About ten months ago, the dueling world was shocked to learn that Shrink, one of the most coveted cards that hadn’t yet seen an American release, would be the new exclusive Shonen Jump Championship prize card for the foreseeable future. Now, all these months later, yet another coveted card has become the prize card, but the previous holder of the title is only weeks away from seeing a mass release in the Strike of Neos Special Edition packages. First off, the Strike of Neos packs themselves are well worth the cash, especially after SJC Houston. So while you’re accumulating copies of Twister and Pulling the Rug, you’ll also be racking up copies of the hard-to-find Cyber End Dragon . . . and more importantly, Shrink! All players worth their salt are going to want to get at least a set of them, and the first thing they’ll want to do is use them!

One of the best uses for Shrink is with monsters whose effects trigger off of battle damage. Airknight Parshath and Don Zaloog, in particular, have been highly valued in the past for their amazing effects, but nowadays, these cards are seeing much less play than they used to. Don is still an excellent choice right now due to his high searchability, valuable discard effect, and DEF higher than Green Gadget’s ATK, but Airknight Parshath isn’t quite so lucky. Nova Summoner, one of the new secret rares hiding out in Strike of Neos, is capable of recruiting the Airknight from your deck, but the effect requires you to have The Sanctuary in the Sky in play. That leaves Airknight as a tribute monster with less ATK than Cyber Dragon and an effect based on battle damage—exactly the kind of card that most players try to avoid these days.

Enter Shrink: with its timely use, Cyber Dragon will be reduced to scrap by your Airknight and you’ll draw a card! Since we’re talking about a promo packaged with Strike of Neos packs, we should also make use of some cards from the set, right? There are two that I can think of right off that love Shrink: Sage of Silence and Sage of Stillness. Both of these cards have effects that occur when they destroy a monster, and with proper preparations, they can either lock down your opponent’s spells and traps, or force your opponent to simply not play any monsters. Either option is welcome. Here’s how we make it happen:

Monsters: 21

3 Cyber Dragon

2 Airknight Parshath

2 Don Zaloog

2 Gravekeeper’s Spy

3 Shining Angel

2 Sage of Silence

2 Sage of Stillness

2 Freed the Brave Wanderer

1 D.D. Warrior Lady

1 Sangan

1 Neo-Spacian Grand Mole

Spells: 12

3 Shrink

2 Rush Recklessly

2 Enemy Controller

1 Book of Moon

1 Heavy Storm

1 Mystical Space Typhoon

1 Snatch Steal

1 Premature Burial

Traps: 8

2 Dust Tornado

1 Call of the Haunted

1 Ring of Destruction

1 Mirror Force
3 Sakuretsu Armor

You may be asking why you should go through all this trouble just to stop your opponent from doing things like playing spells or traps, when you could just play Spell Canceller or Jinzo and be done with it. The answer is that those options would stop you from playing your spells and traps, and that’s just no fun at all. However, with a little more work (i.e. destroying opposing monsters through battle), we can make that limitation one-sided, while forcing our opponent to make bad decisions in order to avoid his or her fate. Fortunately for us, the Sages from Strike of Neos are both Light attribute monsters with less than 1500 ATK, making them perfect selections for the effect of Shining Angel. This makes them a lot more dependable, allowing them to appear in the middle of the battle phase and thus make the opponent more susceptible to his or her own mistakes (say, by attacking while you have a Rush Recklessly or Shrink set).

This now begs the question of why I’m playing Don Zaloog instead of White Magical Hat when the latter can be fetched out of the deck with Shining Angel. While the Angel has certainly increased in usefulness as time goes by, Magical Hat has not. Don Zaloog’s extra 400 ATK points make it a lot more likely to deal damage to your opponent than White Magical Hat, especially considering that not even Shrink can let the Hat take down a Cyber Dragon. I could cause the Hat to trade off with a Vampire Lord, but since you wouldn’t even get to discard a card from the opponent’s hand for doing so, the prospect seems unappealing. Don Zaloog’s DEF can also fend off a Gadget or recruiter attack and force the attacker to discard a card—a prospect of immense value, especially in a matchup against Ratty Gadget.

The general strategy for this deck is pretty simple: deal battle damage and destroy monsters through battle at strategic points. By “strategic points,” I mean that you want to destroy monsters with Sage of Stillness on your opponent’s turn so that he or she can’t use traps on your turn. You also want to destroy monsters with Sage of Silence on your turn so that the opponent can’t use spells on his or her turn. In this way you leave your opponent with only two options: play monsters and let you continue to mess him or her up, or don’t play monsters and hope that defensive traps and spells will stop you from picking apart his or her hand with Don or drawing cards with Airknight. Actually, in the second case, it doesn’t matter if there’s a monster in the way thanks to Airknight’s piercing effect. It’s especially handy for that one Spirit Reaper that’s likely floating around in your opponent’s deck.

Freed the Brave Wanderer is also a huge fan of all the Light monsters this deck is packing, allowing you to remove them from play to destroy big monsters in a way that resembles a combination of Chaos Sorcerer and Skull Lair. There may seem to be a conflict between Freed and the Premature Burial and Call of the Haunted, but the trick is to only remove the monsters that you don’t necessarily want to revive while your Airknight and Cyber Dragon cards can chill in your graveyard waiting to be called back to battle. Finally, the last monster choice I want to talk about is the pair of Gravekeeper’s Spy cards that I’ve chosen to include. Neither Light nor Shrink compatible, the Spy seems an odd choice. However she is an extremely effective method of curbing aggression, especially in the face of the newly popular Card Trooper/Bazoo Return decks from Houston. Card Trooper can pump itself up to 1900 ATK—pretty mean for a level 3 Machine monster—but that’s not enough to break through a Spy’s DEF. Not without Limiter Removal anyway. (Actually, Limiter Removal and Card Trooper make a neat combination, especially since you get to draw a card once Card Trooper is destroyed at the end of turn.) The point is that most level 4 and under monsters cannot defeat a defense-position Spy in battle, and the end result of such a battle is a second Spy on the field. There was no end to the trouble that this monster caused players at Houston, and I feel like she’s a worthy inclusion based on that fact alone.

Now that we have an SJC under our belt for the new Advanced format, we can get a better idea of what the expected matchups should be at future events. I'd like to say that Card Trooper/Bazoo Return is the most likely matchup, but given how difficult it is to find any copies of Card Trooper, I suspect that only organized teams are going to have this deck ready. If you do run into it, Dust Tornado and Sage of Stillness are going to be key cards in the matchup, allowing you to remove Skull Lair from the field and prevent the activation of Return from the Different Dimension, all while destroying copies of Card Trooper and Cyber Phoenix. It’s unfortunate that each copy will allow your opponent to replace it with a draw, but it will also stop you from getting smashed by Return for a win. You should definitely side in Banisher of the Radiance and/or Dimensional Fissure and D.D. Survivor to shut down Card Trooper. You might want to have some counter-traps as well so that you can force the opponent to waste a huge amount of life points if he or she does try for a Return.

Sage of Silence, on the other hand, makes you beat Diamond Dude Turbo outright. Sure, she won’t stop your opponent from getting spell effects via Diamond Dude, but every time you destroy a monster the opponent controls—be it Malicious or Diamond Dude or Card Trooper—you stop the opponent from winning the game for another turn and limit his or her ability to run through the deck.

As for Ratty Gadget, you’re in trouble. You can create a longer string of recruiters than Ratty Gadget can, but the opponent likely has three Exiled Force cards and a pair of Injection Fairy Lily cards. Injection Fairy Lily is probably the worst card ever to try a Shrink on, since her original ATK is 400. So when the pump occurs in damage calculation, that ATK will raise up to 3200, making your use of Shrink irrelevant. Counter-traps are definitely the order of the day here, along with Banisher of the Radiance and more removal cards.

Finally, your matchup with Six Samurai is greatly dependant on what kind of build your opponent is playing and how well he or she draws. The Sages are fairly useless here since they’ll probably never actually beat something in battle, but the quick-play spells easily allow the rest of your monsters to keep the Samurai in check. Side in mass removal if you feel that Samurai are going to be a popular choice, but be careful of My Body as a Shield.

That’ll do it for my first look at the things you can do with Shrink, but rest assured that it’ll be cropping up in all sorts of places, both in articles and in reality. It’s a great card, and it feels good to finally be able to include it in my decks. School of Duel will be back again next week, and until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!

Jerome McHale

jcmchale@andrew.cmu.edu

NEXT WEEK: The Joey Skiles match from Houston was really inspiring. I have to try Hero City for myself now.