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Doomkaiser Dragon
Card# CSOC-EN043

Doomkaiser Dragon's effect isn't just for Zombie World duelists: remember that its effect can swipe copies of Plaguespreader Zombie, too!
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The Apotheosis: Light and Darkness Samurai

Matt Murphy

January 09, 2008

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By the time you read this, it will be the new year, and in keeping in tradition with “New Year’s Resolutions,” I’d like to invite all my readers to send me not only their decks but their feedback for my column. If you have feedback, I have an e-mail address. I’d be happy even with negative feedback, because, as it currently stands, the only changes I can make are based off of my own personal musings and not the opinions of the people who are supposed to be enjoying this column. In case you don’t know that e-mail address, it is mjm.metagame@gmail.com. Send me your thoughts!

The winter break also gave me some time to re-evaluate my goals for this column. I had a number of arbitrary goals I wished to meet and a number of arbitrary limitations I placed upon myself for reasons that would generously be described as silly. So I reconsidered my previous rules. First, I gathered them up in a neat list. Then I crumpled the list up and threw it in a fire fueled with dead, dry wyrmwood: a twisted and bitter tree growing only on the desolate and unforgiving slopes of Mt. Woe. That said, my deck fixes should border less on the metaphysical discussion of, say, Texas Quant’um, and more on the practical aspect of “here’s a deck, now let’s make it better.”

That said, I am at a lack for a humorous transition, so let’s get started this year with an interesting deck!

Hi Matt,

I’ve always liked playing the Six Samurai, but I didn’t feel they were really competitive until Gladiator’s Assault. Now, with three cards from Gladiator’s Assault, and the powerhouse negate-everything Light and Darkness Dragon, I think the Samurai have a real shot at winning an SJC. The way this deck works is (obviously) to run the Samurai, and use Foolish Burial to get Samurai into the graveyard for Enishi, Shien’s Chancellor or Double-Edged Sword Technique. Then, once the graveyard is full, I use the Sword Technique to summon two Samurai, who I tribute for the Dragon. That means I have a huge negotiator on the field, and I don’t take any damage from Sword Technique. Then, when the Dragon is destroyed, I either grab a Shogun from the graveyard, or a normal Samurai so I can special summon Grandmaster of the Six Samurai. I was just hoping you could give me some help to make the deck run smoother.

Thanks,

Joe B, Detroit, MI

Light and Darkness Samurai: 40 cards

Monsters: 22

3 Grandmaster of the Six Samurai

2 Great Shogun Shien

2 Enishi, Shien’s Chancellor

2 Light and Darkness Dragon

3 The Six Samurai - Zanji

3 The Six Samurai - Yaichi

3 The Six Samurai - Irou

1 The Six Samurai - Kamon

1 Morphing Jar

1 Treeborn Frog

1 Card Trooper

Magic: 12

2 Foolish Burial

3 Cunning of the Six Samurai

2 Reinforcement of the Army

1 Mystical Space Typhoon

Traps: 6

1 Call of the Haunted

1 Mirror Force

1 Torrential Tribute

3 Double-Edged Sword Technique

Joe has already earned points in my book for using the word “negotiator” to describe a huge beatstick. That just sounds cool. His deck is another issue, but it also earns him points in my book.

The Six Samurai deck is a good one and Joe’s is no exception. There is obvious strength in bringing out monsters that seamlessly combine good field presence, aggression, and powerful effects with support that would have any fan of the theme salivating in anticipation. Consider Double-Edged Sword Technique, which, with a little bit of creative thinking, is essentially a spell speed 2 Monster Reborn. Sure, it only hits your own graveyard, but it works twice and doesn’t have a downside if you win the game with the two powerful monsters you just summoned, or (in this deck’s case) use them as tribute fodder for a Dragon with some seriously cool art.

Light and Darkness Dragon is an interesting choice in this deck, and personally it inspired pause to consider how well it could work with the theme. You can easily have three monsters on the field in one turn, and with Double-Edged Sword Technique, even something as trite as Torrential Tribute seems only a momentary setback that will soon be rectified. Whether your concern is hand, field, or life-point advantage, the Six Samurai can play in a diverse enough way to achieve the goal. So what does the Dragon, cool as it may be, add to the deck? It’s not as though we’re at a loss for finishers considering the power of the Six Samurai theme. But the idea has merit if you make a rather basic consideration—you can prevent traps from affecting your monsters, find more utility in Double-Edged Sword Technique, and should your Dragon succumb to your opponent’s efforts, you can put another monster on the field (perhaps Grandmaster of the Six Samurai). Especially the Grandmaster, in fact, since he will reinforce your hand even if he is destroyed again and will reinforce your field after that. To top it all off, the Dragon requires quite a bit of devotion from your opponent to successfully take out, leaving him or her at a loss for options when dealing with the 4000 points of damage you can put on the table the next turn (in addition to whatever you got from your graveyard).

After all of this, however, I am at a loss for how to fix the deck. It’s about as good as it gets for the goals it wishes to achieve, and outside of increasing the deck size or changing the theme drastically, there’s not much I can change. Since I don’t particularly want to do the former, the choice is limited to changing the basic way the deck plays. Congratulations Joe, you gave me a very polished deck. The one I am about to give you is quite different, however.

It occurred to me the very first time I perused through the list of Gladiator’s Assault cards that a Six Samurai deck that emptied out its hand and filled its field would be very, very fast and definitely capable of burning more than half an opponent’s starting life points in three cards. This was already possible before, and Gladiator’s Assault supplied the extra options needed. This was only if the deck in question abandoned “conservative” play and actually made those crazy four-summon plays that are discussed in frightened whispers. Mystical Space Typhoon followed by Cyber Dragon, The Six Samurai - Irou, Grandmaster of the Six Samurai, and Great Shogun Shien with Cunning of the Six Samurai to finish the whole thing up just seemed silly, and the most frightening thing is that every card I just mentioned is completely replaceable. Double Cunning of the Six Samurai with Grandmaster of the Six Samurai and Irou or Zanji would take out an opponent in one turn.

The more conservative player would consider using Cunning of the Six Samurai to prevent a nasty trick with Sakuretsu Armor. The fact is that it’s usually safer to avoid these insane plays simply because a single Torrential Tribute would put you at a severe disadvantage, and stuff like Bottomless Trap Hole wouldn’t help either when the play you were counting on to succeed sort of fizzled. From this observation was born, in the gallimaufry of ideas swimming in the sea of my brain, the simple idea of harnessing that sheer excess of special summons, perhaps for something like insane draw power. Cookies with gingerbread-flavored milk was another idea, and also some ideas about harnessing Six Samurai with burn or perhaps a tiny amount of Armed Samurai - Ben Kei. On topic, thankfully, we have a very prominent Zombie deck in the world metagame, and it gives us the idea of Card of Safe Return. This will be a focus for the new deck. Card of Safe Return has the added benefit of working well with Light and Darkness Dragon.

And for all the talky-talky I’ve done, the changes are rather simple. Watch the logic evolve.

Enishi, Shien’s Chancellor does not contribute to Card of Safe Return, and with Irou, Zanji, and Lightning Vortex already in the deck, I question the necessity of the extra removal. Either he or Lightning Vortex should get the boot, and, in the end, I decided on Lightning Vortex since it detracts from hand size and does not also attack for more than a quarter of someone’s starting life points. If we are to add Card of Safe Return, it makes no sense to keep Treeborn Frog in the deck, and that itself calls into question the basic utility of Foolish Burial. In the new list, Double Summon makes more sense, but even that is questionable, so after cutting two Foolish Burial cards, only one Double Summon gets added as another tool to fill the field. In this case it actually acts as a less versatile version of Cunning of the Six Samurai. After that, we add two copies of Card of Safe Return to the deck. Enemy Controller is still a star in aggressive strategies, and here it can destroy Spirit Reaper or turn Marshmallon and Treeborn Frog to attack position. It can even trade Yaichi or Kamon for a Cyber Dragon or better once they’ve used their effects. And finally, the idea of the “surplus option” I mentioned before comes into play. If we consider Yaichi to be a toolbox effect (since that is the same use we have put Kamon to) then we can replace one copy of him with another toolbox effect that will make Double-Edged Sword Technique that much better. One copy of The Six Samurai - Yaichi gets the axe for one copy of Spirit of the Six Samurai.

From there? I think we can push to 41 cards, and the extra slot can be used for more support or tribute fodder such as Spirit Reaper, but another Double Summon or Card of Safe Return doesn’t feel right. The single card that feels best in this role is probably Breaker the Magical Warrior, but even that doesn’t feel completely right here—he does nothing to support the theme besides blow up a spell or trap and I almost don’t want to reduce the likelihood of you drawing Grandmaster of the Six Samurai or Cunning of the Six Samurai just to fit this amazingly good card in. In the end though, the strength of Breaker versus all the other options available convinced me that he was not only worth adding to the deck, but better than all the other options. In he goes.

I’m not sure I actually made this deck better, however. The original list was quite polished, but obviously Joe wasn’t satisfied with it or he wouldn’t have sent it in. While I have experimented with Ben Kei and burn in Six Samurai, I’m actually fairly unfamiliar with the Light and Darkness Dragon/Card of Safe Return combo. The result is that we have a deck aiming to achieve a draw engine and abuse Six Samurai support to summon “negotiators” (ah, what a nice term) and fill up the hand in obscene ways at the same time. It plays a little bit like a combo deck, in fact, and I’m not certain which version I like more, but this is worth a try at least.

Cut:

-1 Lightning Vortex

-2 Foolish Burial

-1 Treeborn Frog

-1 The Six Samurai - Yaichi

Added:

+2 Card of Safe Return

+1 Enemy Controller

+1 Spirit of the Six Samurai

+1 Double Summon

+1 Breaker the Magical Warrior

Light and Darkness Samurai—Matt’s Fix: 41 cards