Well, that was pretty cool, wasn’t it? The last time I feature matched an absolutely awesome deck it was Shonen Jump Chicago, and though I’d approached Nicholas Alessi to write about his innovative deck-out deck for Metagame, he never wound up e-mailing me.

He seemed really eager to do it. Hopefully he’s not dead.

Anyway, today we have an even cooler deck-out deck winning match after match, coming off a Round 7 feature match with a 6-1 record. If you already read the match you know what this deck is about; it looks to put one, eventually two or as many as three copies of Soul-Absorbing Bone Tower onto the field to deck the opponent two cards at a time. I really don’t want another Nicholas Alessi incident this time, so I’m skipping the Round 8 feature match to show you Arimas’ deck. If you’re like me, you probably can’t wait to see it. Here’s what it looks like:

This deck is largely about redundancy. Since most of its combo pieces have alternate defensive or aggressive uses, and many are desirable to draw in multiples anyway, Arimas has gone all out with no worry for utility. He plays three Soul-Absorbing Bone Tower, three Zombie Master and three Mezuki to facilitate special summoning, and three Goblin Zombie and Pyramid Turtle to search out the cards he needs. Plaguespreader Zombie drops big Synchros while clearing the field of used up Zombie Masters, generating both a tremendous field presence while also allowing Arimas to special summon over and over. They clear space, and they let Zombie Masters freshen up in the graveyard so their effects can be used again.

Three Allure of Darkness, three Hand Destruction, and three Upstart Goblin power the deck to its key combo cards. Card Destruction does the same while also forcing the opponent through his or her deck, while Book of Life, Burial from a Different Dimension, and Foolish Burial set up a near-endless font of special summons. Two Card of Safe Return represent the big payoff, turning those special summons into free cards which are then looped back into more special summons. And so on, until the game is over.

Giant Trunade clears the opponent’s spell and trap cards, Monster Reborn is a must-run, and Mass Driver provides more field clearing power. When Arimas just needs to get more monsters off the field, the Driver lets him do that while generating a bit of burn damage as a bonus. “I actually burned a guy to death with that today,” he reflected. “Cycling Zombie Master with Card of Safe Return and stuff. Normally it’s just useful to get stuff off the field though, more so than for the burn damage.” Again, it helps him reuse those lynchpin copies of Zombie Master, and it gives the Master’s special summoned buddies a place to land when he yanks them out of their graves.

The final card in the deck is Zombie World — just one copy. “A friend of mine told me to put it in as a filler. It’s for when you bring up Doomkaiser Dragon, and you can take their stuff with it. That’s it.” It’s a cool choice, and while it’s a bit niche, it was effective in at least one instance earlier today: Arimas used it to swipe a copy of Goyo Guardian and strike for game.

Arimas lost in Round 1, which kept him off my radar for a deck profile earlier in the day, but he battled back. He went undefeated from that point on, and has managed to dodge the one matchup he wants to play: TeleDAD. He’s beaten Lightsworn, Gladiator Beasts, and even Zombie Master, but hasn’t even seen TeleDAD yet today: “I really want to play TeleDAD, cause it’s my best matchup, but it hasn’t happened yet. It’s weird!”