To begin the New Year, we’re going to look at what might be the cheapest Yu-Gi-Oh! deck to be introduced by Metagame. With only six rare cards and thirty-four commons, this is a deck almost anyone can afford! To make the deck even more enticing, it’s a first turn KO strategy that should surprise your opponents. This is a great way to break into the game, or cheaply experiment with combo decks.
The deck is a splice between the OjaExodia one turn KO deck, and Vincent Tundo’s Blasting the Ruins Life Equalizer build. You’ll be drawing through all your cards, using rather complex synergies between them and eventually ending your turn with no cards in deck, then setting a copy of Blasting the Ruins, Life Equalizer, and Wall of Revealing Light. How you get there is the interesting part.
The Monsters
Monsters: 15
Spells
The best card in your deck is Card Destruction. It’s very rare for you to lose the game should you draw it. You’ll want to keep it until you have the chance to make a huge move. Actually, a majority of the game should consist of you trying to draw to Card Destruction. It allows you to discard about a dozen useless cards, get your hands on a dozen new ones, and get very close to the required thirty cards in graveyard for the activation of Blasting the Ruins.
The most basic combo is discarding Ojamagic with Card Destruction, Dark World Dealings, Magical Stone Excavation, A Feather of the Phoenix, or Hand Destruction. That allows for quick access to an extra few cards, which you can then discard for costs, or send back to the deck with Magical Mallet or Reload. Remember to save a copy of Magical Stone Excavation for the end of your turn. You need thirty cards in your graveyard to win the game, and you can’t do that with twelve cards in your hand (a situation which occurs frequently when playing this deck). You can activate one copy of Magical Stone to get your other one, and repeat the process until you have no hand.
You’ll have a lot of cards at a given time, but many of them will often be useless. That’s why we’re running three copies of both Magical Mallet and Reload. You can turn your garbage into more drawing power, reusing your engines over and over. They also make the deck more consistent in the initial explosion. If your first hand is poor, and can’t quickly turn into . . . say . . . ten or more cards, you can simply return it to the deck and start afresh.
Pot of Avarice is an interesting card in this deck. It obviously offers you a fresh two cards from your deck, and it allows you to reuse your Ojamagic combo and your three copies of Thunder Dragon and Volcanic Shell. The one copy of Upstart Goblin makes Life Equalizer playable, as your opponent needs over 8000 life points for the card to activate.
The Traps
Think of this deck as a step by step process. First, make your hand very large using a combination of Ojamagic, Thunder Dragon, and Volcanic Shell. Then use Magical Mallets and Reload to continue drawing cards until you get to Card Destruction. Then, you’ll discard a majority of your deck and most of the remaining cards. Fill your graveyard with Magical Stone Excavation, set your three traps, and win the game.
Of course, the in-play decisions can be a bit more difficult than that. Using Pot of Avarice to return three copies of Thunder Dragon and two Volcanic Shell is a key play which can allow for various other combos. A Feather of the Phoenix combined with Royal Magical Library is an important way to reuse your cards with ease. Remember that if you have two useless cards in your hand, one of which is a Thunder Dragon, and you have to choose to discard one of them, keep the Thunder Dragon in your hand. By keeping a Thunder Dragon in your hand, Pot of Avarice will offer you two new cards, and allow you to activate Thunder Dragon’s effect to search the other two (just shuffled from your graveyard into your deck) from your deck.
It’s difficult to choose the best part of this deck; it’s a one turn KO deck that involves Ojama, and it’s possibly the cheapest deck Yu-Gi-Oh! has seen in a while. If you’re a competitive player, you should make sure to keep an eye on the players in your tournaments and adjust your side deck to deal with this. If you have a friend that wants to start playing the game this just might be the deck to hand him or her. It’s a fun, innovative way to shake up your local metagame . . . all for under ten dollars. In the meantime, keep innovating, and may 2009 start you on the path to Yu-Gi-Oh! stardom.
-Ryan Murphy