It may take a little digging to get the commons necessary to make the deck, but once you get them, it’ll be enough fun digging through the deck to find the remaining cards necessary to kill an opponent for you to justify creating it. Yes, I’m talking about one of the most popular and long lasting one-turn KO decks that just won’t go away: Demise, King of Armageddon. You probably already know how fast it is in Advanced: almost no one actually likes getting paired against it. There’s one truth about one-turn KO decks that I enjoy though: better players will win more often with them. Despite common criticism of such strategies, a good understanding of reads and mathematics in the game allows a player to build the most 
efficient version and make the correct moves to advance in a tournament. Basically, I suggest that every player give a one-turn KO deck a try at least once to learn how important precise play can be. Instead of misplays creating understated effects in a game which may or may not snowball, they often decide who will win a match.
What does Demise offer specifically to the Traditional format (or rather vice-versa)? You’ll be thinning your deck faster, making harder decisions, and drawing a lot more cards. As always, inconsistencies within decks can burn away rather quickly when you’re playing Pot of Greed and Graceful Charity. I’ve been saving this theme since the most recent
Shonen Jump Championship Indianapolis,where I placed second in a Traditional tournament (yes, second). During the second round, I played against a deck featuring Demise, running three Light and three Dark normal monsters to use with Advanced Ritual Art to play a fast Black Luster Soldier - Envoy of the Beginning or Chaos Emperor Dragon - Envoy of the End. While I won’t be moving in this direction, it’s an interesting thought that I may explore at a later date.
I’m going to refer to my Advanced build of this deck and use Traditional cards to increase consistency and speed. I just love winning a match fast enough to grab a bite to eat between rounds, don’t you?
The Monsters:
My favorite part of this deck is the monster lineup. To me, a monster list of nothing but maximum numbers of each card is beautiful. It means the ultimate consistency will be exploited. The more centered the deck (especially a one-turn KO combination deck), the more it will perform the same every game. Here, I will take a moment to digress . . .
In a 40-card deck with absolutely no cards in duplicate, there are a total of 2,763,633,600 six-card starting hands. That’s a really, really big number. If you think your deck is consistent with what it does, just consider that. However, if there were three copies of thirteen cards, and a single card that wasn’t played as a multiple (a very unlikely situation, but this is simply for theory’s sake) then there are only fourteen different cards you can draw. This leaves far fewer starting hands. For those of you who don’t think it makes a difference . . .
So let’s break the monsters down. We have nine searching monsters, which contribute nine cards to the first two pieces of the four-piece combination (Demise, Advanced Ritual, a second monster to special summon, and a card to double the second monster’s ATK). We have three copies of Doom Dozer and three copies Metal Armored Bug, which will act as the second monster we’ll be special summoning. The three Gren Maju cards are a doubling ATK agent for the deck, beginning another piece of the combination.
This means that, within the Monster lineup, we have:
Demise/Demise searcher: 9
Second monster: 6
Doubling ATK agent: 3
Advanced Ritual/Advanced Ritual searcher: 6
The Spells:
The spells will finish the deck, as any traps would be too slow to play. We want every card to either clear the way or find/act as more pieces of the combination.
The Pot of Greed, Graceful Charity, Card Destruction, and Trade-In cards all count as drawing cards. They’ll let us rifle through our deck to find the other pieces of the combination. Heavy Storm, Giant Trunade, Mystical Space Typhoon, and Harpie’s Feather Duster all clear the way for the key combo: we don’t want to assemble the combination and be thwarted by a well-timed Torrential Tribute. Remember, I may not be giving you a side deck for this, but you should definitely have at least two copies of Cold Wave to play whenever you know you’ll be going first (for example, if you actually lose game 1). Snatch Steal and Change of Heart are outside the theme of the deck, but I think they’re readily justifiable by their ability to bring you back from a losing situation.
Metamorphosis and Megamorph both count as an ATK doubling agent, though the latter does it indirectly by turning your Demise into Cyber Twin Dragon. Swing of Memories is used to retrieve your Bug, but we can’t double count it (we already counted the Bug as our second monster). This brings our total combination ratio of the deck to:
Demise/Demise searcher: 9
Second monster: 6
Doubling attack agent: 5
Advanced Ritual/Advanced Ritual searcher: 9
Just for theory’s sake, let’s convert this into ratios so we can make some assumptions about performance. This is how you should be creating your competitive decks: with thorough consideration of the chances you’ll be drawing certain cards (or certain groups of cards).
Demise/Demise searcher = 22.5 percent of deck
Second monster = 15 percent of deck
Doubling agent = 12.5 percent of deck
Advanced Ritual/Advanced Ritual searcher = 22.5 percent of deck
Since we have six cards that draw more cards at an average of over three cards each, we’ll need to increase our probability of drawing each of our combination cards to account for the games where we’ll have one of our deck-thinning cards in our starting hand. Since they make up 15 percent of the deck, we’ll be starting with at least one of them roughly 37 percent of the time (we‘ll just increase it to 40 percent to make our life easier). Sadly, we’ll only be able to use a majority of our drawing cards less than half the time in our opening hand, so we’ll have to degrade to 20 percent. This means that 20 percent of the time, our deck really only consists of 38 cards. On the occasions this happens, it increases our combination ratios to:
Demise/Demise searcher = 24.3 percent of deck
Second monster = 16.2 percent of deck
Doubling attack agent = 13.5 percent of deck
Advanced Ritual/Advanced Ritual searcher: 24.3 percent of deck
The real chance of drawing one of these cards in our opening hand is between these two lists (three-fourths closer to the former). It doesn’t seem like much of a difference, but if you’ve played any deck that includes cards that draw more cards, you know how large a difference that can make. These percentages may seem small, but remember that you start with six cards, not just one! That means that, in a six-card hand, your chances of drawing at least one of the cards from each group are:
Demise/Demise searcher: 81.2 percent of starting hands
Second monster: 65.4 percent of starting hands
Doubling attack agent: 58 percent of starting hands
Advanced Ritual/Advanced Ritual searching: 81.2 percent of starting hands
Those numbers seem quite a bit more impressive than the previous. This means that a full one-fourth of your opening hands will have the combo already at your disposal. On average, you should be winning your games within the first four turns: a strong consistency.
Playing the deck may seem simple: you draw your hand and throw the game-winning combination on the field. However, I’ve played in quite a few locals with Demise and I can honestly say I won more games without the combo than with it. You’re going to have to be inventive, and you’re going to have to use reads and math to make the right moves when the time arrives.
Until next time, remember to think, critique your strategy, and be mindful. Be a better player every day, win as much as you can, and (of course) have fun doing it!
—Ryan Murphy