I’m a huge fan of the Ancient Gear monsters. Maybe not as big of a fan as the esteemed Dr. Vowler, but a fan nonetheless. Specifically, I like them because of all the things they make opponents not do. When a Gear monster attacks, they can not stop it. When an Ancient Gear Beast destroys one of their monsters, they can not activate its effect. When you summon Ancient Gear Engineer, they can not hit it with Ring of Destruction. In general, they just can’t put up a defense against your Gears. That’s great, but defending is only part of the game. There’s also attacking, and since the best Gear monsters have smaller ATK values than many popular monsters, opponent’s attacks tend to be a lot more effective than you’d like them to be. Additionally, there’s a little issue about not being able to special summon the Gear Beast that really forces you to be careful about how and when you play it. Nowadays though, we can afford to live a little bit dangerously with Gear monsters, thanks to the recent mass release of Shrink.

Ancient Gear Engineer still gets a fair amount of hype from a lot of players, but no one ever seems to play it. A lot of that has to do with the fact that the Engineer has to survive the attack it makes in order to claim its effect of destroying an opposing spell or trap. Rush Recklessly used to be the way to go when you wanted your Engineer to live to fight another day, but now we have Shrink. While Rush is enough to get your Engineer over a Cyber Dragon or Grandmaster of the Six Samurai, it doesn’t do you much good when you come up against the big guns. Jinzo, any big Dark World monster, and any Monarch are still big enough to run your little Engineer down if all you have is Rush Recklessly. The last time I showed you an Ancient Gear deck, there were special regulations put in place to make it a character deck. This time, there are no such limitations, and I’m free to do whatever I have to do to make sure that I can create and maintain an Ancient Gear army. Check this out:

Monsters: 21

3 Ancient Gear Beast

2 Ancient Gear Engineer

3 Ancient Gear Soldier

3 Giant Rat

3 Nimble Momonga

3 Cyber Phoenix

1 Injection Fairy Lily

1 Neo-Spacian Grand Mole

1 Sangan

1 Morphing Jar

Spells: 8

1 Heavy Storm

1 Mystical Space Typhoon

1 Book of Moon

1 Snatch Steal

1 Confiscation

3 Shrink

Traps: 11

3 Sakuretsu Armor

3 The Transmigration Prophecy

3 Pulling the Rug

1 Mirror Force

1 Ring of Destruction

I feel that right now is a very good time to talk about The Transmigration Prophecy. I’ve been experimenting with the card in a variety of decks since I got my hands on some Strike of Neos packs, and I have to say that it might just be the best card in the set. Sure, Grand Mole was Limited for being an incredibly good (and obnoxious) workaround to every monster ever, but that’s nothing compared to what The Transmigration Prophecy can do to you. “What can it do for me?” you ask? Just about anything as long as it involves the graveyard. Did you just flip Morphing Jar and inadvertently discard a couple of Goldd, Wu-Lord of Dark World cards from your opponent’s hand? Rather than get smoked by the Goldds next turn, just chain The Transmigration Prophecy to their special summon effects and put them back in the deck. Did your opponent manage to summon five monsters in one turn to make sure they get through your set Nimble Momonga and deal some serious damage? Well, they didn’t do a very good job, did they? The Transmigration Prophecy can put two of the fallen squirrels back into your deck to be fetched again once your last one goes down. Maybe you were down on your luck and had Morphing Jar plucked from your hand by Confiscation on the first turn. You have a Sangan down; if only that Jar were back in your deck . . . oh wait, Prophecy can put it right back into the deck in response to an attack on Sangan. (For the record, these are all moves I pulled at some point on Sunday after the Jump in Columbus ended.)

The Transmigration Prophecy doesn’t just work for monsters either. You can also put key spells and traps back into your deck that you’ll hopefully draw into at a later point in the duel. My main point is that Prophecy is insanely good, especially if your deck relies on using a constant stream of recruiters or other self-replacing monsters to stave off opposing monsters or set up for a combo in your next turn. It can even give you another shot at drawing an important card like Dimension Fusion should it inadvertently arrive in the graveyard. If you aren’t playing this card right now, I strongly suggest you take a serious look at your deck to see what The Transmigration Prophecy can do for you. It could change your life.

Now that I’m done expounding upon the wonders of Prophecy, let’s talk about the rest of the deck. Last time, I couldn’t use any key cards of characters other than Vowler, but that’s not the case this time around. That means I can run three Cyber Phoenix cards, and since we’re not going to be running Rush Recklessly, why not? Phoenix shuts down some really annoying cards (Snatch Steal, I’m looking at you!) in addition to acting as yet another self-replacing monster joining ranks with Nimble Momonga and Giant Rat.

You’ll also notice that there aren’t any Card Troopers in this deck. There are two main reasons for this. First off, Card Trooper is incredibly difficult to get at this point, and I’d like to, if at all possible, keep this deck very easy to build and highly affordable. The most expensive cards in there right now are Mirror Force and Injection Fairy Lily, and you only really need to have the Mirror Force. Actually, you probably don’t even need that, but Mirror Force is the ultimate card for taking down armies of monsters that want to blow your guys away without destroying the monsters you’re trying to protect in the process. The other reason for the lack of Card Troopers is that while I am running The Transmigration Prophecy, I don’t want to waste any of the cards in my deck. I don’t want to dump Ancient Gear Beast into the graveyard and have to shuffle it back into my deck. I don’t want to have a chance to lose my Nimble Momonga cards without simultaneously having a chance to claim their effects. In short, your potential draws and searches are too valuable to risk with Card Trooper.

The general function of the deck is simple: summon your Ancient Gear Beast and Ancient Gear Engineer cards to wreak havoc on the opponent while his or her attacks are stymied by Shrink and various recruiters. You’ll likely end each game with a huge life point total, or a reasonably sized total if you used Lily once or twice. I’m using the word “game” here as shorthand for “game in which you get to play.” Combo decks were even more rampant than I had imagined they would be in Columbus, and that’s why, before I started playing people after the event, I switched some cards around so that I could main deck three copies of Pulling the Rug. If there’s one thing that you should change about this deck before trying it out somewhere, the three Rugs are the most likely thing to go. They’re essentially a metagame call. Do you think all of your opponents are going to be running Monarchs, Gadgets, and monsters that search out Ritual spells or monsters when they’re normal summoned? If so, you play the Rugs main decked. If you expect to be playing in an environment filled with decks that like to commit lots of monsters to the field early on, you may want to switch a couple Rugs out for Lightning Vortex. If you find that heavy spell-based decks like Diamond Dude Turbo are giving you trouble, switch the Rugs out for Magic Drain. In fact, Magic Drain is probably one of the most useful cards in the game right now, given the extreme reliance on spells we saw in Columbus.

Regardless of what you decide to do, you should at least keep the Rugs in your side deck, due to their extreme usefulness against currently popular decks. Other side deck candidates include Kinetic Soldier or Cloak and Dagger, depending on exactly how threatening specific decks seem to be to you. Right now, competitive players need to perform a bit of a balancing act in order to stay sharp and prepared for all the threats currently being seen in the environment. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there at the SJCs, and you’ve got to be prepared, lest you end up left in the dust after round 2 of your next major event. Be careful, and until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!

Jerome McHale

jcmchale@andrew.cmu.edu

NEXT WEEK: Next time we’re going to have some fun with the new World Championship 2007 video game promos.