Random “Plant” Deck

Today is just a quick deck profile of a really fun deck I’ve been working on. Hope you enjoy, and sorry for the lack of a more hefty article!

As you likely have heard on the podcast I’ve been playing around a lot with plants, or what used to be plants, making some fun Synchro decks using Drill Warrior and re-using the remaining monster from the plant engine. It’s been pretty fun and I’ve had some pretty great success with testing it in my game that I have.

On a quick side note, I really like testing things in the Yugioh video games a lot more than anywhere else. It has by far the greatest speed of all the dueling apparatus we have like dueling in real life, Duel Network and Yugioh Virtual Desktop. It also has a lot of cards, but not new ones yet (I’m really hoping for a new DS game soon). The only down side is you pretty much test your deck against totally dim witted computers, so testing only goes as far as whether or not combs work and whether or not the deck can be efficient. That aside, I’m sure the deck works outside of the games as well since I’ve seen other people at our events with success using similarly styled decks and the deck also beats the tar out of the computer players and that’s usually a good sign.

As of now I’ve gotten a pretty solid engine down for performing versatile plays and it seem very splash-able in just about everything. I’ve tried it in Chaos, Monarchs, full plants and even just tried it with Toons for the recent podcast and all of which have done very well. I’ll just post a deck profile of what I have here because I think the deck is really cool and has lots of fun reminiscing of formats long ago and I figured other people might enjoy playing around with it as well.

MONSTERS (20):

• 2 Cyber Valley
• 2 Quickdraw Synchron
• 2 Level Eater
• 1 Summoner Monk
• 1 Elemental HERO Stratos
• 2 Destiny HERO – Malicious
• 1 Destiny HERO – Doom Lord
• 1 Plaguespreader Zombie
• 1 Lonefire Blossom
• 1 Dandylion
• 1 Mystic Tomato
• 1 Debris Dragon
• 1 Armageddon Knight
• 1 Sangan
• 1 Gorz the Emissary of Darkness
• 1 Dark Armed Dragon

SPELLS (14):

• 1 Allure of Darkness
• 2 Destiny Draw
• 2 D.D.R. – Different Dimension Reincarnation
• 1 Foolish Burial
• 1 One for One
• 2 Mystical Space Typhoon
• 1 Heavy Storm
• 1 Dark Hole
• 1 Monster Reborn
• 1 Pot of Avarice
• 1 Mind Control

TRAPS (6):

• 2 Phoenix Wing Wind Blast
• 1 Solemn Judgement
• 3 Reckless Greed

EXTRA:

• 1 No 39: Utopia
• 1 Photon Papilloperative
• 1 Photon Strike Bounzer
• 1 Junk Warrior
• 1 Drill Warrior
• 1 Junk Archer
• 1 Junk Destroyer
• 1 Road Warrior
• 1 Ally of Justice Catastor
• 1 Brionac Dragon of the Ice Barrier
• 1 Ancient Fairy Dragon
• 1 Black Rose Dragon
• 1 Dark End Dragon
• 1 Stardust Dragon
• 1 Scrap Dragon

One of my favorite parts about the deck is it runs one copy of almost every card in the deck so that every game is very different. The versatility also allows you to adapt your play style more accordingly to what your opponent is playing since the deck can easily change course for different situations.

It uses some old school play style in that it builds up a lot of its advantage in the graveyard over time allowing it to generate free plusses when needed. At the same time this can give it a pretty easy weakness to Graveyard hate so watch out for that and if you’re going to be siding using this deck side accordingly.

I also built the deck to draw a crap load of cards. The early game usually is me trying to make Cyber Valley plays using his second effect to draw 2 with either Road Warrior or One for One and then using those cards to hopefully draw into a lot of combo pieces and other setup draw cards such as Allure of Darkness or Destiny Draw and hopefully multiple copies of Reckless Greed. The deck also re-uses a lot of its cards using D.D.R. specifically Cyber Valley to abuse the Token spam done by the Drill Warrior loop as well as Debris Dragon spam into Black Rose or other Dragon Synchros by using Dandylion. There’s also some pretty neat recursion plays using D.D.R. with Malicious and Plaguespreader.

I also tried to make it so each individual card had multipurpose uses with many different cards in the deck. As an example, Dandylion has a pluthera of uses with many different cards in the deck and is one of the corner stones of the deck’s movement. Ideally the deck brings out a Drill Warrior pretty early in the game and uses it to juggle a Debris Dragon to bring out Stardust and Scrap Dragon, you know those basic plant plays. I figured in todays meta it’d be harder to pull of Drill Warrior consistently due to all the effect negation running around, that’s why I opted for 2 copies rather than the standard one. (EDIT: I ended up changing this to make room for a Catastor. In general if my Drill Warrior got Veiler’d I’d do one of the following things, all of which seemed to work very effectively: Let it die and play either Monster Reborn or Pot of Avarice, attempt to protect if for a turn with Solemn/PWWB/Stardust or just XYZ summon using it an Malicious for a Strike Bounzer. As a side note Strike Bounzer + Stardust Dragon has got t be one of the strongest locks in the game. All that to say 2 Drill Warrior wasn’t as necessary as I’d once thought.)

The deck also has a mini Destiny HERO engine that basically is only used to get Malicious in the graveyard as either Cyber Valley fodder or for Synchroing with Plaguespreader or if you’re lucky an XYZ play using Strike Bounzer. The Summoner Monk is an important part of the engine that makes nice advantage using Diamond Dude or Stratos to make back the disadvantage of Monk’s effect while also making a Rank 4 XYZ and setting up.

The Dark Armed Dragon may seem a little odd at first given the amount of Darks in the the deck, but the deck sports some unprecedented Graveyard manipulation that makes it easy to pull out Dark Armed and in my opinion Dark Armed is one the stupidest legal Yugioh cards ever, which means you should be running it if you can.

Th deck also has a lot of room for custom manipulation for any card choices that may tickle your fancy. The deck can easy take out the Upstart Goblins and Reckless Greed’s and replace them with a meaty line-up of traps and still work to the same potential. The Destiny HERO engine is also easily replaceable with nearly any other engine you may desire to be running in the deck. Maybe you want a mini chaos engine with 3 Tour Guide 3 Veiler and a BLS. By all means, it will work wonders.

So, tell me if you liked seeing random fun deck profiles because I always have lots of deck floating around in my mind I could share. Also feel free to be all like, ” bleh, deck profiles are boring! I want to see strategy articles like you usually do!” because that’d be helpful feedback as well. As always, happy dueling out there!

EDIT: I made a couple edits to the deck after some more testing over the week. I switched the Diamond Dude to a Destiny HERO – Doom Lord because Diamond Dude wasn’t ever really going to work with such a low spell count and Doom Lord is really powerful in this format with all the XYZ monsters. I also tested out Destiny HERO – Defender but his high defense was never really relevant enough and neither was the fact that I could revive him with Debris Dragon.  I also took out both of the Upstart Goblins and replaced them with Mind Control, which I realized I had forgot to run and I should definitley be running considering its synergy with Cyber Valley, and a copy of Armageddon Knight for more versatile Summoner Monk and Mystic Tomato plays. I added a Catastor to the extra as well because it became increasingly necessary to Synchro away my Dandylion or Sangan’s with Plaguespreader in order to get there effects. Lastly, I official named the deck “Plant Hydra” based after the YCG Podcast crew’s description of the plant deck being a multi-headed hydra that Konami cuts the heads off of but it continues to grow new even more versatile heads. If you get it cool, if you don’t there’s not much else to say.