One Shonen Jump Championship into the format and I can tell you one thing has changed: it’s fast. In this format games can end two to three turns deep. It’s all about playing your cards as intelligently as possible and hoping your deck is built well enough to come out on top. The game is so much more intense. Every play matters, every mistake is costly, and every draw counts.

The card you draw on your turn is often the difference between playing a live hand or a dead one. If you’re holding Gladiator Beast Laquari when your opponent’s got Stardust Dragon on the field, you’re not in much of a position to do anything. But if you draw Mind Control for the turn, suddenly you have a play that destroys the Stardust and puts you back in the duel. In Teleport decks it’s the difference between a dead Destiny Draw or two fresh cards. The momentum that can be built off of dumping Destiny Hero - Malicious to the graveyard is ridiculous, and with a pair of Emergency Teleport cards you can quickly go from nothing to 6000 ATK worth of monsters.

The game is all about who can set up first. That doesn’t mean who can put the most cards on the field as quickly as possible. It means who can prepare a course of action that leads to winning the game. For a long time, the best deck for this has been Gladiator Beasts. Since you play so many search cards, the plan of action is almost always the same in every game: force your opponent to use answers on 2100 ATK Laquaris, and use Gladiator Beast Gyzarus, Cold Wave, and/or Solemn Judgment to ultimately contact Fuse for Gladiator Beast Heraklinos. The result is an opponent who just lost his or her field and can’t use spell or trap cards to fight back.

But there is finally a deck that can keep up with Gladiator Beasts. Teleport Dark Armed is the new-age Dark Armed Return. Six draw cards and six search cards make the deck incredibly fast. The amount of special summoning is similar to that of Dark Armed Return and a lot of the victories look similar to that deck’s game-winning scenarios. Normal summon Elemental Hero Stratos, special summon Dark Grepher, Dark Armed Dragon and Krebons, and voila: you have 9400 damage on field and a means to destroy three cards.

The best part is that Solemn Judgment doesn’t really stop it. There’s a reason Solemn Judgment didn’t see widespread play until after Return from the Different Dimension and Dimension Fusion got taken care of. You can’t afford to pay half your life points when your opponent can easily special summon another monster or two to finish you off. In the past your opponent could use up his or her normal summon for , use some draw cards to find Dark Armed Dragon, and special summon it. If you used Solemn to stop the Dragon, your opponent could still act. Even without a normal summon left, simply playing Soul Release and Dimension Fusion brought back enough monsters for the Dark Armed player to win the game.

This is why Gladiator Beasts have been dominant. Before Synchros, the Dark deck would freeze up every time it ran into a Solemn Judgment. With no special summon cards other than Dark Armed Dragon, stopping one was as good as ending the Dark deck’s turn. Now Dark Armed players have a way to special summon multiple monsters in one turn once more. Emergency Teleport is everything Destiny Hero-based decks could ask for. When I wrote my preview on Nitro Synchron, I said I thought of the Tuners like Test Tiger for any monster. That is to say they turn one monster into a much better one from your deck (or Extra deck in this case.)

The flaw in this comparison was that Gladiator Beasts could play a monster and change it out on that same turn because Test Tiger was a special summon. Emergency Teleport is that special summon that Tuners needed in order to keep up. The ability to special summon is a necessary component to a fast deck. Special summons allow you to play your monsters like they’re spell cards. Most of the control in the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG is based around the thought that "they can’t do anything else this turn." The reason is usually because you’ve already summoned or used your battle phase.

Special summons make your deck fast because you can strike again on the same turn. Your opponent thinks you’re out of plays until next turn, but you’ve got another play he or she couldn’t anticipate. The opponent won’t be ready for it. Suddenly the opponent isn’t in control of the game, is taking life point damage, and is left without the game state he or she was hoping to take advantage of.

The best thing about fast cards is that you can afford to play a control game with them. "Fast" cards often translate into "readily available" cards, which means you’re able to create problems for your opponent. Take for example Dimension Fusion. In days past, one could easily play it to special summon a field of Dark Magician of Chaos, Dark Grepher, and Strike Ninja. Returning the Dimension Fusion to your hand means that you’re ready to do it all again when necessary. A player attempting to control your cards is going to have lots of trouble dealing with a field of monsters that constantly replenishes itself with one card, especially if that one card is returned to your hand when played.

At the same time, one could use Dimension Fusion to win the game. Returning those three monsters could allow the turn player to use Dark Grepher’s effect, followed by Strike Ninja. Now there are three more monsters removed from play, allowing Dimension Fusion to fill your field. Assuming you picked the right monsters for Grepher’s effect, you’ve probably got the game in the bag.

The days of slow-paced control games are gone. Control strategies still exist, but they’ve got to be fast to succeed. Otherwise every top deck is going to punish you with its own speed and ability to lock up a slower player’s game.

—Matt Peddle