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It’s been about two weeks since the release of the Gadget monsters, and we’ve already had a Shonen Jump Championship in which to test their “metal.” While the actual information regarding the Top 8 decklists and the eventual winner of the event is not available to me at the time I’m writing this, I’m willing to bet that the Gadgets made a pretty serious impact on the metagame down there in Orlando. A Gadget player may have even won the event. Regardless, I’ve seen Gadgets touted as the be-all, end-all reality of our metagame for months to come, and that’s something that I do not accept. Gadgets simply don’t stand up to the standards for metagame-warping “excellence” set by the Scapegoat/Thousand-Eyes Restrict lock and the Chaos variants from the April 2006 format. They’re so tiny that you could poke them with a pillow and they’d explode. This week, we’re going to take all the principles and strategies introduced in the last installment of School of Duel and tear them apart to expose the Gadgets’ weaknesses, starting by answering the homework question from last time. For those of you who missed it, the question was:

We know that Gadget decks work off of a constant stream of monsters alongside a good amount of removal in order to quickly simplify a duel and win by running the opponent out of playable monsters to fight back with. What single card hurts the Gadget strategy the most? You can interpret the question as broadly or as narrowly as you wish, as long as you choose a single card (not a combo!) and explain exactly why you think it is the most detrimental to a Gadget player.

I got a number of answers to this one ranging from excellent to not so hot at all, and interestingly enough, there was one card I had picked out as being particularly good that I didn’t see anyone suggest. Let’s start with some of the not-so-solid answers to the question and talk about why they don’t work as well as one would like them to.

First up on this list is something you probably saw Jason mention in his pre-SJC Trends ‘N’ Tactics article and also something you probably saw bandied about on forums being hailed as “the tech.” I’m talking about Mind Crush and Trap Dustshoot. First off, suggesting the pair of cards isn’t a proper answer to the question (which specifically asks for a single card). Second, the cards in question aren’t a particularly effective counter to a Gadget strategy. You’ll almost always put a Gadget back into the Gadget player’s deck or discard one from his or her hand with either card, so what did that really accomplish? Sure, it let you temporarily slow the opponent down and it let you see which spell-based removal cards he or she is holding in hand, but chances are that the opponent has already got a Gadget or two on the field, making this knowledge a realization of exactly how you’re going to lose, rather than a method that will lead you to victory. In fact, ridding the opponent’s hand of monsters is the least effective method of dealing with Gadgets, since all the stuff the opponent has on the field is much more of a concern. We’ll leave the question of the most effective method for dealing with Gadgets until later.

The next card I saw suggested frequently was King Tiger Wanghu. While Wanghu can certainly slow a Gadget deck down a bit (if you don’t attack with it and the Gadget player doesn’t happen to have removal in hand), it’s strictly a nuisance. A Gadget player likely has plenty of removal, and if you’re not going to attack, he or she won’t either. Waiting suits the Gadget deck just fine, considering that it’s really a control deck rather than an aggressive deck.

This brings us back to the question of what it is that really hurts a Gadget deck (or any control deck really). In my experience, the answer is “hands that consist of either all monsters or all spells and traps.” The single card that most people came up with to hinder the Gadget strategy just happens to induce this situation. It’s a card we’re all familiar with and one that any deck with the means should play. I speak, of course, of Deck Devastation Virus, which hits more monsters in the Gadget deck than any other deck I can think of, obliterating everything but any copies of Cyber Dragon and Chiron the Mage the opponent chose to play. Without monsters, your opponent is left to deal with all your monsters while trying to mount a counteroffensive. He or she may even be forced to use removal on things that otherwise wouldn’t merit it. Between the turns under the influence of the Virus and the generally low monster count in Gadget decks, your opponent might not get another playable monster for the rest of the game. Of course, there’s always the chance that he or she can keep up enough removal to take out all your monsters and outlast the Virus. In that case, you might just lose anyway, but pound for pound, Deck Devastation Virus is the best single card you can use against a Gadget deck.

As I mentioned above, one of the situations that can cause most control decks to lose is being stranded with only monsters or only spells and traps. Deck Devastation Virus can strand the opponent with nothing but spells and traps, but in this particular case, I think there’s a better way to go about beating the Gadgets. We know that the Gadget player’s ideal situation is to have a field presence while his or her opponent has no monsters. If, however, we could engineer a situation where the Gadget deck spends (or loses) all of its removal and we still have monsters with enough ATK to beat a Gadget, all of sudden we’re winning. Your opponent could theoretically have a lot more monsters than you do—both in hand and on the field—but if all of them are Gadgets (which is fairly likely), your one or two playable monsters will get a chance to run all over your opponent’s field. How can we accomplish this? If I had to pick a single card, I’d go with Ancient Gear Engineer.

Let’s say that our Generic Gadget Player (GGP) has a Green Gadget out alongside two set traps. (We’ll say Mirror Force and Ring of Destruction.) The Green Gadget fails to get through our defensive monster and our opponent is currently unable to get through our defenses. Perhaps his or her only spell based removal is Hammer Shot and GGP either can’t or doesn’t want to summon Snipe Hunter. On our turn, we tribute for the Ancient Gear Engineer. The first thing that our Gadget-loving friend should do is read the card. If he or she doesn’t, GGP might be very tempted to activate Ring of Destruction on it, thinking that it works exactly like the rest of the Gear monsters. If our opponent does, he or she has just made a mistake of extraordinary magnitude, since the Engineer negates any trap that targets it. Bottomless Trap Hole is about the only thing that can stop that Engineer from attacking, and if the Gadget player either doesn’t play it or doesn’t have it, you’re getting an attack through. What does that mean for you? It means you’re destroying a Gadget, (likely) destroying a trap, and (likely) forcing your opponent to spend another removal card to get rid of your Engineer. All in all, your Engineer has absorbed two of your opponent’s removal cards and destroyed a monster. While the monster isn’t necessarily important in the grand scheme of things, losing the removal is serious business. The opponent only draws one card a turn, regardless of the illusion created by the Gadgets—putting removal at a premium. It’s incredibly bad for the Gadget player when any of those cards hit the graveyard unaccompanied by one of your monsters.

Last weekend I also discovered another highly effective way to produce the desired situation. As most of you already know, my tournament deck is a Counter Fairy deck, and to prepare for the arrival of Gadgets, I decided to start main decking three copies of Seven Tools of the Bandit. Needless to say, Tools was the MVP of the day, negating key trap cards all over the place. Solemn Judgment used on my Heavy Storm? I’ll use Tool on it. Mirror Force? Somehow I don’t think so. It was really excellent for me, because I got to draw a bonus card off of Bountiful Artemis for many of these, but that doesn’t mean that the card is only useful in a Counter Fairy deck. Seven Tools of the Bandit is an excellent card in a format where traps set the pace of the game. With trap cards, players who have control of the field maintain it and players who don’t can try to recapture it or win the game outright.

Of course, we can’t ignore spells either. Gadget decks pack a ton of spells, and if you can force them to use more than one spell to get rid of only one of your monsters, you get closer to achieving the goal of sticking them with nothing but Gadgets while you have bigger monsters. Magic Drain is an excellent way to do this, and my deck from last week applies these principles. While I’m at it, I’ll go ahead and predict that there were some people playing that exact deck (or at least a similar one) at the SJC. Of course that prediction doesn’t really mean much to all of you who are reading this after the fact, does it? Regardless, this brings us to another important anti-Gadget strategy.

There’s more than one way to make your opponent lose all his or her removal while leaving yourself with at least one big monster. Another good example is playing monsters that are immune in some way to the standard monster removal agents played by a Gadget deck. Many people have jumped on the idea of playing a Horus deck backed with Royal Decree to accomplish this, and in theory, it’s an excellent idea. Unfortunately, Horus has always had a pretty bad relationship with a little card called Exiled Force that we’re allowed two copies of. Fortunately, there is a pair of monsters out there that don’t care about Exiled Force or any other standard removal card: Vampire Lord and Sacred Phoenix of Nephthys. What point is there to the removal if you’re just going to get the monster back every single turn, possibly with a Heavy Storm effect? These two monsters belong to the list of old favorites that are seeing new life in this metagame, and that pleases me greatly.

To summarize, the best way to beat down on Gadget decks is to exploit the fact that their monsters have low ATK. Stranding them with nothing but Gadgets leaves them vulnerable in the face of larger monsters. We had a nice little Gadget quiz last time, so this week I think we’ll do an anti-Gadget quiz.

1. Which player benefits more if you play Chain Destruction against a Gadget deck?

2. If you’re going to play one of the following in your standard Monarch deck as tech in the Gadget matchup, which one should you play and why?: Elemental Hero Wildheart, Mirage Dragon, or Hand of Nephthys with the Sacred Phoenix.

3. What kind of monster does the generic Gadget deck have the most difficult time destroying?

4. Regarding the Lazaro/Spicer Monarch deck, which one card should you swap with what other card of the same type (monster, spell, or trap) in order to vastly improve your matchup against Gadgets?

5. Name a monster with 1500 DEF that makes an excellent turn 1 set against the Gadget deck.

Like last time, score 4 points for each correct answer. Looking at the first question, the immediate thought of most people when they read Chain Destruction was “Wow, if the opponent loses all the rest of his or her Gadgets of a given color, that opponent is in trouble!” Unfortunately, that’s not quite true. While it would certainly be a real pain in the long run, the fact that you’ve burned a card without having an immediate effect on the field does a lot to improve the Gadget player’s game in the short run. After all, if you’re just going to sit there and help your opponent simplify the field, he or she is definitely going to let you do it. The opponent will just save that Solemn Judgment for something that doesn’t benefit him or her. Don’t use Chain Destruction against the Gadgets. Trust me: it’ll all end in tears.

For the second question, when I think of a successful tech card, I think of something that’s easy to play and easy to fetch out of your deck. If the card doesn’t have those qualities and it also doesn’t throw the game wildly in your favor, you probably shouldn’t try to play it as a one-of tech card. Mirage Dragon, while undeniably useful in the Gadget matchup, can’t really be searched out by any useful means and is the kind of card that you’d rather run in threes to make sure you get it. Hand of Nephthys is very searchable in the standard Monarch deck (thanks to the Apprentice Magician engine), but you also have to dedicate a spot to the Phoenix in order for it to work. As I’m sure you’ve heard in the past, drawing Sacred Phoenix of Nephthys is one of the worst things that can possibly happen to you, especially if you’re already playing six other tribute monsters. Thus, I would keep yet another tribute monster far away from my Monarch deck, especially when I can’t directly summon it by way of Treeborn Frog. That leaves our good friend Elemental Hero Wildheart. Immune to the traps of both friend and foe, and highly searchable to boot, Wildheart is once again an excellent one-of card in a variety of decks. And it works against more than Gadgets, too. Any deck that packs a ton of trap-based removal can easily fall victim to Wildheart’s immunity trick.

If you take a look at Hammer Shot, Fissure, Smashing Ground, Widespread Ruin, and Sakuretsu Armor, you’ll find they have one thing in common: they only destroy face-up monsters. In fact, the only cards in a general Gadget deck that can handle face-down monsters are Exiled Force and Snipe Hunter, the latter of which has some risk. Leaving your opponent with no choice but to use Snipe Hunter is another side effect of eliminating the rest of his or her removal cards, and even then some players might not do it for fear of failure. That said, face-down monsters that can’t be destroyed by Gadget attacks are the best kind of monster to have set, especially if they have some sort of beneficial effect . . .

Regarding the Lazaro/Spicer deck, there’s one card it currently plays that it really shouldn’t main deck anymore, unless the player is fairly certain he or she won’t be dealing with Gadgets. That card is Zaborg the Thunder Monarch. The Gadgets themselves are inconsequential. Any Monarch can vaporize them. The Monarchs can’t do that, however, if there are trap cards around to stop them. By replacing Thunder Monarchs with an equal number of Mobius the Frost Monarch cards, you improve your matchup greatly against a deck not known for playing chainable cards. Ring of Destruction is the primary worry. Finally, I mentioned that the most difficult thing for a Gadget player to get rid of is a face-down monster that he or she can’t destroy in battle. Beneficial effects are bonus, and if you’re looking for the max in Gadget-Strategy-Ruination, you want to set Don Zaloog on your first turn. If the opponent doesn’t have Nobleman of Crossout and you can stop a Cyber Dragon attack, he or she will likely attack with a Gadget just to see if that can destroy it, and that’s when he or she gets nailed. The attack fails, and you also get to pluck a card from the opponent’s hand. You could even interrupt the Gadget cycle, or take out the removal that’s about to be thrown at your Don. Any way you look at it, you’re on your way to a win.

If you didn’t score well this week, my best recommendation would be to take a good long look at all the cards that people suggest as counters to Gadgets and think about them. What are their immediate effects on the field? What are the long-term implications of playing them? Do they get you any closer to an ideal situation? If you can answer these questions when you’re looking at potential anti-Gadget cards, you’re in a much better position while building your deck. If you can answer these questions with regard to your own in-game options, you’re in a much better position to win the game.

Before I go, I’ll remind you that just because you theoretically know how to beat the Gadget deck doesn’t mean you’re never going to lose to it again. It’s a tough skill to master, and honestly, I’m still working on it myself. Still, master it you must if you plan on defeating the many Gadget decks you’re likely to encounter in the future. As for the matter of Gadget mirror matches, I’ll leave it to those who actually plan on engaging in them. Sounds like a lot of fun for people who aren’t me. Keep on practicing, and until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!

HOMEWORK: Enough of this Gadget stuff. The homework for next time is a bit of a riddle, and it deals with card identification.

To complete this puzzle, successfully identify the five cards that fit the following clues:

All of the cards have the number 1000 written somewhere on them. One of them has it written four times.

Only one of these cards can activate its effect while Macro Cosmos is in play.