I am writing this article on the Monday before the Yu-Gi-Oh! U.S. National Championships. By the time this article is posted, the tournament will have ended, and the four players to go to Tokyo from the States this year will have been decided. I have also almost assuredly scrubbed out of Pro Circuit San Francisco as well . . . but outside of Franklin Richards, there is nothing in a Vs. System Tournament related to the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG. Okay, they did both take place this past weekend (your past weekend, not mine) and therefore contributed to one of the biggest weekends of Upper-Deck-related gaming in Metagame’s history.

I’m willing to bet that one of the big deck themes many duelists saw at the U.S. National Championships was a full playset of Royal Decree cards in many competitors’ decks. I have seen the trend in a lot of recent decks built by those planning for the big tournament. The biggest threat in the format at the moment lies in the “Chaos-Return” decks that have swept Shonen Jump Championships for the past few weeks. Royal Decree strategies have popped up in order to put a stop to them, making the card fairly influential at this moment in time.

The Basic Breakdown

Royal Decree’s effect is very simple, yet often misinterpreted. It simply negates all other trap card effects, including all continuous trap cards that are already face up on the field (unless it is a previously activated Royal Decree, in which case any decrees flipped afterwards are negated). The negation power of Royal Decree extends pretty far, from being chained to the activation of Mirror Force or Sakuretsu Armor, to effectively “Trap Jammering” the opponent’s tricks, to being activated in response to Breaker the Magical Warrior’s effect that was targeting your Call of the Haunted, which in turn was keeping your Chaos Sorcerer alive. (In that last example, the end result is that you negate Call of the Haunted and its drawback of taking the monster it revived to the grave with it if the trap card were to be destroyed).

However, Royal Decree can be a beast against your own deck if you do not spend enough time in the construction stage. Though certainly powerful, the card often keeps you from running many trap cards in your own deck. If you choose to run a single Royal Decree and also run about four or five other trap cards, you risk more than a fair share of dead draws. While Royal Decree is active, any trap card you draw while it remains face up might as well have blank text; their effects are basically useless. The amount of spell and trap removal in the environment can minimize these risks, and as can simply cutting back on the number of traps you run.

Some players will scrap all of their traps in order to run three Royal Decree cards, which still leads to two dead draws (in the form of any other Royal Decrees if you have one active). The benefit to this strategy, however, is that it focuses on stopping trap cards altogether in the format. This can be very beneficial with the popularity of cards such as Sakuretsu Armor and Return from the Different Dimension. However, trap cards are a player’s last line of defense in this game. By ridding a duel of them, both players run the risk of losing complete control of a game. This can be supplemented a little bit through quick-play spell cards such as Scapegoat, Book of Moon, and Enemy Controller, which provide a fast and efficient defense. They can also be useful under more aggressive scenarios. Despite quick-play spells, running three copies of Royal Decree requires a player to be much more aggressive than his or her opponent. When destroying an entire line of defense, you need to make sure your opponent always wishes trap cards could be used in order to let you make the best possible play.

Of course, the fact that multiple Royal Decree cards require their users to be aggressive will probably keep quite a few people from actually playing the triplet-Decree strategy. I am sure a single Royal Decree will be much more popular, albeit slightly risky. Let me clarify a few facts and rumors about the card and the decks it goes into. They reveal a lot about why I think the card will be a huge part of the metagame in the future:

1)     Royal Decree trumps Return from the Different Dimension.

Yeah, I guess this is a given. Return from the Different Dimension is a ridiculous trap card. It’s one of those “I play this, so I win the game” cards. It’s that powerful . . . and yet Royal Decree negates it. Whether you bluff that you don’t have Royal Decree and get your opponent to basically pay half of his or her life points for nothing, or if you simply activate Royal Decree to ensure that you can attack for the win the following turn, Return from the Different Dimension is powerless against a card that negates traps. Obviously a card that does this is going to see some serious competitive play, as demonstrated by teams such as Comic Odyssey.

2)     Running Treeborn Frog and Royal Decree together is awesome!

This is a complete myth. Treeborn Frog really, really hates continuous trap cards. That includes Call of the Haunted. In fact, Treeborn Frog would rather stay dead than come into play while a Royal Decree is face up on your field. Some players can get away with this because they’re looking to earn shock factor against more experienced players in the later rounds. For example, if I were playing against such a player, and he flipped Royal Decree in response to my Mirror Force while Treeborn Frog was in the graveyard, I would definitely be taken by surprise. I’d probably also let out a few gripes about the two being in the same deck, but that’s just my deckbuilding nature coming out. I personally detest running the two of them together, but some players can earn some Day 1 success at a Shonen Jump Championship with this kind of tactic. Just don’t expect it to carry over to Day 2, when players have your exact decklist. This strategy is one of the most risky available, since playing both tends to double the number of dead draws in your deck. That makes it pretty unreliable.

3)     If Royal Decree doesn’t suit my main deck, it almost certainly suits my side deck.

This statement is somewhat true. You have a lot of flexibility when side decking for a second or third game during a match at a Shonen Jump Championship. This could allow you to side out most of your trap cards for Enemy Controllers and three Royal Decrees. If you won your first game, it can completely throw off your opponent’s side deck trickery and cause him or her to lose the second game simply because he or she wasn’t prepared for your change-up.

However, Royal Decree doesn’t suit every deck. A Return-Chaos deck is heavily set on playing Return from the Different Dimension as a solid win condition, and changing that to a Decree strategy is very risky. It leaves you with very few methods of controlling the game’s tempo except through quick-play spell cards that can cause you to lose serious card presence over time. Make sure that you know whether or not your deck can support a Royal Decree sideboard before you include them, because removing the wrong cards or running them in the wrong deck can cost you a lot during a larger-scale tournament.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully I can build up my ego next week and mention how my predictions were right: that many players played with a triplet-Decree strategy at the U.S. National Championships. It would be bittersweet because Royal Decree cards are the biggest enemies to any kind of slow-control stasis deck like Lava-Lacooda control. (I guess it’s fair to state that you probably didn’t see Des Lacoodas at all during U.S. Nationals, right?)

Just remember that if Royal Decree wasn’t popular at U.S. Nationals, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a popular strategy overall. The concept is picking up a lot of attention in various online communities, and you should be ready to see the continuous trap card all over regional and Shonen Jump Championship events in the future. Don’t think you are free of Royal Decrees if you don’t see any during the first game of a match either, because they could always be lurking in your opponent’s side deck.

If you have any questions or comments regarding this or any previous articles of mine, feel free to email me at Mrosenberg@metagame.com.