First, let’s take a look at the breakdown of the Top 8 decks. This event marked the first true success of Dark World since the cards were introduced in Elemental Energy. In fact, more than one Dark World deck made the cut. Normally, the success of a unique or innovative deck is “explained” away as a result of Cyber-Stein use, but this time no such excuse can be made. Theeresak Poonsombat, 2004 National champion and six-time SJC Top 8 competitor made his sixth Top 8 with Dark World, and he did it without a single Cyber-Stein in his main or side deck. As a quick note, the eventual winner didn’t play the Stein either. I hope I’m not the only one noticing the trend here. We’ve determined that T’s success was entirely unrelated to random Cyber-Stein, so just what is it that made his deck good enough to cut through an event packed with Monarchs? I think a lot of it has to do with the two maindecked copies of Deck Devastation Virus. Many decks these days are built with Cyber Dragon, Breaker the Magical Warrior, and whatever contingent of Monarchs the player brings to the table as the only offensively-oriented monsters. The rest of the deck is mostly occupied by the Apprentice Magician engine, two copies of Exiled Force, maybe a pair of Mystic Tomato cards, a few Sangan-searchable tech cards, and oftentimes a single Cyber-Stein.

In general, a Monarch deck runs about 22 monsters, five or six of which are Monarchs and three of which are Cyber Dragon. Throw in Breaker the Magical Warrior and you’ve got about nine or ten monsters that aren’t vulnerable to Deck Devastation Virus, only one or two of which you’d like to see in your graveyard. That means that Deck Devastation Virus is capable of taking out about half of the Monarch deck’s monsters before it even plays them and will continue to do so for three turns. Not having any monsters to tribute tends to be a major problem for a deck that runs off of five or six tribute monsters, so it’s pretty clear to see exactly what Deck Devastation Virus does to a Monarch deck.

The other (and perhaps more important) aspect of the Dark World deck is that it has a natural resistance to today’s Monarch decks. Thestalos the Firestorm Monarch is usually a huge threat as soon as he hits the table, but if his discard effect happens to hit a Goldd, Wu-Lord of Dark World or Sillva, Warlord of Dark World out of the opponent’s hand, the game can suddenly spiral in a totally different direction. In fact, it’s not just Thestalos that needs to worry about Goldd. Many decks still play Spirit Reaper, and Confiscation is still an excellent card. Don Zaloog is seeing more play as well. Looking at all these factors as a whole makes it easy to see that Dark World really is a great call in this format, regardless of whether you prefer T’s build or Tim Perry’s or Third Planet, or even the version Paul Levitin brought to the event.

Another thing that happened a lot over the weekend was that people made good plays and were rewarded for them. You’d think that anyone would be able to see or at least infer that by the fact that someone heads home with a Shrink in hand at the end of it all, but unfortunately, a large portion of the internet community is too attached to the so-called word “lucksack” to get it through their heads. News flash! There are people who are good at this game! Unfortunately, sometimes this isn’t aptly communicated through our feature match coverage. Sometimes you get those matches where the circumstances work out so far in one player’s favor that it just doesn’t matter how good the other guy is. Other times the match ends in an unfortunate penalty for one player that makes everyone wonder what would have happened if the game had continued. Fortunately, sometimes you get the rare match where you can really tell that one or both of the players is just playing a great game. The round 1 feature match between Michael Lux and Kris Perovic is a great example of this, and Jason did a wonderful job of capturing the atmosphere of the match in his coverage.

When I was writing last week’s School of Duel, I knew that I wanted the next installment of the series to be about deckbuilding decisions, but I had a difficult time thinking of a good problem to use as the homework leading into it. In the end, I came up with the card-ranking question you see in the article. I chose that particular idea for a couple of different reasons, but mainly because removing all of your opponent’s cards from play is a great way to wreck any strategy based on the use and re-use of a few good cards. Little did I suspect that a very similar deck would make the Top 8 of SJC Anaheim. Kirk Leonhardt piloted a dedicated remove-from-game deck to his second SJC Top 8 finish, bringing yet another oft-forgotten strategy back into the public eye. Interestingly enough, the deck was very light on traps, opting to only use one copy of the poster-child of removing everything from play, Macro Cosmos. Regardless of whether or not I would have built the deck in the same way, Kirk still managed to show off the power of that strategy in one of the most fiercely competitive SJCs of the season. I know that you’ve probably heard Mike saying this a lot recently, but the main reason that decks with five or more tribute monsters stand a chance in an aggressive format like this one is Treeborn Frog. Fortunately for Kirk, the Frog is nothing before his Dimensional Fissure and Banisher of the Radiance cards. Other favorites, like Pot of Avarice and Magician of Faith, are pretty useless against him as well, and there’s nothing that someone playing D.D. Survivor likes more than knowing it’ll always be on the field come turn’s end.

The last event-related topic I want to touch on is the “Creature Swap Control” deck that Fili Luna played to the finals. To be honest, I’m not sold on it at all. It looks to me like the kind of stuff we were seeing at the very start of the format: Chaos Swap decks without Chaos Sorcerer. Still, two steps forward and one step back is still progress, and progress is good. I fully expect to see a lot more of it come SJC San Jose in December.

As many of you know, I like to trundle around the forums for my daily dose of Yu-Gi-Oh! drama, but sometimes I read something that really strikes a nerve, compelling me to write about it here. I recently encountered such a topic: why are so many good decks ignored by so many people? It’s a really good question. Why aren’t we seeing more Clockwork, Cat’s Pajamas, Counter-Fairies, and Third Planet flying around? I think the primary reason is that none of these decks have been “proven consistent.” Notice the quotation marks around the last two words. This is because “proven consistent” is a terrible limitation that should never be allowed to play with the rest of the sentence. Many people use the Copy->Paste->Print “style” of playtesting, and while I don’t agree with it, I do accept that it’s a part of any TCG. What I don’t accept is that people who choose that path simply ignore 98% of the material available to them.

Take the Clockwork deck for instance. It was originally built (and later improved upon) by a previous U.S. National Champion (Max Suffridge), and it’s also widely recognized as an excellent concept by many of the game’s most well-regarded players. It’s even a good call for the current metagame. Why is no one playing it? Because it hasn’t been “proven consistent.”  In many players’ eyes, decks are only worthy of use after they’ve won the first three SJCs of the format. Which is funny, because before the third one ends, a deck is only “proven consistent” if it won the first two. The hilarity continues (in a “my stomach feels funny” sense rather than “funny, ha-ha” sense) in that before that SJC, the deck is only “proven consistent” if it won the first SJC. What happens before that? People just play whatever deck was winning last format minus any cards that were Forbidden or Limited. It’s a purely human folly, and could be easily avoided if people would just try new ideas instead of forcing things to stay the same.

Overall, SJC Anaheim is a great step forward in showing off the true potential of the format, and I hope we’ll see similar progress at San Jose. I kind of got off schedule with this whole “talking about the tournament scene” thing, so expect things to be back on track with a deck next week, along with another School of Duel. Until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!

Jerome McHale

jcmchale@andrew.cmu.edu

NEXT WEEK: At least 90% fewer clock puns than the episode of GX with the first appearance of Clock Tower Prison. I guarantee it.