Lightsworn Ruler 2014 Post Dragons of Legend

It’s finals week, so for lack of time I’ll do a quick update on Lightsworn Rulers.

I was requested to do an update on my deck now that we have Kuribandit and in the future some Lightsworn tuners, so I’ll do a quick profile for you guys.

Main Deck (40):

Monsters (35):

• 1 Red-Eyes Darkness Metal Dragon
• 3 Judgment Dragon
• 1 Blaster, Dragon Ruler of Infernos
• 1 Tidal, Drago Ruler of Waterfalls
• 1 Tempest, Dragon Ruler of Storms
• 2 Lightpulsar Dragon
• 1 Gragonith, Lightsworn Dragon
• 3 Darkflare Dragon
• 1 Jain, Lightsworn Paladin
• 3 Lyla, Lightsworn Sorceress
• 1 Ehren, Lightsworn Monk
• 2 Eclipse Wyvern
• 1 Debris Dragon
• 3 Lumina, Lightsworn Summoner
• 3 Kuribandit
• 1 Necro Gardna
• 1 Shire, Lightsworn Spirit
• 2 Card Trooper
• 1 Bacon Saver
• 1 Ryko, Lightsworn Hunter
• 2 Rainbow Kuriboh

Spells (5):

• 3 Solar Recharge
• 1 Allure of Darkness
• 1 Charge of the Light Brigade

Extra Deck (15):

• 1 Star Eater
• 1 Black Rose Dragon
• 1 Orient Dragon
• 1 Number 74: Master of Blades
• 1 Mecha Phantom Beast Dracossack
• 1 Number 11: Big Eye
• 1 Constellar Ptolemy M7
• 1 Queen Dragun Djinn
• 1 Number 101: Silent Honor ARK
• 1 Diamond Dire Wolf
• 1 Starliege Paladynamo
• 1 Lavalval Chain
• 1 Daigusto Emeral
• 1 Constellar Hyades
• 1 Leviair the Sea Dragon

Side Deck (15):

• 2 Lightray Daedalus
• 2 Ryko, Lightsworn Hunter
• 2 Ghostrick Jackfrost
• 3 Mystical Space Typhoon
• 2 Twister
• 2 Breakthrough Skill
• 2 Royal Decree

Changes from last time:

• +1 Judgment Dragon
• +3 Kuribandit
• +1 Bacon Saver
• +1 Allure of Darkness
• +1 Orient Dragon
• +1 Number 74: Master of Blades
• +1 Daigusto Emeral

• -2 Necro Gardna
• -3 Needlebug Nest
• -1 Ancient Fairy Dragon
• -1 Ghostrick Alucard

The main reason I post this is because of the release of Kuribandit in Dragons of Legend. Basically, Kuribandit allows me to not run Needlebug Nest and also allows you to run Allure of Darkness, both allow you to setup infinitely faster. Needlebug Nest is fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but it’s quite slow and vulnerable to end phase MSTs, which sucks, so the Bandit gives some very adverse speed and even skrys into cards that make the deck go even faster. Bandit also allows for the addition of Allure of Darkness once again, which I welcome. Allure of Darkness is great because it pushes into the deck to see Recharge and Charge more often and it also is a really easy card to side out game 2 and 3. Kuribandit is only particularly good turn 1, late game I tend to want to summon Lightsworn monsters instead, so you can just Allure Bandits away late game or pitch them to summon Lightpulsar from the graveyard. The fact that Kuribandit is DARK is very helpful as well. The additional DARKs makes summoning Darkflare from hand more regular and reviving Lightpulsar much more frequent, meaning you can graveyard correct by pitching Lightsworn monsters more often and make Judgment Dragon live more often.

I replaced a single Necro Gardna with a Bacon Saver and dropped the third Gardna. The Bacon Saver has unique interactions with opposing cards that require attacks to be negated because Bacon Saver can negate my own attacks. An example would be Swift Scarecrow. Scarecrow must negate the attack to end the battle phase, so if I negate the attack of my own monster with Bacon Saver in response to a Swift Scarecrow the battle phase won’t end because Scarecrow isn’t negating my attack, my Bacon Saver is. Bacon Saver is not nearly as powerful as Gardna though because it has more strict activation requirements and Bacon Saver can only be used once per duel, but in testing that rarely, if ever, comes up. Bacon Saver can also targets the monster it’s negating, unlike Gardna, so it can target your own Master of Blades, which he can negate to destroy a card. Also, many people don’t even know what it does, so it allows you to “pull a fast one” on them sometimes when they check your graveyard for Gardnas. Lastly, it’s far more adorable than Necro Gardna. I dropped the 3rd Gardna in favor of the Rainbow Kuribohs, which I wasn’t running for the past months.

About Rainbow Kuriboh: I was not running it for a while in testing because it’s not very important in a lot of match-ups, but in the end it works similar to Necro Gardna in that if you don’t run it you randomly lose a lot more. It adds this invisible layer to prevent you from losing that’s hard to specifically credit to the Gardnas and Kuribohs. The Kuribohs could feasibly be swapped with cards like Honest or Tragoedia, but with all the excessive milling brought by Bandit it’s a lot better to have useful graveyard effects as well. As I said, I wasn’t running them for the past months, but when I took out the Needlebug Nests, I had a lot of space so I added the Kuribohs and Jain back in (which I was technically running in my last post, but I took out afterwards).

I added back in the third Judgment Dragon, really against my better Judgment (no pun intended). I may end up taking it out again, but for now it’s been fine for a few reasons. I was testing Dark Armed Dragon in the deck again now that I had the Kurbandits for additional DARKs, and it actually works very well. The problem though was pretty obvious to me after a short time; If I’m running 2 JD and 1 Dark Armed, why not swap the Dark Armed Dragon for a 3rd JD because JD is better than Dark Armed Dragon is? And so I did. I’m keeping it in now basically for the same reason as Allure of Darkness, because it’s easy to side out game 2 and 3 and has no detrimental side effects from being taken out.

As far as the side deck goes, I don’t have much to say other than that you can’t really side out more than 4 cards in this deck and I’m still unsure on some of the side. That being said, the side deck will probably need some work and probably run more 1 ofs. When siding I side out Allure of Darkness and 1 Judgment Dragon almost every match. In addition I’ll side out Rainbow Kuribohs against deck that are slow and if I’m siding in Rykos I’ll swap them for Gragonith, Jain and Ehren (whichever 2 of the 3 are least useful in the match-up). The only other card that I side out is 1 Lightpulsar Dragon. I never ever side any other cards out or the deck loses functionality. I do side out the Gardna and Saver against Gravekeepers though because of Necrovalley.

As far as what I have in the Side Deck, I am 100% certain about siding the Rykos, the MSTs, the Daedalus and the Breakthrough Skills. The other stuff is just in testing and might get scrapped. I’ve been seriously thinking about siding in 2 to 3 of each of the Fire Hand and the Ice Hand, they’d really help versus Evilswarms and Skill Drain decks.

The last thing I have to talk about is that I’m sure someone will ask “why not run Soul Charge? You mill a lot which fills up your grave and that card is broke bleh bleh”.   Here’s my attempt to justify myself:

First, this deck’s success is highly based around how good your opening hand is. Unlike many other decks, if you open rather poor you can wait until you get a better hand or slowing build up resources. In Lightsworns you open well or bust; any hand that is sub-par usually causes you to lose within 2 or 3 turns. That being said, Soul Charge is completely awful turn 1 in Lightsworns. You will not have a graveyard turn 1 and with a Soul Charge in hand, you have one less card to build a graveyard with, so it makes your opening hand consistently worse if you open with it. You might say that you could open with Charge of the Light Brigade o Solar Recharge and then play Soul Charge, but honestly if I already have though cards in hand I’m already winning the duel, so the addition of Soul Charge is probably irrelevant; I’d rather just not run the Soul Charge to prevent the inconsistent starting hands than have wombo combos every once in an while, by definition that is “win more”.

Second, when drawn late game there actually ins’t a whole lot to be doing with this card. You can revive some Lylas and pop back row, but if that flies I’d be surprised. At best they’ll have 1 Spell Trap and you’ll revive 1 Lyla for a pop and some other stuff. In addition, what you can do with these monsters you revive is rather limited because this deck can’t provide very much defense as far ass the Extra Deck is concerned other than Dracossack and that’s assuming you’ve milled 2 of 3 Dragon Rulers. The best late game use of this card would probably be to revive as many Lylas as possible as well as REDMD then pop some back row and use REDMD to revive Lightpulsar and mill some stuff and sit on that defense (that’s actually not a bad play so I’m not making that great of a case for myself).

Third, late game, when Soul Charge is ideal, you’re incredibly likely in this deck to be running on extreme life point lowness. This deck plays really defenseless so you tend to just eat attacks because you have no reason to stop them. Soul Charge in the deck forces you to start negating random attacks with Rainbow Kuriboh and Necro Gardna just so you don’t drop below lifepoint thresholds for Soul Charge and Judgment Dragon in addition which can kill you when you actually do need to be using Gardna and Kuriboh on important setups later. This also conflicts against decks where you have to pay multiple times with Judgment Dragon, like against Bujins, where most duels end with me summoning JD and paying 3000 to break a Hare and then a Mikazuchi.

At the very least I will concede to 1 copy in place of the 3rd Judgment Dragon. When running 2 you’ll consistently see it in your opening hand, which is bad. As general theory-oh with Soul Charge I would never play 3 in a deck where I would want to use Soul Charge to revive 3 or more monsters in most cases because drawing a second copy will generally be a dead draw with the amount of Lifepoints you have to pay. 3 is for decks that use it to bring back 1 or 2 monsters in most cases. 2 is for decks that really want to see it, but will regularly bring back 3 plus monsters. 1 copy is for decks that can use it but don’t necessarily desire it every game so it could be thought of as a tech choice.

I hope that helps you with my thoughts on Soul Charge.

Feel free to ask any other questions about the deck or chastise me in the comments below!

QOTW? Question of the Week:

Whatever happened to Ninjas? Aren’t Ninja Grandmaster Hanzo and Super-Transformation still really good cards? Tell me your thoughts in the comments below!

Written by: Kyle