I’ve teamed up with the judges to circulate around the top tables and find the top pieces of tech from Denver, Colorado. After a noticeable absence from most decks for the past few events, Goldd, Wu-Lord of Dark World has started to make a comeback as a main deck choice for many players today. You saw it in action today when Chris Moosman paid the price for discarding it from Dave Wilkinson’s hand, and it’s been nailing greedy players all day. If you’re preparing for a major event, Goldd is definitely a card to take into account if you’re planning on maxing out on Spirit Reapers. Main-decked Goldd started as a response to everyone playing three copies of Spirit Reaper, but dropped in popularity once people dropped to using between 0-2 copies of the nasty little Zombie monster. This, in turn, led to Goldd’s near disappearance, which prompted the number of Goldds to rise again. Just remember to check to see how many Reapers and Goldds were maindecked in each of the Top 8 decks from the most recent Shonen Jump Championship before deciding what combination of the two you want to play, if any. If you hit the right part of the cycle with the right cards in your deck, you could be cruising for a (relatively) easy win.
The other two main pieces of tech I’ve seen today stem from the immense popularity of Last Will. Last Will has been seeing more and more play since its limitation errata, due to its incredible versatility and utility. As time has gone by players have found more and more ways to abuse Last Will in order to score some quick wins. The first way they’ve been going about it is with Injection Fairy Lily. Normally, Lily is relegated to the side deck of some standard decks and the main deck of anything that plays Giant Rat, but a few intrepid players have opted to include one in their main deck. Lily is the cure for any monster that’s too big for you to handle, whether it be due to lack of removal or lack of ATK strength in any of the monsters you do have. It’s also a great way to end the game against an opponent who’s being very stingy with his cards, but in terms of sheer game-ending capability, Lily pales to the awesome wrath of Cyber-Stein.
It started as a side deck trick to scare players into over-extending, but now main decked Cyber-Steins are being seen all over the place for purposes of intimidation in addition to being a game-winning card. Having a single copy of the Stein gives meaning to those fusion decks that most players carry around out of habit rather than out of necessity, and it even enables some non-OTK based decks such as James Brown’s Dragon deck that you saw in round 6. Put quite simply, the possibilities are endless for anyone that’s willing to take the risk involved in paying 5000 points for Cyber-Stein.
The safest way to go about this is to tech Stein in your Anti-Chaos Return deck with your Royal Decrees and Creature Swaps. There’s nothing quite like special summoning Cyber Dragon, normal summoning Stein, paying to bring out Cyber Twin Dragon, using Creature Swap to take the opponent’s Cyber Dragon and attacking for game on turn 3. Speaking of OTKs, I’m surprised by the lack of dedicated Cyber-Stein decks at this event. I only saw one in my early-day walkthrough, and I’ve lost track of it since then.
That’s about all I have on the tech front today, it’s been a relatively quiet day tech-wise, but the action is heating up. With just two rounds to go and plenty of great duelists on the bubble for Day 2, you can’t afford to miss these last two rounds!