Have you ever had a particular card that you just keep on pulling no matter how many packs you buy? I’m sure it varies from set to set, but I find that there’s always one card that I get more of than any other in a particular set, and it’s always an ultra rare. When Phantom Darkness came out, I hoped beyond hope that the card in question would be Allure of Darkness. It wasn’t. It was actually The Beginning of the End. Missed it by that much. Of course, I did what any good deckbuilder would do with a mound of the same foil that no one is trading for: try to artificially inflate its value by coming up with a ridiculous deck that requires it. Unfortunately, that didn’t work so well.

Trying to build a rogue deck (and worse: a slow rogue deck) in a format where Dark Armed Dragon Return was regularly destroying players on its first turn was an extremely bad idea. I quickly resigned myself to being forever in possession of seventeen copies of The Beginning of the End with nowhere to put them. Slow decks didn’t really exist at that point. Until the mid-format changes to the Forbidden list took place, a "slow game" was about three turns for each player. The only anomaly was the Gladiator Beast victory at Shonen Jump Championship Minneapolis powered by Shadow-Imprisoning Mirror. Even then, Gladiator Beasts weren’t exactly being played slowly. It was more like a mad rush to get Mirror and Gladiator Beast Heraklinos out as quickly as possible so you could stop the Dark Armed Dragon deck from exploding in your face.

Things never really slowed down at all, even once Gladiator Beasts came into power. Games were frequently decided by who lost more cards to the Gladiator Beast Gyzarus brought out by the Elemental Hero Prisma/Test Tiger combo . . . barring a Rescue Cat from the opponent. Things were a lot more complicated, but not really slow. Then summer ended, and Teleport Dark Armed Dragon appeared . . . and we all know what happened next. Fortunately, this story has a happy ending, as Shonen Jump Championship Detroit showed us that flinging all your cards at the opponent as fast as possible just isn’t going to work anymore. Conservative play is viable once again, and it’s all thanks to these three cards: Necro Gardna, Threatening Roar, and Black Garden.

These three cards can be run in basically any deck to make your opponent really think about whether dropping all those Synchros and Dragons is a good idea (all three are especially good in, and against, TeleDAD). If your opponents suspect you are running Threatening Roar, they’re going to want to make sure they have Stardust Dragon on their side of the field and a Dark Armed Dragon in hand. If they see you have copies of Necro Gardna in the graveyard, they have to force you to use them one at a time while conserving cards and protecting themselves from your attacks. If you have Black Garden, however, your opponents are more or less hosed.

The thing about Black Garden that drives players batty is that it makes you sad that your deck is so good at summoning monsters. Even the best of your monsters will get turned into weaklings and give your opponent a monster of comparable power if Black Garden’s on the table, and I firmly believe that this is the card that will force the duelists of the world to improve their game. Here’s yet another way you can use it to give your opponent nightmares.

Monsters: 20

3 Destiny Hero - Diamond Dude
3 Destiny Hero - Malicious
2 Destiny Hero - Plasma
1 Dark Grepher
3 Plaguespreader Zombie
1 Dark Resonator
2 Necro Gardna
2 Mystic Tomato
1 Snipe Hunter
1 Sangan
1 Elemental Hero Stratos

Extra Deck: 15

I see people at my local store raving all the time about how "broken" it is to stick Destiny Draw on top of your deck with Plaguespreader Zombie and then dump it with Destiny Hero - Diamond Dude. These people are thinking way too small. If you’re going to stack something with Plaguespreader, why not get the biggest possible bang for your buck and set yourself up for three free cards on the next turn? Save that Destiny Draw for a spun Destiny Hero - Malicious or an extraneous Destiny Hero - Plasma or something. The thing I really like about this deck is that it can slow things down to the point where even if you don’t do something silly with Diamond Dude and The Beginning of the End, you’ll likely be able to just play it anyway.

Your entire strategy here is to play for a late game, based on the idea that the average Teleport Dark Armed Dragon deck doesn’t have one of those. Thus, you advance the game to a point at which the only option is a push that winds up irrelevant due to a combination of Black Garden making all the opponent’s monsters bad (while giving you tokens) and the fact that you can drop Black Rose Dragon and start afresh with more cards available than your opponent will see for the rest of the game.

It’s the same basic idea used by both Calvin Tsang and Steven Harris in their SJC Detroit decks, except applied differently through the filter of my own Detroit strategy. The deck also has one other very important thing going for it, a quality that most decks sadly lack: you will never lose to an OTK on turn 2. It’s a virtual impossibility because you’re packing Necro Gardna and Threatening Roar and Black Garden. I can’t actually conceive of a realistic pair of hands that you and your opponent can get whereby the opponent would actually manage to take you out on his or her first turn. This is important, because the fact that it’s virtually impossible means that your intelligent opponents are a lot less likely to try it.

As I mentioned above, this deck is basically just playing to get to the late game. While it’s not a win condition per se, leaving your opponent completely out of options while you still have a ton of cards tends to give you lots of choices. Bombing the field with Black Rose Dragon and starting from scratch is always an option, but I’d much prefer skipping that and leaving it as a contingency option should things go horribly, horribly wrong. Instead, I’m going to make use of the fact that I’m playing both Destiny Hero - Malicious and Black Garden to pull off some nasty Synchro summons and punch through my opponent’s defenses.

You’ll notice that the Extra deck has three copies of Red Dragon Archfiend. This is because it’s the most important Synchro monster for Black Garden-based decks. Almost invariably, your opponent will try to turtle up with one or two copies of Colossal Fighter in defense position and try to wait for outs that probably aren’t even there. For times like these, you need Red Dragon Archfiend. It doesn’t just punch holes in walls: it tears them down. The Archfiend also lets you selectively clear out your own monsters by not attacking with them, a handy option if your opponent has been playing to try and lock you.

Getting to your cards should be no big issue with this deck. You have the usual copies of Destiny Draw and Allure of Darkness with more Destiny Heroes and Dark monsters than any other deck in the format. You also have three copies of Destiny Hero - Diamond Dude there to get you even more free cards with his effect. With fourteen normal spells in the deck, chances are good that you’ll hit something, and if you put a spell on top of your deck with Plaguespreader Zombie, your chances improve to 100%.

Dark Grepher is fantastic at setting up such combos, and access to Diamond Dude is easy between your draw cards, search spells, Sangan, and Mystic Tomato. You shouldn’t really need any copies of Terraforming, but if you find that you still aren’t drawing Black Garden enough, go ahead and run one. Remember, you can set a field spell to get rid of your active field, so you can turn off Black Garden while you flood the table and then turn it back on in order to make a potential Gorz or comeback turn irrelevant.

The things this deck can do are truly brutal, and I implore you to dig out all those copies of The Beginning of the End that you were never going to play and give it a shot. Until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!

—Jerome McHale