Amorphage Deck Profile (update 06/06/16)

A vastly improved and updated version of the previous Amorphage deck.

In short, I’ve done a lot of testing with Amorphages, tinkering and updating. The deck has changed a lot since I posted my first list, which wasn’t even all that long ago and enough has changed I thought that it warranted an update article. So here ya go!

Amorphage Deck

Monsters: (17)

• 3 Amorphage Pride
• 2 Magical Abductor
• 3 Amorphage Wrath
• 3 Amorphage Greed
• 3 Amorphage Lechery
• 3 Amorphage Gluttony

Spells: (18)

• 3 Card of Demise
• 3 Swords of Revealing Light
• 2 Pot of Riches
• 3 Pot of Duality
• 2 Scapegoat
• 3 Amorphage Infection
• 2 Amorphous Persona

Traps: (5)

• 2 Echo Oscillation
• 3 Amorphage Lysis

Extra Deck: (6)

• 2 Castel, the Skyblaster Musketeer
• 2 Diamond Dire Wolf
• 2 Sky Cavalry Centaurea

Monster Changes:

After a lot of playing with this deck, I came to realize which Amorphage monsters I really needed and which were either subpar or unhelpful altogether. The last of the Amorphage monsters to remain in my deck before being cut was Goliath, which I still ran two of, but after playing with the deck at my locals and literally never activating or summoning the card (even though I drew it plenty), it seemed more than fitting that I completely drop it. Here’s my decision making process for each one I dropped:

• Goliath – Of the ones I dropped, Goliath has the most valuable Pendulum effect. Overall though, the Macro effect it provides tends to be redundant with Gluttony, who prevents monster effects. Gluttony is better though for multiple reasons, first, Gluttony obviously covers over decks that use monsters that aren’t particularly affected by Macro, so its effect is literally better. You can also normal summon and set Gluttony to activate your scales more easily than with Goliath. Goliath also clashes with Card of Demise because it’s much more difficult to utilize than the remaining Amorphage monsters simply for the sake of lowering hand size. In general, dropping my monster count was neccessary to work with Card of Demise anyways.
• Sloth – I never want this card for any reason. Almost every deck that searches does so with Spells, so I would rather have Lechery in that instance anyways because Lechery also wards off the ever destructive Twin Twisters, which wrecks this deck. Preventing searches also hurts yourself, which this deck cannot afford. The same issue arises with Sloth as does Goliath with Card of Demise.
• Envy – I held out on Envy for a while because it’s a level 4 and that’s really important, but even in games where I ran Envy it as completely irrelevant that it was a level 4 because I wasn’t going to search it ever and I would summon anything else first. Envy’s Pendulum effect it literally irrelevant if not bad for you, so it quickly became a card with no value for the deck.

I relegated Archfiend Eccentric to the side deck after playing with the deck more. It was helpful when I wasn’t nearly as good at piloting the deck, but then once I knew the plays and what I wanted to do in the future, it became a dead card a lot of the time. The card still has enough value to be used, so I decided it makes more sense in the side deck to deal with specific threats. It also conflicts with Card of Demise because it increases my monster count.

Card of Demise:

I’ve already mentioned this card quite a few times already, but that’s because it’s very important to this new build and is a card you have to alter your deck to make most effective use of.

Amorphage has a serious consistency problem and there really aren’t any good ways to solve that problem that are explicit. In order to solve this problem I have gone the route of injecting the deck with massive amounts of draw power, the idea being that if I draw more cards I’ll draw into the cards I need, most importantly Amorphage Infection because it really supports the whole deck. With Card of Demise you have to discard your entire hand during the End Phase, and you cannot special summon the turn you play it. This means it’s very important that most of your deck is spells and traps so that you can set them all instead of having to discard them. This is particularly interesting with this deck because you can have 3 monsters, but still be able to play all of them because they’re Pendulum monsters. Ideally you play 2 scales, normal summon an Amorphage (preferably Pride or Wrath), and then set your hand. Then, you can draw 3 cards and ideally again draw into at least 2 of the 3 cards being other spells and traps you can play or set.

This card works in combination quite powerfully with the other cards of the deck. Pot of Duality is kind of a gimme; since you cannot special summon you might as well perfect you hand by gaining even more ability to search for exactly what you need and additionally Duality increases the odds of you opening with Card of Demise.

With Pot of Riches in the deck, it’s not particularly detrimental if you have to discard any of your Pendulum monsters with Card of Demise. Pot of Riches turns that disadvantage of discarding into literal advantage. This same factor applies to you having to destroy you scales during your next turn. When you can only normal summon 1 monster that means you can only maintain one scale if you play 2. Likely you’ll have to destroy one, and you probably discarded at least 1 monster with demise. This means on your next turn you’ll have a minimum 2 Pendulum monsters already setup for the activation of Pot of Riches. If you also drew into Amorphage Lysis you can put a third so you can activate Riches on your next turn for a quick plus one. After all of that drawing, the hope is you have all the cards you need for success.

As I just mentioned, Lysis is also very important with Card of Demise because you want it to give passive advantage with Card of Demise. It also provides some trickiness during the opponent’s turn and safety versus Mystical Space Typhoon and Twin Twisters making it incredibly powerful.

New Additions

I added Scapegoat upon the suggestion of one of the players at my locals named Mark. We both have been working on the deck so we’ve been bouncing ideas off of each other at locals and looking at each other’s builds. I tested it upon his suggestion and I really like it. It provides extra layers of defense against OTKs which this deck really has problems with. For example, really aggressive decks can simply play Raigeki and can attack freely into your open board because this deck doesn’t run any defensive traps, only preventative defense. This adds at least one card that provides defense. It also provides much more though:

• You can activate Scapegoat to get tokens to be tributed to maintain your scales.
• Even the destruction of Token monsters activates Amorphage Infection, so defending yourself with Tokens nets you searches.
• It works nicely with Card of Demise because you can set it to prevent its discarding from Demise and you can activate it during the opponent’s turn to help maintain two scales if you played two with only summoning 1 Amorphage monster.

The other card I added was Magical Abductor. This was also suggested by Mark at my locals, and I have no idea why I didn’t think of this card. I knew it existed and I knew what it did, but for whatever reason it never crossed my mind to test it, but it’s actually amazing in this deck. Whenever a spell is activated and Magical Abductor is in your pendulum zone it gains a spell counter. Once per turn you remove 3 from it to add any Pendulum monster from your deck to your hand. This significantly increases the consistency of the deck and is even a valuable scale for the deck, being a 3 scale. Also, with the addition of the Card of Demise engine, it’s really easy to play 3 spells in one turn and get off a search with Abductor. The use of Abductor is pretty self explanatory in this deck, so there’s not much more to say than that.

Additional Things:

I thought I should also mention both the Extra Deck, Amorphage Lysis and future potential cards. First, the Extra Deck. Once again the Extra Deck is almost completely useless. I added the 3 XYZ monsters that the deck has even the remotest use for and the remotest chance of summoning. Then, because literally there’s no reason not to, I double each of them just incase you actually need to use one of them and it gets negated for whatever reason, so you’ll still have another copy just in case.

You could additionally run Extra Deck monsters to use with Ghost Reaper & Winter Cherries if you have that and want to side that, because it’s potentially viable to side in this deck, though I haven’t tested it. I would probably add a Dante, Dark Law, Azure-Eyes, Blue-Eyes Spirit Dragon, Dinoster, Ignister, Hope Harbinger Dragon and maybe Gem-Knight Seraphinite. I’m sure there are other things I’m not thinking of as well, but I think you get the point.

Previously, I ran 1 Lysis, because I thought it wasn’t that good, but after a lot of play, I find it to be very important and impactful. There are quite a few decks, namely Kozmo and Monarchs, that summon huge beaters and whether or not you have up Gluttony to prevent monster effects, it can sometimes be a huge hassle to get them off the field because Amorphages have to attack over monsters to get them off the field. When you run less Lysis that means  you have to rely almost solely on Infection to get over those monsters. With an Aether on board for example you’ll need 11 total Amorphage cards on the field to allow an Amorphage Pride to attack over it even if you have 1 Infection, which is incredibly unlikely. This can be halved to 6 with Lysis. So with a Lysis and an Infection you only need 6 total Amorphage to attack over it, which is actually just 4 because both Lysis and Infection count themselves. With 2 scales and the monster you’re going to attack with this means all you really need is either 1 additional monster on board, Amorphous Persona for its 300 boost, or another Infection/Lysis, which isn’t all that difficult. With 3 copies of Lysis this makes that occurrence far more likely.

Lysis is also very important because it’s one of the decks only reliable counter plays to Mystical Space Typhoon and Twin Twisters. All the potential negation cards this deck could run to counter spell and trap destruction aren’t particularly good, and the best in my opinion is probably Solemn Scolding, but I really don’t like running all that many traps in this deck when in most scenarios you have Greed preventing you from using traps. Lysis provides insurance versus spell and trap destruction but also has many additional benefits, such as the ATK and DEF manipulation and crazy awesome control and draw power in combination with Echo Oscillation.

The Fuuuuture…

Much like my last deck profile, I mentioned cards from the future that will help this deck. I figure I might as well mention Pot of Cupidity again because with the changes made to the deck Cupidity only makes the deck even more viable. The crazy draw engine of Pot of Duality, Pot of Cupidity and Card of Demise provides absolutely ridiculous card advantage to a deck that can support it and I think it will start making waves for slow decks running the 3 of them.

Another interesting card is a card currently called “Ties of the Brethren”. It’s a normal spell, this is the effect:

Pay 2000 LP, then target 1 Level 4 or lower monster you control; Special Summon from your Deck, 2 monsters with the same Type, Attribute, and Level as that monster, but with different names from each other and that monster, also for the rest of this turn after this card resolves, you cannot Special Summon monsters. You cannot conduct your Battle Phase the turn you activate this card.

Basically, you can use it to target either Pride, Greed or Wrath (also Envy if you run it) and then special 1 of the others from your deck, giving you 1 of each on the board. This significantly stunts your Extra Deck and can gives you a lot of monsters to tribute off for you scales turn one. It conflicts with Demise, which is unfortunate, but I will certainly test it because it provides high value for the deck.

Written by: Kyle Oliver