The new promo cards from the Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship 2007 video game are really good. All of them. At this point it should be fairly obvious that anything with “Destiny Hero” in its name is going to be a hot card (if only for its interaction with Destiny Draw), but the new Destiny Hero - Disk Commander has surpassed the expectations of many players, offering a powerful and easily repeatable draw effect for Destiny Hero decks. Is it fast enough for Diamond Dude Turbo? I doubt it, but it’s certainly a must-play for slower Destiny Hero builds, especially ones that use Destiny Hero - Fear Monger and, to a lesser extent, Destiny Hero - Captain Tenacious. Meanwhile, Exploder Dragon is the best thing to happen to fans of the Cyberdark monsters since their release, providing another target for both the Cyberdark monsters’ effects and the search from Masked Dragon, without having to resort to Gray Wing. Sure, you won’t get a 2000+ ATK monster if you equip a Cyberdark monster with Exploder Dragon, but that’s largely irrelevant when the Dragon likely made it into your graveyard while taking down some other big opposing threat.

This brings us to Spell Striker. Like many great monsters, Spell Striker has very low stats and an incredible effect to compensate. Once he’s on the field, you’ll never take any damage from a battle involving him and you’ll be able to attack directly for 600 damage every turn. The exciting part, however, is the line on the card that tells you how you can special summon the Striker for “free.”  All you have to do is remove a spell card from your graveyard and you get a monster on your field that you didn’t have to spend a normal summon or a card on that could still have an impact on the duel. After all, what can you use to bring back spells from the graveyard? In terms of direct recursion, you’re limited to Magical Stone Excavation and Dark Magician of Chaos, one of which is costly in every possible meaning of the word while the other is Limited to one and can’t be searched for by any quick and easy means. Still, Dark Magician of Chaos is an excellent card, so let’s make sure we leave the power spells in the graveyard for him to retrieve. After all, we’ve got to do something with our free monster, and as fans of Treeborn Frog can attest, the best thing to do with a free monster is tribute it for something huge.

Monsters: 19

3 Spell Striker

1 Treeborn Frog

1 Sangan

1 Elemental Hero Stratos

3 Destiny Hero - Dasher

3 Destiny Hero - Malicious

1 Dark Magician of Chaos

1 Ancient Gear Gadjiltron Dragon

1 Sacred Phoenix of Nephthys

1 Majestic Mech - Goryu

1 Jinzo

1 Dark Ruler Ha Des

1 Freed the Matchless General

Spells: 22

3 Destiny Draw

3 Reasoning

3 Monster Gate

3 The Warrior Returning Alive

2 Reinforcement of the Army

3 Brain Control

2 Metamorphosis

1 Snatch Steal

1 Heavy Storm

1 Premature Burial

Traps: 1

1 Call of the Haunted

Fusions:

3 Cyber Twin Dragon

3 Ryu Senshi

3 Dark Balter the Terrible

This deck is, in a word, terrifying for everyone involved. Everything could go so horribly wrong, but at the same time, you can also just explode onto the scene and drop one or more horrifyingly huge monsters every turn. Just one successful game could be enough to frighten everyone around you into not playing monsters face up should they happen to be paired against you. The idea for this deck came from a player I met at Shonen Jump Championship Columbus, who had gathered up a set of Spell Strikers for use in a deck packing a lot of Monarchs. It was actually a really cool deck, and if I’m remembering correctly, he did quite well in the Sunday Regional qualifier. Still, while the deck was very cool, Monarchs just aren’t a monster set that I find particularly exciting. So I decided to kick things up a notch and add the relevant “Turbo” engine most commonly seen in Diamond Dude Turbo decks (minus, of course, all the Magical Stone Excavations and Card Troopers that are nearly impossible to trade for right now). Trust me, you have a much better shot at finding Malicious and Destiny Draw than either Trooper or Excavation.

Accessibility issues aside, once the engine of the deck was set up I had to decide what exactly it was that I wanted to be able to summon out. Normally in a deck like this you want to go for monsters with either big explosive effects or effects that suppress your opponent’s ability to respond to your actions. I’ve opted to go primarily for the latter in this build, since many of the monsters with really explosive effects aren’t useful outside of specific decks, aren’t useful when special summoned, or can’t be special summoned by the means I’m using. Behemoth the King of All Animals is a good example of the first two while Dark Eradicator Warlock is a good example of the last limitation. Imagine how good Dark Eradicator Warlock would be if you could play it in this deck. No one ever picks seven for Reasoning, and the deck has nineteen normal spells! Still, there are a good number of monsters that can do their thing regardless of how you bring them out. Majestic Mech - Goryu is a great example of a high-level monster with a variety of useful talents, including being huge, inflicting piercing damage, being easily special summoned by Monster Gate, Reasoning, and Destiny Hero - Dasher, and being capable of a temporary summon using only one tribute. It’s an impressive list of abilities, and the only reason Goryu doesn’t see more than one slot in the deck is because the other level 8 monsters I’ve chosen are even better. Trading piercing damage for special summon capability earns Ancient Gear Gadjiltron Dragon a slot in the deck, due to its 3000 ATK and built-in protection ability, while Dark Magician of Chaos is simply amazing no matter how you look at him. Sacred Phoenix of Nephthys is, as always, the comeback king, capable of rising from your graveyard every time it’s destroyed by an effect. In addition, since it’s likely that you’ll have a Dasher in the graveyard a good percentage of the time, drawing into a level 8 monster often becomes a good thing instead of something to be afraid of.

On the level 6 front, you have a lot more monsters to choose from, including the obvious choice (Jinzo) alongside a not so obvious choice (Freed the Matchless General). A big part of this deck is finding, using, and re-using all your copies of Spell Striker to create free tributes for either summons or Monster Gate, and if you’re willing to skip your draw phase to use Freed’s effect, the General can find you another copy of Spell Striker or Elemental Hero Stratos, if you haven’t already found and used him. Freed is also immune to the dreaded Snatch Steal alongside the newly mainstream Shrink, giving him his own style of effect suppression that your opponent is sure to hate. Dark Ruler Ha Des provides another great suppression effect (this time negating the effects of monsters that he destroys), while Destiny Hero - Dasher helps to keep your deck rolling along the way it’s supposed to. That brings us Destiny Hero - Malicious, a card that you should have no intention of tribute summoning unless you fall upon hard times and need to trade an opposing monster in for the self-replicating Hero. Malicious should nearly always be special summoned by some means and used for the same purpose that we are using Spell Striker for. In fact, it’s entirely possible to tribute summon a level 8 monster on your first turn by using a combination of Spell Striker and Malicious.

Now, let’s talk about some fun Spell Striker tricks. Probably the best part of Spell Striker is that nearly every card in the deck that you can use to fetch him to your hand can then be immediately removed to summon him to the field. Reinforcement of the Army brings him to your hand and is then removed to summon him. You later tribute him off or he is destroyed. Later, you can use The Warrior Returning Alive to put him back in your hand and remove The Warrior Returning Alive to put him into play. He’s no Treeborn Frog, but Spell Striker is an excellent and reliable source of tribute material. Even if you don’t have him, however, your Frog and your Dashers should be able to carry you through for a few turns. The main thing that you want to do is produce at least one high-level monster each turn to attack with. Force your opponent to use all of his or her removal early, and then capitalize on this with monsters that the opponent can’t possibly defeat in battle.

If you don’t like the way I’ve set up my high-level monsters, you’re more than free to exchange them with others. If you do, I’d definitely leave a relatively large number of level 8 monsters in there for use with Metamorphosis, but if you like to mix things up with Reasoning a bit, some level 5 monsters could be a good choice as well. Another route you could take with the deck is to use the fact that you’re likely going to take a direct attack or two to make Megamorph a useful card in the deck. In fact, you could even change it into a sort of cross between Diamond Dude Turbo and Demise OTK if you really put your mind to it. I wouldn’t recommend doing so for hobby league play, however. After all, if huge monsters every turn are enough to frighten the pants off your opponent, imagine what Megamorph-equipped huge monsters winning the game in a turn or two will do. Good luck finding out, and until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!

Jerome McHale

jcmchale@andrew.cmu.edu

NEXT WEEK: Sometimes I inspire myself even as I write. Time to break out my copies of Dark Eradicator Warlock!