If there is one thing players have learned over the past year or so in the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG, it is that monsters with small stats can be more powerful than monsters with a larger ATK if the effect is powerful enough. Effect monsters such as Magician of Faith and Tsukuyomi ruled the game for well over a year.

So far, we’ve played in the new Advanced format for a little over a month and the new environment has been a refreshing change: consisting of more aggressive decks and the re-kindling of the Monarch control deck. However, there is still one major threat that lurks in this format: Cyber-Stein. I’m sure many of you are familiar with this card by now—the master of stealing wins away from a player who has the duel in his or her hands. It’s not exactly the most complex combo deck to come out of the game (I think new writer Vincent Tundo’s Royal Magical Library deck earns that award), but it does its job of annihilating an opponent effectively enough. While many players have considered it the bane of the format, I do not believe that it is really that threatening in the form that players have been using it.

I’ll go so far as to say that Cyber-Stein shouldn’t be that good in the format. There are plenty of excellent tech cards or options to put into your side deck that can render Cyber-Stein a non-issue. This especially rings true for heavily aggressive decks such as Dark World . . . a deck that has this nifty little trap card that can easily crush control and Stein strategies alike: Deck Devastation Virus.

Deck Devastation Virus has received some attention since its release, but has never actually seen serious success in a tournament. This is likely because of the heavy drawback to even activate it. Getting a 2000 ATK Dark monster sounds like it would take a lot of work! Why would you want to tribute that monster away to a trap card like Deck Devastation Virus?

At this point, I hope some of you just remembered that Chaos Sorcerer was seeing heavy, heavy play right up until it was banned from tournament play. That monster was Dark. It had at least 2000 ATK. It had an effect you could use before you tributed it to this overlooked trap card. So why exactly did it not see tournament play?

Well, Deck Devastation Virus actually did see play. The players who used it just never got far enough to earn themselves a Top 8 at a Shonen Jump Championship. Before the Return-Chaos format, many players from Comic Odyssey ran a heavy tribute-monster deck that used discard effects from Card Destruction with monsters such as Thunder Dragon and Goldd, Wu-Lord of Dark World. Both monsters made Card Destruction and other discard-based effects very powerful, and were conveniently Light and Dark monsters respectively, allowing the use of Chaos Sorcerer in their decks. These decks sported copies of Deck Devastation Virus which allowed them to mow down players who relied heavily on slow tempo monsters such as Dekoichi the Battlechanted Locomotive. The players who ran this deck from Comic Odyssey wanted to have the option to activate Deck Devastation Virus so badly that they even ran copies of Blowback Dragon to make sure they had tribute fodder for the trap card, while still allowing the tribute fodder to have an effect on the opponent’s current field!

However, Deck Devastation Virus was quickly pushed aside the moment Return-Chaos became popular this past summer. Unfortunately, while you had three Chaos Sorcerer cards to fuel the costs to this trap, it would ultimately end up helping your opponent speed up his or her Chaos game plan, since Deck Devastation Virus would send a ton of small Light and Dark monsters to the graveyard. This gave the opponent the chance to summon his or her Chaos Sorcerer cards much faster than in a normal duel.

The time of Chaos has passed, however. In its place, many smaller monsters have risen in popularity. These monsters do a good job fueling many decks, allowing a Monarch control player to build up tribute fodder or card cycling before they drop a Thestalos the Firestorm Monarch or speeding up or stabilizing a one-turn win via Cyber-Stein.

Cyber-Stein also falls under the category of “little monster”. It shares the same stats as Frog the Jam, but packs an effect that has left many popular players talking about how they lost, despite a seeming advantage in cards or game play that did absolutely nothing against the Stein user. Like many monsters before it, though, Cyber-Stein falls to Deck Devastation Virus. Activating this powerful trap card can not only throw an opponent off of his or her prepared Cyber-Stein plan, but also stops any support cards that could assist that player in pulling off the one-hit combo, such as Nimble Momonga, Exiled Force, and more! In fact, Deck Devastation Virus completely dismantles most of the Cyber-Stein deck’s monster line-up, and will continue to do so for three turns! You should be able to win if your opponent can’t do anything productive for three full turns. Otherwise something has gone terribly wrong with that game. The one thing Cyber-Stein players rely on is setting the tempo, and halting their plans for three full turns gives you a chance to attack as much as possible before they can start setting up their combo once again.

The best part about Deck Devastation Virus is that it can be easy to set up for some decks. Warrior decks can make use of a Deck Devastation Virus conversion by siding the necessary copies of the trap card and a couple Zombyra the Dark cards, which can be searched out via Reinforcement of the Army. Dark World naturally runs monsters that can be easily summoned and tributed to Deck Devastation Virus, and almost every relevant monster you can summon with Pyramid Turtle in a Zombie deck can act as food for the devastating trap!

While Deck Devastation Virus can’t actually deal with some deck’s threats (such as the Monarchs in the Monarch control deck), it has the ability to completely annihilate one of the most feared decks in the format. A Stein player should not be able to win if you activate and resolve this trap successfully. It gives you too much time to reduce his or her life points to an unrecoverable state. Not only do you wipe out the Stein player’s monster line-up, but you also gain information on what is in your opponent’s hand when you activate Deck Devastation Virus, so you should be able to make the right plays knowing what your opponent can do to you. This applies to any other deck as well, since a duel becomes much easier to win once you know what your opponent is capable of for three turns.

Deck Devastation Virus is probably one of the best trap cards an aggro deck or Warrior toolbox deck can have access to in this current format. Its effect completely dismantles Cyber-Stein strategies, and also throws off most other control deck’s support cards. The information that this trap card provides you is just as valuable as the destruction it will cause to your opponent’s monsters, so make sure you use that information properly.

If you have any questions or comments regarding this or any previous articles of mine, feel free to e-mail me at Mrosenberg@metagame.com.