Fusions: 11

3 Elemental Hero Thunder Giant

3 Elemental Hero Rampart Blaster

3 Elemental Hero Flame Wingman

2 Elemental Hero Shining Flare Wingman

In a nutshell, this deck is all about combat. Your goal is to play monsters and have them attack, attack, and attack some more until you win. As you can see, there aren’t any spells or traps that remove monsters, so you’ll need to rely on your heroes in order to take out your opponent’s monsters. The most consistent way to do this is by getting Skyscraper onto the field as early as possible. As long as it is, you can take out essentially any enemy just by attacking it. Of course, most players like to have plenty of defense in the form of traps, but a pair of Royal Decree cards makes it more than likely that those traps will be irrelevant. In addition, since we’re using plenty of monsters with less than 1500 ATK, users of the increasingly popular Bottomless Trap Hole will have problems getting the most out of their trap card regardless of whether or not you have a Decree on the field. On top of all of that, if and when they do start destroying your heroes, O - Oversoul simply brings them right back to start delivering the pain anew. This is especially handy for Elemental Hero Neos, since you can dump it into the graveyard via Magical Merchant or Morphing Jar and then activate O - Oversoul to give yourself an instant 2500 attacker. Add to that the lack of Snatch Steal in the format, and you’ll find that your opponents have to scramble in order to take out Neos. Creature Swap is still an option, of course, but they’ll have to eliminate all of your weaker heroes in the same turn in order to make any real use of it.

Now, before you pick up this deck and start playing, you’ve got to think about the kind of cards you’re dealing with here. There are thirteen normal monsters in the deck, so if you’ve always relied on monster effects in the past, playing with all these normal monsters is going to take some getting used to. This deck is all about combining the power of your spells to help your monsters wreak havoc on the battlefield. The most direct example of this would be H - Heated Heart, which lets you boost your monster’s ATK by 500 in addition to giving it the ability to deal piercing battle damage through an opposing defense position monster. Obviously you’d want to use this card whenever you’re dealing with a face-down defense position monster on your opponent’s side of the field. Most monsters that get set in defense position have extremely tiny DEF statistics, so even a monster like Elemental Hero Burstinatrix can cause some serious harm if it attacks through a defense monster with the aid of H - Heated Heart. If you need a particular Hero to take out a specific opposing monster, you’ve got E - Emergency Call to fetch it out of your deck. This is especially useful if you’ve drawn one of the Miracle Fusion cards in the deck but don’t have one of the components you need for the fusion monster you want.

Speaking of Miracle Fusion, I can’t help but stress that it’s the absolute best support card ever released for Elemental Hero decks. Making a powerful fusion summon essentially costless is nothing short of brilliant in this and any other Hero-based deck, especially when the normal monsters are an integral part of the strategy. Remember, you want to save your O - Oversoul for Elemental Hero Neos, so why not put the rest of the heroes to work once your opponent takes them down? Each fusion I’ve included provides a powerful effect that can help you end the game a lot earlier than you initially expected, especially if your opponent is one of those people who doesn’t like to commit cards to the board. For example, in one duel my opponent played Confiscation on me, discarding my Morphing Jar and leaving me with Elemental Hero Neos and O - Oversoul in my hand with no Heroes in the graveyard. My field was a set Ring of Destruction and a set Magical Merchant (I had gone first). He then summoned a Giant Rat, set a Sakuretsu Armor, and said “go.”  For my turn, I drew R - Righteous Justice, then flipped Magical Merchant, tossing Clayman, Sparkman, and Burstinatrix into the graveyard and picking up Miracle Fusion from the Merchant effect. I won that turn: the third turn of the game. That’s how good Miracle Fusion is.

Of course, that wouldn’t have been possible without the help of R - Righteous Justice and O - Oversoul. Heroes get their own versions of Harpie’s Feather Duster and Monster Reborn to work with, which makes them so much better than anyone gives them credit for. In fact, many different theme decks have access to their own versions of extremely powerful, often forbidden cards, and yet no one seems to pay any attention to them. It really makes me wonder sometimes exactly how much damage the “Light and Dark” mentality did to the community as a whole. It must have been catastrophic to cause players to completely disregard exceedingly powerful cards just because of the existence of one or two monsters. Fortunately, things seem to be looking up. Anthony Alvarado did the world the favor of rediscovering just how good Injection Fairy Lily can be at Shonen Jump Championship Hamilton, and even Iron Blacksmith Kotetsu and Ekibyo Drakmord saw some play as well at that event. Looks like people are already beginning to think more and more outside the box, which is a trend I definitely hope will continue into SJC Boston.

Returning to the topic at hand, it’s time to re-examine the win condition of the deck. Once we’ve played at least one copy of H - Heated Heart, E - Emergency Call, R - Righteous Justice, and O - Oversoul, we can remove them all from the game in order to activate HERO Flash!!. Before doing this, however, it’s important to make sure that you’ll actually win by doing so. Fortunately, R - Righteous Justice tends to help you out a lot on that front. Ideally, you’ll probably have two Elemental Heroes on the field when you begin to go for the win, which will probably make Righteous Justice potent enough to clear the entire backfield. Failing that, a copy of Royal Decree will keep you safe from every generally played card except for Enemy Controller. Not even Scapegoat can stop the beatings brought on by HERO Flash!! so go ahead and let them summon their silly Sheep tokens. They won’t do a bit of good. Obviously you’ll want to summon Elemental Hero Neos with HERO Flash!!, and since you’ll probably only get to two copies of the card in a given game, Flash!! can easily retrieve the third one and put it directly into play. Add the fact that you probably revived another Neos with O - Oversoul, and you’ve got at least 5000 damage on the board. This means that as long as your opponent is out of Stein range, he or she is in Flash!! range. In fact, he or she is probably in Flash!! range regardless as long as you have another Hero on the field (like that Sparkman). Just remember that HERO Flash!! only lets your normal Elemental Hero monsters attack directly, so if you have a Flame Wingman or Thunder Giant out, those cards would still have to attack any available monsters. Of course, the Wingman deals damage when it destroys monster, and Thunder Giant can get them out of the way if need be, making this point effectively moot, but it’s still important to remember. Rampart Blaster can attack directly regardless, so it’s not relevant here.

After that, congratulations! You just beat someone with an Elemental Hero deck, and he or she will probably never hear the end of it, which is always a bonus in my book. Another bonus is that this deck is generally very cheap to construct. With the reprint of basically all the necessary Elemental Heroes and support cards in the Jaden Duelist Pack, the hardest cards to find will be Enemy Controller, Mirror Force, and Morphing Jar. Miracle Fusion only comes in Cybernetic Revolution, but it’s an extremely inexpensive card unless you decide to shell out for the ultimate rare version. Breaker is a common in a structure deck, Magical Merchant is a common in both Dark Revelations 1 and Magician’s Force, all the HERO Flash!! stuff is either common or rare in Enemy of Justice, and you can’t go anywhere without tripping over a Sangan. Seriously, people are likely to just give you a Sangan if you ask.

Overall, this is a great deck for both beginners and veterans to play around with. It’s easy for the new guys to learn the basics using it and it’s a good way for veterans to sharpen their skills while having a good time. It’s also a great way to deal a humbling blow to the store jerk who thinks he’s better than everyone else just because he posts on message boards or has had a conversation with someone who once did well at a Regional or SJC. Every store has one. Beat yours today. Until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!

Jerome McHale

jcmchale@andrew.cmu.edu

Next Week: Continually underestimated, but actually amazing, this deck actually hasn’t lost as much to the new list as most people think.