Those of you who have ever seen me play my Counter Fairy deck are fully aware of how much I enjoy denying my opponents the ability to do anything, but there’s a very large difference between simply preventing the cards the opponent has from resolving and preventing them from ever being played. One of these is frequently much more powerful than the other, and you can tell which it is by how many cards are printed of that particular type. Specifically, compare the number of counter traps to the number of cards that specifically prevent actions from being taken or skip phases altogether. In fact, look at the Limited list and tell me how many counter traps are on it. None, right? Now look and see how many cards are on there that prevent phases or prohibit actions. Just from a cursory glance, I see at least three. (Gravity Bind, Swords of Revealing Light, and Level Limit - Area B) Prohibiting attacks is serious business in a game where one turn of missed attacks can turn a sure win into, "Help, I’m getting trashed by Dark Armed Dragon."
Action prohibition is now in vogue in Gladiator Beast decks as well, with Cold Wave getting the nod to help Gladiator Beast Gyzarus and friends wreak havoc on the field. None of those cards, however, is capable of a complete and total lockdown. I’m talking can’t draw, can’t set spells or traps, can’t play monsters, can’t attack, can’t have a turn here. A card that would lock the opponent down in such a fashion hasn’t really been seen since the days of the Yata-Garasu lock, and even then it was only in combination with the rest of your deck working to whittle down the opponent’s game position that the lock was possible.
If you think about it, a card that forces your opponent to skip his or her turn is pretty unfair. It’s only been used once before to my knowledge—as the consequence for losing the coin flip on Gamble—and that’s a case of skipping the user’s turn, not the opponent’s. Now, imagine how surprised people were during the Light of Destruction Sneak Preview when they pulled a card with the power to skip the opponent’s turn attached to a 3100 ATK body. It was akin to a deer in the headlights followed by a request for a judge to make sure the card did what they thought it did.
The card is Arcana Force XXI - The World, and yes, it does do what you think it does, if what you think it does is, "allows for one to create a nasty deck based on forcing the opponent to skip limitless turns." My only questions were, "How fast can I get the card to do this?" and "Do I really need to win a coin toss to make this work?" To my surprise, the answers were "within a couple turns" and "no" respectively. That’s pretty exciting from a deckbuilder’s point of view, so here’s what I came up with to try and string endless turns together for a win.
There’s a three-step process that you need to go through in order to achieve infinite turns. The key components are Arcana Force XXI - The World and Samsara Lotus. With the heads effect of The World active and two copies of Samsara Lotus in the graveyard, as long as your field is clear of spells and traps you can bring back two copies of Lotus and then immediately send them back to the graveyard so that The World can skip your opponent’s turn. Ideally, you’d want all three copies of Lotus in the yard just in case your opponent is holding D.D. Crow, but the basic idea remains the same: make free monsters, swing for big damage, then skip the opponent’s turn. With this in mind, there are three goals that you have to pursue in-game in order to make this happen. First, you’ll need to summon The World. I’ve included a number of ways to do this, including Reasoning, Monster Gate, Premature Burial, 
, and just plain tribute summoning it if you have to. Your second task, which occurs concurrently with the first, is ensuring that The World is summoned with its proper effect activated. If you don’t want to have to flip heads, you’ll need Light Barrier to get the job done. Between Terraforming and the Barrier itself, you have four cards out of the deck able to influence the effect of The World, and if all else fails, you can always leave things up to Lady Luck.
Assuming you achieve this by whatever means necessary, you need to make sure that The World can actually do its thing, and that means supplying it with an endless amount of monsters. Obviously, Samsara Lotus is the preferred method of generating monsters for as many turns as you need to win, so to get it into the graveyard I’m using two copies of Foolish Burial and a full complement of Armageddon Knight cards. Foolish is still a combo player’s dream as it lets you put any monster you need into the graveyard, so you can get a Lotus if you need it or The World if you’re holding Monster Reborn in your hand. It can even get Spell Striker in combination with The Warrior Returning Alive if for some reason you need to pick one up, such as if you’ve already got the combo but are being stymied by Spirit Reaper or Marshmallon (with infinite turns, even one Striker can get the job done).
This last step also involves getting Light Barrier off the field so that your Lotuses can actually return. In practice, this tends to be the tricky part since you need to use either Heavy Storm, Giant Trunade, or Mystical Space Typhoon to do it, and in the case of bringing back The World with Premature Burial, only one of the three will work. It seems sketchy, but if an infinite turns combo wasn’t sketchy and was, in fact, incredibly consistent, you can bet we’d be seeing one or all of the combo pieces on the Forbidden or Limited list in September after it goes and wins a Jump or Nationals. With that said, I’m using a copy of Magical Stone Excavation, since it can retrieve spells that are lost to Reasoning, Monster Gate, Hand Destruction, or Card Destruction while also dropping any copies of Samsara Lotus you might have drawn in the process.
While this build would probably be fine for most local events, if you wanted to take a deck built on this concept to a higher-level event, there are a few things you’d need to come up with first. First and foremost, the deck needs a better draw engine. Allure of Darkness doesn’t really work here because, above all else, the Samsara Lotus cards must go to the graveyard. Removing one for Allure simply won’t cut it since you know someone is going to draw D.D. Crow and try to trip you up. If you get hit by Crow and become stuck with only one Lotus, your option is to hope the opponent hasn’t got Reaper, Marshmallon, or any other monster that The World can’t break through and keep on dropping monsters to feed while you win. With 3100 ATK, The World can win the game on its own in three turns, but keeping it fed that long becomes an issue if you’ve just gone through most (if not all) of your hand in order to manipulate fate into giving you what you want. Spell Striker is the obvious candidate here, though you can easily special summon Infernal Prodigy before bringing out The World as insurance against Crow for a turn.
The next thing the deck needs before it’ll go anywhere on the Regional or National level is more redundancy. It’s hard with this deck because there’s no loop or OTK that you’re attempting to go for. This deck doesn’t wipe the opponent’s field with Darklord Zerato before swinging in with a number of monsters brought back by Dimension Fusion, and in fact, no deck gets to do this anymore. Eliminating a vast majority of the infinite loops in the game made it much more difficult to pull off shenanigans like this, and for the most part, that’s good. If someone is going to come up with the next big combo deck, that person will have to be super clever about it. My prediction is that the next time we see a combo deck blazing a trail through the metagame, it’s going to be more like Vincent Tundo’s Life Equalizer deck than Diamond Dude Turbo. Finally, the last thing the deck needs before it can become successful is a pilot who is willing to put in the time to both optimize the build and then playtest it again and again until that player can run it in his or her sleep. I barely get enough sleep as it is, so in this case, that person isn’t going to be me. If it’s something that you think you’d like to do though, I encourage you to run with it. The most successful players are those who spend a lot of time learning the intricacies of the decks that they build. Look at Kris Perovic for proof of that, and until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!
—Jerome McHale