Normally I’d straight up avoid covering Burn decks until I had no choice but to do so — say, if one made it to the finals. As a general rule, Burn strategies are boring, repetitive, slow, and tend not to really do a whole heck of a lot: they don’t make for exciting coverage. But today, James Pennicott has traveled all the way from the UK to prove that not all Burn decks are born equal. And you know . . . to try and take home the biggest Shonen Jump Championship prize, too.
But yeah, that Burn deck . . .
The core of the deck is very similar to Comic Odyssey’s Dark Burn or Matt Peddle’s Machine Burn; Pennicott’s deck depends on three copies of Wave-Motion Cannon and Stealth Bird, plus two copies of Des Koala, to generate enough burn damage to win. Level Limit – Area B, Swords of Revealing Light, and Gravity Bind protect the deck’s infrastructure. The central idea is really nothing new.
But innovation to this engine never alters the engine itself — it’s the choices that surround the burn cards that make for a new burn variant in almost all cases, and Pennicott’s choices for complementary additions are impressively groundbreaking. Burn variants of this type are most often defined by their key monsters, and that’s definitely the case here, as Pennicott uses monster-based tech to surprise opponents and beat up on Dark decks.
Exiled Force is an obvious pick that can clear big monsters and let Pennicott make direct attacks with stuff like Card Trooper and some of his sided options, but the real star of the deck is Kinetic Soldier. Pennicott is running a pair, and even just one round into this tournament he’s had some exceptional results. “Kinetic Soldier absolutely destroys this metagame. I can go first, set Kinetic, and the most common thing that happens is that they’ll send Armageddon Knight straight into it.” Then, since very few decks are running monster removal, Pennicott is usually free to just turn the Kinetic 90 degrees on the following turn and swing for even more damage, abusing the fact that Armageddon Knight is a Warrior. It can punish Strike Ninja too, and I can’t help but feel bad for anyone who uses Premature Burial to bring back Disk Commander and leaves it vulnerable to Pennicott’s attack — if Kinetic gets through, it’ll punch past Disk Commander for 3050 damage.
A single blow of that power shaves huge amounts of time off of Pennicott’s proverbial clock, reducing the number of turns he needs to end the game with Wave-Motion Cannon by two on average. That’s something that old standbys like Big Shield Gardna or Dark Mimic LV3 just can’t do, and it’s something that Pennicott is relying on here today.
Two Book of Moon provide defense on several different levels. Big monsters that could threaten Stealth Bird are held in check and often left in vulnerable defense mode, allowing Pennicott to destroy them with a follow-up attack on the next turn. Enemy Controller and Brain Control also seem to be seeing an increase in play today, and Book of Moon can keep either card from stealing an important monster. Book can even be set to sucker out ambitious presses with lower grade attackers, crashing things like Mystic Tomato or Banisher of the Radiance into Stealth Bird or Kinetic Soldier’s well-defended hides.
Two Pulling the Rug cause general trouble for virtually any popular deck in this format, wrecking Gadgets, Armageddon Knight, Elemental Hero Stratos, and more. It’s not groundbreaking tech — it’s been popular since Orlando — but it is really wrecking house in this tournament. In fact, virtually all of Pennicott’s tech is borrowed from somewhere else, and nowhere is that more evident than in his use of three Royal Oppression.
Yes, three Royal Oppression. Previously regarded as a card that would be run almost exclusively in Gadgets, Pennicott has managed to make the rulings-heavy continuous trap work exceedingly well for him, playing only one special summon card himself. The logic is really simple: if Oppression doesn’t hurt you, you play it, because it stops so much stuff in this format. Zombies, Gladiator Beasts, Dark Armed Dragon, Diamond Dude Turbo . . . so many big strategies in this format are shattered by Royal Oppression, and when it’s backed by a suite of negation cards that can keep it on the field, there just isn’t much the average player can do. In order to defeat a Burn deck you usually have to out-speed it; doing so without special summoning is darn near impossible for the decks that are seeing play right now.
The combination of Oppression and Kinetic Soldier is really taking people by surprise and with a pilot like Pennicott helming a deck like this, the results are sure to be impressive. The European players traveled a long way this weekend with one goal: winning. James Pennicott certainly seems to have a strong chance of doing so.