I'm a big fan of decks with alternate win conditions. They're just fun to play. I mean, honestly, have you ever flopped down all five pieces of Exodia and seen the look on your opponent's face? Or watched them squirm as
Final Countdown gets closer and closer to its culmination, slowly grinding towards a “huzzah for you” victory? It's irresistible.
Ben McCrae takes that premise to the ultimate degree by combining every alternate win condition I can think of into one deck. Exodia? Check.
Final Countdown? Ben's got it covered.
Last Turn? Yup. He's running everything but
Destiny Board. The kicker? He's winning. Check it out.
Ben McCrae's “Ultimatum”: 40 Cards
Not only does it absorb
Nobleman of Crossout and act as a huge wall, but it combines with one of the deck's other lynchpin cards.
Skill Drain is highly important to the strategy. “It's an amazing card, and it just counters everything”, explained McCrae. It also negates
Big Shield Gardna's effect, keeping it in defense position when it gets attacked. Pretty awesome.
“Sometimes I'll
Good Goblin Housekeeping an Exodia piece to the bottom of my deck”, said McCrae, describing his strategies and frequently used tactics. “They think ‘he's running Exodia! I need to worry about his hand!' and they play with the wrong thing in mind. Then I
Last Turn to win the game and they never see it coming. It's great.” It's a powerful theory that works for any of the deck's goals—play one very visibly, and most opponents will never see the second one coming.
The deck is all about misdirection. It tricks opponents with a pool of cards not generally seen in tournament play and a block of brutal effects, like
Skill Drain, that players are aware of but simply aren't used to dealing with on a regular basis. Watching McCrae play in round 2, I saw his opponent forget over half a dozen times that
Skill Drain was on the field.
While this is a stylish deck that is customized to fit McCrae's play style, it's worth looking at for Nationals. It has the surprise factor backing it now, and that'll probably remain the case for a while. It's very difficult to side deck against, as it doesn't have any particularly poor matchups in the current environment. It has plenty of answers for Ben Kei decks, and can win despite the long stalled blocks the deck creates. Against standard Chaos and Chaos Zombie or Warrior decks it has reams and reams of defense that are incredibly difficult to overcome, and it's packing tons of dangerous things that need to be removed when they hit the field, which can give those decks headaches. This deck can even give
Tsukuyomi- and
Thousand-Eyes Restrict-Lock a run for its money, as the three copies of
Solemn Judgment can cut
Metamorphosis off at the knees as long as
Magician of Faith isn't around to continually bring it back into play.
The simple grace of this deck just can't be explained. While it looks like a pile of “assorted noob jank,” it coasts along doing its thing and is incredibly difficult to disrupt. There's a teaching in Kung Fu that the river is stronger than the rock. While the rock is solid and hard to break, the river flows around it, flexible, fluid, and impossible to stop. It's a cliche, but that's what watching this deck brings to mind.
McCrae stated that when he made the deck he was “just looking for something different to play. I wanted something that could stop Chaos, but that could also, you know, stop everything else. I think I found that.” He very well may have, and with this being his first major premier tournament showing (flying the flag of Superhero City, a local store) the Yu-Gi-Oh! world may have a new celebrity worth watching in the immediate future.