Jake McNeely, Jake Campbell, and Chris Sorelle are all dominating the field today with a Chaos Return variant that borrows heavily from recent metagame trends in Japan. While some of the factors that gave rise to the deck in Japan aren’t present here in North America, it doesn’t seem to matter—the deck is wrecking people, regardless. While the builds vary slightly, the core theme and framework of the deck is essentially the same.
The deck is essentially built like a tricky build of Chaos Return, packing one Return from the Different Dimension, two Royal Decree, and a Creature Swap. It’s maxed out on Cyber Dragon, Chaos Sorcerer, and Spirit Reaper, just like many other Chaos Return builds. What sets it apart is the use of three not-so-common cards that change the entire face of the duel.
The major players? Two copies of Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer and two Banisher of the Radiance. While Kycoo removes monsters in the opponent’s graveyard from the game, Banisher ensures that cards never even hit the graveyard, resulting in two major effects. First, they keep the opponent’s graveyard devoid of the monsters needed to summon Chaos Sorcerer, stripping them of their Lights and Darks. Banisher provides the same service in a pre-emptive context, removing monsters that are destroyed before they can even hit the graveyard while also disrupting cards like Magician of Faith (which some Japanese versions of the deck don’t even run).
The result? Well, because the deck uses a balance of Kycoo and Banisher, it can gather small amounts of destroyed monsters itself, while still stripping the opponent of all of theirs with Kycoo. A portion of both duelists’ monsters will go to the graveyard over the course of the game, dodging Banisher, but the strength of this deck is twofold: the first is Kycoo, and the second is the fact that Banisher itself goes to the graveyard when destroyed. That gives players like McNeely and Campbell an extra Light monster, and that counts when the opponent doesn’t have any.
Both monsters serve to alienate a Chaos Return player from their Chaos Sorcerers, turning one of the game’s best topdecks into a horrible one. While the removal of so many monsters loads the opponent for a big Return, many duelists are running only one copy anyways. For those who are using more, well, that’s where Rush Recklessly comes in.
Rush Recklessly ensures that even if you have only one mid-sized monster on the field, it’ll be able to block just about anything that tries to attack it short of D. D. Warrior Lady. This isn’t just insurance against random activations of Return: it also allows the deck to maintain field presence while dishing out damage and making card exchanges that increase tempo. When you’re relying on monsters like Banisher and Kycoo in a field packed with Cyber Dragon, Rush Recklessly is invaluable. While Sakuretsu Armor can block a single attack and destroy a monster, Rush destroys one as well, but also wards off any other potential attackers that turn.
Anyone who considers monsters like Vampire Lord or Berserk Gorilla a lost cause due to Cyber Dragon, take note. Rush Recklessly saves the monsters that could otherwise be liabilities in this format. It’s an interesting theory, and it’s borne out incredibly well over the past few hours. All three duelists running the deck hold X-1 records or better.
The deck creates a fast tempo with all of its card-for-card exchanges, and while that’s good news for Return players in general, it’s bad news for Chaos Return in the early game. In addition, if a game comes down to topdecking it’s important to remember that Chaos Sorcerer is usually a dead card for the opponent. That gives this deck a huge advantage.
Depriving your opponent of a format-defining monster while still being able to use three copies of it yourself? That’s a winning strategy, and looking over at Jake McNeeley sitting at table 3 right now, I can’t help but think that it might be the tournament’s best bet for a Day 2 appearance.
If this deck makes the Top 8 this weekend, you can expect netdeckers to leap on it instantly. Flat out, it beats the monster that everybody hates, and that alone is going to give a lot of people solid reason to run it. With some close Inspection this build seems almost kind of basic – it’s got few answers to Cyber-Stein, a major concern here today. But it’s still winning. While the future is bright for this strategy, it’s not a work in progress, and its level of effectiveness upon its first appearance is really impressive. Months from now, we might look back on Shonen Jump Championship Arlington as the event that gave birth to the new mainstream strategy.