The early build. Before we get support and it becomes really good.
For fun, I decided to test out what could be done with Subterrors at the current moment, rap my head around them in a way. The deck has a lot of cool plays and control mechanism that I liked, but it clearly was not a good enough to compete on a high level. I am of the opinion that this deck will become a pretty broken deck once it gets more support because it has such solid mechanics as is and it’s in the Kozmo/Burning Abyss slot in the TCG part of new packs, meaning Konami loves them a lot. For now though I settled on what I thought was the best I could do with what we have and here’s what I made:
Subterror Deck
Monsters: (22)
- 2 Subterror Behemoth Stalagmo
- 3 Pot of Taboos
- 3 Subterror Behemoth Umastryx
- 3 Subterror Nemesis Warrior
- 3 Manju of the Ten Thousand Hands
- 2 Prediction Princess Coinorma
- 3 Des Lacooda
- 3 Prediction Princess Tarotrei
Spells: (10)
- 3 Terraforming
- 3 Prediction Ritual
- 3 The Hidden City
- 1 Ritual Sanctuary
Traps: (8)
- 2 Quaking Mirror Force
- 3 Burst Rebirth
- 3 Floodgate Trap Hole
Extra Deck: (15)
XYZ: (15)
- 1 Number 77: The Seven Sins
- 1 Number 81: Superdreadnought Rail Cannon Super Dora
- 1 Superdreadnought Rail Cannon Gustav Max
- 1 Number 35: Ravenous Tarantula
- 1 Phantom Fortress Enterblathnir
- 1 Number 92: Heart-eartH Dragon
- 1 Number S39: Utopia Lightning
- 1 Digital Bug Corebage
- 1 Number 39: Utopia
- 1 Castel, the Skyblaster Musketeer
- 1 Diamond Dire Wolf
- 1 Abyss Dweller
- 1 Traptrix Rafflesia
- 1 Super Quantal Mech Beast Grampulse
- 1 Number 20: Giga-Brilliant
Basic Premise:
Predominantly, Subterrors act as a control deck. They don’t OTK, though they can, and they don’t provide any lockdown potential seeing as they literally have no cards that lock opponent’s out of specific play styles. As a control deck, the prime directive is to react to the opponent’s plays, specifically stopping ones that are most crucial to the opponent’s strategy. This is my favorite type of deck style. A past deck of this style would be Shaddolls, there’s also noticeable similarity in Flip Effect mechanic, but that’s not exactly what gives them the “control” tag.
Currently, the deck’s control options are rather limited, but that seems to be where the deck is moving. With Prediction Princess Tarotrei in the deck, the main modes of control are through the battle phase with The Hidden City and Tarotrei. That means currently you have to supplement the built in control mechanisms with Trap cards, or hand traps if you so desire. The Hidden City allows you to flip up your Subterror Behemoth Umastryx during the opponent’s turn to banish their monsters. Tarotrei can flip important monsters the opponent controls face-down or can flip face-up your own powerful flip effect monsters such as Pot of Taboos. This all ideally and ultimately combines to have you slowly gain cad advantage and attack for game over multiple turns.
How to Subterror:
Subterror monsters are pretty simple, I would personally suggest hitting up the deck on an automated dueling platform such as DevPro to get a hang of the motion of the deck, specifically Subterror Nemesis Warrior, who was a little confusing in terms of application for me upon simply reading the card.
The first basic thing to do with the Subterrors is chain there summoning from the hand. Here’s an example of what you can do with a fairly typical set of three cards: Des Lacooda and any 2 “Subterror Behemoth” monster or The Hidden City/Terraforming used to search a Subterror Behemoth.
- Normal Summon Des Lacooda.
- Activate Des Lacooda’s effect to flip itself face-down.
- This allows you to activate a Subterror Behemoth’s effect in hand, special summoning the Subterror from your hand.
- Activate your new Subterror Behemoth’s effect to flip itself face-down.
- This allows to use yet another Subterror Behemoth from the hand.
Technically you can keep doing this until your field is full or until you run out Subterror Behemoth’s in hand. As of now this is a mostly pointless chain because you can only use the Flip Effect of each Subterror Behemoth once per turn, making having more than 2 Subterror Behemoths (as there are only 2 Subterror Behemoth’s total) redundant.
The second important thing for this deck is the use of Subterror Nemesis Warrior. Nemesis Warrior has a very bizarre quick-effect that allows you to dodge and respond to the opponent’s plays in weird ways. Because Nemesis Warrior’s effect tributes your monsters, you can use his effect to tribute a monster that would be affected by another negative effect. For example, if you where to flip summon Umastryx and use its effect targeting a monster in order to banish it, the opponent might activate Effect Veiler, Breakthrough Skill, etc. You can chain Nemesis Warrior’s effect to tribute the Umastryx to dodge the effect negation in order to summon another Umastryx from the deck. The first Umastryx’s effect will still resolve banishing a monster, and you’ll only lose 1 card, being your Nemesis Warrior, which isn’t really a loss, because once you flip the new Umastryx you can revive the Nemesis Warrior for free, making a loop of sorts to evade effects. This loop is also very nice for dodging the pluthera of Mirror Force cards now in play because it summons the new monster in defense mode.
A neat play, that I find quite helpful when your hand is in a bind, and because it’s not completely obvious after you read all the Subterror cards utilizes just The Hidden City alone. With The Hidden City you can search your deck for a Subterror Nemesis Warrior. Then, you can set that Nemesis Warrior and negate 1 attack on your opponent’s turn by flipping the Nemesis Warrior face-up with The Hidden City. This play is nice when you have no way to get started on your first turn because it it’s just a hair better than normal summoning Nemesis Warrior and hoping it survives. If you maintain the Nemesis Warrior you can then next turn summon any normal summonable monster (at least in this specific build) and tribute it with Nemesis Warrior to get you engine moving.
How to Predict a Princess:
Prediction Princesses are also pretty straightforward. Using Manju and the field spell Ritual Sanctuary, search you deck for Prediction Ritual and Prediction Princess Tarotrei in order to make a Ritual Summon. In general you’ll want to be using Pot of Taboos or Subterror Behemoth Stalagmo for the ritual tribute. Tarotrei is level 9, making the level 9 Taboos and level 10 Stalagmo make a lot of sense in the ritual summoning regard. They’re also both Flip Effect monsters, so you can immediately revive them during the End Phase with Tarotrei’s effect. The synergy is pretty apparent.
The only other thing I think that’s worth mentioning is how to OTK using Tarotrei and Nemesis Warrior. Here’s an example field you could make pretty easily in this deck: Tarotrei, Nemesis Warrior and any monster (at least level 3), I’ll assume for this play that it’s Des Lacooda because it’s the weakest monster in the deck.
- Attack with Nemesis Warrior and Tarotrei and Des Lacooda: 5000 total
- Use Nemesis Warrior’s effect tributing Des Lacooda to summon an Umastryx from your deck face-down.
- Use Tarotrei’s effect to flip Umastryx to face-up attack mode.
- When Umastrx is flipped face-up activate Nemesis Warrior’s effect to special summon it from your graveyard.
- continue attacking with Umastryx and the new Nemesis Warrior: 8800 total
That’s all for my profile, I’ll leave the rest to your testing and to hopefully future builds utilizing new support.
Written by: Kyle Oliver