This past weekend’s Shonen Jump Championship in Baltimore was amazing. Some of the world’s best deckbuilders were out in force—unafraid to play new strategies that they themselves had created—and while decks like Synchro Dude and Vision Gun Synchro fell short of Day 2, I think the pace has been set for a format where innovation is a more common theme.

At the same time, the biggest surprise of the weekend wasn’t an innovative new Synchro build—it was that Gladiator Beasts won again. In a Day 2 field where Gladiators were played by only six duelists (compared to the eight competitors piloting Teleport Dark Armed), it was the smart man’s bet that Gladiators were going down. In a direct confrontation, Gladiators are at a distinct disadvantage. But at the end of the day it was Gladiator Beast duelist Jermol Jupiter who claimed the trophy, triumphing over Teleport Dark Armed player Jeff Walker. That match left duelists across the globe with a lot of questions.

The obvious one is "how the heck did that happen?" How did Gladiators beat what’s so obviously a terrible matchup, and in Jupiter’s case, how did he do it three times? More than that, how did a fourteen-year-old Day 2 newcomer manage to make it to the finals anyway, when Paul Levitin, Dale Bellido, and Hector Heras fell? Jermol Jupiter is an accomplished duelist, but he didn’t have Michael Kohanim’s claim to an SJC title—so why did two underdogs duke it out for the Championship, while Kohanim and Levitin battled for third place?

All these questions have the same answer: tech. While Mike and Paul are both incredible duelists—with three Shonen Jump Championships between them—Walker and Jupiter had them outclassed when facing the Gladiator Beast and Teleport Dark Armed matchups respectively. While Levitin ran three copies of Krebons to repel Gladiator attacks, Walker ran three himself, while also packing two copies of Psychic Commander—a card that absolutely wrecks Gladiators. Kohanim played no new Gladiator support, while Jupiter ran what is now clearly the preferable tech spread—one copy of Gladiator Beast Equeste and two Gladiator Beast War Chariot cards.

And the reason Walker lost? The reason six Gladiator Beast decks even made it to the Top 16? The Gladiator decks were widely varied—some played one Chariot, while others played two, or even none. Some played one Equeste: others chose not to run it, and Jon Mak ran two copies. But the one thing that all six Day 2 Gladiator duelists had in common was two copies of the card that will singlehandedly keep Gladiators in the game—D.D. Crow.

Same Old Song And Dance

D.D. Crow has served as main-deck tech and often a side-deck staple for over a year now—that’s no surprise. Last format it let players keep that third Dark monster out of their opponents’ graveyards, shutting down Dark Armed Dragon. It could keep your opponent from getting to his or her fourth Lightsworn monster, locking him or her out of Judgment Dragon, and it could remove the Dragon or Honest when the Lightsworn duelist tried to retrieve them with Monster Reincarnation or Beckoning Light.

It got even more popular when Gladiators really took off, stealing away Gladiator Beast Darius’s recursion target and keeping an opponent from contact Fusing for Gladiator Beast Heraklinos off of Gladiator Beast Gyzarus. It chained to Monster Reborn and Premature Burial to remove the target, kicked Pot of Avarice and Treeborn Frog out of play, and kept cards like Royal Firestorm Guards from ever taking off.

So we know those uses, and we know they’re all pretty good. They’re still just as good today as they were two weeks ago, too: all of those individual cards are still seeing play, save the ones Crow ejected from the format entirely. But one new factor has made Crow far better than it’s ever been before, transforming it from top tech into a metagame-breaking card that’s going to shape the next several months of competition.

But losing Disk Commander was a big blow to legitimate Dark decks too, so something had to come back to keep them competitive. Destiny Hero - Malicious moved from two per deck back to the old three per deck, and that made a huge difference in this format. I think three copies of Malicious have singlehandedly made Synchros into what they are.

After seeing some of North America’s top duelists run Synchros in a variety of ways this weekend, I think it’s safe to say that Destiny Hero - Malicious is the number-one source of fuel for most Synchro strategies. He wasn’t just played in the conventional Teleport Dark Armed builds that made Day 2—other competitors ran him in Teleport-free decks as well. He’s just too good to ignore, and for a variety of reasons.

First is the speed of Synchro summoning. I think most of the Teleport players won when they were able to get out two Synchros early on, and doing so isn’t particularly difficult with Malicious at three. All you need is Malicious in the graveyard and two copies of Krebons. That means you can open with Krebons on turn 1, use its effect to get it to turn 2, and then go off from there. At that point normal summoning another Krebons, or playing Emergency Teleport or Monster Reborn, is all you need to thump down two Synchros, and if one of them is Stardust Dragon both become extremely difficult to eliminate. Even if you don’t have an opening-turn Krebons, any combination of a normal summon, Reborn, and/or two Teleports gets the job done. That play was arguably the one that brought all eight Teleport players to Day 2, and when it happens there’s almost nothing you can do about it—especially if you play Gladiator Beasts.

In order to beat Teleport Dark Armed, Gladiators usually need to summon Gladiator Beast Heraklinos before the Synchro madness starts. That way, the Synchro player is stuck with any draw spells, monster theft spells, or Teleports they draw (or decided to hang onto). The deck is dependent on spells, and without them, it needs to rely on a lucky Caius the Shadow Monarch or Dark Armed Dragon to pull out the win.

So delaying the flood of Synchros becomes a top priority, and the number-one way to do that is to shut down Malicious. Gladiator Beast War Chariot can do it, but it can be preempted by Mystical Space Typhoon, Heavy Storm, or even something as simple as monster removal eliminating the Gladiator player’s only face-up Gladiator Beast. D.D. Crow is a far easier answer: it has no real weakness and it’s virtually unstoppable as far as the Teleport deck is concerned. When that first Destiny Draw or Phoenix Wing Wind Blast hits, and Malicious is discarded to the graveyard, D.D. Crow simply cripples the deck.

When that happens the Teleport player is forced to try and get another Malicious into the graveyard, struggling to redeem what would have been two Synchro summons just to get one and eliminate a potential dead draw—the third Malicious. But that player loses more than his or her second Synchro summon. By losing that first copy of Malicious to Crow, the Teleport player misses out on his or her immediate offense and (maybe even more importantly) some precious deck thinning.

The term "deck thinning" is often viewed with some degree of skepticism—it tends to get tagged onto a card that lacks sufficient merit to be a decisively optimal choice. You know the type—the kind of card people play due to personal preference, then loudly defend on message boards with a long list of five to ten lukewarm reasons the card should be run. But here, in Teleport Dark Armed, I think deck thinning is actually a huge factor contributing to the archetype’s success. And I’m not sure how obvious that was over the weekend.

So let’s make it obvious. We saw players like Hector Heras make ridiculous moves in their early games, doing stuff like summoning Stardust Dragon, Red Dragon Archfiend, and Dark Armed Dragon all on turn 2. Oddly enough, those duelists made those types of plays all day long—maybe not in all of their matches, but on a reliable basis. Are Levitin, Heras, Bellido, and Walker simply the luckiest duelists on earth? It sure looked that way, but logic states that that can’t be the case. Something else was happening, and while cynics will immediately declare top players as cheaters, the real answer is actually pretty obvious.

The most successful Teleport Dark Armed builds ran crazy deck thinning. Three copies of Destiny Draw and Allure of Darkness mean that up to twelve cards can be accessed by draw cards alone—that’s eighteen cards right off the bat when combined with your six-card opening hand. Now add in two or three copies of Reinforcement of the Army, and the deck shrinks again. Toss in three copies of Emergency Teleport, Elemental Hero Stratos, and Sangan (which can be proactively triggered with Crush Card Virus or a Synchro summon), and you cut five more cards out of your potential draws. Now add in Destiny Hero - Malicious and he shaves two more cards out of your deck all on his own. We’re suddenly talking about a deck that can go through twenty-five cards or more in just a few turns, on a reliable basis, every game.

Is it any wonder that we saw Dark Armed Dragon so often?

But removing Malicious hurts deck thinning as well, keeping the Teleport Dark Armed duelist from thinning through the other two copies of himself, while also delaying the speed at which he or she can play Teleport—that means more drawn copies of Psychic Tuners, and fewer Dark Armeds. It also means slightly lower access to cards like Destiny Draw and Allure, and while these are all small mathematical handicaps, they add up pretty darn fast. D.D. Crow hurts Teleport Dark Armed in more than just the obvious ways, and I’m not sure anyone understood the full scope of the damage it was doing while they were still on the tables.

So the question at this point changes. Are two copies of Crow enough? Let’s run the numbers and find out.

If you run two copies of D.D. Crow in a 40-card deck, hyper-geometric distribution dictates that you’ll have a 24 percent chance of drawing one in your opening hand of five cards, with a 29 percent chance of drawing one in your first six. However, if you run three copies those figures go up by ten percent: a 34 percent chance of a Crow in your first five cards, and a 39 percent chance of a Crow in your first six.

(Yes, "hyper-geometric distribution." Throw it into Wikipedia  if you think I make this stuff up.)

If you’re playing Gladiators, many opponents will play their Synchros on turn 1 if possible—this limits your chances for interrupting their Malicious plays with Crow, robbing you of that extra five percent chance to draw it. You can’t count on winning the die roll, so let’s consider the low-end figures of the two-Crow and three-Crow scenario to be the relevant ones. At this point the question is simple: do you want to open with Crow in 24 percent of your games, or in 34 percent? In other words, do you want to auto-win one in every four games, or do you want to auto-win one every match?

I think the answer’s clear, and I think Gladiators should be main-decking three copies of D.D. Crow from here on out. Every other deck might want to do so as well.

The builds of Teleport Dark Armed that we saw this past weekend are progenitors—they’re works in progress. Gladiator Beasts have been perfected over four months, and slipping in one Equeste and two Chariots isn’t particularly difficult. Minus that third Crow, a deck like Jermol Jupiter’s is about as good as it’s going to get without a radical change like the removal of Stratos and Prisma. But Teleport Dark Armed is going to get much, much better over the next couple of Jumps, and Gladiators need every single advantage they can get. Heck, so does everything else. I’ve never been a fan of diluting a central strategy for main-decked copies of Crow, but I think that if you’re not running Teleport Dark Armed yourself, you need to be maining three Crows.

Do it and you’ll have a big advantage at upcoming tournaments.

—Jason Grabher-Meyer