Calvin Tsang may be a lot of things, but "bad at Yu-Gi-Oh!" has never been one of them. If you missed the coverage from Shonen Jump Championship Detroit, you may not have seen Tsang’s stellar performance with a highly innovative TeleDAD variant. He played a defensive strategy packed with unpredictable tech, and the real stunner of his creative arsenal was today’s featured card: Dark Eruption.
Since then I’ve seen Dark Eruption splashed into a lot of TeleDAD decks, as duelists attempt to tap into Tsang’s success. It’s a great card, but unfortunately a lot of the decks I’ve seen trying to use it aren’t using it as effectively as Tsang did. While his spell lineup may have looked like a jumble of splashed tech cards, the entire deck was actually very well built to capitalize on them. Magical Mallet helped Tsang make the best of his Reckless Greed cards, letting him seek new options when he had lots of cards, but not the ones he needed. Lightning Vortex and Mind Control helped him get through opposing monsters (also helping him mitigate the impact of Reckless), while Giant Trunade let him get past spells and traps when he was under similar pressure to win quickly.
As for Dark Eruption, its impact correlates directly to the number of options it represents. That means its utility increases as the duel stretches on and more compatible Dark monsters hit your graveyard. It also means that a typical TeleDAD monster lineup may not present enough targets to make Eruption worthwhile. This is the number-one problem afflicting the decks I’ve seen it in these past few weeks: people are running Dark Eruption, but aren’t playing the monsters that make it a game-breaking card.
Let’s Take a Peek at Tsang’s Lineup
Tsang’s deck played strongly to his three copies of Destiny Hero - Diamond Dude, the first of several monsters Dark Eruption could let him retrieve. Bringing back a Diamond Dude could do one of two things. First, it could get him something to summon: blocking damage, attacking, and using Diamond Dude’s nifty effect. That effect pressures the opponent to attack, leaving him or her vulnerable when Tsang rebukes that player’s attempt. However, the most common use of a recovered Diamond Dude in Tsang’s feature matches was to trade Dark Eruption for Diamond Dude in order to pay for Destiny Draw.
Your first Destiny Draw is almost always easy to activate: Stratos sees to that. But with three copies of Diamond Dude and three copies of Malicious—along with Dark Eruption acting as a seventh Destiny Hero—Destiny Draws number two and three become far easier for Tsang to activate compared to other decks that made Day 2. Take Champion Steven Harris’s lineup: Harris only played three Destiny Hero - Malicious cards, along with one copy each of Destiny Hero - Plasma and Destiny Hero - Doom Lord. Five Destiny Heroes is pretty average these days, and it clocks in at two fewer discards than Tsang had. That’s a substantial difference.
But if we factor all three copies of Malicious as just one Destiny Hero for the purpose of discards, the difference is even bigger—after all, successive copies of Malicious are usually summoned from the deck before you ever get a chance to draw them. In that case we’re comparing just three potential discards to five, meaning that Tsang will have a much, much easier time playing multiple copies of Destiny Draw. That in turn means he’ll see more cards and put together OTK’s faster.
Moving along, Tsang can reuse Sangan to search other small Dark monsters from his deck in a pinch, or he can dig it out as tribute fodder for his side-decked Crush Card Virus. The ability to reuse Snipe Hunter gives him superior removal and a great answer to any Synchro monster, while having another way to get to Krebons lets him Synchro summon more. He can even play desperately and summon it as a defensive wall.
All of these cards strengthen Tsang’s early game a bit, and they work very well in the mid-game. Dark Eruption gets stronger in the late game as more options for recursion stack up, but it also gets the best trick of the bunch, and the one that most duelists seem to be ignoring: Prometheus, King of the Shadows.
We saw Tsang win game 1 of the Finals in Detroit with that card, summoning it and removing a whopping seven Darks from his graveyard to bump it up to 4000 ATK. It’s an incredible late-game powerhouse that swings over small monsters for huge damage, but if it hits the graveyard before that point, it just isn’t being played to its full potential. Without Dark Eruption, Tsang would have to hold his Prometheus if he drew it early—it would be a dead card, or a sub-optimal summon at best. However, since Tsang has the ability to retrieve it from his graveyard with Eruption, he can summon it early to bait out attacks, boost it with just one or two Darks to get over things like Snipe Hunter and Breaker the Magical Warrior, or use it as Synchro material to bring out Goyo Guardian. He can play loose with Prometheus, because he knows that by the time it becomes a game-ending card, he has a strong chance of having drawn his lone Dark Eruption to bring it back.
It’s awesome. Dark Eruption makes Prometheus a higher utility card in the early game, while Prometheus turns Dark Eruption into a potential win condition for the late game. Very cool.
Without that late-game punch, Dark Eruption isn’t nearly as good. I’m seeing it being run not only without Prometheus, but also without Snipe Hunter: another incredibly strong addition to the Eruption suite. If you’re playing TeleDAD, I don’t think you should run Eruption without those two cards. You can still up your chances at activating your second and third copies of Destiny Draw, and you can recycle Sangan, but that’s less than half of the big picture.
There Are a Lot of Other Possibilities Too
While we’ve examined everything in Tsang’s main-deck lineup, there are too many monsters that are compatible with Dark Eruption for them to all fit into a single deck. The one card Tsang sided that we haven’t discussed yet is D.D. Crow: he side decked a pair of them, and in addition to Dark Eruption, that means he could remove up to three cards from his opponent’s graveyard while only adding two cards to his deck. It’s an interesting notion: you can side just one or two copies of a particular Dark monster, and thanks to Eruption you have the potential to play as if you sided an additional copy. While there’s a narrow range of Eruption-friendly Dark monsters that benefit from this, the theory does apply elsewhere. For instance, a single sided copy of Destiny Hero - Doom Lord can be reused and score multiple removals instead of just one.
Thinking further outside the box, Dark Eruption can be used to toolbox in the mid- and late game for a number of Dark monsters central to particular strategies. Warriors (or even just Dark decks packing the ubiquitous pair of Reinforcement of the Army cards) can reuse Greenkappa—an incredible piece of tech these days. Don Zaloog can be played by both decks as well. Side in Marionette Mite against Zombies to take control of Zombie Master, discarding cards to rip apart your opponent’s precious graveyard. Alternatively, if you play Zombies yourself then Dark Eruption has a strong base of Spirit Reaper and Plaguespreader Zombie cards to draw from.
Night Assailant can be exceedingly annoying both as repeated removal and as discard fodder returning more flip-effect monsters to your hand—it’s another Limited card that Dark Eruption gets you a second crack at, and it combos really nicely with Snipe Hunter. Apprentice Magician and Old Vindictive Magician are easily recycled as well, and the Apprentice engine is pretty good at filling your yard with Eruption targets early on.
Dropping to more casual decks, you can reverse toolbox with the majority of the Gravekeeper monsters, or do the same in Dark World and pick between Kahkki, Guerilla of Dark World, Gren, Tactician of Dark World, or Broww, Huntsman of Dark World. Recycle major burn power with Stealth Bird and Des Koala, or even get back pieces of Exodia . . . there’s so much you can do with Dark Eruption.
The Point?
Okay, so you could probably go to your favorite card database and look up "Dark monsters with less than 1500 ATK" and write that last chunk of the article yourself. So why am I writing it? Because it’s the actual play technique and deck construction that’s important, and a lot of people haven’t figured it out yet. Dark Eruption gets better with every compatible monster you play, and without enough such monsters in your deck it isn’t worth running. For some reason a lot of the players experimenting with it now are playing very few compatible monsters, and then writing it off as "a bad card" without looking at it again. That’s unfortunate, because those players are missing out on a great card simply because they don’t get how to use it.
For the players who were using it well, I’m eager to present the side-decking advantages even just one main-decked copy of Eruption presents. I’m hopeful that I can get you to consider the math behind all of this a little bit more than you perhaps did. Between issues like the Destiny Draw utility point I covered earlier, the side-decking details, and just simple facts like "four Krebons is better than three," there are a lot of basic numbers here that are quite easy to deal with. The catch is that you have to be able to see those numbers and know that they’re there in order to do that, and discussion toward that goal has been slim since Detroit.
From TeleDAD, all the way down to strictly casual strategies, there is a tremendous amount of potential in Dark Eruption. Master it, and you’ll have a strong option for many decks you might build in the future. Definitely try it out, if only to get some experience with the card so you can use it later.
And with that, happy holidays and see you in the New Year!
—Jason Grabher-Meyer