Deck Profile: SPYRALs

Return to the SPYRAL secret base!

I saw on YouTube recently a very interesting deck profile for SPYRALs at an ARG event by Liyn Jay Garcia and the deck greatly intrigued me. I did some research to see what else people were doing and then some more testing and made my own version of his build to share here because I thought it was worth showing everyone and with the near release of the next set, which is destined to have more SPYRAL support. Originally, I hadn’t been able to make a version of the deck that I had ended up liking, but after seeing what others had done I found out the deck is actually pretty good and even has some pretty good match-ups across the board. More than anything what I lacked knowledge about was the plays that you should go for with this deck, which I suppose I’ll talk about in a moment. First, here’s the deck profile:

Monsters: (17)

• 1 Gadarla, the Mystery Dust Kaiju
• 2 Gamecial, the Sea Turtle Kaiju
• 1 Kumongous, the Sticky Strong Kaiju
• 3 SPYRAL Super Agent
• 2 Ghost Ogre Snow Rabbit
• 2 Maxx “C”
• 3 SPYRAL Quik-Fix
• 3 SPYRAL GEAR – Drone

Spells: (22)

• 1 One for One
• 1 Reinforcement of the Army
• 2 Machine Duplication
• 1 Upstart Goblin
• 3 Terraforming
• 1 Foolish Burial
• 3 Interrupted Kaiju Slumber
• 1 Book of Moon
• 3 Twin Twisters
• 3 SPYRAL GEAR – Big Red
• 3 SPYRAL Resort

Traps: (1)

• 1 Compulsory Evacuation Device

Extra Deck: (4)

• 1 Number 78: Number Archive
• 3 Number 24: Dragulas the Vampiric Dragon

The deck in effect is extremely simple in execution because all it really does is attack over everything with monsters boosted by SPYRAL GEAR – Drone and keep on doing that until you get game. Unlike a lot of battle predicated decks, this deck essentially has the capabilities to get infinite attack monsters. That of course is an exaggeration, but safe to say you can reliable get monsters above 4000 ATK, which is the maximum Yugioh attack threshold.

Now getting big monsters is great and all, but the real crux of the deck lies with SPYRAL Resort. Resort, in addition to searching a monster once per turn, which is incredible, prevents your SPYRAL cards (notice I said cards, not just monsters) from being targeted. This makes is so the deck can easily get a 4000 ATK beatstick that cannot be targeted by card effects. I understand that that’s not all that spectacular since we’ve had similar things in the past, but what makes it so incredible here is how easily the deck can perform that feat and continuously perform that feat. Some decks outright don’t have a lot of answers to that kind of presence to begin with, but others only can deal with it so many times before you chunk them for game.

Basic Strategy:

How is it done, very simply actually. The deck just does simple looping based around 4 cards: SPYRAL Super Agent, SPYRAL Quik-Fix, SPYRAL GEAR – Drone, and SPYRAL GEAR – Big Red, all of which are unsurprisingly being maxed out in every SPYRAL deck profile you can find at the moment. Those 4 are of course supplemented by the searching power of Resort which makes getting specific pieces even easier. In general, the basic combo of the deck is this:

• Normal Summon Drone and stack the opponent’s deck.
• Use that knowledge to special summon a Super Agent from the hand.
• Use Super Agent to pop a spell or trap card.
• Use Drone to boost Super Agent’s attack.

Super Agent will probably at worst gain 1000 ATK, putting him at a meager 2900 ATK. You’ll have destroyed 1 spell or trap and also stacked the opponent’s deck so they’ll ideally be dead drawing, or not drawing optimally. From here there’s a pretty wide variety of moves, but this is the general play for the deck.

One of the most important factors about this deck is Drone’s effect. It cannot be overstated enough how powerful the ability to stack the opponent’s deck is. Not only does this ensure the summoning of your Super Agent, but this also ensures that your opponent is playing suboptimally against you at almost all times. In general, when the deck is operating correct, you’ll be summoning a Drone as your Normal Summon almost every turn. This means you’ll be continually stacking the opponent’s deck over the course of the entire duel. If you can get the opponent down to no cards in hand, for example they make a very big board turn one going first, when you stack the opponent’s deck from then on you control literally every option they have and can predict their plays 100% of the time, which can give you certainty of victory as long as you have knowledge of a lot of Yugioh decks.

The second half of this engine is Quik-Fix and Big Red. Quik-Fix basically just swarms for Rank 1 XYZ summoning as well as to search and summon more Drones. When Quik-Fix is summoned you can search either Drone or Big Red from your deck . Then you can either use Drone or use Big Red to revive a Drone or Super Agent. One play that’s really nice involves the standard play plus a Quik-Fix in the graveyard, since Quik-Fix can be revived by discarding a card if you control a Super Agent:

• Do the standard play ending with a boosted Super Agent.
• Revive Quik-Fix by discarding a card.
• Quik-Fix adds Big Red.
• Big Red can be used to revive Drone.
• XYZ Drone and Quik-Fix to summon Number Archive.

Number Archive is just a silly Number monster that allows you to detach 1, then the opponent randomly selects a monster from your Extra Deck, and if it’s a Number monster, it’s summoned using Number Archive as XYZ Material. In order to facilitate this the only Extra Deck monsters in this deck are the 3 copies of the monster you want to summon with Number Archive: Number 24: Dragulas the Vampiric Dragon. The orignal deck I based mine off of ran Number 81: Superdreadnought Rail Cannon Super Dora, but after testing with Dragulas I like it a lot better because it can dodge Number Archive’s effect to banish the monster it summons by flipping itself face-down with it own effect. Flipping a monster face-down removes lingering effects, so it won’t be banish by Number Archive unlike Super Dora, despite its effect. Dragulas in addition meets the three ideal criteria for the monster summoned off of Number Achive: high attack, defensive effects during the opponent’s turn, and the ability to detach a material the turn it’s summoned.

Why the three criteria for Number Archive matter: first, you cannot just run a bunch of different monsters you want summoned off of Number Archive for utility because Number Archive chooses what to summon randomly, so in order to be as consistent as possible we need to run 3 of the same single monster and 1 Number Archive and no other Extra Deck monsters, this has both upsides and obvious downsides. The high attack clause is the most self-explanatory, you want a high attack monster so you can easily attack for game, there are plenty of more powerful monster that you could run instead of Dragulas, such as Number 77: The Seven Sins, having 4000 ATK, but it doesn’t meet all the other conditions. The defensive capability is also important because Number Archive’s effect is a quick effect, meaning you can summon a Number Archive and then use it during the opponent’s turn. During the opponent’s turn Dragulas can be summoned in defense, 2800 DEF, and then use its effect to counter opponent’s Extra Deck plays. You can also simply flip Dragulas face-down so that if the opponent attacks him he’ll send a card on the field to the graveyard. More often than not this prevents you opponent from doing any reasonable damage to you this turn. Lastly, being able to detach 1 material is also important because of the synergy with SPYRAL Resort. It would be nice to run 3 Number Archive, but then when you use its effect there would be a chance to get another copy of itself, and because Number Archive prevents you from making additional Special Summons the turn you use its effect, you’d get stuck with a Number Archive that would be banished during the End Phase due to Number Archive’s effect. So ideally, we run 1 Archive and 3 of the monster to be summoned off of it. Using SPYRAL Resort though we can continually recycle that one Number Archive during the End Phase, but in order to get it into the graveyard during the End Phase you have to be able to detach it that turn. So you can do the combo to summon a Dragulas and then detach from Dragulas and send Number Archive to the graveyard. Then, during the End Phase Resort will shuffle the Archive back into the deck.

Kaijus:

I decided to also run the larger Kaiju suite in this build. There’s a handful of obnoxious lockdown monsters that give this deck grief, especially considering this deck wants to go second, allowing the opponent to make fields involving those monsters. The Kaiju suite allows you to get around that more easily than normal and also provides nice discard fodder for Quik-Fix and Twin Twisters. Most deck profiles I looked at where main decking at least 2 Kaijus to begin with, along with Raigeki, I figured I’d just cut to the chase and run 4 more cards and not have to deal with any of those lockdown monsters. They also have minor synergy with Resort because you can keep shuffling them back into the deck in order to make Interrupted Kaiju Slumber live almost always. On that note, I may potentially drop the Kaiju count down to 3 Kaijus.

Closing thoughts: I’d really like to see some cool SPYRAL cards coming out of the new set that can benefit this current deck’s strategy, so I’ll be looking forward to that news breaking over the coming days and weeks. If the right stuff comes out, maybe I’ll run SPYRAL at YCS Seattle, which would be a lot of fun. If you have any other cool ideas or maybe just want to make a comment about SPYRALs feel free to comment below!

Written by: Kyle Oliver