If there’s one thing that all players can agree on, it’s that you always want to have a monster or two on your side of the field. Monsters are what defend your life points and attack your opponent. They have all kinds of special effects, and they’re also needed as tributes for even bigger monsters. Monsters can be of such significant size or power that they become nearly impossible to defeat, regardless of how many cards an opponent is holding.

In the end, everything we do as players revolves around our monsters. Protecting them while destroying the opponent’s monsters is what the game is all about. Usually, you have to use your traps and spells to protect your monsters, but some are more than capable of protecting themselves. Strike Ninja is one of the best monsters of this type: its ability to simply dodge any sort of removal effect or attack is unmatched by any other monster in the game. In fact, it requires the use of a trap card in order to replicate the effect with any other monster.

Strike Ninja also provides you with a convenient way to load your removed zone with plenty of powerful Dark attribute monsters. In fact, the cost of removing two Dark monsters from your graveyard is more of a reward than it is a cost, since it easily sets you up for a massive win with Return from the Different Dimension. It’s truly amazing that so few duelists have succeeded in high-level play with this incredibly versatile card: it just screams for all the clever deck builders out there to abuse it. As a fan of clever and interesting decks, I couldn’t resist the allure of Strike Ninja, and as such, I’ve made it my deck of choice for the past month or so. Here’s what I’ve been playing:

Monsters: 20 (21)

3 Strike Ninja

2 Mystic Tomato

2 Newdoria

2 Spirit Reaper

1 Don Zaloog

1 Sangan

1 Breaker the Magical Warrior

1 Jinzo

1 Dark Ruler Ha Des

1 D. D. Assailant

1 D. D. Warrior Lady

1 Destiny Hero - Doom Lord

1 Pitch-Black Warwolf

2 Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer

1 D. D. Warrior

Spells: 12

1 Graceful Charity

1 Snatch Steal

1 Heavy Storm

1 Mystical Space Typhoon

1 Book of Moon

1 Brain Control

2 Smashing Ground

2 Reinforcement of the Army

2 Nobleman of Crossout

Traps: 8 (9)

3 Sakuretsu Armor

2 Return from the Different Dimension

1 Call of the Haunted

1 Mirror Force

1 Torrential Tribute

1 Magical Arm Shield

In my opinion (as a player primarily focused on deckbuilding), the best thing about Strike Ninja is the surprising number of decks it fits into. The build above is a Return from the Different Dimension deck, but I could have just as easily built the deck around, say, Monster Gate and D. D. Scout Plane. I could even have dropped the Return theme entirely and made this deck into a straight Tomato Control variant with a Strike Ninja or two to help bait out opposing removal cards. The point is that it’s an all around solid card—useful for many different purposes—and that’s something you definitely need to keep in mind as you play this deck. Strike Ninja isn’t just a method of removing lots of Dark monsters: it’s also a monster you can rely on when you need it (assuming you can pay the cost to dodge it and survive any ensuing attacks). You can also count on Strike Ninja to not be there when you don’t want it around. Knowing what to do with the Ninja and when to do it is an important part of learning to play this deck, and you’ll want to try it out against as many different deck types as possible in order to get a feel for the timing.

Before I go any further, I’d like to clarify a couple of rulings issues that tend to come up with this deck. First off is the part of Strike Ninja’s effect that returns it to the field. This part of the effect does not special summon Strike Ninja. Therefore, Bottomless Trap Hole and Torrential Tribute cannot be activated during the end phase when your Ninja returns.

Speaking of things returning, the other major rules hassles often come from Return from the Different Dimension itself. Remember that turning a monster summoned by Return face down protects it from being removed from play again during the end phase. This is handy for when you’re holding Book of Moon and you really want to keep something like Spirit Reaper on the field after a less than successful activation of Return—perhaps one foiled by Scapegoat or an opposing Return from the Different Dimension.

Scapegoat is a real annoyance for this deck: it’s one of the few cards that you can’t stop by Returning Jinzo or Pitch-Black Warwolf during the battle phase. Additionally, while Dark Ruler Ha Des cannot be special summoned from the graveyard, it can be special summoned from the removed zone, making it excellent to have removed when you go for the win with Return. Finally, as a public service announcement, I must admit that the above list isn’t exactly what I’m playing. It’s off by two cards—one D. D. Warrior and one Magical Arm Shield—but those two cards aren’t exactly easy to come by. If you’ve got them, feel free to try them out in place of Destiny Hero - Doom Lord and one of the Sakuretsu Armor cards. If not, don’t fret: they’re hardly necessary for this deck to be effective.

Let’s move on to the actual operation of the deck. Anybody familiar with the play style of Tomato Control will immediately feel at home with it. A fairly standard opening move is to either set Spirit Reaper or summon Mystic Tomato. That’s right. Summon the Tomato. Losing a Tomato to Nobleman of Crossout is really, really bad, and you want to avoid that at all costs. Summoning the Tomato will usually also draw out some of your opponent’s removal spells. Unlike pure Tomato builds, this deck doesn’t mind losing Mystic Tomato to Smashing Ground or Sakuretsu Armor because it makes one less piece of removal for your Warriors and Spirit Reaper cards to worry about and one more Dark monster in your graveyard for Strike Ninja to dodge with if necessary.

When searching with Mystic Tomato, you’ll usually want to grab Newdoria, since it often forces your opponent to make bad attacks or no attacks at all. If the board is relatively clear of monsters or you have some sort of field-clearing ability ready and waiting, grab Spirit Reaper instead. With the use of Goldd, Wu-Lord of Dark World currently in decline and Morphing Jar on the rise, the risk associated with Spirit Reaper has greatly diminished. Trust me, knocking that Chaos Sorcerer out of your opponent’s hand before he or she can play it is well worth the chance of running into a random copy of Goldd.

The other common situation involving Tomato searches comes when you have a tribute monster in your hand. Mystic Tomato is really good at keeping a monster on your field long enough to be tributed, and usually the monster you’ll want to use for this task is Sangan. No one uses Smashing Ground on Sangan unless it’s absolutely imperative for continued survival in the game. That means unless your opponent is completely certain you have a win-condition card nearby, your Sangan will be safe. This assumes, of course, that he or she doesn’t have another monster to attack it with. Normally, a player will have between zero and two monsters on the field at any given time, so you should be able to stave off enough attacks with your searchers to keep Sangan from being immediately attacked when it comes out.

Once you’ve gotten past the first few turns of the game, you’ll begin to deploy your Strike Ninjas. In general, you only want one on the field at any given time, but there are still three in the deck to increase the chances that you’ll draw one without having to use Reinforcement of the Army. Cases where the extras come in handy include the turns right after you tribute one Ninja for a bigger monster, and if the game simplifies to the point where both players are topdecking. Your Ninjas should be used as the main attack force in the mid-game, since Sakuretsu Armor, Smashing Ground, and Snatch Steal are most likely to be played then. Ninja cards can also be used to dodge either player’s Torrential Tribute and can even be dodged out of the way in order to bring more monsters out on to the field or to prevent your opponent from using cards like Lava Golem.

As you whittle away at your opponent’s board and life points with Strike Ninja, you’ll find that your removed-from-play pile fills up with nice Dark monsters, and by the time you’ve amassed a decent amount of ATK values in the removed zone, you should have drawn into one of your Return from the Different Dimension cards. The basics for Return are pretty simple. Use it when it’ll win you the game. It’s pretty easy to tell if you’re going to win when you play Return. If your opponent only has facedown spells or traps, and has already played Scapegoat and Call of the Haunted, and if you have Jinzo or Pitch-Black Warwolf removed from play when you activate Return in the battle phase, you’re very likely to win (barring some seriously crazy maneuvering on your opponent’s part).

Finally, I’d like to talk about a couple of my more unorthodox selections for the deck. First off, anyone opposed to Doom Lord just because it has “Hero” in its name should put aside their prejudices and just try the card. You can search it out with Sangan, Mystic Tomato, and Reinforcement of the Army, you can remove it to dodge Strike Ninja, and it can remove any monster from the game for a couple of turns. All it takes is two turns for a Return deck to set up its win condition, especially once the card counts are low. The thing is, sometimes there’s just that one monster getting in your way of total victory. Doom Lord is there for you then, and it’s really easy to grab from your deck. If you find that it still doesn’t fit your play style (after trying it out of course), go ahead and use Exiled Force in its place. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you when you waste your Exiled Force on a Treeborn Frog.

Speaking of Treeborn Frog, Dark Ruler Ha Des can stop it from recurring itself every turn. It can also make Newdoria stop the Frog from recurring, and it has 50 more ATK than the Monarchs and Jinzo, which makes it a nice tech card for a lot of decks. I’d recommend trying it out some time.

That’s going to do it for me this week, so until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!

Jerome McHale

jcmchale@andrew.cmu.edu

NEXT WEEK: I wouldn’t be surprised if someone, somewhere is re-recording a few of the songs from “Mary Poppins” in order to accommodate next week’s big bruiser.