First off, I’d like to apologize to anyone who was overly worried about last week’s preview. I only meant "end of the world" in the sense that my focus this week is going to be the toppling of the narrow perceptions of players who refuse to judge cards on their own merits. One of the things that really drives me crazy whenever a new set comes out is the people who pick the one or two most obviously powerful cards from the set and declare the rest of the cards to be "terrible." These people are usually forced to revise their opinions later when other, less obviously powerful cards wind up being the actual stars of the set. Despite the clear quality of an incredibly high number of cards available in Phantom Darkness, this set seems to suffer from this "overshadow effect" more than any other set in recent memory due to Dark Armed Dragon and Allure of Darkness. It’s so bad that people are using these two cards and the decks they enable as the be-all, end-all reason why you shouldn’t even consider the rest of the set. Sure, those cards are amazing, but if we allow ourselves to be taken by tunnel-vision we’re never going to be happy with the rest of the cards and will miss out on a number of incredibly potent strategies.
Every article that appears on Metagame.com appears alongside a small snippet of text from the article that gives you an idea of what you’ll be reading. Back during our Phantom Darkness previews, I was particularly surprised by one of Ryan Murphy’s blurbs, specifically the one that says, "Any spell that includes the words ‘draw three cards’ deserves a second glance." I thought to myself, "Well, yeah! Anyone who wouldn’t want to find a way to effectively use a ‘draw three’ spell is kidding themselves at best," and so I set off to find a way to make The Beginning of the End win me the game whenever I play it. Most of the time when a spell lets you draw cards, it somehow evens out the draw with a discard or some other sort of drawback. As a general rule, spells just don’t give you free cards these days, and The Beginning of the End is an important exception in that it not only gives you two more cards than you started with, it also removes five Dark monsters from your graveyard as a cost to play it. Depending on what those Dark monsters are, you may have set yourself up for a win via Return from the Different Dimension or Dimension Fusion in addition to digging three cards deeper into the deck to find them—or anything else you want. With power like that, it would at first seem totally inconceivable for such a card to avoid hype, and yet The Beginning of the End has managed to do just that. People play Pot of Avarice to draw two cards and shuffle five monsters back into the deck. Heck, people play it in twos despite the fact that it’s a dead card in the opening turns and can be disrupted by a timely D.D. Crow, so why not The Beginning of the End? I suppose it’s because you need seven Dark monsters in the graveyard in order to activate it at all, but take a look at this deck and tell me it’s not worth it.
After playing this list for the better part of a week, I submit that anyone who shies away from The Beginning of the End due to its large Dark monster requirement is either a coward or abnormally afraid of Macro Cosmos. It’s remarkably easy to get seven Dark monsters into your graveyard. In fact, it’s much easier to get Dark monsters into your graveyard than other type of monster since Phantom Darkness blessed us with the very searchable Armageddon Knight and Dark Grepher for all our Dark dumping needs. Just fetch the one you want with Reinforcement of the Army, plop it on the field, and you can have anywhere from one to three more Dark monsters in your graveyard than you did at the start of your turn. It’s madness, and if you want to get Dark monsters in your graveyard without sacrificing any overall card presence, might I suggest Giant Germ or Magical Merchant? With both of these monsters receiving a foil reprint in Champion Pack: Game 5 in addition to all the other Dark monster support in that particular set, I have to assume that someone at UDE sat down and asked him- or herself, "What would be some good cards for people looking to play the new Phantom Darkness cards?" when planning the release. Magical Merchant is particularly excellent in that it can fill the graveyard with enough Darks to fuel The Beginning of the End in addition to fetching The Beginning out of your deck! It’s just too perfect! The best part is that all this deck thinning can take place over the course of the first couple of turns. At the earliest, I’ve been able to play The Beginning of the End on my second turn, but on average I find I’m able to activate it around my third or fourth turn. That’s faster than most people can fill the five monster requirement for Pot of Avarice. Hopefully no one out there still thinks that The Beginning of the End is too slow to be considered.
This is a Return style deck with a bit of a twist. While the old builds of that strategy focused on Return from the Different Dimension and used a large number of basic card trades to simplify the field so that Return would reach maximum effectiveness, mine is designed to wipe your opponent’s field as a result of the Return or Dimension Fusion. That’s right, if things are going to plan, you can activate Return from the Different Dimension and have the monsters you summon completely obliterate the opponent’s field with their effects. Dark Nephthys quickly became a favorite of mine when I saw that it received its effect of destroying a spell or trap card any time it was special summoned, even if it wasn’t as a result of its own ability. This stands in stark contrast to Sacred Phoenix of Nephthys which can only clear the spell and trap zones if it’s destroyed by a card effect and then special summoned in your next standby phase. The result of the difference is that if you get all three copies of Dark Nephthys out of play before playing Return or Dimension Fusion, you’ll get to destroy three spell and trap cards when they all come back. Combine that with the monster-clearing power of Darklord Zerato and the spell recursion from Dark Magician of Chaos and the only relevant cards your opponent can stop you with are Bottomless Trap Hole and Torrential Tribute. Even then, your opponent will just be setting you up for either another Return or another Beginning of the End and you’ll still get to wipe his or her spell and trap cards out. It’s pretty ridiculous, but it does involve playing five level 8 monsters, so I felt that a copy of Trade-In was warranted.
The big issue with this deck and all of the other graveyard-centric Dark strategies is that Macro Cosmos, in theory, ruins you. It’s not as pronounced with this one though, since if you find yourself up against a Macro Cosmos deck it’s possible for you to use the opponent’s Dimensional Fissure or Macro Cosmos against him or her to win the game even faster than you would otherwise. You’ll be loading the removed-from-play pile directly with Armageddon Knight and Dark Grepher, so you’ll want to prioritize dropping your big monsters out of play with them since the Dark Eruption reverse toolbox strategy won’t be effective. Games 2 and 3 should certainly involve D.D. Survivor cards from the side deck, but other than that, I think I’ll let you work out some interesting ways to convert this deck into one that can tangle with Cosmos. Like Ryan Murphy said, you can’t just pass on a "draw three" spell because it seems "too slow" at first. That’s what people initially thought about Pot of Avarice too, and you know how that story ended. Next week I’ll be building under an all new Advanced list, so until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!
-Jerome McHale
jcmchale@andrew.cmu.edu
NEXT WEEK: New beginnings, quick ends.