It took a while today, but in scanning the top tables, I’ve managed to identify what appears to be the event’s dominant tech. At first, the field today actually seemed to be rather generic: a spread of decks that either looked like Shane Scurry’s build from Baltimore, or looked like they were built to beat that deck in particular. But after some digging and careful observation, I return victorious with delicious single card inspiration!

Behold!

Royal Decree: For some reason, a lot of people are running one random copy of Royal Decree. Max Suffridge, Jerry Wang, Kris Perovic, and many others are running a single copy of Decree in order to shut down the gamut of field controlling traps that continue to see more and more play. The reason? I’m willing to credit this one to momentum. This format rewards aggressive play and commitment to the field, and that gives the average deck a lot of opportunities to attack. While we saw in Baltimore how Mirage Dragon and Jinzo could allow a duelist to make the most of those opportunities, Decree was totally off the radar.

Now, of course, duelists have realized that it’s an obvious choice to maintain momentum, or to initiate a shift in a game’s balance of attack direction. What turned duelists off of Decree is the fact that it negates your traps, too. Most competitors previously regarded Decree as necessitating a low trap count to function well in a deck. However, if you’re running Decree for the sake of momentum you won’t really care if you negate your own Sakuretsu Armor or Bottomless Trap Hole – you don’t need them anyways so long as you keep bashing the opponent into submission and keep them from making offensive moves. Sure, any trap that you draw is a dead card, and over a long period that can create serious issues. But it seems that usually, by the time Decree becomes a liability, the duelists using it here today have already won anyways. Watch for this trend to continue.

Morphing Jar: Yes, Morphing Jar. Apparently a lot of duelists have just decided to forget about the risk Goldd, Wu-Lord of Dark World can present and run Morphing Jar anyways, including what appears to be the bulk of Team Overdose. It’s an interesting decision, and it’s taken a lot of competitors by surprise simply because they didn’t think anyone was going to be playing Morphing Jar. It’s been a popular choice today for people running Chaos Return variants similar to Shane Scurry’s, since it buries monsters in the graveyard to remove for Chaos Sorcerer.

In that respect, it’s replacing slots that are normally occupied by Magical Merchant. Though the Jar itself isn’t a Light or Dark, it can discard such cards with relative ease, while acting as a killer late game topdeck in conservative scenarios. It can give insane card advantage in the right situation, and it’s even seeing some play in decks oriented around Pot of Avarice. Whether or not this trend will continue is dependent on duelist reactions to it: one would imagine that if Morphing Jar sees more play, Goldd, Wu-Lord of Dark World will appear in more decks, and then Morphing Jar will see less play. It’s a potentially recurring cycle that we might see repeat itself a few times over the summer.

Blade Knight: Blade Knight has been an integral part of the “Anti” deck that so many duelists are running, aiming to tech Chaos Return. Blade Knight and Mystic Swordsman LV2 take out the flip effect monsters that the deck relies on to create the tempo it needs, and Blade itself generates a lot of late game power with its high ATK. There are very few beatsticks in the deck that Scurry ran, and Blade Knight can exploit that fact if its controller has a low hand count.

There’s not much to say about this one. Blade Knight came into fashion when Flip Flop Control became a threat, fell out of vogue when duelists stopped running it, and now it’s back for similar reasons. Its use is predictably tied to the dominance of flip effect monsters in any metagame you examine, and there are a lot of “slow tempo” flip effects (like Magician of Faith and Dekoichi the Battlechanted Locomotive) being run here today.  

Return from the Different Dimension: As a handful of duelists predicted when the new Advanced format list was announced, the inclusion of a single Return from the Different Dimension has become an accepted practice in the opinion of many players. A lot of the players at top tables are running at least two Chaos Sorcerer, and that factor, combined with the fact that virtually every duelist here today is running a pair of Nobleman of Crossout, makes one Return from the Different Dimension a healthy bet.

Running one copy of Return eliminates the chief costs of including Return in your deck: drawing one too early in a duel, or drawing multiples. Dead cards kill, and that can keep dedicated Return duelists on the ropes. But if you’re only running one you don’t deal with either of those challenges very often: you have only a 15 percent chance of seeing one in your opening six cards, and that scales to just a 25 percent chance over the first five turns of a duel. The early game concern is far less of an issue, and the chances of drawing multiple Returns is obviously non-existent. The entire theory is based on the idea that if you draw Return and win in the late game, great, and if you don’t draw it, no harm done. It’s an interesting view, but we’ll have to see how it pans out in the long run here today.

So, there are the trends for the day thus far! There are some other interesting single copies that have seen play in the top 20 tables as well. Stealth Bird is being splashed by one duelist in a deck that is otherwise battle-oriented, and Matt Peddle is running a Flip Flop Control build that has a random Solemn Wishes as its 41st card. Go figure! Elemental Hero Wildheart is also being used in a deck that is currently 5-0, and is proving to be a great answer to decks packed with Bottomless Trap Hole. If any of these cool, more singular pieces of tech can make it to Day Two, they may set trends for the coming months.

Even Solemn Wishes . . .

 . . . maybe.