When Elemental Hero Ocean was released, everyone wondered how he would impact the metagame. If you’ve ever stared down a Card Trooper in tournament play (and chances are you have), you’ll know the pain of having to play conservatively, forced to allow Card Trooper to activate its effect multiple times. Chances are your opponent is playing Trooper to fuel the graveyard with monsters for a higher purpose. As such, you probably want to get rid of Card Trooper as soon as possible. Now imagine that you have Elemental Hero Ocean, who is retrieving monsters from your graveyard—scary monsters, who are unaffected by traps or can fetch even more Elemental Heroes.

Suddenly, you’re playing a deck that forces your opponent to take action. While decks were completely unable to handle this problem in the past, today’s metagame features strategies that are able to answer back very quickly. Most decks have Card Trooper, allowing the opponent to choose which side of the bad deal he or she ends up on: destroy Card Trooper and let its controller draw a card, or allow Ocean to be destroyed. OTK and burn decks don’t really adjust, instead trying to make their usual plays. This is the beauty of the Big City deck. Most decks don’t have many win-win scenarios against it, so if the deck is properly built for the metagame, it should succeed. Jeff Jones has done just that, using this deck to earn a Top 16 appearance at Shonen Jump Championship Philadelphia:

Monsters: 10

3 Elemental Hero Ocean

3 Elemental Hero Wildheart

1 Elemental Hero Stratos

2 Snipe Hunter

1 Morphing Jar

Spells: 17

3 Lightning Vortex

2 Skyscraper 2 - Hero City

1 Snatch Steal

1 Swords of Revealing Light

3 E - Emergency Call

2 Reinforcement of the Army

1 Nobleman of Crossout

1 Confiscation

1 Premature Burial

2 R - Righteous Justice

Traps: 14

3 Trap Dustshoot

1 Mind Crush

1 Gravity Bind

1 Mirror Force

1 Torrential Tribute

3 Pulling the Rug

3 Solemn Judgment

1 Call of the Haunted

The idea for Big City is pretty simple. Elemental Hero Wildheart handles the beatings, Elemental Hero Ocean provides the cards needed to keep the Wildheart attacks coming, and Skyscraper 2 - Hero City keeps it all going, preventing your opponent from blocking your strategy by running over all your monsters. What makes the deck special is the amount of metagame-specific tech it played.

Many players have considered playing Pulling the Rug in the main deck for quite some time. The ability to prevent your opponent’s Monarch effects—and indeed, destroy the Monarchs outright—is amazing. Rug also helps against Demise OTK, potentially shutting down combo searchers like Manju of the Ten Thousand Hands and Sonic Bird, and allowing for enough time to drop the Demise player’s life points below 2000. Elemental Hero Stratos also falls to the Rug, providing the rare opportunity to shut down DDT’s engine or improve the mirror match. Monarch players can’t take advantage of such a card effectively, though, because they’ll risk locking up their own Treeborn Frog. No such problem for Jones’ Big City deck.

The best thing about Pulling the Rug for Jones is the way it compliments Solemn Judgment. Smart players will try to break a deck playing Solemn Judgment by using Heavy Storm and a Monarch in the same turn, to try to force out the Solemn early. Pulling the Rug provides additional options against Monarchs, and lets Jones save his Solemns for other game-breaking cards.

Backing up the pair of trap cards is Trap Dustshoot—a card many players tried out at Philadelphia, and for good reason. Against standard Monarch or Gadget decks, Dustshoot can rob the opponent of some very important monsters. Monarch decks need monsters to defend themselves with, and Monarchs to combo with their Soul Exchange or Brain Control cards. Chaining Trap Dustshoot to Brain Control can save you from a lot of Monarch pain, as well as wasting your opponent’s combo cards.

That’s not all Dustshoot does though. Against Demise OTK or DDT decks, Dustshoot can save you games by returning key monsters to the deck. DDT duelists won’t like to see you rob them of Reinforcement of the Army or Elemental Hero Stratos targets. Demise can be outright prevented if you manage to steal Demise, King of Armageddon from the opponent’s hand in response to Advanced Ritual Art. Mind Crush can achieve the same results, and teams up quite nicely with Trap Dustshoot as well as plenty of other cards main-decked by top decks in today’s metagame.

The spell line-up is also very unique for Jones’ build. While most players have been banking on multiple activations of The Warrior Returning Alive in conjunction with Exiled Force, Jones doesn’t even play Smashing Ground. Instead, he relies on Lightning Vortex to break his opponent’s field in half. This shouldn’t be too difficult, since Jones’ opponents are going to have to make moves to take care of Elemental Hero Ocean. Furthermore, Skyscraper 2 - Hero City will continuously revive monsters that have been destroyed in battle, which means Jones’ opponents will have to summon multiple monsters to push through any damage, making them prime targets for Lightning Vortex.

Hero City is a very powerful card for this deck. Elemental Hero Wildheart’s invulnerability to trap cards means that opponents will have to resort to destroying him through attacks or Brain Control/Monarch combos. If Dustshoots have taken away the big Monarchs, though, Jones’ opponents are going to have a very hard time taking out Wildheart. The constant stream of monsters is twice as devastating because Skyscraper allows Jones to play multiple monsters in a single turn.

Jones backs up his low monster count by playing E - Emergency Call and Reinforcement of the Army. Drawing one of these usually means drawing two monsters when Elemental Hero Stratos does his searching thing. Premature Burial and Call of the Haunted are essentially monsters as well, and offer even more swarm power for the deck. Of course, with all this swarm power, Jones packs a pair of R - Righteous Justice to deal with any pesky spell or trap cards he desires. Heavy Storm was not picked for the deck because of Skyscraper 2 - Hero City and Gravity Bind, as well as the possibility of having many Solemn Judgment and/or Pulling the Rug cards face down. Righteous Justice is also going to give Jones outs against burn, Royal Decree, and the mirror match. Most important, though, is stopping Sakuretsu Armor and Mirror Force if they weren’t used before because of Wildheart’s effect.

Snipe Hunter is used to get defense-position monsters out of the way. The discard cost is lessened by the effect of Elemental Hero Ocean, and with the intelligence provided by Trap Dustshoot, Jones can figure out how to set up a soft lock with Snipe Hunter and Ocean. Swords of Revealing Light and Gravity Bind further cripple the opponent, locking down the field and allowing Ocean to pull enough cards for Snipe Hunter’s effect.

This deck has two very important things going for it. First, it’s teched perfectly for a metagame full of Monarchs, Demise, and DDT. Its matchups with popular decks are very good, and against less commonly played decks, its different approach and main-decked Snipe Hunter cards greatly improve its chances. Secondly, the synergy between all five drawn cards at the beginning of a game tends to be excellent. Unlike other decks that try to pack anti-metagame tech that conflicts with other cards they are using, this deck thrives on every single tech card it has. With these two strengths and a lot of excellent matchups, we can expect to see Jones’ Big City deck among the top tables at future Shonen Jump Championships.