“I can’t believe I just won the worst feature match ever.” David Huertas can’t stop blushing. He just gave about the worst performance of his life, and won 2-0 out of an impossible situation anyway. This deck is scary, and it does mean, mean things.

“I just put together my side deck this morning,” confessed Huertas, who had problems putting the deck together from beginning to end due to the obscure cards it runs. “It was so hard to find copies of The Paths of Destiny. And some guy wanted ten bucks for his three Gift Cards.” Check out the deck Huertas managed to put together:

So what leads a duelist to play a deck that others would consider completely insane? “I just wanted to have fun,” explained Huertas. “Standard Monarchs are just so . . . well, standard, and other decks are downright boring. I wanted to play something different.” And boy did he! Huertas appears to be the only person running this deck today, which isn’t really surprising.

If you haven’t seen this deck concept before, the idea is to use Bad Reaction to Simochi and the new promo card Nurse Reficule the Fallen One, as the primary win conditions. Both cards turn any life points your opponent would gain, into damage instead. From there, Gift Card becomes a chainable 3000 damage, and Paths of Destiny becomes 2000 damage regardless of how the coin flip works out. Upstart Goblin becomes a clean draw and 1000 damage, helping the deck draw toward even more of its damage-dealing tricks.

Huertas balanced the rest of the deck with high-impact burn cards like Ceasefire, Just Desserts, Magic Cylinder, and Dimension Wall. It even runs Chain Strike, alongside two copies of Accumulated Fortune — the deck plays to create large chains as a result, and it can afford to do so because it usually won’t need to pull the trigger early. Huertas can take his time putting together a big sequence of damage-dealing cards, protecting himself with Swords of Revealing Light, Scapegoat, Messenger of Peace, and Level Limit - Area B. Ojama Trio occupies the opponent’s field while helping the damage level of Just Desserts, too, much as it would for a Green Baboon Burn deck.

Since the deck plays to create large chains, it runs very few monsters, though not quite as few as a dedicated Chain Strike strategy would run. Morphing Jar is a must, but so is Mystic Tomato, serving as both a defensive line and as a method of searching out Nurse Reficule. This deck’s ability to get to Reficule and Bad Reaction is a huge asset, and the Tomatoes can often score a shot for damage early on. We saw in Huertas’ feature match just how often a player will press with small monsters in order to get through as much damage as quickly as possible, and the 1400 ATK points Tomato and Reficule share can make for some significant damage that can put Huertas over the top.

The cool thing about this strategy is that it has strong matchups against a variety of decks that are relevant in this metagame. Apprentice Monarch decks have proven to be both popular and slow today, placing that matchup in Huertas’ favor. Macro Cosmos and the plethora of remove from play decks here don’t have any natural advantage over the Simochi strategy, either. Even up against Light and Darkness Dragon, this deck seems to have an edge, as demonstrated in Huertas’ feature. The deck is just blazingly fast, and that makes it a major threat in today’s tournament. Huertas took a loss in round 3, but he defeated his opponent in the first game in two turns. “I was terrified,” was the opponent’s only comment about the experience of playing Heurtas’ deck.

With a 2-1 record Huertas’ life in this tournament is up in the air, but his deck is noteworthy, so I want to get it out there. Without Soul Takers the deck doesn’t seem to be built to its full potential, but the concepts Huertas has introduced here are the basis for what may go on to be a successful strategy. If Huertas can make Day 2 he’ll have a big impact, but if he can’t, his deck concept still deserves a second look.