Deck Profile: Volcanic XYZ

‘Cause I said I would, here’s a profile of my Volcanic deck. The deck is also still in the testing phases so it’s not totally complete, keep that I mind. The deck is based around some quick rank 4 XYZ as well as the basic Volcanic business. If you don’t know about the basic Volcanic monsters and the effects I point your towards this link: [HERE] That’s a link to my old article about the basic Volcanic engine, so check it out.

As always, we begin with a decklist:

MONSTERS (15):

• 3 Volcanic Rocket
• 3 Volcanic Shell
• 2 Summoner Monk
• 2 Royal Firestorm Guards
• 1 Blackwing – Zephyros the Elite
• 1 Blackwing – Gale the Whirlwind
• 1 Sangan
• 2 Effect Veiler

SPELLS (13):

• 3 Pot of Duality
• 3 Mystical Space Typhoon
• 2 Blaze Accelerator
• 1 Foolish Burial
• 1 Book of Moon
• 1 Pot of Avarice
• 1 Dark Hole
• 1 Monster Reborn

TRAPS (12):

• 3 Raigeki Break
• 2 Torrential Tribute
• 2 Fiendish Chain
• 2 Call of the Haunted
• 1 Compulsory Evacuation Device
• 1 Scrap-Iron Scarecrow
• 1 Transmigration Prophecy

EXTRA(15):

• 2 Maestroke the Symphony Djinn
• 1 Photon Papilloperative
• 1 No. 39: Utopia
• 1 CNo. 39: Utopia Ray
• 1 Wind-Up Zenmaister
• 1 Gem Knight Pearl
• 1 Steelswarm Roach
• 1 Evigishki Merrowgeist
• 1 No. 16: Shock Master
• 1 Ally of Justice Catastor
• 1 Brionac, Dragon of the Ice Barrier
• 1 Blackwing Armor Master
• 1 Black Rose Dragon
• 1 Ancient Fairy Dragon

At first glance, I would say the deck has a very obscure line-up when it comes to the cards it’s running. Aside from a couple standard cards, such as the Veilers and Torrentials and pretty standard one-offs the rest of the cards are highly specialized to the deck. I shall hopefully go through each of them and explain my choices.

The deck has two “modes” of play. The first is a pretty standard “stun mode”. You use the basic Volcanic plays and the main way you control  the game in this mode is through Blaze Accelerator. Maintain a field presence using the big bodies like Royal Firestorm Guards at 1700 and Volcanic Rocket 1900. (Ironically clashing with Kabazauls and Sabersaurus respectively) With the Accelerator’s ability to destroy monsters on the spot, a 1900 ATK  monster becomes a big threat pretty fast so don’t be to surprised when the deck hunkers down and Rocket remains on the field for more than a turn. If you’ve noticed, the deck doesn’t exactly have a lot of usable monsters in the sense of attacking. A lot of the monster such as Shell, Veiler and Sangan don’t really count as monsters and with that in mind you attacking force is actually quite slim and comes down to really Guards, Rocket and Rank 4’s. (which are usually a combination of Rocket and Summoner Monk)

The second “mode” is a much more aggressive style that is more of a “Rank 4 spam”. In this mode the Blaze Accelerator’s are almost completely useless, which is an important note to the deck’s strategy. The deck is able to bounce between two very opposite play styles almost seamlessly depending on the opponent’s deck and the general game-state. Say an opponent is being really threatened by your Blaze Accelerator in your “Stun Mode” and go out of there way to destroy it; you can easily switch to this mode since it doesn’t rely on Accelerator at all to take advantage of your opponent’s course of action. But back to this deck style, the Rank 4 mode is more highly based around Summoner Monk. It uses Summoner Monk, Rocket, Call of the Haunted and Zephyros in tandem to make quick, and most importantly, efficient Rank 4 XYZ summons and uses those Rank 4’s as a toolbox. There aren’t any specific plays of note, the deck mostly flows into combos based on the cards you have and the state of the game, if that makes any sense.

The Monsters:

The monsters are all pretty standard and straight-forward but I figured there was a couple important things to mention. First off, the deck is quite vulnerable to opposing Effect Veilers so at all times keep an eye out for it and the odds of the opponent having it. In order to play around Effect Veiler this deck will require you to be very good at reading the opponent’s hand. One of the worst possible things that can happen to you in this deck is to use Summoner Monk’s effect into an Effect Veiler with no back-up play. You can also lose almost all your momentum if your opponent Veilers a Royal Firestorm Guard and you have no follow-up. Sometimes though it is worth it to burn a Summoner Monk or Guards, but that’s depending on how you read the situation. Just know that you need to read the opponent well in the case of Veiler and play around it according to your hand.

The second thing to say about the deck is about Royal Firestorm Guards. When you summon Guards you almost always will want his effect to go off, so ensure you’re in a situation in which it will get its effect when you summon it. Similarly, you don’t want to summon it randomly for an XYZ summon or just because you need a beater unless it’s absolutely necessary. Recycling your Shells and Rockets is vital to the deck working correctly so don’t use the monster flippantly. I designed the deck with a couple specific cards to force Guards (and other similar effects like Monk and Rocket) to dodge cards like Veiler, Fiendish Chain and even Skill Drain. Always keep in mind you can force your effects to resolve with Torrential Tribute, Book of Moon, Compulsory Evacuation Device and even Raigeki Break. (I’d rather not Raigeki Break my own cards ever, so don’t do that, but at least keep this multi-purpose function in mind) On that note, don’t take Book of Moon lightly in this deck it is one of the most versatile and powerful cards in the deck; it is easily the one of the most important play makers the deck has.

Lean Blackwing Engine:

The deck also sports an incredibly lean Blackwing engine. The mini engine is very important to the deck’s success because it provides a large amount of plays and versatility with itself alone.

Zephyros is one of the biggest power cards in the deck. The card has obvious uses with the bouncing of Call of the Haunted as well as Fiendish Chain, and in the worst cases you can bounce Blaze Accelerator and good effect monsters like Rocket and Guards to re-use there effects. It’s searchable very easily using Summoner Monk, Foolish Burial and just drawing it the normal way. I mentioned on the podcast one of the best plays: Call of the Haunted + Summoner Monk in the graveyard. You revive the Monk then pitch a Spell Card to summon Zephyros from the deck, then XYZ for a Rank 4 that can immediately detach the Zephyros. (such as Papilloperative or Maestroke) Then you can bounce the Call of the Haunted to revive the Zephyros. The play is furthered with Rocket or Gale in hand. Rocket gives you a free spell to pitch as well as another level 4 to XYZ with the Zephyros and Gale is always good with Zephyros.

Speaking of Gale, he’s one of the most fantastic pieces of the deck. In combination with Zephyros is makes a lot of nice level 7 Synchros (always keep mind that Armor Master is REALLY REALLY GOOD)since you can special summon Gale if you control a Zephyros, which has some really easy combo potential in a tight spot while only using one card. With just a Zephyros in the graveyard, you can in the worst possible scenario, normal summon Gale, bounce it your hand, then special summon gale again; nicely enough this allows you to use Gale’s effect twice. The same can be done by reviving a Gale with Call of the Haunted, then bouncing Gale for Zephyros then special summoning Gale. I’m sure as you could tell, the plays go on forever.

Gale is also just a generally strong monster and can remove most threats by himself. He also makes a very nice Veiler/Solemn bait since he really is an unimportant monster in the end but is an imminent threat upon the opponent. He also makes the dumbest soft lock in the world with the one copy of Scrap-Iron Scarecrow that I run, a card choice which I’ll talk about later. The last thing that’s important about Gale is that it rounds out the things I can search with Sangan, which can be very helpful when I need an out to big meanies like Laggia and Shi’En.

Spells & Traps:

Starting with the spells; Pot of Duality is a really nice middle man between the deck’s two play-styles. It adds consistency to more stun plays and is pitch-able by Monk when you want to speed up. I use the MST in a similar fashion. Even though a lot of decks may not run any back-row at all (Chaos Dragons) it’s still a live card when it comes to Summoner Monk, and free pitch-able spells are almost always welcome. There’s even the 3 Raigeki Breaks which make just about any dead card game 1 live as a discard fodder.

You may also notice there’s no Heavy Storm. Firstly, the deck runs a pretty fair amount of back-row support, a lot of which floats on the board like Fiendish Chain and Call of the Haunted. Secondly, I don’t run Heavy Storm in most decks now, even in ones that may seem like they could run it, because I feel the threat of the card is more powerful than the card itself. Since I don’t run it, it looks like to the opponent that I haven’t drawn it yet, so the threat of Heavy Storm is always imminent and ideally they wont set as much or they do set a bunch and that signals a card like Dark Bribe or Starlight Road, or maybe that they’ve got some balls.

As for Traps, the Raigeki Breaks are really good in this deck. It’s very easy to make up for the negs you take when playing it with the obvious Volcanic Shell as well as with Blaze Accelerator and Zephyros. It’s also never bad to just ditch a dead card in your hand when you need to activate it but don’t have any of the ideal discards. I plan to test out Phoenix Wing Wind Blast in its place but as I’m currently still in the beginning phases of testing I opted for a more general and obvious use card, since Phoenix Wing is more confusing and I’m still not sure all the decks major weaknesses. As for why I run 3 Raigeki Break, I initially started with 2, but it became really obvious after a short time the deck could easily support the 3rd one and since the card is so dang powerful I was quick to run 3 of it.

Random Scrap-Iron Scarecrow is there because the deck has problems keeping its lifepoint count up when taking into consideration the 500 the deck continually pays for Volcanic Shell. It’s not uncommon in a game to activate Shell’s effect 5 to 6 times which adds up to 2000-2500 lifepoints. It’s also vital that I always have enough to pay for its effect so I can’t allow myself to get far below 2000 or the Shells might become useless. I tested out cards like Mystic Wok since it helped dodge Veiler as well as Emergency Provision, but I wasn’t satisfied with them, and in the end this card was the best tech card to help maintain a higher lifepoint count. Also, due to the deck’s passive nature it was a perfect fit. I can easily protect my fairly threatening Volcanic Rocket from things that can attack over it and proceed to destroy those monsters afterwards with  Blaze Accelerator.

The last card, Transmigration Prophecy,  is a really good card I’ll say that much. The immediate use of the card is to recycle Volcanic Shell’s even more, but it’s also a fantastic stop to any graveyard targeting cards. It can get you a nice leg up in the Inzektor match-up and just do some general negating against common one-offs like Monster Reborn, Call of the Haunted and Pot of Avarice. Trans also can help recycle more important cards in the deck back in which works well in this deck once you’ve got the ball rolling because your deck gets thinned really fast and you get draw loops going with Royal Firestorm Guards. Also, who doesn’t want to use Pot of Avarice a second time?

Extra Deck

Most of the extra is pretty obvious. Every Rank 4 we have right now. (not including the really bad ones) 2 Maestroke because it’s the best fit for the deck. In the future both Daigusto Emerald and Lavalval Chain will be major workhorses for the deck since both of them have effects that hugely help the deck. Those two seem so good for the deck that I foresee a whole lot of potential for Volcanics in the future.

The Synchros are pretty much the easiest Synchros you can make with the deck. Black Rose and Armor Master are the main two you’ll probably make. Ancient Fairy is for Gravekeepers and Darkworlds and any other random field spell deck. Catastor is for Veiler + Level 4. Brionac is for Gale + Sangan or Monster Reborn, which happens more than I’d expect and that’s why I put Brionac in.

Side Deck?

No official Side Deck currently, but cards that I thought about running in the side where

• Level Limit Area B – Really good when you go XYZ Spam
• Dimensional Fissure  – Despite what it may seem this deck dodges this card easily other than Shell, which would likely be the card I’d side this out for.
• Prohibition – It’s good against most decks this deck is bad against, and it’s a spell to pitch with Monk at worst.
• Trap Eater – Skill Drain is a particular nuisance against this deck, that and level 8 Synchros are hawt.
• Bottomless Trap Hole + Dimensional Prison – Generic removal when needed.

Hope you enjoyed. I went pretty in depth. Be back next week!