Last week, I pointed out that it would be amazing if you could summon Dark Eradicator Warlock with Monster Gate in a deck packed with normal spells. Since then, I’ve been looking for ways to make it easier to use the Warlock without forcing myself into playing limited scope substitutes to achieve similar results. That means that you won’t be seeing anything like Sage’s Stone or Thousand Knives in here. You also won’t be seeing pure burn spells in the deck (cards like Ookazi or Tremendous Fire). For the most part, the monsters will be doing the burn damage while the spells will be doing the same things they do in every deck, with a couple of notable exceptions. Specifically, I’m going to play one Magical Blast, since it’s a normal spell that I can have back from the graveyard at the start of any one of my turns, and I’m also going to play Card Trader to help smooth out my draws.

The main thing that I needed to figure out when I started to build this deck was whether I was going to try to be aggressive or defensive with it. Eventually I decided by looking at the normal spells available to me and then basing the way the deck would run off of the spells I chose. Unfortunately, that didn’t work as well as I would have liked, considering that I wanted to play Nightmare’s Steelcage and Swords of Revealing Light alongside Smashing Ground and Brain Control. In the end, I decided to just play them all and see what happens. Here’s what I came up with:

Monsters: 16

2 Dark Eradicator Warlock

1 Dark Magician

3 Skilled Dark Magician

3 Rapid-Fire Magician

2 Apprentice Magician

2 Old Vindictive Magician

1 Morphing Jar

1 Toon Cannon Soldier

1 Sangan

Spells: 18

1 Magical Blast

2 Card Trader

1 Heavy Storm

1 Giant Trunade

3 Nightmare’s Steelcage

1 Swords of Revealing Light

3 Smashing Ground

3 Brain Control

3 Toon Table of Contents

Traps: 6

1 Mirror Force

1 Torrential Tribute

1 Ring of Destruction

3 The Transmigration Prophecy

The primary goal of this deck is to put Dark Eradicator Warlock onto the field and then play as many normal spells as possible to try and burn your opponent’s life points out. Normally, you’ll want to do this all in one turn and without attacking with the Warlock to make sure that your opponent has no chance to destroy him before you’re finished. Unfortunately, you won’t usually be able to pull off a string of eight normal spells in one turn after summoning Warlock, so you’ll need to be able to pull damage from somewhere else as well. Rapid-Fire Magician can increase the damage done by your spells by 400, which, over time, will decrease the number of spells you would need in a single turn to six, which is much more manageable. In fact, there’s a little trick that can get at least five normal spells out in one turn. It ought to be easy to figure out just by looking at the decklist, but I’ll discuss it later on anyway.

Now, I’m sure that there are a number of thematic purists out there, shouting at their screens about where the Magician’s Circle and Magical Dimension cards are. Magician’s Circle is by definition only useful in a deck that seeks to attack with its Spellcasters. I don’t, so the card is essentially useless to me, given that the only times I’ll be attacking are right after I clear the field with Giant Trunade or Heavy Storm, or when I’m attacking with an opposing monster. It really isn’t worth playing a card that I’m not very likely to be able to use on my own without opening myself to an entire subset of opposing cards. As for Magical Dimension, there’s really no reason to run that card either. Aggressive Spellcaster builds use Dimension as a means of either quickly summoning large monsters or as a source of quick-play monster removal that can be used in response to a theft card to counter an opponent’s play. There’s only one high-level monster that Dimension would be able to summon in this deck, and he’s likely to be summoned from the deck by the effect of Skilled Dark Magician. On top of all that, Magical Dimension is a quick-play spell, making it less than ideal for a deck that does damage by playing normal spells.

Card Trader is a card that I’ve been hearing a lot of people talk about lately, but no one actually seems to be playing it. Well, Brian Long played it in his Gadget build at Shonen Jump Championship Columbus, but I never actually saw it do him any good, due to the fact that it was immediately wiped from the field when he activated it. Still, what that tells me is that people see the Trader as a dangerous card that can vastly improve the quality of one’s hand over the course of the game, and that’s exactly the kind of thing I want for this deck. There are certainly going to be times that you draw a card that you just don’t need right now (or don’t need at all this game), and when it happens, you’ll be glad you’re playing Card Trader. I was initially skeptical about its usefulness when I first heard about it, but after playing the World Championship Tournament 2007 game and escaping a rather large number of potentially hideous draws thanks to Trader, I’m sold on it. Card Trader is especially useful for trading away extra copies of Toon Table of Contents that you might draw into, along with sending that single Dark Magician back to the deck where he can be special summoned with ease by Skilled Dark Magician.

Let’s now turn our attention to the trap lineup. You’ll notice that it’s rather small in comparison to many trap lineups we’ve been seeing these days. This is because a lot of the defense is being handled by the normal spell stall cards: Swords of Revealing Light and Nightmare’s Steelcage. Most players nowadays have an overwhelming desire to not blow away cards like Swords of Revealing Light unless they’re getting rid of at least one other spell or trap along with it. That makes it a fairly safe play to just drop a stall card (preferably after you’ve summoned Skilled Dark Magician) and wait it out along with your opponent. If you do set a card to go alongside your stall card, there’ a 66% chance that it’s something you can chain in the event that your opponent does have Heavy Storm in hand. Half of your traps are the standard mass removal cards, along with Ring of Destruction. The other half is comprised of three copies of The Transmigration Prophecy.

What can Prophecy do for you in this deck? Well, for one thing, you can create an abnormally long string of Apprentice Magician recruiting in order to hold off your opponent longer than usual (or just to recycle your Magicians). You can also shuffle spent spells back into your deck to give yourself a chance to play them again later. On a similar train of thought, the ability to shuffle spells back into the deck allows for a neat trick you can perform if you can manage to hold off on playing your Toon Table of Contents until you have Warlock on the field. Activate the first two Toon Tables, and then chain The Transmigration Prophecy to the third copy to shuffle the first two back in. Since you don’t actually declare any targets when you activate Toon Table of Contents, shuffling the other copies back into the deck in response to the third copy allows you to search for one of the ones you shuffled back in. This almost doubles the size of the search chain and (assuming you have a damage-dealing agent on the field) it allows you to boost the damage dealt by up to 2800 points! The last Toon Table of Contents will search you out a Toon Cannon Soldier that can end the game for you, depending on how much damage you were able to inflict. With a Rapid-Fire Magician and Dark Eradicator Warlock out, a string of five normal spells deals 7000 damage, so if you haven’t played your normal summon yet, Toon Cannon Soldier can win you the game right there. If not, you probably have another normal spell anyway, making it a moot point.

The structure deck ultra rares have been criminally underrated since their first appearance. Sure, Vampire Genesis and Red-Eyes Darkness Dragon might not be worth the trouble it takes to summon them, but many of the rest are. Infernal Flame Emperor can be a super-Mobius the Frost Monarch that fuels Dimension Fusion or Return from the Different Dimension, while Gilford the Legend can be an outright win condition for some decks. As we prepare for Force of the Breaker previews, I would take a look back at the structure deck ultra rares. You might just come up with a killer idea of your own. Make sure you check out this week’s School of Duel, and until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!

Jerome McHale

jcmchale@andrew.cmu.edu