Both Jose Barreros and Roy St. Clair had wanted to run this deck today, but a lack of Magical Mallets led Roy to play something more conventional. Barreros went through with it though, and after a one-year break from major competition, he’s banking on an incredibly risky looking strategy to bring him to a Top 8 finish here today.

You won’t be able to read the entire decklist until after Day 1 competition has concluded, but here’s the rundown for those of you who are joining us live!

The deck only runs two monsters, which are Toon Cannon Soldier and Dark Magician of Chaos. Both of these monsters serve as the basis for Monster Gate and Reasoning, which allows the 50-card behemoth to grind through its own bulk, discarding tons of spells along the way. Once most of the deck is gone, one or two copies of the deck’s only trap card, Magical Explosion, literally blows the opponent into oblivion. If that doesn’t finish them off, Toon Cannon Soldier can team up with the Sheep tokens from Stray Lambs to tribute for game.

The deck was developed by Immortal Technique as a whole, and the team has plenty of variants besides the one detailed here. With only three traps and two monsters (extra monsters are side decked to switch up the opponent’s calls on Reasoning), the deck’s spells are integral.

Toon Table of Contents, Graceful Charity, Card Destruction, and others are pure deck thinning. Reload and Magical Mallet can shuffle the monsters back into the deck if they’re pulled too early, and A Feather of the Phoenix allows those cards to be reused as needed.

Field control is established through Stray Lambs, Messenger of Peace, Scapegoat, and a plethora of other spell cards. Hammer Shot is being used, a card that is rarely seen due to its weakness to chained responses. Book of Moon is often chained to Hammer Shot, targeting the Hammer’s intended mark, and it can send the Hammer back at its controller’s monster. This deck really doesn’t care though. Even if that happens, the worst thing it loses is Dark Magician of Chaos, whose recursion effect will have already resolved at least a turn before. Hammer Shot allows Barreros an important edge in life point economy. While Smashing Ground might be a smarter pick for most decks since it can’t be turned into a sudden loss of card advantage by an unexpected play, here it functions as an answer to the opponent’s biggest monster, minimizing his or her ability to capitalize on any opening they might create.

Some of the deck’s synergies are really reminiscent of the Goat Exploitation deck that duelists like Curtis Schultz and David “Foob” Simon. Stray Lambs and Scapegoat lock up the field, but they also act as burn fodder for Toon Cannon Soldier as previously observed, and they provide fodder for Monster Gate. This can almost be seen as an evolution of that deck in some ways: it uses the same core engine of Reasoning, Gate, and Sheep tokens, but it uses them to accomplish a complete different goal.

Coming off of a win in Round 1, Barreros was eager to talk about the strength of the deck. “If they hit me with Dust Tornado, it can mean game, but it’s two out of three,” he remarked. He raised a good point. Early game disruption can be a major threat against this strategy. His Round 1 opponent had side decked in three copies of Dust Tornado, and it was a threatening move. Still, Barreros took two games with remarkable speed: “The first game took four or five turns to get it off, but the second game only took two turns.” In testing, the deck apparently went off on turn one pretty reliably.

“That deck is insane” said Alex Rouck, Barreros’s Round 1 victim. “I can only see Spell Canceller hurting it.” Spell Canceller is pretty much a scoop if it ever hits the field. There’s no way for this deck to get rid of it, aside from an attack with Dark Magician of Chaos. But still, even if Barreros’s opponent manages to set a monster on their first turn and then tribute for Spell Canceller on the second, the deck still has one or two turns in which to go off. Often, that’s all it needs.

Keep an eye on Barreros’s win record as the day progresses. After innovating on the single-card level with Sand Moth at Shonen Jump Orlando, Immortal Technique might just be ready to innovate on the level of entire decks.