Fusion:

2 Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon

2 Cyber End Dragon

1 Cyber Twin Dragon

2 Gatling Dragon

2 The Last Warrior From Another Planet

2 Dark Blade the Dragon Knight

2 Fiend Skull Dragon

2 Reaper on the Nightmare

2 Ojama King

Pair of Zaborgs? Check. Treeborn Frog? Check. Apprentice Magician Engine? Check. But the deck also uses a pair of Cyber-Stein cards, three Megamorph cards, and two Giant Trunade cards, a similar support suite that the rest of the team is using in their Dark World variant.

Megamorph keeps popping up here today, and it really warrants some discussion. While previously most duelists just viewed it as Stein support, this deck goes a long way towards abusing it in other forms. If you read our round 1 feature match, you saw how Limiter Removal and Megamorph can be valuable without Cyber-Stein, as they allowed Kris Perovic to steal a duel that began with the world’s worst opening hand, and ended with a Cyber Dragon swinging on Dekoichi the Battlechanted Locomotive for 8400 damage. Youch.

The truth is that Megamorph is incredible when it’s strapped to darn near anything of a decent size. Monarchs, Cyber Dragon, and virtually anything else with more than 1500 ATK becomes a big threat when you suddenly double its offensive capabilities. Adding Limiter Removal to that kind of pump is just brutal—like we saw in round 1—and a direct shot can often be engineered. You saw that in round 3 when Lance Leonhardt struck for the match win on Mark Garcia.

The deck reads like a laundry list of Monarch and Stein cards, but some really work well for both strategies. The general defensive tone of three Sakuretsu Armor cards gives both Monarchs and Stein the openings they need to cause big damage. Scapegoat makes up for the potential of either strategy to fizzle out due to mismatched draws, and Last Will is just as good bringing out Treeborn Frog as it can be grabbing Cyber-Stein. It’s fascinating to see two decks united through their common cards in this manner. On one hand, some might hate the fact that so many cards are useable in so many decks. From one perspective that can limit creativity. But from another, it just makes even more unique strategies possible, since it’s possible to combine two strategies into one.

Morphing Jar is a standby of the Overdose tech roster, and it of course appears here. It can be used to create devastating combos with Stein, dig for Monarchs once Treeborn Frog comes online, or compensate for an over-extension that doesn’t go well (say, Mobius into Bottomless Trap Hole or Torrential Tribute). The possibilities are endless, and while Morphing Jar can certainly backfire in the Dark World matchup, it’s fair to say that these players will probably be able to work their way around that risk. Dead draws kill, but good players have experience at working around them.

This deck is pretty much “Aggro Beatdown With Random Stein” taken to the next level. The synergies run deep, the deck plays aggressively, and it retains all the tempo manipulation and most of the options that the average early-format deck would have provided. But this is definitely a mid-format deck, as you can see in all the combos, tech picks, and borrowed engines.

So far, the deck has taken several losses, but win or lose, it represents an interesting evolution in the format. It’s worthy of study, and still has a good shot at making a Day 2 finish!