As I look back on the events of recent weeks—U.S. Nationals, Canadian Nationals, and the European Championships—there is an omission from each and every top decklist that I find truly mystifying. Specifically, I want to know why no one was running The Transmigration Prophecy. Remember back when Strike of Neos first came out and everyone was drooling over the card? Well, maybe not everyone, but the card received “mad props” from a number of top players and fellow writers. (I also may have mentioned it a few times in my work, but for some reason I just can’t seem to recall when.) The point is, a card that’s more than worthy of seeing serious play has instead seen no play at all in a metagame where it would wreck house against all the top decks. Why, you ask? Because nearly all of the top decks right now rely heavily on keeping certain things in the graveyard and bringing them back at opportune moments. I’m not just talking about Treeborn Frog here. How many games where your opponent starts off with Destiny Hero - Malicious and Destiny Draw do you think you could have salvaged if he or she didn’t have that Malicious in the graveyard? How about if you had been able to prevent that Premature Burial on Destiny Hero – Disk Commander or Dark Magician of Chaos? Maybe you kept getting blasted by Demise. What if your opponent didn’t have any Insects in his or her graveyard to summon Doom Dozer with? All of these questions can be answered with “Well, if I was playing The Transmigration Prophecy, maybe I’d be able to tell you!”

While The Transmigration Prophecy is an excellent card, it’s generally not something that you can toss into any old deck in threes and expect to thrive. This is likely the main reason why no one wanted to play the card. You want three copies of it to increase your chances of having it when you need it, but it doesn’t do anything to actually further your strategy . . . most of the time. I suppose there are some cases where you knock multiple copies of Destiny Hero – Malicious into your graveyard with Card Trooper and wish you had one of them back in the deck so you could search for him. You could also use the Prophecy to save a key card from D.D. Crow, but that’s not really what I’m talking about when I say “further your strategy.” I want a deck that can use The Transmigration Prophecy to not only prevent the opponent from doing crazy things but also to enable me to do crazy things proactively.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of proactive ways to use the Prophecy is using it with Volcanic Shell to enable you to perform up to five discards in a single turn. Sure, it’ll cost you 2000 life points, but how many of us wouldn’t pay 2000 life points to clear the opponent’s field? Well, I suppose some people wouldn’t, but anyone who has any experience with Demise, King of Armageddon can tell you that it is, in fact, a good proposition. Check this out:

Monsters: 20

3 Volcanic Shell

3 Snipe Hunter

1 Sangan

3 Raiza the Storm Monarch

3 Mystic Tomato

3 Legendary Jujitsu Master

3 Cyber Dragon

1 Neo-Spacian Grand Mole

Spells: 10

1 Heavy Storm

1 Premature Burial

1 Mystical Space Typhoon

1 Snatch Steal

2 Brain Control

2 Lightning Vortex

2 Dark World Lightning

Traps: 10

3 The Transmigration Prophecy

1 Call of the Haunted

1 Torrential Tribute

1 Mirror Force

1 Ring of Destruction

3 Phoenix Wing Wind Blast

The main object here is to use Volcanic Shell again and again to provide the discards necessary to fuel powerful cards like Snipe Hunter, Lightning Vortex, and Phoenix Wing Wind Blast. There is a somewhat important ruling for the card, though, so let’s go over that first. Volcanic Shell says that you can only activate the effect “once per turn, while this card is in the graveyard.” What this means is that you can activate the effect of any particular Volcanic Shell once per turn, not that you can only activate a grand total of one Volcanic Shell effect per turn. This is the key to generating the amount of discard material necessary to fuel all these fun little effects. Hopefully, everyone can see how you get three discards in one turn. Pitch the first Shell, then pay 500 for the next, pitch it, pay 500 for the last one, and pitch it at your discretion. You then can’t pay any further—not due to the once-per-turn clause on Volcanic Shell, but because you don’t have any more of them in your deck. This is similar to the ruling on The Agent of Creation - Venus that prevents you from paying down to almost nothing when you don’t have any Mystic Shine Ball cards in your deck. However, we can pitch all three copies of Volcanic Shell into the graveyard, and then activate The Transmigration Prophecy to shuffle the ones that had already been used back into the deck before activating the third copy to pull one of the others back out again. One copy of Prophecy then ensures that we can discard up to five times for the purposes of Snipe Hunter or to play any number of discard-powered spell or trap cards.

The strategy of the deck works something along the lines of a modified Gadget build . . . without Gadgets. Yeah, it’s pretty weird, but allow me to explain. Gadget decks basically deplete the opponent’s deck by playing a lot of effects that simplify the game while maintaining a constant stream of monsters via the Gadgets’ effects. This deck simplifies things in a different way. In this case, most of the powerful effects constrict the cards your opponent controls via one of two methods. First, it removes them from the current situation by either destroying them or sending them to the top of the deck. Second (and more importantly), every card your opponent is forced to redraw due to Raiza, Legendary Jujitsu Master or Phoenix Wing Wind Blast prevents the opponent from getting further into his or her deck. This can be especially killer if you manage it against a deck that’s capable of starting off slowly like standard Monarch decks or the 12+ Gauge Monarch decks like Bryan Rockenbach’s from U.S. Nationals. As for Snipe Hunter, well, the coverage from the three big events should be more than enough to convince you of why it’s good to keep well fueled. Snipe Hunter was a deciding factor in more games than I care to count, and I wouldn’t be surprised if every single game that occurred in, say, the top third of the U.S. Nationals tables was heavily influenced by the Cyberdark Impact common.

Like most of the decks I’ve been playing lately, Brain Control takes the place of quick card exchange monster removal like Smashing Ground. There’s really no point to just blasting an opposing monster when you can steal it, attack with it to try and bait out opposing removal (all while scoring damage), and then tribute it off for a Cyber Dragon or a Monarch. Lightning Vortex helps to recover from the quick swarms of monsters that are common in decks like T-Hero and the Machine builds that Matt Peddle and Max Suffridge played at their respective National Championships. Card Trooper and Machine Duplication are almost always deadly, but with Lightning Vortex in your deck you have a chance to fight back, assuming that you survive the initial onslaught. Of course, you’ll likely need to win straight away after the Vortex, so keep that in mind if you regularly play against fans of Machine Duplication. The Transmigration Prophecy also lets you create long recruiter chains, which can be useful if you need to set up for Snipe Hunter in an upcoming turn but your opponent has more attackers than you have copies of Mystic Tomato.

Overall, your goal when playing this deck is to force the opponent to tip his or her hand and commit to the field. The more cards you can get onto the opponent’s field, the more damage Snipe Hunter can do in a single turn, so press with your smaller attackers to try and draw out your opponent’s cards. The spin effects will diminish the overall number of cards that your opponent will be able to access during the course of the game, which will then force him or her into making plays or taking a lot of hits. This is the ideal situation for you to create, but be careful. It can take time to set up, and time isn’t readily available these days. The Transmigration Prophecy is a truly awesome card, and even if you don’t play this deck, make sure that you keep your eye out for more Transmigration trickery you can try out. Until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!

Jerome McHale

jcmchale@andrew.cmu

NEXT WEEK: I get really angry at the new version of Word until it stops automatically skipping lines every time I hit enter. Also, Dark World.