Don’t Destroy Stuff.

If we take a peek into the future, a meta resilient to destruction is just around the corner. How should we deal with this?

I always try my best to keep my knowledge up to date on future cards and archetypes that are going to be relevant. As such, I am regularly looking at future sets, analyzing new cards to find quality, and looking at tournament results both in the OCG and TCG. Also, with dueling programs such as DevPro and DuelingNetwork, I can freely duel against decks using cards that have not been released yet and gain even more insight.

Why I even bring this up, is because I’ve noticed a trend in the up and coming decks that we’ll be seeing. The trend is an extreme resilience to destruction, like in a deck like Bujins where you attempt to protect a monster from all destruction, and decks that really couldn’t care less about destruction due to there “floating” nature, like Fire Kings (although I would admit this deck is becoming increasingly less relevant). What’s interesting though is the sheer numbers these decks are coming in with, it almost seems like the entire meta will become resistant to destructive cards, making any deck reliant on them obsolete.

Just to help out here’s some of the decks that are like this that we’ll be seeing now and in the future:

• Starting with the now, there’s Bujins: You really have no business playing cards like Dark Hole or Mirror Force against this deck. The only cards that really hurt this deck are cards that don’t target and don’t destroy.
• Noble Knights: this deck is like a different version of Bujins, aka a Pillar Deck, where you create a single unbeatable monster and it holds up the entire deck, like a pillar. So far, the new support from Primal Origin hasn’t panned out all too greatly, but it does give the deck a small boost.
• Dragon Rulers: The Dragon Ruler monster in essence, are just big floaters. You can destroy them but they come back.
• Ghostricks: I’ve been seeing a lot of random tops with Ghostricks as an engine for some very interesting and unique decks; they seem to be at the forefront of the unique deck building archetypes. Ghostricks are are very destroyable and reimburse you for that destruction with some kind of horrid never ending defense.
• Madolche: Every Madolche monster is a floater by nature of the Madolche effect. Also, this deck will probably become a Tier 1 contender with the release of Primal Origin.
• Artifacts: If there was such thing as Spell and Trap floater monsters this would be it. For the most part this deck also makes Pillar-esque XYZ monsters in the form of Durendal and Pleiades.
• Elemental HEROs: Surprisingly, this deck will become very resistant to destruction when the structure deck comes out. The deck already uses Elemental HERO the Shining as a great floater monster but will gain the addition of Shadow Mist, a floater searcher, as well as access to DARK and LIGHT Masked HERO monsters, making it even harder to touch Neos Alius than ever before.
• Geargia: Everything in this deck searches for something else, so it’s kind of a sham when you destroy things in this deck except for in very specific ways. Of all these decks it’s probably the most vulnerable to destruction because it has the possibility to consolidate into Extra Deck monsters, but that usually means they’ve OTK’d you.
• Shadoll: They’re a new archetype from the Duelist Advent that is based around fusion summoning. All the Shadoll monsters have an effect when sent to the graveyard by a card effect. All the Fusion monster have an effect whenever they’re sent to the graveyard. I suggest picking up Armageddon Knight, Super Polymerization and Needlebug Nest if you’re looking for good cards that may go up in price. They’re showing some very promising results in the OCG, where the meta is far more intense in my opinion.
• Cosmic Dragons: They’re also from Duelist Advent. They’re all a new monster type called “Genryu”. All of them special summon a different named Cosmic Dragon from the deck when destroyed. They also all have different effects when used as Synchro material plus a really good archetype specific Synchro. They’ve showed no OCG results though, but I’m sure people will be playing them at least on a local level.

So, quite a few decks…

I noticed this all very prominently while testing with a fun deck using a Mythic Ruler base combined with Dark Magician and Dragon’s Mirror to fusion summon Amulet Dragon, that along with a couple other cute tech cards. I was playing online on DevPro, and just recently The Duelist Advent, now called Duelist Alliance in the TCG, pack was spoiled on the Wikia and shortly after added to DevPro’s card database, along with Dragons of Legend.  With that, plenty of people jump onto all these new archetypes and in random matches you naturally get to play against them. In these random games, I continually got matched up against decks running the Fire and Ice Hands, Shadolls and the new Genryu type monsters; along with those, a handful of other archetypes that could be considered floaty. Dragon Rulers really lack any type of removal other than hard destruction through cards like Dracossack, Heliopolis and Black Rose Dragon. The only adverse removal cards in the entire deck are Big Eye and Alsei, the Sylvan XYZ, if you actually run it (which I do, because I like it a lot). Big Eye is certainly good, but it’s really a waste of resources to summon one just to take someones Fire Hand so they don’t get its effect, plus there is a high potential of the play being interrupted in such a stun-like deck. Alsei doesn’t get summoned all that often because it has to be summoned with the Mythic Rulers which can expend themselves quickly a lot of the time. This left me with little else to do but continuously crash into his hand monsters, or hope he consolidated them into an XYZ foolishly. At the same time, my opponent was in just about the same situation. I’m running Dragon Rulers, which are just big floaters too, that means destroying them is pretty much a waste for my opponent too, because I can revive them for almost free (if I am managing my resources well enough). This was even more pronounced when I had to play against the Genryu deck, because that deck just incessantly summons their own monsters from the deck when destroyed and has an archetypal Pot of Avarice to facilitate the cycle.

Now, my point isn’t really that we got into this really weird floating gamestate where neither of us want to kill our opponent’s monsters with basic destruction. That is an interesting predicament, but what really matters is how the meta will shift because of that change. If the meta is becoming increasingly resilient to destruction, then we should start seeing an increasing shift towards cards that can remove monsters from the field without destroying them. This means things like Banishing, spinning to the deck and taking control.

Some cards I thought that might start seeing a lot more play would be Dimensional Prison, Phoenix Wing Wind Blast, Compulsory Evacuation Device and Mind Control. We’ll probably start seeing less of Mirror Force, Fiendish Chain and Effect Veiler. A majority of the mentioned decks don’t really care about effect negation, but the ones that do would probably be more hurt by Breakthrough Skill, which will probably see a rise in popularity due to Artifacts in everything. I also think it’d be cool if people started running some of the adverse problem solving monsters again, monsters like Neo Spacian Grand Mole and D.D. Warrior Lady can solve almost any of the problems presented by the above decks.

What does this all mean, I have no idea what it means. I honestly just wanted to document my thoughts.

QOTW? Question of the Week:

What do you think about this floatiness? Comment below!

Written by: Kyle