‘Sup everybody? Thanks for reading these articles if you are reading them right now, because you’re awesome! Today I’m going to be doing something a little out of the norm, and what I mean by that is we’ll be taking a trip to the future today to look at a couple new cards that are going to come out in the next set: Cosmo Blazer. The main focus of my article will be on Gladiator Beasts. Anybody who doesn’t really enjoy spoilers, please discontinue reading and wait again until next week.
Some pre-YCS Seattle insight about a card that I think will be making a huge difference in the new meta: Abyss Dweller. It just came out as a TCG Exclusive in Abyss Rising with what seems like no fanfare, well let’s try to change that.
Pretty busy week, just started school and I’m gearing up to go to the Philippines for 2 weeks at the beginning of October (so I wont be on the podcast then) so I’ve been a little busy. I figured then I’d just do something simple and give you a deck profile of a deck that I’ve been having a lot of fun with recently, which is my Monster Mash deck. For those who don’t know, Monster Mash is a deck variant that’s all monster cards to facilitate the use of two specific cards: Gallis the Star Beast and Witch of the Black Rose. I don’t run Witch though, because I think that card sucks. I’ll explain that later. The variant I’m running is rather original, I’m not focusing on the Gallis OTK nearly at all and I run some obscure tech choices and based the deck around one of my favorite cards: Genex Ally Triforce.
This card is pretty random, but at the same time really awesome. Who doesn’t want to run a Cloudian monster legitimately? I’ve spoken briefly on him before but he’s got a couple specific tricks up his sleeve that may give him an edge. I thought it’d be a rather interesting venture to look a little further into this card, even though it may be a fairly short venture.
When I looked at the new Return of the Duelist pack, I was kind of looking for something that no one else noticed because I always think it’s funner to use the “bad” deck that no one cares about and do lots of cool things with it. Chronomalys are first off, really ugly, and secondly not so straight forward on their goals; so I figured everyone would pretty much steer clear of them and for the most part I was right. The stage was set for me to take a closer look.
The next card is a bit more controversial. Initially I was pretty skeptical of anybody who told me Sinister Serpent should come back, but in all honesty when I look intently at the card it’s not all that great.
Since the banlist is out and all, I figured a good way to start that off would be to talk about the new limiting of Tsukuyomi. A card that has been banned for what seems like forever. In all honesty, this card should probably have been brought back ages ago because it is incredibly weak and outclassed in many ways by cards that already exist.
Altogether the reason for this article is pretty random. I was just thinking the other day that I’d really like a card that was kind of like Tour Guide except for Rank 4’s. Now, Gravekeeper’s spy isn’t that by any means, but the thought got me looking at cards like this and I thought it deserved a bit more of the lime light than it’s getting right now. It also became even more relevant when Brian Hines got top 8 with a deck running a small Spy engine at Nationals. For this weeks article I’ll just be going over some of the advantages of trying out Gravekeeper’s Spy again after its long absence from the metagame.
First off, congrats to Tyler Tabman for getting first at the North American Nationals (or WCQ) with Wind-Ups. He’s been winning a lot lately so also congratulations on essentially proving yourself to the world. But, away from that on to something totally different: Blackwings. Blackwings are kind of under-appreciated, especially in America, since they’ve taken a lot of hits on the banlist and they never perform at any events. (while they obviously aren’t the best it’s also due to sheer lack of play) I’ve taken a look back at them as another archetype that can essentially just spawn level 6 monsters from nowhere, which to me was a perfect indicator of a deck that can make rank 6 XYZ.
With some experimentation I’ve been trying to create a deck that could easily summon Photon Strike Bounzer using a deck that nobody had thought of yet because I found Strike Bounzer to be an extremely powerful and also under-used card in the game, and since all the standard Rank 6 summoning decks are pretty boring and Konami generated (aka Hieratics) I was looking for old archetype specifically. Also, after testing a couple of older decks I’d found that a field of both Stardust Dragon and Strike Bounzer creates a very powerful lockdown so I narrowed my goals towards this. Through all of this I’ve slowly gravitated towards one archetype and that is Destiny HEROs.