If today’s event is any indication, Strike of Neos is the set to go for if you’re looking for some hot tech. Specifically, there are 3 cards from the new set that are appearing all over the place and winning games left and right. These three are joined by one duelist pack ultra rare that I’m sure you’re all familiar with, so I think I’ll start with it. Card Trooper is absolutely everywhere. Regardless of whether or not the tiny little Machine has any relevance whatsoever to the overall deck strategy, there’s a good chance that there’s a Card Trooper somewhere in the deck of anyone who owns one. Honestly, I can’t really blame them. Trooper is an excellent card allowing you to put cards into your graveyard from the deck in order to get a level 3, 1900ATK Machine monster that replaces itself with a draw if it’s destroyed and sent to the graveyard. That’s amazing, absolutely brilliant, and the results it has been showing today more than justify the huge secondary market value it’s achieved with the dealers outside.

Moving on to the Strike of Neos cards, let’s begin with Neo-Spacian Grand Mole! The only Neo-Spacian to make it to the Limited list, people are using it in every deck under the sun. Grand Mole has certainly earned its Limitation. It puts a choke hold on any deck that needs flip effects to win, so players who are running 3 Gravekeeper’s Spy (and there are a lot of them) are out of luck if their opponents manage to fetch their Grand Mole. Grand Mole also helps curb the power of Snatch Steal by allowing the player who was thieved from to retrieve his monster and eliminate Snatch Steal from the game. Overall, Grand Mole is an answer to any and all monster based threats that you should probably be playing if you aren’t already.

Next up is Twister. Back in my profile of Jonathan’s Six Samurai deck, (which took its first and only loss of the night in round 8) I mentioned that The Six Samurai — Kamon is a lot better than people give him credit for. In much the same way, Twister is a lot better than people are giving it credit for. There are a massive number of cards that need to be face up in order to work that are seeing play in this event, and Twister can trump them all. Did your opponent side in Dimensional Fissure and D.D. Survivor? Twister turns those Survivors into vanilla 1800ATK Warriors. Decree? Not any more! Even Swords of Revealing Light, which has figured heavily in some of today’s feature matches, falls before Twister. It’s a quality card, and I highly suspect that its value is going to rise sharply in the coming weeks.

Finally, let’s talk about Pulling the Rug. First of all, it’s a counter-trap, and counter-traps are love, especially if you’re playing a counter Fairy deck. Second, Pulling the Rug destroys Gadgets and Monarchs, and, seeing as those are the classic standby decks, you can never go wrong with siding the card. Read up on the feature matches from the day, and you’ll find that Pulling the Rug has outright won games by negating key Monarch summons and leaving the Monarch player’s field wide open. Keep an eye out for Pulling the Rug, as I think we’re going to see it win a lot more games before this format is through. That does it for the tech update; stay tuned for one more feature match tonight and the cut to Top 16!