient for this format because it uses up ones normal summon. That's where E-Tele comes in. E-Tele gives one an instant level 2 Tuner on demand. One can then use that Tuner to Synchro with Sangan or Goblin Zombie to get your search. If one searches into PSZ/Mezuki, you can then discard it for Brionac and bounce a pesky Exceed or Synchro monster back to the Extra Deck, or get a free turn of attacks. This allows one to instantly set up the Graveyard for future abuse whilst not losing any real advantage. Additionally, Krebons is DARK attribute, which has plenty of support in the form of Allure, Dark Armed, Tomato and BLS-EotB.

In the past, the E-Tele engine has often been seen paired with the Destiny engine (Stratos, Malicious, Diamond, Doom Lord, RotA, Allure and D-Draw). I did test the engine since I had a lot of success with it in 2009 (the last time it was viable), but I found 2 copies of Destiny Draw to be insufficient and often resulted in dead hands. Feel free to try it if you can find space, but don't expect anything fantastic.

The second part of the deck is the Zombie engine. I'm using it to make advantage-neutral Synchro plays. The engine is fairly self-explanatory; use Goblin and Master for Synchros and take advantage of PSZ and Mezuki along the way. I'm only using 1 Zombie Master. With Veiler and other similar cards quite prevalent, I find that Zombie Master doesn't really do much very often. It's good enough to run, but not good enough to rely on in my opinion. I'm using 3 Goblin Zombie for consistency. I can also search other copies of Goblin off of it, so I can stay advantage neutral for most of the duel. Sprit Reaper is and always has been good in Zombies as a 1 of. It gives you stall and hand destruction, two things this deck appreciates. I threw in a random Book of Life for Leviair plays.

Finally, the near-staple Tour Guide engine. TGftU gives one access to Leviair, a card this deck likes a lot. For this deck, it's Burial From The Different Dimension 2.0. It lets one abuse all of the removal outlets in this deck, namely Mezuki, PSZ, BLS-EotB and DAD. Being able to continually reuse these cards is too good an opportunity to pass up. Additionally, it gives one access to Zenmaines, which is one of the best control cards this format in my opinion.

One of the new toys this deck got from the ban list was CotH at 3. With back row destruction so plentiful, CotH really shines. Chaining it to destruction lets you gain access to the effects Sangan, Goblin Zombie and Card Trooper, which will in turn give you a +1. And of course, it can just be used for general revival of monsters to help one make aggressive plays. I'm really liking this card at 3 at the moment.

I opted against the Solemn brigade. Torrential and Veiler are more effective for this particular deck. Veiler is graveyard fodder and Torrential lets you deal with swarms whilst not losing advantage due to the copious number of floaters.

Ryko is in there against Laggia. It also lets you fill up your grave as a bonus. One can also use it to bluff with CotLB by setting Goblin or Reaper instead, which could buy a turn to make plays.

The rest of the deck is staples, which don't need explaining. I'm only running 2 MST because of space constraints.

Conclusion:


It's a fun Tier 2 deck to play around with. I don't think it's strong enough to consistently take on the Tier 1 decks, but it does fine against most other decks.

Hope you all enjoyed the deck list. Please rate and comment.

~Valafar123

Quick Update

I got a request from Pojo for my current Infernity build, so I thought I'd post it here in tandem with an update.

I might do a review on this after I post my Tele-Zombie deck list. I just need to get more play testing done.

Also, I'm feeling a lot of negativity on my last post. I'm going to guess it was any of the following:

• The quality of the post was poor. I've got the balls to admit it, it wasn't as good as some of the posts I've done in the past. It's hard to go in depth about something I've already talked about and hasn't changed much, so my apologies if that was the problem. I'll try to keep it fresh in future and put a little more time into my deck profiles.
• Storm fanboys.
• The deck itself. Maybe people don't like the build. That's fair enough I guess, but it's been solid in testing. To each their own.

Please leave a comment so I know what I'm doing wrong. :/

Also, why I it whenever I run a deck with 9 monsters I open with 5 of them, and when I run a deck with 24+ monsters I open with only 1. Oh DN, why must you troll me. -.-

~Valafar123

LIGHT/Hero Beat for March 2012

Here's one of the decks I mentioned in my earlier post. It's doing better than I expected.

Choices:

• Cyber Dragon: I still main and side a CyDra. It's good for those pesky 2000 DEF walls and is a nice counter to Zenmaines, which can be a very frustrating card.
• Thunder King Rai-Oh: good card is still good. Dropping this on turn 1 is crippling to most meta decks. Inzektors do get around him, which is annoying, but it's very nice against everything else. His negation effect works through Skill Drain, which is always a bonus. Having a 1900 Black Horn of Heaven on legs when your opponent's monsters are limited to mere beatsticks is very good. Verz Heliotrope gives TKRO issues, however.
• E - Emergency Call: I see a lot of OCG builds use it, so I thought I'd give it a go. It's decent, but I'll probably drop it to 1. Luckily Skill Drain removes the conflict with TKRO.
• Miracle Fusion: bumping it to 3 because of Grapha. Sided out Skill Drains, sided in DCK, MST and Sack Storm.
• Compulsory Evacuation Device: still good. Another out to Zenmaines and a very nice disruptive card. Two was overkill, one is perfect.
• Dimensional Prison: dropped to 2 because of Sack Storm. It's been very good in testing. Most people don't see it coming and it makes TKRO very hard to deal with for some decks.
• Mirror Force: I still like it. With SLR mained, it becomes very good.
• Skill Drain: best anti-meta card of the format without a doubt. It renders the big three decks totally useless.
• Solemn Brigade: this is a control deck. Enough said.
• Starlight Road: I mained 2 last time Sack Storm was legal and I main 2 now. Very good card, especially with DH legal and TT at 2. Most decks don't have many outs to back row because Storm does the work for them. Being able to shut down their enabler is nice. It also lets you safely put 2+ monsters on the field without risking 1/5 of all of your monsters.
• Torrential Tribute: nice against a lot of decks. This deck keeps a low monster presence, so it fits nicely in here.
• Hero Blast: too slow so I dropped it.
• Bottomless Trap Hole: redundant thanks to TT.
• Doomcalibur Knight: strong generic side card. Works through Skill Drain so you can stop hand and graveyard shenanigans.
• Maxx "C": Wind-ups.
• Snowman Eater: Rabbit.
• Abyssal Designator: It's dueling network; I play against a lot of Exodia decks.
• Sack Storm: for anything that's annoying.
• Mystical Space Typhoon: good against some decks.
• Super Polymerization: mostly for the mirror match.
• Chain Disappearance: it really hurts a lot of decks, namely Inzektors. Mostly for lower tier decks though.

Next up will be Teleport Zombies.

~Valafar123

Lavalval Chain

Lavalval Chain is soooooo good. This was Turn 3 or so.

And yes, I'm alive.

*fake cheering from background*

Anyway, just a few quick thoughts:

• The new ban list finally addressed Plants, so I am happy. However, it failed to address every other glaring problem in the game. Namely a certain spell card that really shouldn't be legal with the game the way it is.
• Trish banned brought a tear to my eye. It needed a ban, but I will miss it. Luckily, Verz Ouroboros is playing well in testing and has equally awesome artwork.
• Tele-DAD prices woo. Maxx "C" and TGFTU are $120 each last time I checked. Rescue Rabbit's going for about $40-80 from what I've seen. That makes it about $1000 for a Bunny main deck. I wonder how much the extra deck costs.
• Wind-Ups, Bunny and Inzektors. I don't think I need to say anything. I'd rather give Sams first turn for an entire match than play against these things.
• Inzektors are fun. Very broken, but somewhat satisfying. Yes, I'm a hypocrite.
• Bunny with Verz Heliotrope is good. Verz Bahamut's discard cost is frustrating though.
• Skill Drain is very good.
• Lavalval Chain is very good.
• Heroes are good. Nice to see them do well in the OCG again.
• OCG isn't using BFs. I didn't even know that was possible.
• Emergency Teleport with Goblin Zombie shenanigans is effective.
• I miss big back rows. Was more fun and took more effort to win against imo.
• Most of OCG land still doesn't know how to run Infernity properly.
• Even now I still call Exceeds Exceeds. I refuse to call them Xyz. That's not even a word, nor is it any permutation of any word I know. How Kevin gets "exseeze" from "xyz" I'm not sure. I get "ziz" from "xyz". I'm sure XYZ-Dragon Cannon is weeping.
• I don't like the new blogger layout. That said, I'm glad they kept my "magic fix problem" button, more commonly known as the "remove formatting" button. If any of you bloggers out there don't know about it, you should. It's the easiest way to fix buggy posts.

That's about it really. I may or may not make more posts. I want to share a few things I've been working on, so if you're an optimist you have something to look forward to.

~Valafar123

D-Boyz In Da 'Hood

If you are not aware yet, Konami has announced another TCG exclusive in addition to Alexandrite Dragon and Wind-Up Zenmaines called D-Boyz.

As you can see, D-Boyz's picture is quite odd. It features three people who appear to be from the "Ghetto." I feel that this type of artwork is something Konami would not make due to the name and appearance not being "kid friendly" or "child appropriate."

Onto the actual card. D-Boyz is a Level 1 Dark Fiend-Type Monster with 100 ATK and 1000 DEF. It has a Flip Effect in which you can Special Summon up to two D-Boyz from your Deck, but you take 1000 damage for each 1. It was obviously designed for making Rank 1 Xyz's such as Number 83: Galaxy Queen and Baby Tiragon. However, these monsters aren't worth the effort put into summoning them. And to top it off, D-Boyz is a Secret Rare that requires a playset to properly use. In my eyes, this was a poor attempt to promote Rank 1 Xyz's.

The only use I can see for this card is in Mystic Piper decks. First, it's another level 1 target for Piper and Kinka-Byo. Second, it's a Dark monster to fuel your Chaos boss monsters. Finally, it easily fills the Graveyard for cards like Pot of Avarice.

~Arceus

Chain Burn

As I promised, here's the Chain Burn deck list. Once again, I apologize for not posting as frequently as I would like. I've been overwhelmed by work in recent weeks. Gears of War 3 coming out on Tuesday doesn't help either. But I digress. I'll be trying a new format where I bold card names. Hopefully this will make referencing cards easier and add a little bit of style. I'm also learning to program in html code, so you may see a few interesting things on my posts in the future.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Chain Burn, it's a fairly old deck which does exactly what the name suggests: it chains and it burns. The reason for chaining is for three specific cards; Chain Strike, Accumulated Fortune and Fairy Wind. Chain Strike and Accumulated Fortune debuted in CDIP, what is often considered to be one of the worst packs in existence. Incidentally, the best cards in that pack were all commons. Chain Strike lets you deal 2000 or more damage with relative ease whilst Accumulated Fortune lets you replenish your hand. Fairy Wind was released much later in ANPR and is probably the best support the deck has received since CDIP. It's essentially Chain Strike, but without the name clause and the added bonus of not needing to be at the end of a chain to function correctly^[1].

Another ruling people forget is that it is possible to have 2 Chain Strikes OR 2 Accumulated Fortunes per chain. These  cards don't count their own names, only the names of cards lower down in the chain link. This is why Strike is semi; to make it unlikely that one chain link will end the game then and there.

The rest of the deck is essentially chainable draw, stall and burn cards. Morphing Jar is in there because it gives you a fresh hand. In some respects, Jar is a win condition. It does tend to be obvious though, hence sided Marshmallon.

People often question my usage of Battle Fader. People often choose Swift Scarecrow over Fader because it can't be hit by Solemn Warning. I run Fader because it can be hit by Warning. Being down 2000 LP is not a good thing against this sort of deck. Royal Oppression is banned too, making Fader much more effective than it once was.

Ojama Trio is for those opponents who like to wise-up to your plays. People tend to keep their monsters in hand in fear of Just Desserts and Ceasefire, so Trio gives you a way to make Desserts active (though Ceasefire won't work because Tokens are normal monsters). Trio is a great jammer. Nothing like playing it when your opponent is trying to special summon a third monsters as a part of some combo. Trio also acts as a catalyst, speeding up the deck.

All the outs are sided. Lava Golem deals with any monsters that will cause you problems and deals 1000 damage every turn (that you can chain to). Double Snare deals with trap negators. Mystical Space Typhoon deals with annoying spells or traps. The rest is just cards that are good in certain matchups.

That's about it for the deck. It's relatively simple. If anybody has any comments, leave them below.

Here's a link to the pojo page (vets only): http://www.pojo.biz/board/showthread.php?p=22622824#post22622824

~Valafar123

Response?

Activate Heavy Storm, response?

Click for a larger image

Quite a few responses actually. There's nothing like 5100 burn damage and a fresh hand. Won the match 2-0.

In this lucksack based format, I prefer to win with style.

I'll do a more detailed post about the deck later. I just thought this was too funny not to share.

~Valafar123

Through The Hellhole: Part 2

Good day to you fellow members of the blogosphere. Yes, I'm well aware I've been putting off making posts (again), but be assured that my reasons are justifiable. But we're not here to talk about the various mishaps that accumulate together to form my life.

As many of you have heard thanks to Allan's post, the Sanguide engine was more or less made redundant due to the finalized version of the exceed rulings. I will admit I did get a bit of a laugh knowing that people spent a ridiculous amount of money on a card that's only as good as the flimsy ruling that influences it. The biggest culprit of this is Konami, or rather their lack of communication with the player base. And that's the topic of today's post; communication.

As some of you may know, I recently started playing Magic: The Gathering (or MTG for short). I'm not going to hype Wizards of the Coast in this post, although they certainly deserve it. Instead I'm going to be critical of Konami, something that's not that hard to do given their history.

A good place to start is on their websites. I'll cut to the chase and get right to where the communication should be happening. To start with, Konami's articles for YGO:

http://www.konami.com/yugioh/articles/

Pardon my shrewdness, but the Konami articles reek of "buy our product". Occasionally they do post rulings, which is good that they're finally doing that, but for the most part their articles are just a few combos to try and sell product. No offense to the writers of those articles, of course. They just do what they're told to do.

Now let's compare with MTG:

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Default.aspx

A noticeable difference. WotC have a daily magazine which they update consistently. They're a lot more subtle than Konami too. Take this article, for example. Not only did they make the article flavorful, it was in depth and they also had the courtesy of making a few sample deck lists. If you noticed, there's also a contest at the end of the article. I've never known Konami to do the same. From time to time, they also do polls at the end of posts to get feedback.

If you're a pojoer, then you may not have noticed it, but all the cards mentioned are linked and if you hover above them, it will show an image and if you click it, it will go to their database for that card. That's right, they actually had the sense to make a card database. YGO players only have the Wikia to rely on, and the Wikia was created by players, not Konami.

For any of you who about how WotC approaches their ban list, you'll know that it trumps Konami's methods. With Konami, they do what they want. There isn't a shred of communication involved. Konami decides what they want to die and what they want to live and that's the end of it. Some people may say Heavy Storm's return was due to some players "demanding" it back. I'm inclined to disagree. HS being legal and MST at 3 stinks of promotion to me. Monsters are now able to hit the field with little to no opposition. No thought involved. Summon what you have and try to kill your opponent. But wait, didn't Konami just release a new type of monster that is really easy to summon? More than a coincidence I think. It's not the first time. Destiny Hero - Malicious and Allure of Darkness suddenly going to 3 on the September 2008 list probably had something to do with those cards with the wight frames, and possibly even something to do with getting rid of Upper Deck Entertainment.

I think it's a case of incompetence and greed at the same time, not a nice mix if I do say so myself. But I digress.

WotC rarely need to hit cards. They spend a lot more time and effort with their R&D department (which is a topic for another post). Sometimes they do make genuine unintentional mistakes, such as the Splintertwin combo (which is inconsistent anyway) or Jace the Mind Sculptor. And I'm sure most of you know what happened to Jace. He got banned. Unlike Konami, WotC didn't wait 6 months to do it either. They knew they had made a mistake and they took responsibility for it.

Does anybody remember X-Sabers? They were quite good for quite some time. Almost broken. They had hand-killing power (which was very good at the time if you weren't in the Infernity matchup), swarm power and loop power. Does anybody know what happened to them? The answer is nothing. Konami never hit them. Konami put off hitting them for so long that power creep killed them instead. XX-Saber Darksoul and/or XX-Saber Faultroll should have been hit on the September 2010 lists. One year later and they're all at 3. Arguably banning Rescue Cat and Cold Wave was a hit to them, but that's like saying banning Brain Control was a hit to Monarchs. Konami has this ridiculous rule that they never hit anything that doesn't exist in the OCG, and it's been destroying the TCG for years. The fact that they only do a ban list every 6 months just adds insult to injury. If they did them more frequently, we wouldn't have had to deal with Shi En for nearly 7 months.

Konami needs to pay more attention to their player base. And I don't mean the randoms on Pojo who are adamant that putting Torrential Tribute, Tribe-Infecting Virus and Magician of Faith at 3 will somehow make this format better, but the "pro" players who are actually there topping events consistently and know what they're talking about. If WotC, a considerably smaller company, can go the effort of not only acknowledging and discussing their top players, but also listens to them, then surely Konami can.

But I suppose Konami will be Konami...

~Valafar123