Whenever I’m building a new deck for an upcoming Jump, there’s always a phase in which I make horrible side-deck choices based on the irrational fear of playing against that one guy in the whole building who is intent on ruining everybody else’s day with his spoiler deck that doesn’t really have a shot at Day 2. In the past, That Guy has run Demise with only one Advanced Ritual Art, Magical Explosion after the Limitation of Card Trooper, Chain Burn with only one Chain Strike, Rainbow Dark Dragon OTK, and the Armed Samurai - Ben Kei deck. Why do I have a ready-made list of all the decks That Guy likes to play? Because at every Shonen Jump Championship I go to—no matter where—I always find myself matched up against That Guy in the first three rounds. The only Jump where I didn’t have to play That Guy was St. Louis. . . and to make up for it I played against That Guy twice in Philadelphia.

My latest not-so-irrational fear was that in Detroit, I’d face nothing but people running Macro Cosmos, or worse, Quillbolt Hedgehog. I hate it when games are over in a single turn, and I hate it even more when they’re over in a single turn because someone drew the exact six cards necessary to win before anything resembling a game could take place. You can win most bad matchups through intelligent play and proper side decking, but dealing with a combo deck that you’re totally unprepared for often leaves you praying to get even one turn before the opponent assembles his or her combo. Fortunately, the Quillbolt Hedgehog deck, by necessity, gives you at least that one turn.

For those of you wondering what in the world I’m talking about, the win condition of the deck works like this. Quillbolt Hedgehog has an effect that lets you special summon it from your graveyard for free if you control a Tuner monster. If you do, Quillbolt Hedgehog is removed from play instead of going to the graveyard the next time it would be sent there. The big hitch comes when you throw Imperial Iron Wall into the mix. If Iron Wall is out, cards can’t be removed from play, so when Quillbolt Hedgehog tries to remove itself from play, it fails and goes to the graveyard instead.

This could potentially allow for infinite Synchro summons when combined with Plaguespreader Zombie and Card of Safe Return. More likely, however, it’ll be used to burn away all of the opponent’s life points in a single turn through the nefarious machinations of Mass Driver or Cannon Soldier. We’ve seen similar decks before, the most recent being the Shadowpriestess of Ohm/Dimension Fusion loop deck that carried Erin Diaz all the way to the finals of the most recent SJC Columbus. While his exact deck is no longer possible, the spirit of the thing lives on in this week’s deck.

Monsters: 10

3 Quillbolt Hedgehog
3 Plaguespreader Zombie
3 Cyber Valley
1 Toon Cannon Soldier

It probably doesn’t look like much at first, but once you start seeing some of the combos this deck can pull off, it makes you wonder . . . can this really work? Certainly, it can, but the question will always be "how often?" The consistency of a combo deck is directly related to the engine it uses to get its pieces and the number of pieces in the combo. An added factor is whether it wins on that particular turn or has to wait. Quillbolt Hedgehog decks suffer in both of these departments. Needing to resolve a continuous trap makes the combo itself vulnerable to all kinds of disruption, and the draw engine is lacking in the things that made Erin Diaz’s deck work as quickly as it did. I tried for a while to come up with a build that could run Destiny Draw and Allure of Darkness, but I quickly found that they didn’t really mesh well with the strategy I was attempting to employ. Between Destiny Draw and Allure of Darkness you can get to an extra twelve cards, but first you need to get specific cards into your hands. It felt like playing two different combo decks at once just to get the first thing going as opposed to the Ohm deck where the Destiny Heroes were actually playable and the deck needed Dark monsters out of play to win. Instead, I put in every other accelerant I could think of into the deck.

Upstart Goblin works here because your opponent’s life total is completely irrelevant, and all you really need is for your deck to be three cards smaller since there’s only so many cards available to execute your chosen strategy. It’s basically the opposite of putting the card into an aggressive deck where life points are a factor and there could be three better options to further your strategy in place of the Upstarts. Hand Destruction is good for depositing Plaguespreader Zombie and Quillbolt Hedgehog into the graveyard, and will move you closer to finding your copies of Iron Wall and (more importantly) Card of Safe Return. The real trick with this deck is that you can draw a huge number of cards with Card of Safe Return by prematurely returning your Plaguespreader Zombie and Quillbolt Hedgehog cards to play to get you closer to the rest of the combo pieces. Strictly speaking, with only one Card of Safe Return, Plaguespreader Zombie breaks even on your hand count after you bring it back to the field, but more importantly it lets you bring back the Hedgehogs for a draw a piece. Even better, if you’ve found Toon Cannon Soldier or Mass Driver, you can blow all your monsters away for damage and then drop Burial from a Different Dimension to put them all back into the graveyard and allow you to continue comboing. It’s nasty, and it’s not something the deck is going to do every single time . . . which is part of what makes playing against spoiler decks so frustrating. It’s like they exist specifically to end your day rather than actually win the tournament.

To make things more consistent and to allow the combo player to see more cards, these sorts of decks almost always play various stall tools to stay alive long enough to find what they need. Since the deck will never declare an attack, Level Limit - Area B, Gravity Bind, and Messenger of Peace make the cut here. Cyber Valley is also fantastic in basically any combo deck since—barring opposing removal—it’s a guaranteed extra turn that gets you one card deeper into the deck. Decks that make use of Machine Duplication are also huge fans of it, as the 0 ATK Machine is the best Duplication target since Card Trooper and is likely to remain that way for the rest of time. In particular, it can also help you stay alive even in the face of a Phoenix Wing Wind Blast on one of your stall cards.

How do you beat the deck then? Half the time you don’t have to. It’ll just burn out without drawing anything useful half the time, and in the rest of the duels against it, you’re probably playing a deck that runs a ton of ways to throw out OTKs of your own that also clear the field in the process. The only real strategy to take against the deck is to make sure you have plenty of removal around and lots of ATK strength in your deck. It’s not so much a strategy as it is beating the opponent to death before he or she can put together anything resembling a win. Mystical Space Typhoon and Phoenix Wing Wind Blast are a must in game 1, and any counter traps you play will help as well. Just be careful with Solemn Judgment, as it’s much easier for Quillbolt Hedgehog decks to kill you even without setting up the combo if you only have 4000 life points.

All in all, I would only play this kind of deck if I was in a bad mood and wanted to take it out on some people at locals. Combo decks are never player friendly, but it’s important to know exactly what they’re capable of and how to beat them, just in case. This knowledge has come in handy for me on just about every occasion it possibly could. Hopefully you’ll never need it, but if you do, it’s all here. On the Championship circuit front, I’m pretty happy that Detroit was the last one of the season. We’ll all have a month to develop new stuff before San Francisco comes along. Until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!

—Jerome McHale