“Hey,” many of you are saying. “This guy isn’t Jason!” Jason Grabher-Meyer is off doing The Binder now, which I recommend you read to get your weekly dose of awesome Canadian. In his stead, I’ll take over The Apotheosis. Everything remains the same . . . except that the author and the e-mail address for submissions have changed. Have a deck that needs fixing? Want to showcase a cool idea of yours? Send me an e-mail at my new submission address, mjm.metagame@gmail.com.

Our first reader-submitted deck comes from Corey in Florida.

I wanted to try and submit this to you, and hopefully get some feedback on what I could do to improve this deck. I have been working on it for a while, and with the new Advanced list I think this has a really good shot at success. Basically I use a combo of Raigeki Break, Polymerization, and Future Fusion to get Elemental Hero Necroshade to the graveyard (Fusing to make the new Elemental Hero Darkbright) as fast as possible. Using Elemental Hero Stratos and E - Emergency Call I get Elemental Hero Bladedge out easily without tributing once I’ve succeeded in dumping Necroshade. The other Fusions I use mostly to distract, or tear down defenses via removal . . .

—Corey S., Florida

That is quite a concise description of this deck. It uses a couple of tricks to ensure that whatever giant Elemental Hero he chooses to attack with, he will get it in play and attack with it.

Elemental Hero Fusion—40 Cards

Monsters: 15
2 Elemental Hero Ocean
3 Elemental Hero Clayman
2 Elemental Hero Wildheart
1 Elemental Hero Stratos
2 Elemental Hero Necroshade
1 Elemental Hero Bladedge
2 Elemental Hero Sparkman
2 King of the Swamp

Spells: 18
3 Skyscraper 2 - Hero City
3 E - Emergency Call
3 Polymerization
2 The Warrior Returning Alive
2 R - Righteous Justice
2 Miracle Fusion
1 Future Fusion
1 Premature Burial
1 Pot of Avarice

Traps: 7
3 Raigeki Break
2 Hero Signal
1 Mirror Force
1 Call of the Haunted

Fusion deck
3 Elemental Hero Darkbright
3 Elemental Hero Thunder Giant
3 Elemental Hero Wildedge
2 Elemental Hero Shining Flare Wingman
2 Elemental Hero Wild Wingman
2 Elemental Hero Necroid Shaman

Corey’s deck is a good example of an Elemental Hero deck. The plan is very nice—you get out large monsters and, well, beat face with them. Bladedge and the many Elemental Hero Fusion monsters supply the ATK, and the rest of the deck makes sure they aren’t destroyed. The theme is very simple and quite cohesive, but the deck has some curious choices mixed in with its great ones.

The plan has inherent abilities which can summon monsters used mainly for distraction. Some monsters, such as Elemental Hero Thunder Giant and Elemental Hero Necroid Shaman have tricky moves that can be very good—imagine, for example, getting your opponent’s Raiza the Storm Monarch off the field and replacing him with the opponent’s Treeborn Frog in attack position, or destroying his or her Jinzo outright. Even some of the beatsticks have viable effects—Wildedge can clear a field or attack through a chain of monsters summoned by Mystic Tomato. Darkbright, on the other hand, seems a bit like overkill in a deck that focuses on removal with Raigeki Break. While this doesn’t affect the deck as a whole, planning to use Polymerization on something that trivial when the deck’s primary win condition focuses on Fusion summons might leave you without a method of summoning a Wildedge or other powerful monster.

I also question the utility of two Necroshade cards in a deck with only one monster you’d enjoy summoning by his effect. I don’t think the right choice is to increase the number of Bladedge cards, but rather to decrease the number of Necroshade cards.

This changes the way we play this strategy, but oddly enough, has very little impact on how the deck is built. Let’s make some improvements. First off, I cut the entire monster lineup so I can build the deck from the ground up. If focus is what we lack, then focus should be kept in mind all the way from the original conception of the deck and not, say, the second or third draft. So we focus more on how the deck should run. We want to clear the field to summon Elemental Heroes, and we want to be capable of summoning them. We have Elemental Hero Ocean, Stratos, Necroshade, and Bladedge as well as the vanillas to work with.

Ocean immediately goes to three copies, for reasons I’ll discuss later, and one additional copy each of Stratos, Bladedge, and Necroshade are put in. From here, we need to see how we’ll accomplish the goal of searching for the monsters and getting off a direct attack. A few copies of E - Emergency Call help the deck search for important pieces, as well as get a twofer with Stratos (you can get Stratos to hold the fort on the field while he searches for something like Bladedge or Ocean). They also reinforce the utility of certain cards in this deck as single copies, which allows us to make room for cards like Breaker the Magical Warrior and Exiled Force or D. D. Warrior Lady, who can solve problems in addition to providing a buffer between your life points and something like Cyber Dragon.

Getting the Fusions out is trickier, and we have to analyze which ones we want to use. Wildedge and Shining Flare Wingman are nice finishers, and each member of the Wild Wingman-Necroid Shaman-Thunder Giant trio serves a unique purpose that can swing field control in your favor. For these, we will need Necroshade, Sparkman, Clayman, Wildheart, and Bladedge. It becomes clear how important King of the Swamp really is—he acts as one-third of a Fusion summon by proxy, taking the part of either a monster or Polymerization.

The next decision we must make is how many of the monsters we include. Let’s say the five monsters we focus on are each summoned once. We would need three copies of Wildheart, two Sparkman cards, two King of the Swamp cards, and one copy each of Clayman, Bladedge, and Necroshade. With the exception of King of the Swamp, that is how many will be added. The end result, with a sub-theme of Warriors to support the rest of the deck, is this monster lineup.

3 Elemental Hero Ocean

1 Elemental Hero Stratos

3 King of the Swamp

2 Elemental Hero Sparkman

1 Elemental Hero Clayman

3 Elemental Hero Wildheart

1 Elemental Hero Bladedge

1 Elemental Hero Necroshade

1 Breaker the Magical Warrior

1 Snipe Hunter

The spells require much less rehashing, since they were fairly solid to begin with. I felt more monster removal was necessary and added one copy each of Lightning Vortex and Nobleman of Crossout. I also added Swords of Revealing Light and one Mystical Space Typhoon, cutting Skyscraper 2 - Hero City and R - Righteous Justice. While both are very good cards, plenty of options for spell and trap removal already exist in the deck. If our goal were to constantly recycle Elemental Heroes, I would focus more on Elemental Hero Ocean.

Here is the last change to the spells: I’ll swap one Reinforcement of the Army in and remove one E - Emergency Call. This is probably the most confusing move, but it is justified for two reasons. The first is that we put in D. D. Warrior Lady as a problem solver for the deck, and I would like to be able to find her when I need her. The second is that if you decide to include more solutions or other Elemental Heroes in the side deck, Reinforcement of the Army can help you find many answers you need, like Exiled Force, Mystic Swordsman LV2, and Don Zaloog as well—staples of your average Warrior Toolbox lineup. If you don’t need the Reinforcement of the Army, it can easily become that third E - Emergency Call. If you can use it, however, it becomes a lifesaver in certain matchups where you want that Exiled Force or D. D. Warrior Lady more than you want to be able to search for Elemental Hero Bladedge.

The traps, quite happily, required only one change—I swapped two Raigeki Break cards for one Hero Signal, feeling that both Shining Flare Wingman and Ocean would benefit more from a third, redundant copy, and that three (or even two) copies of Raigeki Break may have been overkill with the amount of discard now in the deck.

The end result is this slightly modified list and these changes.

Cut:

-2 Elemental Hero Clayman
-1 Elemental Hero Necroshade
-3 Skyscraper 2 - Hero City

-2 R - Righteous Justice

-1 E - Emergency Call

-2 Raigeki Break

Added:

+1 Elemental Hero Wildheart
+1 King of the Swamp

+1 Breaker the Magical Warrior

+1 D. D. Warrior Lady

+1 Elemental Hero Ocean

+1 Snipe Hunter
+1 Reinforcement of the Army

+1 Lightning Vortex

+1 Nobleman of Crossout

+1 Swords of Revealing Light

+1 Mystical Space Typhoon

+1 Hero Signal

The final build looks like this!

Elemental Hero Fusion—Matt’s Fix—41 cards

Monsters: 18

3 Elemental Hero Ocean

1 Elemental Hero Stratos

3 King of the Swamp

2 Elemental Hero Sparkman

1 Elemental Hero Clayman

3 Elemental Hero Wildheart

1 Elemental Hero Bladedge

1 Elemental Hero Necroshade

1 Breaker the Magical Warrior

1 Snipe Hunter

1 D. D. Warrior Lady

Spells: 17
2 E - Emergency Call

1 Reinforcement of the Army
3 Polymerization

1 Lightning Vortex

1 Nobleman of Crossout
2 The Warrior Returning Alive

2 Miracle Fusion
1 Future Fusion

1 Mystical Space Typhoon

1 Swords of Revealing Light
1 Premature Burial
1 Pot of Avarice

Traps: 6
1 Raigeki Break
3 Hero Signal
1 Mirror Force
1 Call of the Haunted

You can play this deck a number of ways depending on the opening hand and your personal style, but the goal is to use Clayman and Sparkman as basic fodder for Hero Signal to put the necessary cards in your graveyard for retrieval with The Warrior Returning Alive or for use with Miracle Fusion or Pot of Avarice. You search for the pieces you need for a monster to fit the situation you’re in—if you want ATK power, you have two choices that are easy to summon with King of the Swamp. If you want removal, you have three choices to work with. You can also use Elemental Hero Ocean to continually recur monsters for Polymerization or to shuffle stuff around a bit and get an extra use out of Elemental Hero Necroshade. I think a lot of fun can be had with building a stall-burn side deck to change into a deck that makes more use of Elemental Hero Ocean.

Until next time, duelists!

—Matt Murphy