My first experience with this particular strategy came in the form of a Youtube link Jason sent me with the message “Watch this. This is insane.” I watched, and my eyes bugged out. It’s not very often that you see an entire deck move from its spot on the field to face up in the graveyard in a single turn, let alone as the result of a single card. It’s even rarer when the game ends on that turn due to a massive direct attack, but, lo and behold, the video I was watching depicted a deck that could do exactly that. Thanks to the nature of the deck’s strategy, it was easy to pick out all the cards that were played and come up with a decklist, but it seemed to me that such a strategy was doomed to fail much more often than it succeeded. Lance Leonhardt of Team Enigma, however, disagrees, and he’s banking on an explosive and spectacular Rainbow Dark Dragon strategy to carry him to Day 2 and beyond.

1 Monster Reborn

1 Scapegoat

There’s a very good chance that a lot of you are unfamiliar with how this deck works, and admittedly, it’s a little unintuitive if you just stare at the decklist. The basic goal here is to take your opponent out with Rainbow Dark Dragon; however, you can only summon Rainbow Dark Dragon if you remove 7 different Dark monsters in your graveyard from play. This gives you a 4000 ATK Dark monster that gives you the option of removing all the rest of your Dark monsters on the field and in the graveyard to gain 500 ATK for each monster removed from play. Eight monsters removed for this effect gives you an 8000 ATK Rainbow Dark Dragon ready to swing for the fences. Obviously this is a very tall order, but thanks to some creative card selection and careful attention to the rules, it’s not quite as difficult as it seems initially.

The key thing to remember when you look at this deck is that when you play Monster Gate or Reasoning, the card looks for the first monster that can be Normal Summoned. Both cards bypass everything else on their way to the first valid monster, and when they find that monster, everything else goes to the graveyard. This includes any monsters that can’t be special summoned.  Lance’s deck is packed to the brim with huge Dark monsters with powerful effects that he simply cannot special summon. Out of all of his monsters, only three of them will register on Monster Gate or Reasoning’s radar, meaning that there’s a very good chance the graveyard will be loaded with everything Lance needs to win after just one play of Reasoning or Monster Gate and a near guarantee after two. Alright, so we have more monsters than we know what to do with in the graveyard. Now what? There’s a distinct chance that all of the Rainbow Dark Dragons found their way to the graveyard amidst the deck flipping shenanigans, but fortunately, there’s a way to get them back! Rainbow Dark Dragon, like it’s less Dark counterpart, has no DEF. Literally none. That makes it a viable target for Recurring Nightmare and thus turns Rainbow Dark Dragon into a searchable combo piece. In addition, Recurring Nightmare lets you, well, recur the last piece of the combo: Phantom of Chaos.

As I continually promised you every time I mentioned its name, Phantom of Chaos has shown up to do dirty, dirty things to unsuspecting players. In Lance’s deck, its role is to replicate the effect of whatever ridiculously powerful monster is required for the time being. For the most part, it’s going to be copying Demise, King of Armageddon to clear the way for Rainbow Dark Dragon to take the game. However, that’s not the only role Phantom of Chaos is capable of playing. Depending on the current situation, Phantom of Chaos can also copy Destiny Hero – Plasma for quick negation and spot monster removal or even Berserk Dragon if there’s a field full of monsters that needs cleared out. These extra options allow Lance to clear out the field or at least a troubling Spirit Reaper or Marshmallon even if his life total drops below 2000 early on.

The best part of this deck is the multitude of ways it has to draw through to the cards it needs to win. It would be an immense tactical error to throw your entire deck into the graveyard before you have the cards you need to win, and Lance is running a number of ways to draw extra cards before attempting to set off his combo. Hand Destruction from Duelist Pack — Jesse Anderson is a strong choice as always, and the deck is set up in such a way as to support full complements of both Trade-In and Destiny Draw. In fact, about one in every four cards of the deck allows Lance to draw more cards in the hopes of digging his way to victory on the first turn he can attack. This is a deck born from a popular Japanese strategy, but when I talked to Lance he shared the same skepticism that I had when I initially saw the deck in action. This build is born from a fusion of the best parts of the many different builds of the deck floating around Japan along with some of his own distinctive tech. When asked how effective the deck was in testing, Lance’s father, Kirk Leonhardt, quoted a success rate of 87%. The accuracy of that number remains to be seen, but if Lance is on top of his game today it’ll be interesting to see what, if anything, the rest of the competition can do about it.