At this moment Luke Patterson is in a time situation against Chris Flores at the end of Round 2, so his record in this tournament is up in the air. However, I think if I don’t show you his deck, I’m just going to get a ton of emails asking for the deck list and rightly so! Patterson’s innovative strategy has a lot of potential and is like nothing else we’ve seen before, so it really deserves an in-depth look. Here’s what he’s running.
If you missed the Round 1 feature match I’ll recap Patterson’s innovative strategy. He plays three copies each of Volcanic Shell, Necro Gardna, and Volcanic Counter, plus two copies of Blaze Accelerator and one copy of Green Baboon, Defender of the Forest. All of these cards are useful in the graveyard: every last one of them save the Accelerators has effects that only work in that zone, while the Accelerators can be retrieved from the graveyard with Volcanic Rocket. Patterson runs three Rockets as well. His game plan is to send as many cards as he can to the graveyard, establishing a variety of control effects as well as garnering free cards for discard effects. From there he plays three copies of Phoenix Wing Wind Blast to combo with the free Shells and graveyard-live cards, and the Blasts give him even more control over the field. With Necro Gardna and Blaze Accelerator in the graveyard he can negate attacks or simply make attacking a suicidal proposition, stalling indefinitely.
Patterson gets cards to the graveyard at relatively low cost thanks to three copies of Hand Destruction, three Ryko, Lightsworn Hunter cards, Card Trooper, and one Charge of the Light Brigade. The activation of Hand Destruction is easily balanced by Volcanic Shell, and the result is a really precise deck that tends to be quite consistent.
“I used to try and run Volcanic Counter with Grinder Golem,” explained Patterson, “for the OTK and all that.” He paused and gave a laugh. “It sucked! But Volcanic Counter was always a cool card, and it’s especially good right now with Solemn running around. You can stall with an empty field: it was especially good against Gladiator Beasts. I’ve tried to tweak it for this metagame, trying to counter Stardust, adding Baboon . . . it’s been a long process to get this to where it is.” The Baboon was the latest addition to the deck and was added last-minute: the reason why Patterson misplayed it in his feature match.
Green Baboon is a natural fit, feeding off the three copies of Ryko, Lightsworn Hunter and allowing Patterson to slow the pace of the duel even more by running a playset of Nimble Momonga. Two Legendary Jujitsu Master cards round out the list of defensive monster choices. In a format where the ability to slow down the game creates wins against the most feared deck in mainstream competition, this deck reduces the pace of play to an utter crawl, and it does it better than anything else out there.
Blaze Accelerator warrants some dedicated discussion, because it serves three important roles in this deck. First, played in conjunction with Volcanic Rocket the Accelerators become discard fodder for Hand Destruction and Phoenix Wing Wind Blast. Once activated, they provide a simple and reliable way to get Volcanic Shell and Volcanic Counter loaded into the graveyard, while also adding another dose of monster control to this strategy. I don’t think I’ve seen a deck that plays Blaze Accelerator so well, and it makes a big impact here, even in a tournament rife with Stardust Dragon and Thought Ruler Archfiend cards.
Three Burial From a Different Dimension cards are incredibly good here, giving this deck a late game that wouldn’t exist otherwise. By recycling Necro Gardna Patterson can defend himself, while the reuse of Volcanic Counter lets him load multiple Volcanic Counter cards into his graveyard at once. Playing a single Volcanic Counter isn’t a recipe for victory, but with multiple copies in the graveyard it becomes a win condition, dishing out double or triple the amount of damage that you yourself take in. Since Burial can be played in response to an attack, Patterson wins a lot of games that way. The Burials also help to tech against D.D. Crow, and they make Green Baboon highly dependable.
Tech picks round out the rest of the deck. The Transmigration Prophecy stops Destiny Hero - Malicious along with cards like Monster Reborn, while comboing with Volcanic Shell. Spent copies can be shuffled back into the deck, and as long as one Shell remains Patterson can use the remaining one to search out a copy he shuffled away. Magic Cylinder makes it a lot easier to win games through Volcanic Counter, knocking an opponent down low enough for a single Counter to threaten his or her survival.
Patterson’s deck is proving difficult for his opponents to deal with. They just don’t know how to play against it. “I’m not an aggressive player, but it seems like when you can control the game with no cards on the field, there’s not a whole lot people can do to you. You don’t need to worry about what people can do to your field because all your stuff’s safe in the graveyard.” That kind of approach may take him to a Day 2 finish, and if he can’t manage that feat himself, someone else may do it with a variant build in an upcoming event. There’s a tremendous amount of potential here: win or lose, Luke Patterson has pioneered a very noteworthy strategy.