Shane Scurry is recognized as one of the game’s greatest deckbuilders. The fuel behind the fire of the former Team Scoop’s success, his decks have driven Paul Levitin and Carlos Santiago to a total of eight Shonen Jump Championship Top 8 finishes between them. Add to that the fact that Scurry himself is a Shonen Jump Champion, and you’ve got an incredible track record—possibly the best one that any single deckbuilder has ever achieved here in North America.
Yes, that is a whopping 23 monsters in the deck. With Asura Priest, Majestic Mech – Ohka, Mystic Tomato, Morphing Jar, and three Spirit Reaper, the deck is packed with things to Swap with the opponent. More importantly, it can just do a ton of different things with the card. Want a free monster? Give the opponent Asura Priest or Ohka. Want two free monsters? Swap the Tomato. Need to create a gateway to your opponent’s life points? Any flip effect monster is decent, but an attack position Spirit Reaper is even better, allowing for as many near-direct attacks as your monster spread can muster.
The deck is running only one Monarch, a single Zaborg the Thunder Monarch, and is using no Return from the Different Dimension. Needless to say, it’s a little bit against what everyone is expecting.
Just a tad.
The deck’s primary strength is driven by Creature Swap and its ability to offer more options per turn without requiring card advantage, a facet of this little gem incurred by the huge variety in monsters. This deck is dependent on field presence, and in order to protect that, Scurry is using three copies of Royal Decree. That accomplishes a great deal, and again, we can break it down on a per-monster basis.
Decree turns Asura Priest into Raigeki, with the conditions of doing so being the compliant ATK values of your opponent’s monsters and their own vulnerability to battle (Spirit Reaper being the only concern for the latter). While the fact that many monsters have 1700 ATK or more is certainly true, in return you get precision (you don’t have to attack those monsters) and an extra incentive: the potential for big damage against an open field. Enemy Controller and Book of Moon can help mitigate this limiting factor, and Scurry is of course running both.
It also protects a Tsukuyomi loop, allowing you to Recycle a flip effect monster like Dekoichi the Battlechanted Locomotive or Magician of Faith to repeatedly dig for more answers and options. While the deck’s trap spread prevents it from making use of Sakuretsu Armor to protect such a loop, it can again use spell-based defenses to do so. In addition, should a big monster expose itself to attack the flip effect monster, then the Tsukuyomi can come down on the following turn and be Creature Swapped for a free monster.
That’s synergy for you. And it burns like the searing fire of a thousand suns.
It makes Mystic Tomato brutal, too. No Sakuretsu or Mirror Force? In an environment where Smashing Ground is down to one copy in virtually every deck, Tomato can be nigh-impossible to deal with in the face of Decree. Good stuff.
At a tournament where Chaos Return is viewed as the dominant deck, this is the perfect melange of anti-metagame effects. Three Decree stops return, and Creature Swap steals tribute fodder and big hitters (especially brutal when you’re absconding with a Chaos Sorcerer). It can even remove monsters from your opponent’s field without sending them to the graveyard to act as Chaos fodder or removing them from play where they’re fuel for Return. Jae Kim and Comic Odyssey are playing similar decks as well, relying on the same core theories to bring them success here today.
If something like this can make Day 2 this weekend, it may very well change the way we look at the North American metagame. With so many skilled duelists piloting similar builds, it’s a strong bet that we’ll see at least one Creature Swap-centric deck on Sunday. Watch for this deck: it manages to have incredible synergy without being dependant on many low-utility cards, walking the tricky balancing act that is so prevalent in Yu-Gi-Oh! with expert results.