After four long months the Shonen Jump Championship circuit is back on the East Coast, and that means we are back in Rampage country! Jonathan Labounty, Ivan Flores, Roberto Martinez, Luis Ruiz, and newcomer Jemall Plummer are all back in action, uniting to bring an unlikely pick to the forefront of this new metagame: Chimeratech Overdragon.   

No Sangan, no Exiled Force, and no Monarchs — this deck is focused on speed and has made sacrifices to earn it. All but three of the deck’s monsters are Machine-types, with Breaker the Magical Warrior, Magician of Faith, and Morphing Jar all filling important roles that justify the break from the theme. Adhering to the Machine line up is important, because every monster that hits the graveyard needs to be helping this deck build towards one of its primary win conditions: dropping a huge Chimeratech Overdragon and swinging for a billion points of damage. Every monster that isn’t a Machine is a waste once it’s destroyed or discarded.

The other win condition is Overload Fusion and Dimension Fusion, a combo that got a lot of hype coming into this format, but never really saw play outside of Shonen Jump Championship Austin. Even there, the few competitors running the killer combination never made it to Day 2. Future Fusion, two Dimension Fusion, and a full complement of Overload Fusion gives this deck a great chance to special summon a ton of monsters early on. UFO Turtle helps fill the graveyard quickly, while Cyber Phoenix and Dekoichi act as fodder that can replace its loss with an additional draw.

Speaking of monsters, if you’re reading this live then you can’t see the first one on the list: Spell Canceller. Yes, Team Rampage is main-decking a single copy of the high-risk, high-reward Machine, in a deck that mains nineteen spells itself. The Canceller will be invaluable in Gadget matchups, where it can sit on the field and keep almost half of the opponent’s deck from seeing table time.

Other factors help this deck achieve the pacing Flores and co. are striving for. Though they’re only running six traps, they’ve dedicated five slots to additional draw power: three Jar of Greed and two Reckless Greed. While it can take a while to stack several of these cards together for a proper final sprint towards victory, the constant thinning this deck affords its player helps Rampage get to multiples in a timely fashion. This deck is synergy-based, trading utility for heightened combo potential, and, when any three of a vast number of cards can mean game, the viability of the Reckless Greed draw engine gets a lot better.

Rampage’s creation doesn’t just thrive against Gadgets, either. Hydrogeddon and Gravekeeper’s Spy have both been very popular so far, and both often result in multiple face up attackers. While that’s usually a good thing for the aggressor, Chimeratech Overdragon turns that situation on its end by using each monster as a gateway to the opponent’s life points. This deck loves to see an aggressive field presence on the other side of the table, and that’s probably what the team was thinking when they opted to run no defensive traps aside from Mirror Force, and no Smashing Ground. In an era dominated by monster removal this deck is a rarity: though it main decks three Enemy Controller to create more opportunities for damage, it actually runs just a single card that can destroy a monster outside of battle. It really has to be seen to be believed, and it’s evident that the team is working off the assumption that by the time the opponent has enough monsters out for a kill turn, Chimeratech is going to end the game anyway. It’s a gutsy gambit, and it’ll be interesting to see if it pays off.

So far things are looking good, and we’ll be following this deck as the day progresses!