Surprisingly, a handful of tech cards are already emerging and proving to be successful. Here are the top three pieces of new tech that we’ve seen in the first few rounds.

Thunder Dragon: Run by duelists like Kirk Leonhardt and Wilson Luc, Thunder Dragon has become a viable card in the format for several reasons.

The first is Pot of Avarice. The Dragons provide up to three extra monsters for your graveyard, making it easy to cycle through your deck while gaining raw card advantage. Pot of Avarice can win games, but the main problem that comes with using it is the fact that it’s a dead card in the first few turns of a duel. In the wrong matchup, it can remain dead far longer, and because it’s usually hard to drop more than two monsters into the graveyard in a single turn, Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer can be employed aggressively to keep a duelist’s graveyard under the five monster threshold. Thunder Dragon addresses each of these problems, giving you a fast source of discarded monsters to use when pressured by graveyard removal, and a quick way of filling the grave in the early game.

In addition, the value of in-hand Thunder Dragons has risen with the addition of Treeborn Frog to the game. Got a Frog that’s just hanging out doing nothing? Tribute it for a Thunder Dragon, and you’ve at least got a more useful monster. Since the second Thunder Dragon is essentially free from the point of view of hand commitment, you can afford to over-extend a bit with this kind of summon. While 1600 ATK won’t win games on its own, it gives an aggressive player a continual source of mid-level offense, and the importance of the ability to constantly churn out battle-worthy monsters isn’t something to be under-estimated.

In addition, Thunder Dragon is still great at all the things it was always good for. It thins your deck, feeds Chaos Sorcerer, gives monsters to remove from the game for Freed the Brave Wanderer, and provides discard fodder for cards like Phoenix Wing Wind Blast. It can be used in conjunction with Card Destruction to soften the blow of expending the Destruction itself, and with Graceful Charity looming on the horizon its value is only going to continue to increase.

Deck Devastation Virus: Again, this is another tech card that's being run by top players. Jae Kim, Mexican champ Jorge Fabian Pina Lizarraga, and several others are using Deck Devastation to punish slow tempo duelists. Many Monarch and Control variants are dependant on cards like Magical Merchant and Dekoichi the Battlechanted Locomotive, because such cards not only thin the deck and stack the graveyard for Pot of Avarice, but also prevent the opponent from gaining card advantage (and thus manipulating tempo and building momentum) in battle.

The Virus also provides a great answer to Spirit Reaper, breaking the wall that a Reaper can often provide, while also shutting down turns in which an opponent may attempt to push for Reaper’s discard effect.

A wide array of monsters are enabling the use of Deck Devastation Virus. Goldd, Sillva, Chaos Sorcerer, and Dark Balter the Terrible have been joined by some new monsters seeing Shonen Jump play for the first time today, including Blowback Dragon, which I’ll take a look at later today. In addition, Vampire Lord, Ryu Kokki, and a plethora of Necrovalley-boosted Gravekeeper’s monsters can also be used as tributes for the Virus.

Perhaps the nastiest part of the deck’s effect is its ability to disrupt the draws of the opponent, creating a field condition that gives one player a distinct advantage for several turns. Intelligence is also a huge asset. Deck Devastation Virus lets you look at your opponent’s hand as part of its initial effect, and even if the cards they draw aren’t subject to its destruction, you’ll still get to see what all those cards are. In some respects, Deck Devastation is almost like a Confiscation that lasts for three turns.

With Deck Devastation Virus going from limited to semi-limited status on April 1, we can expect it to see a ton of play in coming months. Despite all the factors working to discourage slow tempo strategies duelists are still going to run them, and that’s going to make Deck Dev a great resource for any deck that can run it.

Skelengel: The single new card from the Yu-Gi-Oh! Starter Deck released earlier this month is taking a bit of the spotlight. Several Chaos duelists have been using it to up their count of Light monsters for a few different reasons. The first is that unlike Magical Merchant, Skelengel can’t destroy your deck on an unlucky series of flips. While Merchant discarding a pile of monsters and then losing its controller the duel as a result is rare, it does happen, and finely-tuned decks are hit the hardest by Merchant’s randomized effect. If you aren’t playing a combo deck and aren’t looking to aggressively fill your graveyard with monsters for Pot of Avarice, there really isn’t much reason to run Merchant over Skelengel.

In addition, many duelists are splashing one Skelengel in place of one Merchant in a deck that was previously running multiples. The result is a lowered level of vulnerability to Nobleman of Crossout: if you need your Merchants and Dekoichis to slow the tempo of the duel, losing multiples of either to Nobleman is going to hurt your deck’s ability to operate as it was intended. While including Skelengel to soften the blow of Nobleman is a minor tweak, it’s one that’s cropping up with surprising frequency in today’s metagame. Right now, many duelists don’t even know that Skelengel is available. As awareness about the card rises, and as Nobleman of Crossout becomes a semi-limited card instead of simply a limited one, expect Skelengel to see more use. It might even continue to grow in popularity with the release of Enemy of Justice, which has a ton of Fairy support. Mudora might make a comeback, and that’s good news for Skelengel.

More tech is sure to surface as the day goes on, but as time ticks down to round three, these are the first three big cards of the day! Tech from last week’s Shonen Jump Orlando is holding strong too, with Sand Moth appearing in all sorts of decks that fear Mystic Swordsman LV2 and Zaborg the Thunder Monarch. Even in it’s sunset phase, this format is surprisingly healthy and varied, with perhaps more variation in top decks than any Shonen Jump before it.