Well, I’m back, and I promised you hot combos from Force of the Breaker. So what can I do with the set? There are tantalizing options left and right. The Crystal Beasts are particularly nice, but I couldn’t think up much to do with them beyond one fun combo that didn’t exactly come out of the blue (that one will come soon, don’t you worry) and the combos inherent within the theme. Then I realized that some people might want to see something with the new chiaroscuro-oriented Scourge monsters over the colorful Crystal Beasts. This isn’t to say there aren’t fans of the Crystal Beasts out there and that I’m not thinking of you, but really, Sky Scourge Norleras has some incredible art.

It’s no stretch to say that something like Sky Scourge Norleras is on the minds of more than a few duelists. The powerful “Chaos” monsters from Invasion of Chaos were all added to the Forbidden list, a fitting testament to their power. Norleras bears a striking resemblance to the feared Chaos Emperor Dragon - Envoy of the End. The comparison is easy to make: both require the removal of monsters from the graveyard, and both send everything to oblivion. Chaos Emperor Dragon has particularly nasty synergy with Sangan and Yata-Garasu, forming a combo that never gives your opponent another draw phase and gets rid of all of his or her cards. Quite potent, if you ask me.

Norleras is potent as well, since it cuts the middleman from the basic combo of “blow up the world” + “draw something that’s really powerful when the world is blown up.” For example, a card like Dimension Fusion would make sense if you’re going to remove four monsters in your graveyard from play. What’s that you say? Combos? Oh, sounds good. This week, we’re going to be focusing on Sky Scourge Norleras drawing into Dimension Fusion and attacking your opponent for a lot.

First off, you need some way of putting Dimension Fusion onto the top of your deck. No problem! We have something called A Feather of the Phoenix, and discarding a card doesn’t exactly hurt when we need to put stuff in the graveyard for Norleras—when it comes out, we can’t exactly keep the cards in our hand or on our field. The only tough part about this is building our combo around a Limited card. This is actually simple, because we have cards like Magical Hats to help us in this regard. So two or three copies of each of those would be good.

Let’s move on to a monster base. Norleras requires more Fiends than it does Fairies, so we’re going to complement a theme of Fiends with Fairies. Simple logic there; we can add in Giant Germ to start, which serves the dual purpose of feeding Norleras and burning through the opponent at the same time. From there we’ll look at some powerful Fiend monsters. Newdoria is an excellent option that works well with Mystic Tomato, and allows us to play a sort of toolbox of powerful cards. Night Assailant allows us to get back a flip-effect monster, and since this is a sort of beatdown deck, the powerful Slate Warrior makes an excellent target (though its status as a Wind monster will keep it from directly feeding Norleras). Additionally, Norleras itself is a Dark Fiend, so adding in Card Destruction and Morphing Jar will not only help draw into Dimension Fusion, but will also assist in getting material into the graveyard for Norleras—including an otherwise useless second copy of the monster.

Normally I am not in favor of working so much of the deck around one card, but Norleras is both immensely powerful and immensely hard to get out. Winning the game is not a small goal, so I’d say the effort is more than worth the price.

Since we have plenty of cards that work well with Creature Swap, why not add two copies of it? Also, since we are playing Magical Hats, we can add a nifty mini-combo that I might expand upon in the future (since Magical Hats is just very, very cool—I mean, Yugi used it!). Mask of Darkness serves multiple purposes in this deck, being both food for Norleras and a way to recur copies of Mirror Force or Torrential Tribute, which helps to defend you until you can explode with your combo. Since Magical Hats allows you to pull these cards out and even puts your Mask of Darkness face down, this is an excellent combo with lots of synergy, even if we will not be focusing on it. Still, it is a nice mini-combo in and of itself, and it helps flesh the deck out with strong synergistic elements.

For Fairy monsters, you want one that makes the most devastating impact possible. Beyond that, there are two routes I looked at that could support the addition of Dark Fiends that work well with Dimension Fusion and the “bash your face in real quick” theme. The first is Dark World, which requires too much support to mesh well, in my opinion. The second was a build using Advanced Ritual Art with Norleras, which suffers from the same problems. This troubled me, but in the end, I decided that I would use some cards that only beat face and complement the beatdown with a little bit of burn. The reason I’m telling you this is that you may find ideas which I abandon valid, and the end goal of this column is for you to have fun and do something interesting using these ideas as a spark. This means that I might mention something that never works its way into the deck so that you are able to consider it.

I added Ring of Destruction, Magic Cylinder, and Ceasefire to help assist the deck in burning through the last few life points. Goblin King was an addition that I saw as genius, since he can turn an otherwise weak field of Giant Germ cards or the like into some monstrous force capable of hitting for more than half the opponent’s life points. By adding one, we can set up a large Dimension Fusion with Mystic Tomato, pulling the King out only to fall and become food for a certain Scourge so that the world can be blown up and he can be King again. Snipe Hunter not only beats face, but also sets up Norleras and kills problem cards like Level Limit - Area B.

That gives us thirteen Dark Fiend monsters, three of which are copies of Norleras. Unfortunately, some of them are comparatively small (1000 ATK or so), so we’re going to add some strong Fairies to help flesh this out. The first addition is two copies of Majestic Mech - Ohka, a card that boasts 2400 ATK and bashes the opponent handily. Next is two copies of Gellenduo, because that card is fuzzy-wuzzy adorable. Okay, that’s not proper justification. It acts as a wall and a beatstick at the same time and is a Light Fairy . . . that’s a proper justification.

Asura Priest is another potent addition that works well with Creature Swap. I’ll also add Airknight Parshath, since he allows you to beat face and draw cards at the same time, further establishing the dominance of your post-Dimension Fusion field. Finally, I flesh out the spell section of the deck by adding Brain Control, something that helps to beat face, and some powerful (and in some cases obvious) complementary spells. Since the mission is putting Dimension Fusion on top of the deck, A Feather of the Phoenix is necessary.

Here’s what I ended up with.

Sky Rifts—42 cards

Monsters: 22

3 Sky Scourge Norleras

3 Giant Germ

2 Mask of Darkness

2 Mystic Tomato

1 Sangan

1 Goblin King

1 Night Assailant

1 Newdoria

1 Snipe Hunter

1 Slate Warrior

1 Morphing Jar

1 Majestic Mech - Ohka

1 Airknight Parshath

1 Asura Priest

2 Gellenduo

Spells: 13

1 Heavy Storm

1 Nobleman of Crossout

1 Dimension Fusion

1 Snatch Steal

1 Premature Burial

1 Card Destruction

2 Brain Control

2 Creature Swap

3 A Feather of the Phoenix

Traps: 7

1 Mirror Force

1 Call of the Haunted

1 Ring of Destruction

1 Torrential Tribute

1 Ceasefire

2 Magical Hats

I always love it when a build turns out tight, and this one is especially well-tuned for a rough draft. In addition to splicing this deck with Dark World or Advanced Ritual Art (just think, you could have two different ways to blow up the world!), you can focus less on Norleras and splice it with, say, Strike Ninja or something else that plays with the removed-from-play pile. There are a few ways to go, and Goblin King is definitely a card you can expand upon. Since I wanted to concentrate on Norleras, this is the route I took. Feel free to take your own.

Until next time, duelists!

—Matthew “Coin Flip” Murphy