You know that TCG exclusive archetype that isn’t Burning Abyss? Me either.
It’s me Kyle again with yet another Monday article! It just keeps on happening… That aside, I’ve got a deck profile for what I think is quite the underrated deck: Ultra Athletes. I’ve been playing this deck a lot on DevPro these past couple of weeks and trying to hone the build and I have been quite happy with the results. The deck basically tears Burning Abyss to shreds and also has a fairly even match versus Shaddolls; Qliphorts is a little awkward, but if you open well it’s pretty even. I’ll start off with the build I’ve been running:
Monsters (12):
- 1 U.A. Goalkeeper
- 3 U.A. Mighty Slugger
- 3 U.A. Perfect Ace
- 3 U.A. Midfielder
- 2 Warrior Lady of the Wasteland
Spells (23):
- 3 Reinforcement of the Army
- 3 Terraforming
- 3 Pot of Duality
- 3 Mystical Space Typhoon
- 2 Forbidden Chalice
- 3 Monarchs Stormforth
- 3 U.A. Powered Jersey
- 3 U.A. Stadium
Traps (5):
- 2 Breakthrough Skill
- 3 Royal Decree
Extra Deck (15):
- 3 Chimeratech Fortress Dragon
- 1 Gaia Dragon, the Thunder Charger
- 1 Wind-Up Zenmaioh
- 1 Tiras, Keeper of Genesis
- 1 Adreus, Keeper of Armageddon
- 1 Number 61: Volcasaurus
- 1 Artifact Durendal
- 1 Number 33: Chronomaly Machu Mech
- 1 Number 85: Crazy Box
- 1 Blade Armor Ninja
- 1 Heroic Champion – Gandiva
- 1 Heroic Champion – Excalibur
- 1 Castel the Skyblaster Musketeer
How Does This Deck Work?:
The deck is quite straight forward; you use both Mighty Slugger and Perfect Ace to control the tempo of the game during either players turn. Perfect Ace can discard 1 card during the opponent’s turn to negate anything (even effects of continuous cards that activate, like Qliphort Scout’s effect for instance), but only once per turn. Mighty Slugger is literally the same as Armades, Keeper of Boundaries, nothing when Slugger attacks, which sounds underwhelming, but it’s atrociously good. To supplement all the U.A. monsters is there bouncing summon condition. Similar to Genex Ally Birdman, the U.A. monsters can bounce another on field U.A. to summon themselves from the hand, but only once per turn for each U.A. (another slight difference is that Birdman is an effect to summon, while U.A.s are all inherent which is actually fantastic rulings wise in the favor of U.A.s) Using this summon condition, you can summon a Slugger during your turn and attack with no possible activations by the opponent, then bounce Slugger for Perfect Ace in defense mode to negate things during your opponent’s turn. Once it gets back to your turn, just rinse and repeat, and summon Slugger again by bouncing Perfect Ace.
The Plays:
This deck has one problem, which I’ll refer to as “Midfielder or bust”. This deck cannot grind its way out of a bad hand if it doesn’t at the very least open with one copy of one of the following cards: U.A. Midfielder, Reinforcement of the Army, Warrior Lady of the Wasteland or Monarchs Stormforth. Without one of the four cards, the deck can literally make no plays! Fear not, because when you do open one of those cards the floodgates burst wide open.
Ideal Opening:
The ideal opening for the deck is 1 copy of the Field Spell, 1 copy of Midfielder and Royal Decree (These cards can of course be swapped for any of there searching counterparts, a.k.a Terraforming and Reinforcement of the Army)
- You play the Field Spell, the normal summon Midfielder.
- When your normal summon a U.A. monster, the Field Spell acts as a Black Whirlwind of sorts, allowing you to search your deck for any U.A. monster. You search your deck for Perfect Ace.
- Special summon Perfect Ace by bouncing Midfielder.
- Set Royal Decree.
Pretty simple, but it essentially puts a pretty hefty lockdown on the opponent as well as sets up your entire deck for the future.
Midfielder Mix-Ups:
One of the other important things to do with this deck is make plays with Midfielder. Once, during either player’s turn you can return a U.A. monster you control to the hand to special summon a differently named one from your hand. There are three basic applications with this: pushing for damage, stackin up boosts with Stadium and cycling defenses during the opponent’s turn.
The first application is during your turn. Let’s say we opened pretty standard and have a Perfect Ace on board and a Midfielder and a Slugger in hand.
- You can normal summon Midfielder and switch Perfect Ace to attack mode.
- Attack with Ace, if the opponent tries to activate anything that may effect the Perfect Ace you can use Midfielder to bounce it for Slugger.
- Then, whether or not the opponent does anything, after you’ve attacked with Ace, use Midfielder to bounce Ace for your Slugger. (if you have the Field Spell, at this time you’ll activate it getting a 500 ATK boost to all of your face-up monsters)
- Now you can attack with Slugger and then Midfielder.
- During Main Phase 2 you can bounce Slugger to re-summon Ace in defense mode.
Next, there’s cycling defenses and boosts. Let’s say we’ve just completed the above scenario and also have our 1 Goalkeeper in hand because we searched it. If you activate Ace during the opponent’s turn to negate a card you can chain Midfielder’s effect to bounce for a Goalkeeper in hand. This is good for a few reasons: One, Ace doesn’t need to be face-up to resolve, so this allows you to dodge any effect negation card, most likely Breakthrough Skill. If you activate Ace, they chain Breakthrough, you can chain Midfielder bouncing Ace so it’s not face-up to be negated. Two, this will activate Stadium again boosting Midfielder from the already boosted 1700 ATK to 2200 ATK. Three, this let’s you summon another defensive play during the opponent’s turn, Goalkeeper, making the opponent’s options lessen further.
Card Choices:
The first thing I think I would have noticed when looking at the deck is the lopsided searching cards vs. search targets ratio the deck has (although if you look up U.A. decklists on the internet you’ll probably see the same thing in every build). The reason for this is because firstly, you really want to see the cards that you can search in this deck: Stadium and Midfielder. In order to more consistently open with the cards you really want to see you have to max out on them. Secondly, Perfect Ace pretty much covers you if you draw a search card with no target because that card becomes easy discard fodder.
Warrior Lady of the Wasteland:
Warrior Lady of the Wasteland is a battle searcher, when destroyed by battle she summons a 1500 ATK or less EARTH Warrior from the deck. That includes every monster in the deck except for Slugger. Giant Rat can accomplish the same goal, but has more ATK, but Warrior Lady can be searched by Reinforcements of the Army, meaning you can access her more often than Giant Rat and makes Reinforcements less dead more often. It also make Rivalry of Warlords have higher side deck synergy and can be used to XYZ for Heroic Champion – Excalibur.
Forbidden Chalice & Breakthrough Skill:
This deck really hates Artifacts because of the way they disrupt the deck. I also wanted to have at least one other potential defensive option other than Perfect Ace during the opponent’s turn.
Chalice can be used on your first turn as an answer to Artifacts and other such monster effects the opponent may use. Breakthrough Skill is a little more beneficial in that it provides a double effect negation, but with the downside of not working turn 1 and conflicting with Decree. This is easily remedied though because if you have a Decree up you can just discard the Breakthrough Skills with Perfect Ace instead and still be able to use their graveyard negation effect.
Royal Decree:
There’s a lot of really broken Trap cards floating around in just about every deck right now and also, U.A. doesn’t have a particularly large amount of room to fill with defensive cards, making it really easy to simply put in Decree instead of defense. This gives the deck a sturdy out to Vanity’s Emptiness, Skill Drain, Artifact Sanctum, and pretty much the whole Burning Abyss deck.
The other reason Royal Decree is very helpful is because the largest point of vulnerability for the deck is during their Main Phase 1, when they’re trying to setup and make plays. Cards like Phoenix Wing Wind Blast, Solemn Warning or Bottomless Trap Hole, can shut down a subpar hand, but having Decree pretty much saves you from the majority of the outs most decks have for the Slugger plus Ace soft lock.
The Extra Deck:
This deck pretty much never uses the Extra Deck, so it’s mostly filler. If anything, the only cards I ever summon are Adreus and Volcasaurus. Adreus can clear continuous Spell and Trap cards that may cause a problem and Volcasaurus can make really quick game ending scenarios. Other than that, in 2 weeks of testing I’ve never summoned anything else from the Extra Deck.
Hope For the Future:
Probably the best thing about this deck though, is that it has a lot of future potential. There are a lot of cards that almost work well in the deck such as Feast of the Wild Lvl 5 that are just waiting for the deck to get more support. The good news is that it looks like they’re probably going to get new cards released every pack now for a good while. If the deck already has potential now, I can’t way to see what the deck will be able to do in the future!
QOTW? Question of the Week:
Prediction: what deck do you think will get first at ARG Seattle?
Written by: Kyle Oliver