Lately some of us here at Metagame.com have been telling you about approaches you can take to outplay Dark Armed Dragon Return. We’ve chiefly focused on three factors: speed, negation or prevention of draw effects, and destruction of special summon traps. There’s one approach we haven’t really discussed that I want to get into today: instead of racing to match the deck’s speed, you can slow it down.

Sounds obvious, but it’s easier said than done. A deck that sees so many cards thanks to its draw spells will often be able to dig for answers to whatever you have on the field, so simple stall cards like Gravity Bind or Level Limit - Area B can’t really do the job on their own. Gravekeeper’s Spy, Marshmallon, or Spirit Reaper are all monsters, so they’ll succumb to Darklord Zerato. Tempo-slowing flip-effect monsters like Dekoichi the Battlechanted Locomotive or Magical Merchant can only stave off one attack, so even if Zerato leaves them be, they still can’t defend against the horde of monsters that Return from the Different Dimension brings to the field.

As a result, we need to look for other answers—chainable ones if possible—and that means Waboku or Threatening Roar. Both cards can be chained to the activation of Return or Dimension Fusion and guarantee that you'll see the next turn. If Return was your opponent’s trump card of choice, you’ll land yourself in a pretty secure situation because he or she will lose all the monsters summoned when the opponent hits the end phase. At that point, the problem becomes not how to slow the game: you’ve done that by parrying the thrust of Dark Armed Return. The next step is capitalizing on the situation you’ve created. With your opponent having just paid heavy life point costs, it’s the perfect opportunity to strike back and The Dark Creator is the perfect choice for doing so.

Playing into Dark Armed Return’s Patterns

Take a quick read over The Dark Creator’s effect for a moment. To bring it out, you need to have five or more Dark monsters in your graveyard as well as an empty field. It’s a lot more convenient than Dark Armed Dragon, because that "five or more" requirement is a lot more flexible than "three exactly." In practice, I think most people who played Dark Creator shortly after its release had problems with the empty field requirement more than getting five monsters into their graveyard. I’ve run into that problem myself

The cool thing is that Darklord Zerato usually does the work for you when your opponent activates Return or Dimension Fusion. That makes your life a lot easier, because it sets up half of the conditions to bring out The Dark Creator, while costing you nothing thanks to Waboku or Threatening. Considering that you’ve been building Dark monsters at the same rate as your Dark Armed Return-playing opponent (actually you’ll be doing it even faster, but we’ll get to that later), it shouldn’t be difficult to achieve the "five or more" graveyard condition.

If your opponent doesn’t activate Darklord Zerato’s effect and leaves you with a monster (which might happen if he or she played Dimension Fusion instead of Return), the opponent will be open to Lightning Vortex, Brain Control, Enemy Controller, or a Zerato of your own—all of which are viable for a deck packing The Dark Creator. You can even use Needle Ceiling to clear the entire field if Jinzo isn’t in the picture, setting you up to make direct attacks courtesy of The Dark Creator.

With 2300 ATK, The Dark Creator will often finish off your over-extended opponent on its own, but the power to punish Dark Armed Return doesn’t really rest on The Dark Creator’s beefy shoulders. Its real worth lies in its . . .

For instance, take Destiny Hero - Disk Commander. He's useless in conjunction with Return from the Different Dimension and Escape from the Dark Dimension, and the typical Dark Armed Return deck only has two ways to special summon him and claim his effect: Premature Burial and Monster Reborn. Some Dark Armed Return players don’t even run the Commander—you can see that in the Day 2 decklists from Shonen Jump Championship Costa Mesa. But with three copies of The Dark Creator, that card now becomes a massive threat and the centerpiece of stunning plays in which he’s brought to the field for two draws and then tributed. If The Dark Creator survives to the following turn, that same trick can be used again.

The same can be said for Dark Nephthys. Effective in Dark Armed Return, it’s even better here, where it can be pitched for its own effect and then immediately special summoned by The Dark Creator. Not having to wait a turn and not having to remove it from play makes the card a looming threat that’s exceptionally difficult to predict.

In fact, even in the cases of Dark Magician of Chaos, Zerato, and Jinzo, The Dark Creator simply provides more direct routes to those effects. Special summon The Dark Creator with Armageddon Knight in hand and you’ve got immediate access to at least six game-shaping effects depending on what you send to the graveyard.

That’s good, because you obviously need to move fast once your opening arrives. Options abound at the perfect time, and with careful play you should have the precise answer to whatever situation you find yourself in.

With three copies of The Dark Creator and one copy each of Darklord Zerato and Dark Magician of Chaos, you can easily support two copies of Trade-In. That number increases to three if you add just a single additional level 8, and with options like Destiny Hero - Plasma and Dark Nephthys at your disposal, it’s likely in your interest to do so. Trade-In loads your graveyard with monsters for recursion with The Dark Creator just like Allure removes monsters for Return and Dimension Fusion, but there’s another level to this kind of play that Allure can’t offer. The reason I say that is because Trade-In also brings you closer to that five-monster threshold you need to bring The Dark Creator online, something Allure of Darkness has no parallel for.

A deck focused on The Dark Creator can support three Destiny Draw, three Allure, and three Trade-In, giving it a whopping nine draw spells compared to a typical Dark Armed Return’s three or six. In addition, while both decks can use Destiny Hero - Disk Commander, this deck can use it far more efficiently, making it extremely fast and dangerously reliable. Trade-In also has the advantage of making one more card a possible pick . . .

Playing Phantom of Chaos means that you can access The Dark Creator’s effect as early as turn 1. Just discard The Dark Creator for something else (probably Trade-In), summon Phantom, and from there you’ll be able to special summon any other Dark monster you can get to the graveyard. While a turn 1 Phantom of Chaos may be premature in the same way a turn 1 Dark Armed Dragon is, options win games, and having more of them is never a bad thing. Like so many cards in this deck, Phantom of Chaos makes your next move exceptionally hard to predict, and it gives you access to plays that would be impossible otherwise.

I really didn’t see just how good The Dark Creator can be until a friend of mine (Toronto’s Hsoros Nairebas) showed me all the amazing plays and combos this card brings to the table. Like Dark Armed Dragon, the true strength of The Dark Creator rests in cards that synergize with it, more so than its own effect. A deck based around The Dark Creator can repel the big pushes that currently define the competitive metagame in North America, while drawing through a higher number of cards and kicking out a lot more unpredictable plays than the rest of the competition. It’s more maneuverable, more forgiving, and like so many decks I’ve been urging people to try lately, it punishes play patterns that Dark Armed Dragon tends to fall into.

That makes it a top pick, and a card that’s definitely worthy of tournament play. Try it yourself—once you master it, you won’t be disappointed.

—Jason