It’s July 13, and a unified set of trends demonstrated at the European Championships, Canadian Nationals, and Shonen Jump Championship Denver have sent the format in a new direction. The priorities of competitive duelists are shifting, and the result is new tech, new decks, and new attitudes towards playing the Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game.
Monster Presence is Greater Than Card Presence
While many duelists once used raw card advantage as a guiding rule to determine the cards in their deck (as well as a yardstick to measure the viability of their potential plays), a new mathematical focus seems to be taking over. While the number of potential options you have will always be relevant to your current play situation, that fact is fading into the background. The dueling world is accepting it as a fundamental starting point, not a strategic destination.
Instead, monster presence is taking its place at the forefront of the format, a factor that has determined wins and losses for years. The time when this element of play could be ignored in favor of hoarding cards is officially over, and there are many factors contributing to that trend. They all come back to one point: dueling has evolved, and the best duelists have learned that in order to win, they need to leverage their cards into monster advantage. If you have more monsters on the field than your opponent you’re not only in a better position to win, but you’ll be in a better position to not lose.
The latter is perhaps the most important point. The current Advanced format is dominated by three monsters that can change the face of a duel on the fly: Chaos Sorcerer, Zaborg the Thunder Monarch, and Cyber-Stein. While Chaos Sorcerer’s rise to fame is well documented, it isn’t the most feared card in the format simply because it immediately costs your opponent a card. The kicker is that that card is a monster, part of a limited pool that your opponent possesses.
Zaborg the Thunder Monarch’s rise is more interesting, and has garnered far less discussion. Erupting into top-level competition at Shonen Jump Championship Los Angeles last year, it was at first simply a coping mechanism for the deck once known as Soul Control. Goldd, Wu-Lord of Dark World was a big threat at the time of its release, and Soul Control duelists needed a replacement for Thestalos the Firestorm Monarch. Zaborg stepped in and was soon found to be a worthy replacement. In conjunction with Soul Exchange or Brain Control, Zaborg would strip the opponent’s field of two monsters and create an instant swing in momentum with a follow-up attack. Mobius the Frost Monarch was still the Monarch of choice for the average cookie-cutter deck, and Zaborg would not gain mainstream popularity for several months, but the groundwork was being laid at this event.
Fast-forward to June 3 and the US National Championships. The instantaneous destruction of two cards that Mobius offered was now thoroughly eschewed for the single piece of monster destruction Zaborg wielded, and a number of reasons contributed to the shift. While Mobius offers the destruction of two cards to Zaborg’s one, duelists often chain against its effect, and Bottomless Trap Hole is especially damaging. When used against Zaborg, the same card essentially creates a situation in which the opponent loses a monster and a spell or trap to your two monsters (Zaborg and its tribute). In the same situation, Mobius removes the same number of cards from the field, but the cards lost by the opponent are purely spells and traps. The ideal trade becomes clear: the opponent can set more spell or trap cards to his or her heart’s content, but monsters can usually only be summoned once per turn. The damage that Zaborg’s effect causes (even when it is immediately removed from play by Bottomless Trap Hole), is more permanent than Mobius’s simply because of the way the game treats monster cards.
That piece of core theory didn’t go unnoticed, as evidenced first by trends at that event. If you’ve looked at the Top 8 decklists, you might have noticed that fourteen copies of Zaborg were used in main decks on Day 2, while Mobius was relegated to side decks. What you might not know is the ratio of that comparison for the entire event. According to sources at Upper Deck Entertainment, 24 percent of duelists main-decked Mobius the Frost Monarch, none of whom made the cut to Top 8. But a whopping 81 percent main-decked Zaborg the Thunder Monarch, demonstrating that the shift from Mobius to Zaborg was practically universal.
The trend of prioritizing monster presence continued over the past five weeks as Cyber-Stein took starring roles at all three of the game’s most recent high-level competitions. In Shonen Jump Championship Denver, it was a defining tech card of the day, splashed into many Chaos Return builds to take advantage of openings offered by the opponent. It was a strategy that cracked the Top 8, and Lindsey Mantos carried the concept all the way to the semifinals.
Calvin Tsang beat out a stunned Chris Pittao on the same day, in a brutal 2-0 final match that allowed him to capture the title of Canadian National Champion. Packing Cyber-Stein, Limiter Removal, and Last Will, Tsang managed to fight his way out of two consecutive duels where his opponent had more cards than he did. Two more members of the Top 8—Marcus Spanier and Richard Piper—also used a single copy of Cyber-Stein and Last Will.
A week later, Cyber-Stein appeared in three of the Top 8 decks at the prestigious European Championships. Of the three duelists using it, only one was playing more than a single copy: Sven Adam ran a dedicated Cyber-Stein OTK that got him to the quarterfinals. The other two, Mohamed Ali and Vincent Wielandt, each played a single copy in Chaos variants. Wielandt went on to win the entire tournament, giving another impressive demonstration of Cyber-Stein’s power.
Why does a single copy of Cyber-Stein win games? Many duelists still have the false impression that card advantage is the be-all end-all of the format. Just get a few more cards than your opponent and grind out the easy win, right?
Cyber-Stein rejects that philosophy. Play conservatively to maintain your hand presence, and it hammers through massive damage with Cyber End Dragon*. Keep flipping monsters like Magician of Faith and Magical Merchant, and it’ll punish you with a pair of attacks from Cyber Twin Dragon. Cyber-Stein’s potential is based entirely on the intelligence and guts of its controller, and it utterly destroys the simplistic dueling philosophies that so many competitors have come to rely on. Commit yourself to the field with more monsters and more back row cards that can defend your life points and it’s not a huge problem. But if you refuse to over-extend or decide to slow-roll a duel that you’re already winning, Cyber-Stein will make you pay for it.
If you aren’t playing with monsters as a top priority, Zaborg the Thunder Monarch and Cyber-Stein are going to force you to reconsider how you see the game over the next few months. Take a long, hard look at decks like those played by Adrian Madaj at the European Championship. The deck’s primary intent was to keep monsters on the field while preventing his opponent from doing the same, and his understanding of the game’s inner workings rewarded him with a trip to Tokyo.
Beating Chaos Return
The success of Cyber-Stein is actually just the most visible part of a far larger trend that we’ve seen over the past two months. Without a doubt, Chaos Return is great at what it does: it dominates in battle and maintains a high number of options in hand. As a result, many duelists have stopped trying to win through these means. Instead of creating a deck that prioritizes card advantage, they’ve opted to force Chaos Return out of its comfort zone, into a style of play that it was never designed to compete in.
Trying to beat Chaos Return at its own game is stupid. Duelists have finally realized that in order to defeat it reliably, the game itself has to be played differently. Decks like Reversal Quiz, Cyber-Stein OTK, Emmanuel Golddstein Control, and even my own Cat’s Pajamas deck are all designed to win regardless of whether or not they have card advantage. Reversal Quiz needs only two or three cards to score a win, and the rest of the game is practically irrelevant. Cyber-Stein needs three cards and some life points, while Emmanuel Golddstein, the deck played by Marcus Spanier at Canadian Nationals, actually thrives on having a low in-hand count. It makes it easier for a mid- or late game Spirit Reaper to hit one of the deck’s copies of Goldd.
Decks built around Ojama Trio are of particular interest, because a single copy of Trio causes two major problems for Chaos Return. First, having three useless monsters on the field collapses the potential of Return. If it’s bringing back two monsters at best, it’s not very effective. Second, if you can stick a Return player with two smaller support monsters and three Ojama tokens, he or she can’t really do anything until he or she draws into a tribute monster, since the Ojama player is going to leave those two small support monsters on the field to clog up the opponent’s monster zones. That usually gives the Ojama player all the time in the world to draw into a winning play, regardless of what win condition he or she might be looking for.
If you want to beat Chaos Return with more than a 50 percent ratio, play a different deck. Practice with it, and don’t give up just because your first week or two of testing might be unfavorable. If you ever played Empty Jar Deckout in its heyday, you know how long it takes to adapt to a totally different play style. Strategies like Max Suffridge’s Clockwork Control deck and Spanier’s Emmanuel Golddstein deck are perfect examples of complicated, demanding decks that reward the time you put into them. Not only are they more consistent than Chaos Return, but they’re also perfectly tuned for that match-up.
The Graveyard As A Resource
The final trend I want to discuss is one that hasn’t completely materialized yet. With Return being so dominant, and Chaos Sorcerer being so popular, many duelists have begun to recognize their graveyard as an important resource. What most haven’t realized yet is the potential of the graveyard to act as a versatile source of effects—it does a lot more than just provide fodder for Chaos Sorcerer.
There are a lot of different ways you can use your graveyard. Pot of Avarice is the foil to Sorcerer/Return, recycling monsters into your deck instead of demanding that you remove them from play. I’m currently of the opinion that virtually any battle-oriented deck should be running either Avarice or Return, simply because each can be so game breaking. With that said, though, there are many powerful cards out there that let you exploit your graveyard. Stuff like Skull Lair, Dark Factory of Mass Production, Strike Ninja, Soul Resurrection, and Divine Sword - Phoenix Blade all use the graveyard to generate powerful, unique effects. Explore those options and you might be surprised at the viability of some older, forgotten cards.
The days of going with the flow are over. Duelists are tired of the card-for-card Chaos Return mirror match, and winners are starting to look at the game from new perspectives in order to stay at the top of the heap. Playing the same deck, the same way, week in and week out might win your local tournament, but it won’t be enough to make consistent showings at Regionals and Shonen Jump Championships in the next year.
The world’s best duelists are innovating the game. You can too.
—Jason Grabher-Meyer
Contributing Editor, Metagame.com
*It was this exact situation that resulted in Calvin Tsang winning game 1 of the finals at Canadian Nationals. Though Chris Pittao had what appeared to be massive advantage over Tsang, he’d committed very few of those cards to the field. When Calvin topdecked into Cyber-Stein, Pittao had an attack position Spirit Reaper and only one spell or trap card to act as an attack deterrent. The set card was useless, and Calvin’s Cyber End Dragon cut through Spirit Reaper like it was made of butter. Pittao’s massive hand did nothing to save him, strictly because he hadn’t used it.