I really didn’t know what to expect going into the Ryne Jeans vs. Andrew Fredella feature match. With no clear-cut, must-feature pairing, I figured I’d cover a local team versus national team clash. I had no idea Jeans was playing such a great deck. I was about as surprised as Andrew Fredella was, and I was glad to have a chance to look at Jeans’ “Perfect World” deck after the match. Here’s what it looks like:

With a ton of one-ofs, the deck is unpredictable and highly complicated. It’s running 33 different cards total in a 41-card build, so it’s going to perform differently in some games. The good news is that keeping a relatively low count of Dark World monsters lets the deck keep a relatively high utility, while the draw power of the Destiny Hero monsters and Destiny Draw let Jeans get to those cards on a reliable basis. “It can draw bad hands, but it rarely opens with two Malicious or two Destiny Draw,” explained Jeans.

“I really owe this deck to my teammate Brandon Gille,” he noted, eager to give credit to the deck’s creator. “He built it for me, and it seemed consistent online. My best matchups are anything Monarchs and burn. It does alright against Zombies, which is probably its toughest matchup. It’s about fifty-fifty there.”

The deck works a lot like Perfect Circle in theory, using the Destiny Heroes for speed and tribute bait but toward a different end: explosive aggression more often than not thanks to Dark World, instead of a more controlling pace. Again, like Shane Scurry’s deck, speed is key. Jeans can take his opponent down quickly, and he can also cycle through his deck with relatively high efficiency. That helps him dig for tech cards and makes the deck very effective in games 2 and 3.

Dark World Lightning is a card that’s been lauded as strong in this format in particular matchups, but burn has long been a detractor from its, and Dark World’s, popularity. The card really comes full circle in games 2 and 3 though, where chained cards that are flipped face up to prevent their destruction become vulnerable to sided copies of Twister. Even on its own, Dark World Lightning will usually create a card-for-card trade against the chainables that are so common in this format, forcing inopportune plays and simplification that works in Jeans’ favor.

Some of the less conventional monster choices really work nicely with Dark World Lightning too. This deck runs a stunning thirteen tribute monsters, even more than we’re used to seeing from a regular Perfect Circle, and they’ll frequently be used as discard fodder for Dark World Lightning or Lightning Vortex. This deck sort of takes the idea that Jon Labounty presented in Shonen Jump Washington, the use of Phoenix Wing Wind Blast to give dead cards more utility, and ups the ante by using more discard cards. Then it adds more cards that become live in the graveyard, like Destiny Hero - Dasher and Dark Magician of Chaos, to take advantage.

Jinzo is a nice main deck choice here today, as there are several undefeated Big City builds being run. As Shane Scurry’s deck profile demonstrated, trap use in general is pretty high this weekend, and this might be the event where that trend is finally punished. The one copy Jeans is using really gives him an edge in the burn matchup, a factor we saw in his feature match against Fredella last round.

For now Ryne Jeans is undefeated, and he seems to have favorable matchups all-around. Even against remove-from-play strategies he’s got plenty of main decked options, and players seem to be having a very hard time against his deck so far. If he can keep it up, seven rounds from now he may be on his way to Day 2.