Amorphage Deck Profile

A deck profile for the new archetype: Amorphages.

This deck has been updated! If you would like to see the update version please follow the link [HERE]

My friend was very interested in the new Amorphage archetype before it was released in the most recent pack. They have a very lock-down styled deck strategy, which is the kind of style he prefers, and he had asked me to help him build the deck once it came out, and this deck profile is the results of my work:

Amorphage Deck

Total: (40)

Monsters: (23)

• 2 Amorphage Goliath
• 1 Amorphage Sloth
• 3 Amorphage Pride
• 3 Amorphage Wrath
• 2 Amorphage Envy
• 3 Amorphage Greed
• 3 Archfiend Eccentrik
• 3 Amorphage Lechery
• 3 Amorphage Gluttony

Spells: (14)

• 3 Swords of Revealing Light
• 3 Pot of Riches
• 2 Igknight Reload
• 3 Amorphage Infection
• 3 Amorphous Persona

Traps: (3)

• 2 Echo Oscillation
• 1 Amorphage Lysis

Extra Deck: (5)

XYZ: (5)

• 1 Number S39: Utopia the Lightning
• 1 Number 39: Utopia
• 1 Castel, the Skyblaster Musketeer
• 1 Majester Paladin the Ascending Dracoslayer
• 1 Abyss Dweller

Amorphage Monsters:

The Amorphage monster are all a pretty straightforward bunch. Each has the same monster effect:

If this card is Pendulum Summoned or flipped face-up, neither player can Special Summon monsters from the Extra Deck while this card is face-up on the field, except “Amorphage” monsters.

This is with the exception of Sloth and Goliath, being the two monsters that require a tribute summon, whose effects are just a no Extra Deck other than Amorphages as long as they are on the field in general, not requiring a Pendulum or flip Summon.

Then, each Amorphage monster also has either a 3 or a 5 Pendulum Scale and a Pendulum effect that prevents the use of some Yugioh mechanic as long as you control an Amorphage monster. This includes effects like not allowing the use of spells other than Amorphage spells, which is pretty darn good, aside from each Amorphage monster also having the same maintainence cost to their Pendulum effect:

Once per turn, during your Standby Phase, Tribute 1 monster or destroy this card.

This effect keeps them fair an also plays into the decks spells and traps.

The following are the Pendulum effects of each Amorphage:

• Goliath: Macro Cosmos for all cards except Amorphage cards.
• Sloth: No searching except by drawing.
• Pride: No burn damage.
• Wrath: No tributing, except Amorphage monsters.
• Envy: No effects of Chain Link 2 or higher.
• Greed: No Traps, except Amorphage cards.
• Lechery: No Spells, except Amorphage cards.
• Gluttony: No monster effects, except Amorphage monsters (although no Amorphage monsters have effects that activate).

You may notice I don’t run an even amount of all of the Amorphages. That’s because some are clearly not as good for reasons I will explain. First is Goliath and Sloth; being above level 4 means they cannot be Pendulum Summoned or easily Normal Summoned. This makes both of them less optimal early in the game when you generally will be Normal Summoning your first Amorphage to create a lock. Goliath in particular is no good for summoning because he’s level 8, meaning he requires 2 tributes to summon, which I rarely have to do. Sloth is 1 tribute, being level 6, so it’s no as unlikely to tribute summon it, but it is nonoptimal. You cannot Pendulum summon back either because the only level Amorphages can Pendulum summon is 4. You can Pendulum Summon Sloth if you have Archfiend Eccentrik as your high scale though. Goliath does boast one of the better Pendulum effects, being the Macro Cosmos effect, this is good against most decks, warranting at least 2 copies. Sloth’s effect is great too, except for the major shortcoming that Amorphages ideal strategy involves searching and Sloth prevents their own search card. The deck really wants more 3 scales though so I begrudgingly added the 1 Sloth.

I maxed out on all remaining Amorphage monsters except Envy. Envy’s effect is essentially neither player can chain cards. This effect is cute and would be good in other decks, but the problem is Amorphages rarely activate cards that will go on chain link 1 and are mostly comprised of continuous effects. This means more often than not if there is a chain occurring it’s the opponent chaining to themselves, which we mostly don’t care about. The other 5 scale Amorphage monsters also have very dominating Pendulum effects that are preferable in almost every match-up. Envy saves itself though by being a level 4 monster, a sacred level for the Amorphage deck, since literally all the attacking will involve level 4 monsters, of which there are 4.

Pride initially seems to be a useless effect, but, it has the highest ATK of all the level 4 monsters and has a 3 scale. This makes it the go to beater for the deck and an instant 3-of. In the off chance you play against a burn deck, this card also completely obliterates burn decks.

Wrath is pretty much the same as Pride, being a usually useless effect plus the second high ATK level 4 in the deck, also boasting the 3 scale. Wrath prevents tributing, which is mostly only good against Monarchs, and incredibly so.

The remaining Amorphage monsters I find pretty self explanatory in their uses. The Amorphage spells are all very good, the trap less so. Both the spells I think are very straightforward 3-ofs in the deck. The trap, Lysis, is really hit or miss. It can help, but it’s really slow and only is a minor help. I would potentially drop it in the future. Feasibly you could run 1 Terraforming 2 Field Spell instead my 3 Field Spell line-up, but I’ve left it at 3 for my testing with a card I would run in the future for this deck.

Individual Card Choices:

The Amorphage deck is heavily bound by the cards they open with, and in order to present any kind of threat you basically have to open with either Amorphous Persona or Amorphage Infection (the two spells). These are the only two ways the deck can gain card advantage and they heavily bolster the ATK and DEF of your monsters so it’s unlikely you’ll be able to win with the deck aside from the ATK boosts. There’s really no viable ways to search for the spells while maintaining consistent scale draws other than with turbo drawing. This is why I run 7 draw cards.

The first and most important draw card is Pot of Riches. Pot of Riches shuffles back 3 Pendulum monsters from the Extra Deck or Graveyard back to the deck and draws 2 cards. These can nicely recycle the Amorphage that end up in your Extra Deck and cannot be summoned back, consisting of the two level 2 Amorphage monsters and the two above level 5 Amorphage monsters, as well as recycle any Amorphage who had its summon negated and is in the graveyard. All of these things are fairly prone to happen due to the Amorphage maintenance effect. The ease of building up 3 Pendulum monsters is also aided by Archfiend Eccentrik.Sometimes I purposefully play a scale of Amorphage monsters to only Pendulum summon 1 Amorphage monster on my turn one, knowing that 1 of the Amorphage monsters in my scale will have to destroy itself if I have Pot of Riches. This is really important because it allows you to setup 2 negation effects and the Extra Deck lock effect of the Amorphage monster you summoned with less drawbacks early game. This setup also can be used with the two Amorphage spells to gain more advantage and potentially setup further.

Igknight Reload is an extremely simple card choice. Shuffle back the Amorphage monsters you don’t want and hopefully draw into things you do want. Early game it’s best and it becomes more dead as the game progresses, so I didn’t want to run 3, thus I ran the 2 copies.

Echo Oscillation is a card that I think is very interesting and has a lot more utility and effectiveness than most people would give it credit for. It’s a pretty unknown card so here’s the effect:

Continuous Trap

You can target 1 card in your Pendulum Zone; destroy it, then draw 1 card. You can only use this effect of “Echo Oscillation” once per turn.

This card works in similar instances to Pot of Riches and also works very well in tandem with Pot of Riches. You can play two scales and only one monster to tribute, then during the opponent’s End Phase use Echo Oscillation to pop the scale you’ll have to destroy anyways during your Standby Phase for an extra draw. Once it’s face-up you can use it once during each turn to draw a lot of cards and setup very large pendulum summons and more drawing off of Pot of Riches. This card also acts as a fail safe of sorts if the opponent can clear all of your monsters while you have a scale setup. Since both will be destroyed during your Standby Phase it’s in your best interest to use Echo Oscillation on both scales to maintain card advantage, once during the opponent’s End Phase and then the other scale during your Draw Phase. You can also do some weird stuff using Echo and Amorphage Lysis, but it’s really unlikely to come up, and not good enough to warrant more copies of Lysis.

A card I don’t see a lot people running in other Amorphage deck profiles I looked at was Archfiend Eccentrik. I really felt like this deck got bodied by cards like Solemn Warning and Strike because of the heavy reliance on the Pendulum Summon so I had initially ran Mystical Space Typhoon in the deck to try to snipe those cards, or hit a one-of backrow when I went second, because a well time Solemn would lose you the duel. You also cannot afford to run Twin Twister in this deck because you don’t gain advantage quickly early game so you cannot afford to discard. I eventually remembered the card Archfiend Eccentrik and it has vastly more synergy in the deck and has multiple uses that are very helpful. Not only is it MST, but it has the obvious benefits of destroying monsters in a pinch and being a high pendulum scale. It also accelerates the use of Pot of Riches and can set off Amorphage Infection, which can help you search for the exact cards you need in each moment. Eccentrik also works the same with Lysis, which will replace Eccentrik destroying itself as a scale with the Amorphage of choice from the deck. All things I thought were pretty neat.

Last is Swords of Revealing Light. Recently I’ve been testing a lot of decks using Messenger of Peace and I think that card is incredibly powerful. Me and my friend where testing out Messenger in Amorphages and I think that it works brilliantly in the deck. I recently swapped it for Swords of Revealing Light because it functions as effectively the same card except it allow you to attack under it and has the random flipping effect, which might come in handy, who knows? The basic idea is that it stalls attacks for a while in order to get the engine rolling. In Amorphages, after a couple of turns the deck can start steamrolling the opponent with advantage, especially with Amorphous Persona, which generally draws you into Infection, which generates tons of advantage. In general once you’re in this game state you can easily maintain the two most effective lockdown Pendulum effects on the opponent and have a very large field presence. Swords slows the game down enough to hopefully get to that state, while also protecting your monsters from being attacked over so you can use them to maintain your scales. Swords also diverts removal from your scales or gives you stall, both options are helpful to the Amorphage player.

Extra Deck:

The Extra Deck is literally useless in this deck because it’s so hard to utilize in the deck. You might as well be running one, and if you where to go to a high level event you should probably run a full 15 cards, but there’s barely any chance of you using it. If anything, I added the rank 4 XYZ monsters I thought had the most utility, Castel being the foremost. You could also just run a bunch of cards to work in tandem with Ghost Reaper & Winter Cherries, which you could easily side in this deck. If you really don’t care though, you can just run no Extra Deck at all.

The Future:

Unfortunately, Amorphages don’t look to be getting any support in the near future if at all, which is rough. Since the deck is overall not competitively viable it’s hard to argue in favor of this deck or attempting to pick it up, although it’ll probably become quite inexpensive and is pretty fun to play around with. It’s really hit or miss on its play style and can be easily blown out by cards like Twin Twister. The future is grim for the Amorphous fellow.

Of the cards in the future, I’ve only found the use of one card useful, which I vaguely hinted at previously in the article, and that’s the card Pot of Cupidity. Pot of Cupidity banishes the top 10 cards of your deck face-down and then you draw 2 cards. Cupidity seems to me to be a staple in any deck that can run 3 of every card in its deck. It gives basically a cost free plus one and extensive knowledge of your deck’s remains by looking at what was banished. You can more accurately predict what you’ll draw and literally just have more cards. I think Amorphages are one the perfect decks to utilize the card and in testing I think it’s fantastic. Overall, Pot of Cupidity is a card I’m really looking forward to it coming out.

Written by: Kyle Oliver