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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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Combination Attack!—Do You Have a Coupon?

Matt Murphy

August 11, 2007

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I’m going to take a step back from the complex draw-phase manipulation of my last few decks and just give you a combo that straight-out wins you the game today. Yeah, it might not be as elaborate, but it’s a heck of a lot simpler than figuring out your draw phases five turns in advance.

One little kink of every deck is understanding when to save cards like Mirror Force, Torrential Tribute, or Book of Moon that protect your life points but can potentially be more damaging to the opponent. This principle has always been present in deckbuilding: Injection Fairy Lily, for example, is a powerful monster but shrinks down to a meager size if you have 2000 life points or less. Likewise, having too many effects that make you pay life points (like Solemn Judgment or Return from the Different Dimension) has always forced duelists to understand the economy of life points and cards. It may then come as a surprise that the goal of this deck is to activate Dimension Fusion twenty times in a single turn.

The trick is economics, and to be more specific, Spell Economics. While this particular combo has been floating around for a while, it proves difficult to update for the current format since one lynchpin (Dimension Fusion) is Limited. “Bah,” Barnaby the Pirate says. “Mere trivialities! We have a number of tricks that can get around something as minor as scarcity, ye scurvy dog!” And he’s right. There are plenty of ways to put Dimension Fusion somewhere where we can get to it. So the trouble is the other lynchpin to our combo, Dark Magician of Chaos. I’ll get to that in a moment.

Note three things present here. Spell Economics provides you with a little “cheat code” of sorts to get around the cost of cards like Brain Control, Premature Burial, and Dimension Fusion. Dimension Fusion gets back all monsters removed from play, and Dark Magician of Chaos removes himself from play every time he leaves the field. This means we have a monster who gets back something that gets back the monster, and all we need to do is find something to get the Dark Magician of Chaos off the field. The inclusion of Mass Driver or Cannon Soldier allows you to tribute the Magician for 500 points of damage, replay him with Dimension Fusion, retrieve the Dimension Fusion with the effect of your Dark Magician of Chaos, and then start over with another 500 points of damage. The amount of damage your opponent takes? Well, I’d like to say it’s infinite, but you’ll win the game too quickly.

So let’s think over what we can do to set the loop up. The hardest detail is Dimension Fusion, since we have to either put it in the graveyard for Dark Magician of Chaos or have it in hand. One card solves both problems: Monster Gate. It dumps a bunch of cards in the graveyard that can all be retrieved, whether by Dark Magician of Chaos, Spell Reproduction, or Magical Stone Excavation. To top it off, if Dark Magician of Chaos and Toon Cannon Soldier are the only monster cards in your deck . . . well, things get simpler.

The trouble with this plan is twofold. The first is probably our biggest concern: Monster Gate is not only hard to activate with fewer than five monsters in your deck, but there is also no guarantee of a successful hit. The monster problem can be amended by including Scapegoat and Brain Control, or even copies of Stray Lambs, but Dimension Fusion is still tricky. There are, as I see it, two paths to go down. The first is to include copies of Card Trooper in the deck, but that forces you to run the risk of dumping a Dark Magician of Chaos and every method of recursion you have for it. Considering that speed is paramount to the success of this deck, waiting to draw a copy of Call of the Haunted or Premature Burial is highly inefficient.

The other plan would be to up the monster count by using self-replacing or deck-thinning monsters, and include an old favorite of mine—Magical Hats. That way you could up the speed while reducing the need for it at the same time, since you are slowing your opponent down and speeding yourself up. I prefer this course of action.

Now that we’ve found a solution to the first problem (which sates our hunger for efficiency and productivity), we’ll deal with the second—Macro Cosmos. Effects like this will make it very hard to get the deck to function properly. Banisher of the Radiance can be amended with a combination of Brain Control and Monster Gate (as well as the other tribute effects in the deck), or simply Book of Moon. Giant Trunade, Heavy Storm, and Mystical Space Typhoon should provide enough help against Macro Cosmos.