We got a good response to our first Ultimate Duelist Challenge! It was a lot harder than our usual challenges, and a lot of duelists at the events we judged commented on how much they’d enjoyed it. We tried to go out of our way to make this one difficult, but it wasn’t hard enough to deter our determined audience!
This challenge required entrants to summon as many animals pictured on The Big March Of Animals as possible. We made it a little more difficult by giving the entrants only four turns, and by including the presence of King Tiger Wanghu on the opponent’s side of the field.
We had a lot of entries to go through, and we’re declaring Shane F. of Applegate, MI, the winner. Shane relied on a tricky series of moves to generate a massive amount of draw power, then used his opponent’s King Tiger Wanghu to clear his own field and get ten of the pictured monsters out in the specified time limit. Nice work!
Want to see exactly what Shane did? Here’s his setup.
His opponent goes first, draws a card, summons King Tiger Wanghu, and ends his turn.
Shane’s Turn 1:
His opening hand (We allowed two extra cards, to compensate for the difficulty of the challenge):
Blue-Eyes White Dragon
Magical Merchant
Thunder Dragon
Pot of Greed
3 Backup Soldier
Shane draws Super Rejuvenation, then sets Magical Merchant and three copies of Backup Soldier. He then activates Pot of Greed, draws two more copies of Super Rejuvenation, and ends his turn.
Opponent’s turn 2:
He draws, summons another King Tiger Wanghu, and ends his turn.
Shane’s turn 2:
Shane draws Morphing Jar, then flip summons Magical Merchant, picking up three copies of Lizard Soldier, three copies of Winged Dragon Guardian of the Fortress #1, three copies of Petit Dragon, three copies of Andro Sphinx and Sphinx Teleia, two copies of Gora Turtle of Illusion, and Infinite Cards. Infinite Cards goes to his hand, and the other cards are sent to the graveyard.
Shane activates Backup Soldier and selects three copies of Lizard Soldier. He activates the second Backup Soldier and selects three copies of Winged Dragon Guardian of the Fortress #1. He then activates the third copy of Backup Soldier, and selects three copies of Petit Dragon. He sets Morphing Jar, activates Infinite Cards, and then ends his turn.
Opponent’s turn 3:
He draws, summons another King Tiger Wanghu, and ends his turn.
Shane’s turn 3:
Shane draws into Card Destruction, and moves into his first main phase. He activates all three copies of Super Rejuvenation, and discards a Thunder Dragon to dig for two more. He activates Card Destruction, discarding ten Dragons to the graveyard and drawing twelve cards.
The cards drawn by Card Destruction are:
3 Dark Factory of Mass Production
3 Red Eyes Black Dragon
3 Red Eyes Black Chick
3 Red Eyes Darkness Dragon
He activates all three copies of Dark Factory of Mass Production to bring back three Lizard Soldier and three Petit Dragon. He then flips summons Morphing Jar to discard fifteen Dragons and draw five cards. The cards drawn are:
Reckless Greed
Mystical Space Typhoon
Mysterious Puppeteer
Ultimate Offering
Pyramid of Light
He sets Pyramid Of Light, Mysterious Puppeteer, Ultimate Offering, and Reckless Greed, and ends his turn. During the end phase, he draws a total of 75 cards for the three Super Rejuvenations. We’ll spare you the list, but suffice to say Shane now has all the cards he needs.
Opponent’s turn 4:
The opponent draws and ends his turn.
Shane’s turn 4:
Shane draws, and though the draw is irrelevant due to his massive hand presence, he specifically draws Neo Aqua Madoor. He moves to his main phase and activates Reckless Greed, drawing two copies of Labyrinth Wall. He flip summons Mysterious Puppeteer, activates Ultimate Offering by paying 500 life points, and thus begins his big march. He first summons Des Koala, and gains 500 life points from the Puppeteer’s effect. Des Koala is destroyed by King Tiger Wanghu, and as Shane proceeds to make more summons, the Tiger keeps the field relatively clear (otherwise he’d have to stop summoning due to having filled his monster zones). He summons the following monsters in the following order:
Rescue Cat
Giant Rat
Nimble Momonga
Dark Gray
Mystic Sheep #2
All the monsters are cleared off the field. He then activates Polymerization and selects Ojama Green, Ojama Yellow, and Ojama Black from his hand to special summon Ojama King. He gains 500 life points for doing so, and it’s promptly pounced on by King Tiger Wanghu. He activates Polymerization again, and selects Petit Angel and another Mystic Sheep #2 from hand to special summon Fusionist. He gains 500 life points for doing so, and again loses the Fusionist to the Tigers.
He activates Ultimate Offering again to summon Bazoo the Soul Eater, and he tributes Bazoo and the Merchant to summon Behemoth the King of All Animals. He opts to return Andro Sphinx and Sphinx Teleia from the graveyard with its effect.
At this point, Shane’s setup lets him summon virtually any, almost all, Beast-type monsters. However, there were only ten that he could recognize from March of Animals that were legal for this challenge, so he ended his turn here, despite the fact that the eleventh monster did happen to be on his list of cards drawn from Super Rejuvenation. Those ten monsters were as follows:
Rescue Cat
Giant Rat.
Nimble Momonga.
Dark Gray.
Mystic Sheep #2.
Des Koala
Ojama King
Bazoo the Soul Eater
Fusionist
Behemoth, the King of All Animals
Eleven was the maximum possible score for this challenge. The one monster that Shane missed was the hardest of them all—3-Hump Lacooda. Very few duelists recognized the Lacooda, and a handful mistook it for Des Lacooda, but in the end Shane distinguished himself as being the only competitor to successfully summon ten of the eleven monsters without overshooting in his professed score or making errors. His brilliant, open-ended solution managed to abuse the King Tiger Wanghus that first appeared to be obstacles, and his trick of using Super Rejuvenation and Magical Merchant to draw an insane amount of cards was extremely creative. That makes him the champion of metagame.com’s first Ultimate Duelist Challenge!
Thanks go out to Shane and to everyone else who competed. We saw some very creative entries and a level of quality that surpassed any challenge before it. Stay tuned to metagame.com this month as we bring you more Ultimate Duelist Challenges and more enormous prizes!