Right now, the hottest topic in the game is, “What can we do about Chaos Return?” One of the most obvious answers to that question is, “Don’t let it do anything,” and as such, many people have turned to one-turn-win strategies like Cyber-Stein in the hopes of shutting down the dominant deck before it has a chance to take control of the game. Vincent Tundo took things a step further with his deck: designed to prevent Chaos decks from even having a turn.
While extremely clever, Tundo’s deck takes a while to work and you can’t really skip to the end because there’s no guarantee that it won’t run out of steam before it reaches its win condition. There’s also the slight problem of losing the game if you can’t draw Royal Magical Library. If I really wanted to beat my opponent before his or her first turn, my choice for the job would be the Dimension Loop combo deck, originally played by Michael Powers at Shonen Jump Houston.
Of course, times have changed significantly since then, and many cards that Powers had used in threes are now limited to one copy per deck. Other cards from his deck are now outright forbidden. Regardless, I think that the deck’s founding idea is strong enough to resurrect in this day and age. The primary challenges in doing so will be the loss of two Scapegoat cards and the entire Cyber Jar draw engine that the deck used to rely upon. Fortunately, we still have three copies of Book of Taiyou, so if we can set up a scenario whereby Morphing Jar is constantly renewed, we can try to replicate the effect of the Cyber Jar engine. Here’s what I came up with.
“Back to the Different Dimension”
Monsters: 6
3 Gilasaurus
1 Morphing Jar
1 Cannon Soldier
1 Dark Magician of Chaos
Spells: 34
3 Magical Mallet
3 Reasoning
3 Monster Gate
3 Book of Taiyou
3 The Shallow Grave
3 Dimension Fusion
3 Mass Driver
3 Spell Reproduction
3 Soul Release
3 Spell Economics
1 Graceful Charity
1 Book of Moon
1 Premature Burial
1 Card Destruction
At first glance, it might be tough to figure out exactly what this deck is supposed to do. Once you’ve checked everything out and let it sink in, the combo becomes apparent. Spell Economics lets you play spell cards without paying any associated life point costs. This means that Dimension Fusion’s 2000 life point cost is irrelevant. In fact, you could play Dimension Fusion as much as you wanted, provided you found a way to keep re-using it. Fortunately, Dark Magician of Chaos will return it to your hand every time you summon it to the field, and since it removes itself from play every time it would leave the field, it’s easy to set up the combo. Specifically, get Dark Magician of Chaos onto the field with Spell Economics and either Cannon Soldier or Mass Driver. Then, tribute the Magician to damage your opponent and remove the Magician from play. Then play Dimension Fusion for free, recycle it with Dark Magician of Chaos, and tribute the Magician again for more damage. Repeat until you win.
Like any combo deck, the hardest part of this deck is gathering all the pieces you need to win. Back when Michael Powers first came up with this strategy, he was forced to use Reload to send away bad hands and dig for combo pieces. Nowadays, we have Magical Mallet to do this for us. Mallet is much better, since it allows you to hold on to any cards you might want to keep and send away the rest without being forced to set anything. This is important when it comes to things like the quick-play spells you’ll need to keep your combo rolling. It would be a terrible shame to set Book of Moon so that you could safely use Reload, only to find that you need the Book later in the turn and you can’t use it.
Another new addition to the deck is the three copies of Gilasaurus. Initially, Gilasaurus saw play in Magical Scientist combo decks as a way to find tribute material for Catapult Turtle. Using it in this way allowed Catapult Turtle, Gilasaurus, and Last Will to become another instant-win hand for the Scientist deck. In this deck, Gilasaurus allows us to find tribute material for the three copies of Monster Gate. Now that we’re allowed only one copy of Scapegoat per deck, winning on the first turn becomes incredibly important, since you’re likely to suffer some unpleasant direct attacks if you don’t. Truth be told, you can probably survive a direct attack or two as long as none of them involve Spirit Reaper. Unfortunately, Spirit Reaper is a rather likely occurrence in today’s game, so I’d advise against passing your turn unless you absolutely must. You aren’t necessarily finished if you don’t win on turn one, but it’s admittedly tougher to get it done after that.
Your main way of drawing through your deck comes from using Morphing Jar. If you don’t have it in your starting hand, there’s a good chance you’ll get it from either Reasoning or Monster Gate. Unfortunately, this gives us the Jar in a rather useless face-up form, so we need to find a way to get it face down. Book of Moon is the obvious choice, but we only have one of those. Most of the time, you’ll have to get it into the graveyard with Cannon Soldier or Mass Driver, and then follow up with The Shallow Grave and Book of Taiyou. Unfortunately, The Shallow Grave requires a monster in your opponent’s graveyard for you to activate it. This isn’t a problem if you’ve already flipped Morphing Jar once naturally, but otherwise, it could be trouble. This is where we can take advantage of the way that Chaos decks work. The general first turn play for a Chaos Return or Chaos Swap deck involves setting Dekoichi the Battlechanted Locomotive or summoning Sangan. We can therefore easily get a monster into the opponent’s graveyard by special summoning Gilasaurus and attacking before we do anything else. Unfortunately, this requires us to go second, meaning that there is a slight chance that the opponent will have set Mystical Space Typhoon on the first turn. There’s usually a way around such a play, but it’s not something that can be determined until the situation arises in a game.
Assuming that things have gone smoothly, you should have a Morphing Jar in your graveyard, and your opponent should have something in his or her graveyard. You then activate The Shallow Grave to get your Jar back, set any other cards you still need, and play Book of Taiyou to flip the Jar up. If you still can’t pull off the combo after seeing your new hand, you can get the Jar’s effect again by tributing it to Cannon Soldier or Mass Driver and playing another The Shallow Grave (or you can recur it with Spell Reproduction). Your opponent should have plenty of monsters in the graveyard after the first Jar, so that’s no longer an issue. Hopefully you’ll have enough spells available to rinse and repeat until you have everything you need to successfully pull off the combo.
Overall, the execution of the deck remains the same as it was a year ago. It lost a key card in Cyber Jar due to format changes, but compared to some of the other decks from that era, this one got off easy. Goat Control cannot possibly exist in the current Advanced format, due to limitations on Scapegoat, Tsukuyomi, Metamorphosis, and Thousand-Eyes Restrict, in addition to Black Luster Soldier - Envoy of the Beginning taking up residence with its draconic counterpart on the Forbidden list. The Empty Jar deck was completely devastated since Cyber Jar was an active part of its win condition, and stall burn was greatly weakened due to the limitation on Level Limit - Area B and the restrictions on Gravity Bind. The Dimension Loop combo deck is certainly weaker than it was back then, but compared to most of those other decks, this one is doing just fine.
The main allure to playing this deck is the priceless look on everyone’s face the first time the combo goes off. It’s really amazing to see the lengths some people go to in order to find the next big combo deck. Speaking of which, it’s a lot closer than you think. Power of the Duelist previews start this Saturday right here on Metagame.com, concurrent with Shonen Jump Philadelphia, and you won’t want to miss either of them. Until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!
Jerome McHale
jcmchale@andrew.cmu.edu
NEXT TIME: Power of the Duelist previews start off with a monster whose maximum possible (though highly improbable) original ATK is nearly 100000!