The goal is going to be familiar to some of our readers but completely new to many others. Bollinger uses Swarm of Scarabs and Medusa Worm for monster control. Swarm of Locusts and Mobius the Frost Monarch dominate the spell and trap zone, and Des Lacooda provides draw power. Stealth Bird rounds out the deck’s monsters, giving a renewable source of damage. The idea is to abuse effects that activate whenever a self-flipping monster is flip summoned in order to lock down the field and gain massive card advantage. Seem simple? On some levels, it is. On other levels, it’s actually pretty complicated, and the deck isn’t as easy to play as one might assume at first glance.

If the deck gets off to a decent start, it can quickly begin generating card advantage on pretty much all fronts, destroying monsters, spells and traps, and drawing. Yu-Gi-Oh! isn’t all about card advantage—lots of other factors can contribute to a winning strategy. With that said, this deck in particular is all about running the numbers, depriving the opponent of options and creating a snowballing effect that can be impossible to escape.

This version of the deck does not run Spirit Reaper, a monster that was once included in the standard build. Again, it’s another example of players dropping Reaper from their deck. If older versions of Pacman ran well, they wouldn’t need Reaper anyway: it was essentially just another source of stall, and with the gamut of Reaper tech being seen in tournaments, it sort of outlived its usefulness.

One of the coolest cards in the deck is Anti-Spell Fragrance. “It adds a whole level of control,” Bollinger explained shortly after winning his Round 2 match. “If my opponents are going to change tempo, they’re going to do it with a spell, and I can basically prevent that with the fragrance. Normally I would run three copies of every non-limited card in the deck, but this time I had to break that just because I couldn’t get a third copy of Anti-Spell.” Once the lock is in place, there’s not much that can stop Bollinger’s domination of the field. The disruption that can hurt him, like Heavy Storm and Nobleman of Crossout, is virtually all in spell form with the exception of Torrential Tribute, so Anti-Spell Fragrance is a great answer.

It gives Swarm of Locusts a chance to blow away the set spell before it can be activated, and whether that spell was an integral one or not, it’s another piece of card advantage to be munched away. It’s a great combo, and with many spell-heavy decks in the environment it can be utterly infuriating to go up against.

Bollinger’s pretty cool himself, always remaining level-headed about a deck that has, realistically, inspired near-fanatical obsession from some of its users. “I didn’t create Camel Control, I don’t take credit for that,” he said. “But I did create this variant.” Though he’s rightfully proud of his strategy, he’s very careful to give credit where it’s due and doesn’t come off as boastful or cocky.

He took a Round 1 loss to an opponent that just shunted out too much matchup-breaking disruption. “In game 1, he had Heavy Storm, Mobius, and two Nobleman of Crossout. Then in the next game he played Heavy Storm on me three times.” While that’s a tough beat for any deck, it’s a death sentence for this one.

The main challenge for Pacman is perhaps the concept of delayed utility. Previously, discussions of a card’s utility (it’s average usefulness across different parts of a duel) were limited to judgments between low and high utility cards. Synergy versus utility has long been an integral part of the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG—the better a card is on the synergy level, the better it is for combos and long-term strategic implementation, but the worse it usually is on its own. High utility cards usually have low potential synergy, while high synergy cards usually have low average utility.

This deck takes that theoretic model in a new direction, introducing the concept of delayed utility. Monsters like Medusa Worm and Swarm of Scarabs are never really low-utility monsters: even in topdecking situations, when there are few cards on the field, they’re still generally useful. The problem is that they aren’t useful on the turn that they’re drawn: they need to be set for a single turn before they can be flip summoned, so if you’re under fire they won’t really do anything. They suffer from a delay in usefulness before they can claim their naturally high utility, hence the term “delayed utility.”

That fact makes for the deck’s one weakness. A poor draw can lead to a weak opening, because none of the monsters in the current build are strong on turn one. Whether or not that challenge proves to be enough to keep Pacman out of the spotlight today is up for debate. On one hand, the deck is incredibly consistent once you know how to play it. On the other, this is a very aggressive metagame, so if bad draws hit Bollinger’s hand in too many games, he’ll probably go down.

This is the first Shonen Jump Championship at which Pacman has seen significant play, and Bollinger is far from the only duelist running the deck here today. With his deck seeing enough play for the dueling public to draw conclusions about its viability, and his reputation on the line in the Top 8 Challenge, this is going to be a big event for Andrew Bollinger regardless of how things end up turning out.