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Deck Profile: Ultra Athletes (post Crossed Souls)

Considering my recent articles, I figured it was only fitting to make a deck profile.

So, here we are, U.A. stuff again. Sorry if you’re tired of it, but it’s that or Tree deck (or Shaddolls if you’d like, but don’t expect anything special there), because that’s all I’ve been really doing Yu-Gi-Oh! wise. I recently have been playing a lot of the Pokemon trading card game; I went to a large event in Seattle and played a Flareon deck (for anyone that means something to) and had a lot of fun. Long story short, I haven’t been taking all too much time to do Yu-Gi-Oh! stuff in my spare time other than for locals, which only involves the decks I already have built being Shaddolls, Sylvans and U.A.s. So for the time being, my Yugi-thoughts are only about those decks.

That being said, a lot of my testing for U.A.s has been online and this is the preliminary deck list I’ve come up with. I wouldn’t be confident at all with this build at a large scale event, but I’m trying to work towards potentially taking it to my next regionals. While U.A.s certainly got better with the new support and it really covered up a lot of the deck’s problems, I would say that the meta has been developing much faster than the Ultra Athletes have been, so despite being better than before, I would probably say the deck will perform worse in competitive play than before. With that, not so exciting intro, here’s my current build:

 

Monsters (16):

  • 2 U.A. Dreadnought Dunker
  • 1 U.A. Blockbacker
  • 2 U.A. Rival Returner
  • 1 U.A. Goalkeeper
  • 2 U.A. Mighty Slugger
  • 2 U.A. Perfect Ace
  • 3 Heroic Challenger Assault Halberd
  • 3 U.A. Midfielder

Spells (19):

  • 3 Reinforcement of the Army
  • 3 U.A. Signing Deal
  • 2 Terraforming
  • 3 Mystical Space Typhoon
  • 2 U.A. Turnover Tactics
  • 2 The Monarchs Stormforth
  • 1 U.A. Powered Jersey
  • 3 U.A. Stadium

Traps (5):

  • 2 Mirror Force
  • 3 U.A. Penalty Box

Extra Deck (15):

XYZs (15):

  • 1 Mecha Phantom Beast Dracossack
  • 1 Number 11: Big Eye
  • 1 Constellar Ptolemy M7
  • 1 Gauntlet Launcher
  • 1 Stellarknight Constellar Diamond
  • 1 Wind-Up Arsenal Zenmaioh
  • 1 Adreus, Keeper of Armageddon
  • 1 Constellar Pleiades
  • 1 Artifact Durendal
  • 1 Heroic Champion – Excalibur
  • 1 Castel, the Skyblaster Musketeer
  • 1 Lavalval Chain
  • 1 Gagaga Cowboy
  • 2 Planetellarknight Ptolemaios

Basic Strategy:

The game plan is the same as before, pressure the opponent with Slugger during your turn and swap to Perfect Ace during the opponent’s. The difference is new tools to get that same job done as well as more ways to set up your ideal fields. I’ll spare the double explanation for anyone who has read my previous articles, but if you haven’t, please go read those now for some insight on specific cards and choices. For the most part I’ll just talk about numbers and strategy rather than card choices for this article.

As far as opening plays go, it really depends on whether or go first or second and what my opponent has on the field (if I’m going second). Ideally, if I’m going first I’ll shoot for getting a Perfect Ace on the field with a setup to search with Stadium during my next turn. If I have the choice I’ll usually choose to go second unless I know my opponent has some kind of detriment to my deck in their deck that I can’t allow them to use on their first turn.

Going second I try to go into my opponent really aggressively as fast as possible, I try to get them to use a lot of cards so I can know what they have at their disposal. It’s really important for this deck to understand how much your opponent is capable of doing to you during their turns so you know what to be negating with Ace and what are the best setups to disrupt the opponent’s turn. In order to pull this off it typically involves using either Mighty Slugger or Dreadnought Dunker on my first turn in order to pressure the opponent. If making an offensive play causes me to not have any plays on my next turn or if failing causes me to have no resources I always choose the passive option (unless the situation is naturally dire enough to require aggression).

I also tend to play cards in this deck in waves of sorts. You want to hold off on revealing you have an additional option for as long as possible in this deck. For example, if I’m trying to be aggressive turn one and I have Midfielder, Dunker and a Signing Deal, I’ll first normal the Midfielder then bounce for Dunker and continue with only that play as long as my opponent does nothing about it. I only use the Signing Deal if I feel it I can use it to bait something I want to bait or if my first play forced out an opponent’s option and I want to continue making plays. I’ll never summon the Dunker, and then upon success continue to invest more monsters to the board for a more aggressive push, unless of course the opponent has no possible way of stopping my play (like if they have no spells or traps).

Ratios and Numbers:

I chose to run 2 of all the essential U.A., or at least what I consider to be essentials, and then 1 of the U.A.s that are very situational. Both Goalkeeper and Blockbacker tend to be good on a match-up basis so they aren’t regular search targets, but because they’re so easy to grab when needed I decided 1 copy was optimal. Neither of the two is completely dead in any match-up, but sometimes neither is pivotal.

Similar to before, both Perfect Ace and Mighty Slugger are the two main players in the deck. I run 2 of each, while before I probably would’ve ran 3. The reason for this is do to the advent of Rival Rebounder. Rebounder allows you to recur U.A. monsters so you can less of your essentials because they can be recurred if necessary. I run 2 of Rebounder because he tends to get important if you get into a later game because he causes you to have good comeback options.

Initially, I was expecting Dreadnought Dunker to be a 1 of utility card, but I consistently in playtesting went to search for it and needed more copies after one perished, especially since Dunker works as a really good bait, so the first copy tends to get expended pretty quickly. Dunker also works fantastically in moving the game towards a simplified game state, where both players have less cards, in which U.A. thrives due to it’s powerful stand alone monsters. Every time you resolve Dunker’s effect the games scale tips slightly in the Ultra Athlete’s players favor.

I run only 1 Powered Jersey now, I mean I really love this card because it just massacres the opponent when it works, but it really causes your opening hands to suffer when you open with it because it provides no help as far as setup and defense are concerned. Now, with the addition of Penalty Box you can search the one copy when necessary, so I don’t think running more than 1 is quite necessary. The card itself is incredibly powerful though, I might consider more copies after more testing.

Extra Deck:

The Extra Deck is mostly pointless in this deck, so I tried to put as much utility in it as possible. The only monster I’d say you have to run in the deck is Lavalval Chain simply because it can dump Penalty Box. You run a fair amount of 7’s so Big Eye and Dracossack aren’t all that difficult to make. The Rank 6 XYZ are probably the easiest to pull off next to 4’s because you can just normal summon Rival Rebounder to special summon either another copy of himself or a Goalkeeper and then you have 2 6’s. For Rank 4 XYZ there is of course Lavalval Chain, then Castel for removal utility, Excalibur as an out to Towers, and then a Planetellarknight Ptolemaeus engine consisting of 2 Ptolemaeus, 1 Diamond and 1 Pleiades. Ptolemaeus can also summon Zenmaioh, Adreus and Durendal, but the deck is capable of summoning them the true way with 5’s so I don’t count them as a part of the engine.

Other Things:

On a YouTube channel I watch, for Dubkdad if you’re familiar, he made a deck profile recently for U.A. and it featured Reasoning. I had previously tried it and been less than satisfied with it, but he made a good point about its synergy with the new Levels that the deck gained as well as for milling Penalty Box, so I’ll probably be testing that out again in the future. He also ran Double Summon, which I would like to test too.

If you’ve got any questions about the deck feel free to comment below!

QOTW? Question of the Week:

What did you think of the results of the most recent YCS? Did you watch the live stream? What do you think about the change back from draft to standard for the top cut?

Written by: Kyle Oliver

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