Among the many decks that have appeared on the tournament scene of the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game, burn has always been one of the most feared. Sure, you might not normally see burn decks in the Top 8 of Shonen Jump Championships, but it’s important to notice that when burn does make Top 8 at a premier event, it’s a sign that players need to start side-decking in cards that can keep them alive in the matchup. In fact, various Advanced formats have seen side-decks packed with anti-burn tech, such as Pikeru’s Circle of Enchantment or Des Wombat. However, these powerful anti-burn cards tend to vanish out of side-decks because players can become too comfortable and assume burn will never have an impact on the tournament they enter. Why does this thought go through players’ heads?
While burn can be very powerful, the deck can also be a little bit inconsistent. Slow draws on the burn player’s part usually lead to the burn deck losing, since it will give the opponent too much time to mount an offensive with a monster or two. At this point, the opponent’s monsters will have the burn player beaten in one or two turns, while the burn player will be left with a bunch of spells and traps that can deal a burst of damage that doesn’t equal the kind of damage those monsters could deal. This is also why you typically see Dekoichi the Battlechanted Locomotive in burn decks, since it replaces itself while shielding your life points for a turn against an opponent’s attack.
The other reason why burn decks tend to lose on occasion is that they run out of cards far too quickly. When most of a deck’s cards consist of direct damage, it’s easy to enter a top-decking situation within a turn or so. Unfortunately, if you are top-decking while your opponent is over 1200 life points, then the cards you are going to draw won’t be that useful unless you can draw multiple powerful burn cards in a row.
The reason why I’m even bringing up burn in the first place is because the deck type received a tremendous boost from the new Cyberdark Impact expansion set. Chain Strike, for instance, is a powerful new weapon that can deal between 1200-2000 damage with one card. However, Chain Strike is not the topic for today. That honor is reserved for Accumulated Fortune.
Veterans of the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game should be familiar with Pot of Greed. It was that one card every opponent hated to see activated. It meant that the user automatically got extra cards and options . . . for free. It didn’t take a turn or two to set up with a flip effect monster, and it didn’t have a heavy activation requirement. You just drew two cards . . . for free. While the effect doesn’t seem powerful, effects that draw you more cards with little investment give you easy access to more options. Pot of Greed provided a player with two new options instead of one, and it dug that player a little deeper into his or her deck to make the odds of drawing specific cards a little better. Pot of Greed really got out of hand when Magician of Faith allowed a player to re-use it multiple times.
Burn decks liked Pot of Greed as much as they liked Magician of Faith and Mask of Darkness. However, with Pot of Greed gone from every deck, the burn player has to feel a little special for still actually having a Pot of Greed available to him or her. Accumulated Fortune is essentially the same thing as Pot of Greed. The difference is that the burn deck’s card-drawing ability now has an activation requirement. Oh shucks.
The activation requirement for Accumulated Fortune is a bit rough. You can only activate the trap card on or after chain link 4, meaning that a minimum of three other cards or effects need to be on a chain before you can activate your new “Pot of Greed.” For a normal deck, this activation requirement is tough. A Monarch control deck could manage a chain link 3 effect easily enough with its Monarch’s trigger being chain link 1 and the opponent’s chained spell or trap being chain link 2. However, chain link 4 is a little out of that deck’s reach. Likewise, most “good stuff” decks* won’t be able to efficiently activate Accumulated Fortune because their cards are scattered amongst different and often conditional effects. Chain link 4, however, is very easy for a burn deck to reach.
A burn deck commonly runs various chainable burn abilities such as Ojama Trio with Just Desserts, Ceasefire, Secret Barrel, and Poison of the Old Man. Because of this, it’s very easy to get to chain link 4 with an average opening hand. This makes Accumulated Fortune a powerful burst of cards for the deck that desperately needs to refuel after launching a pile of burn at an opponent’s face. More importantly, since Accumulated Fortune is a spell speed 2 normal trap, it can capitalize off of an opponent’s chain link 1 effect while adding links to a chain for a deadly Chain Strike. Imagine if your opponent’s fearful reaction to four cards set in your spell or trap zone is Heavy Storm. You respond with Jar of Greed, then link to that with Just Desserts, followed by Ojama Trio, and then capped off with Accumulated Fortune. Heavy Storm acts as chain link 1, while Accumulated Fortune is chain link 5. Once the entire chain resolves, the resulting effect puts your opponent up three Ojama tokens, down at least 1500 life points, and down a card, while you are sitting with a five-card hand after your initial six-card starting hand. You’ve conceded almost nothing, you dealt 1500 damage, and now you’ve cluttered up your opponent’s field.
Another important fact to remember about Accumulated Fortune (besides cards like Chain Strike) is that you can activate back-to-back copies of these cards one after another. Well . . . at least you can activate one more in response to the first copy. Their effects specify that they can’t be activated if two cards of the same name are a part of the same chain, but the rules can’t do anything about having a second activated Accumulated Fortune on the chain if it was activated while there was only one copy of Accumulated Fortune there already. This makes multiple copies of this card incredibly powerful, since you won’t have to set up an elaborate chain with a second copy of your card-drawing trap card. You’ll simply draw four cards in one massive chain, easily refueling you for another all-out burn turn.
Accumulated Fortune is just one new tool for the classic burn deck, or for an entirely new variation on it. Cyberdark Impact has added more cards to this strategy, and I’ll be looking at more of them next week. Be sure to check it out!
*A “good stuff” deck is a deck that almost exclusively runs cards that can be powerful draws on their own. These decks essentially have no theme and don’t actually play an aggro or control strategy. What the player draws with these sorts of decks dictates how he or she plays out the duel.