By the time you read this, Nationals will be over and done with—so I’d like to offer my congratulations to the Top 4 players who will be representing the U.S. at the World Championship. Good luck to all of you!

With Nationals out of the way, large-scale events are few and far between. Does this mean that the competitive metagame is going to take a break for a couple months until Regionals start up again? Not a chance! Most teams are probably still testing away, looking for the perfect deck to play in the new The Lost Millennium-enabled format.

These summer months offer the perfect opportunity to tweak and perfect all those cool decks that you made over the past year that didn’t quite work out right. As such, I’m going to look at some decks that didn’t quite make it into the testing gauntlet and others that have been successful at a local level, but haven’t yet made it to the big time. To start things off, I’ll be taking a look at the poster child for “Decks that Almost Made It”—the Gravekeeper deck.

This Time, Stay Dead!

Monsters: 16

3 Gravekeeper’s Spy

3 Gravekeeper’s Spear Soldier

3 Gravekeeper’s Assailant

1 Gravekeeper’s Chief

1 Mobius the Frost Monarch

1 Breaker the Magical Warrior

1 Sangan

1 D.D. Warrior Lady

1 Sinister Serpent

1 Tribe-Infecting Virus

Spells: 14

1 Pot of Greed

1 Graceful Charity

1 Delinquent Duo

1 Lightning Vortex

1 Heavy Storm

1 Mystical Space Typhoon

3 Book of Moon

3 Necrovalley

2 Nobleman of Crossout

Traps: 10

3 Rite of Spirit

2 Dust Tornado

1 Torrential Tribute

1 Ring of Destruction

1 Mirror Force

1 Ceasefire

1 Bottomless Trap Hole

There are plenty of reasons to play this deck. First, Necrovalley negates all those pesky recursion cards that are in many of today’s top decks. Stuff like Magician of Faith, Call of the Haunted, and Premature Burial are useless against Necrovalley. It also stops players from summoning the powerful Black Luster Soldier – Envoy of the Beginning to the field, an ability that most decks can access only in the form of Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer. In addition to all its graveyard-related effects, Necrovalley also upgrades your Gravekeeper monsters from “annoying” to “a total beating.” 500 extra ATK and DEF is nothing to sneeze at, especially when you consider the Gravekeepers’ bonus effects.

With Necrovalley on the field, Gravekeeper’s Assailant and Gravekeeper’s Spear Soldier are 2000 ATK, four-star monsters. However, if all I wanted was 2000 ATK, I’d just stick Berserk Gorilla into one of my other decks. It’s their effects that really make the Gravekeeper monsters worth playing. Gravekeeper’s Spear Soldier deals breakthrough damage to opponents when it attacks a monster that’s in defense position, making it an excellent choice against pesky Scapegoat tokens, Spirit Reapers, or anything else you care to switch to defense position. Gravekeeper’s Assailant gives you the means to switch the battle position of any face-up monster your opponent controls. This effect has many pertinent uses—killing off Spirit Reaper, switching your opponent’s big monsters to defense position, or even switching Sheep tokens to attack position. The only truly bad thing about the effect is its dependence on having Necrovalley on the field in order to activate. In either case, these two monsters go a long way toward countering the Goat Control/Thousand-Eyes Restrict-lock decks that have filled Top 8s for the last month.

It’s also important to note that for all the rules and traditions Gravekeeper players insist that their opponents follow, they sure don’t subscribe to any themselves. Gravekeeper’s Chief lets the Gravekeeper player ignore all the negative rules text on Necrovalley while keeping the nice, fat power bonus it provides. Rite of Spirit also ignores the negative effect of Necrovalley, and in essence, it also lets you break the one-per-deck limitation on Call of the Haunted. For that matter, it also lets you ignore all that pesky stuff about “your monster dying if Call of the Haunted leaves the field” that’s on the real Call of the Haunted. The only real limit is that you have to bring back a Gravekeeper monster, but hey, you’re playing a Gravekeeper deck, so that doesn’t really matter. The Gravekeeper monsters also get to join the exclusive club of “monsters that get their own special search card,” right up there with the Warriors. However, Gravekeeper’s Spy does Reinforcement of the Army one better, as it brings the monster directly to the field and contributes to your board presence with at least 2000 DEF.

The Catch

With everything the Gravekeeper deck has going for it, there has to be some reason that it hasn’t shown up in the Top 8 of any Shonen Jump Championship thus far. One reason that the deck has been known to fail is that if Gravekeeper’s Spy gets nailed with a Nobleman of Crossout, you’re in big trouble. Without the extra swarm power granted by the Spy, the Gravekeeper player might not be able to press the advantage needed to quickly win the game.

Another problem stems from the deck’s reliance on Necrovalley. Any deck that has to rely on one specific card for the majority of its tricks to work is inherently weaker than a deck that doesn’t have this restriction. I’ve seen many a Gravekeeper deck lose because Dust Tornado or Mystical Space Typhoon took out Necrovalley. This usually allowed the other player to revive Jinzo and pull out Black Luster Soldier – Envoy of the Beginning to attack and win the game.

The final major weakness of Gravekeepers is that they usually lose to Burn. Any kind of stall engine wrecks the Gravekeepers, as all the major players in the deck are at least four stars with 1500 or more ATK. This makes them vulnerable to all the widely-played stall cards. Most Gravekeeper players are reluctant to play Heavy Storm for fear of taking out the only Necrovalley they’ve drawn so far, so they hold off on playing it until it eventually becomes too late. Additionally, cards that are dependent on the number of cards or monsters an opponent controls are a real pain for Gravekeepers. I’ve seen Secret Barrel and Just Desserts take a Gravekeeper player straight from “about to win” to “suddenly dead.”

What To Do About It

The above version of the Gravekeeper deck has a few modifications placed there in an attempt to counteract some of the deck’s weaknesses. First is the dependence on Necrovalley. One of the biggest problems with not having Necrovalley is that your opponent has an opportunity to bring out plenty of big monsters that you can’t really deal with. To try and soften the blow, I’ve put in three Book of Moon to at least delay the threat, if not place it into a more manageable state.

Second, I put in Mobius the Frost Monarch and a pair of Dust Tornados to help eliminate any stall engine a Burn deck could put out. Combined with Breaker, Heavy Storm, and Mystical Space Typhoon, this gives me six options for removing spells and traps from the field. Most decks only play four sources of spell and trap destruction, so the extra bit here will even give me a leg up on non-burn decks as well. The only regrettable thing about this is that with ten traps, I can’t reasonably play Jinzo. It also makes my deck weaker when playing against Jinzo, but with the three Book of Moon, he should be relatively easy to deal with.

Finally, I’ve added Ceasefire as both a finishing move and a preventative measure against Nobleman of Crossout. Of course, Ceasefire is much more than either of those things. The long-underrated Ceasefire can also prevent nasty flip effects from ever happening, such as that of the ubiquitous Magician of Faith or those of any of the Jars. The shot of direct damage it deals can also be used to put an opponent under the all-important 800 life point benchmark, where he or she can no longer play Premature Burial or Brain Control.

Off-Season Training

That about wraps it up for me this week. Before I go, I’d like to thank Frank for suggesting Gravekeepers as this week’s topic. If you have any deck ideas that almost made it, ideas that you think will do well in the current environment, or even suggestions on how to make an “Almost There” deck better, drop me a line at jcmchale@andrew.cmu.edu. Any other feedback is welcome as well. Until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!

NEXT WEEK: The D-D-Deck I almost took to Nationals.