Stall Deck Profile

Welcome to stall deck! Yay!

I’ve been churning continuously on this stall deck for about a month now and I figured it was about time I posted some form of a deck list for ya’ll to see, though I understand that many people may be less than enthused to see a stall deck profile. Personally though, I’ve been having a lot of fun with this deck, learning about weird cards and how to pull them off. For example, the deck I’m profiling in this article utilizes some pretty funny Counter Traps and I’ve tested through a slew of other weird cards that where a blast. Check it out:

Counter Stall Deck

Monsters: (14)

• 3 Guiding Ariadne
• 2 Tsukuyomi
• 2 Mask of Darkness
• 2 Cardcar D
• 3 Aroma Jar
• 2 Magician of Faith

Spells: (11)

• 1 One Day of Peace
• 1 Upstart Goblin
• 3 Pot of Duality
• 3 Book of Eclipse
• 3 Messenger of Peace

Traps: (15)

• 3 Quaking Mirror Force
• 2 Burst Rebirth
• 1 Wall of Revealing Light
• 3 Ultimate Providence
• 3 Cursed Seal of the Forbidden Spell
• 3 Dark Bribe

Extra Deck: (8)

Fusion: (1)

• 1 Chimeratech Fortress Dragon

Synchro: (3)

• 3 Stardust Dragon

XYZ: (4)

• 1 Castel, the Skyblaster Musketeer
• 1 Ghostrick Dullahan
• 1 Slacker Magician
• 1 Number 63: Shamoji Soldier

First off, ignore the Extra Deck, I never use it. The Stardust Dragons are for my sided copy of Starlight Road. In testing it wasn’t worth main decking because even though it’s great against the things it works against, for example Twin Twister, you can already negate such cards with your main deck counter traps.

So, what’s the deck win condition? This deck wins by deck out in one of two ways, either by slow deck out, literally waiting for your opponent to draw out of their deck the old fashion way, or by Book of Eclipse looping the opponent out of cards. In order to achieve these states you stall, and the chief staller is Aroma Jar. Not only does it prevent the opponent from attacking you but by gaining lifepoints you can prevent the opponent from attempting to time you out as a reverse strategy because you’ll typically have more lifepoints, meaning in time you will win. So, for example a third win condition of this deck would be to go into time game 1 and have the most lifepoints after turns. In that sense this deck encourages you to slow play, though I do not typically aim for that strategy because it’s slightly outra-game and I find that a little seedy.

There’s the 3 basic stall cards: Aroma Jar, Messenger of Peace and Wall of Revealing Light. There purpose is to stop attacking. The rest of the deck is aimed at preventing the opponent from breaking your stall setup. As is pretty clear, I have 3 sets of 3 different Counter Traps, all aimed for negating cards that stop you from stalling. Dark Bribe is any spell or trap, Cursed Seal of the Forbidden Spell permanently negates spells disallowing same named cards in the future (this significantly removes your future burden of negating cards), and the be all end all for the deck Ultimate Providence, which can negate anything. These 3 combine very nicely with Guiding Ariadne which makes it so you don’t have to pay the cost to activate both Cursed Seal of the Forbidden Spell and Ultimate Providence. Against some deck, negating monster effects may be more important (for example Monarchs, which only realistically consist of Spells and Monsters), so if you can get your hands on them, Solemn Strike is a great side deck addition for this deck and you can swap out Dark Bribe for Strikes.

The other portion of the deck is the recycling engine.

• 2 Tsukuyomi
• 2 Mask of Darkness
• 2 Magician of Faith

• 3 Book of Eclipse

• 2 Bust Rebirth

This engine allows you to gain advantage in probably the most simple fashion possible: slow manual recursion. The purpose is to just keep recycling negation traps with Mask of Darkness until you exhausted all of your opponents outs to your lock. Similarly, Magician of Faith recycles draw support to more consistently build your lock and can eventually perpetuate the Book of Eclipse loop to deck the opponent out. Book of Eclipse comes of triple use: it flips your monsters face-down for re-use, it can stall by flipping opponent’s monsters face-down, and it decks the opponent out. It also is very difficult to play around causing a lot of hassle for the opponent.

Last, for good measure I added in Carcar D and Quaking Mirror Force. I had tested a lot and eventually boiled the deck down to 38 neccessary cards and had two open slots. Carcar D may not be the best option, but currently it’s what I’ve liked best in that slot, this may change though. This slow can be replaced by additional monsters that cannot be destroyed by battle, such as Arcana Force 0 – The Fool. Quaking Mirror Force is the safety net card for the stall cards and is also a potential win condition. If a deck does not run any tribute monsters and they summon 5 monsters and attack into Quaking Mirror Force you basically win by deck out no matter what. This is possible against Burning Abyss for example, though that deck honestly isn’t very scary for this deck to deal with since they don’t have particularly good options against this deck.