The way things tend to shake out is that after a change in the forbidden and limited lists, the first deck to win a major event becomes the “deck to beat” and the deck that 90% of the population will play and stick with for the next 6 months. Thus, our choices are to either play this deck or build something that can beat it. I’m a firm believer in the second option, so after Shane Scurry won SJC Baltimore, I set out to find ways to beat the (constantly improving) Chaos Return deck. Eventually it was determined that Chaos Return wins because it’s packed with powerful, nigh “unstoppable,” game-winning effects. Of course, nothing in the deck was really unstoppable. It was the combination of a number of tiny chunks of un-pleasantry that kept putting pressure on the opponent, allowing cards like Return from the Different Dimension to really shine. Soon after that, side decks started to pack Ceasefire to try and finish off an opponent who was using Return before things got out of hand. The next natural progression was to include Royal Decree in either the side or the main deck. Decree started to pop up as a serious side deck choice at SJC Columbus, and after watching it wreck a lot of people when it was chained to Return from the Different Dimension, I came up with a plan.

Chaos decks win by making a series of powerful moves that the opponent cannot possibly respond to. If any one of them somehow fails, it’s often enough to bring the entire strategy crumbling down. Thus, I considered making a deck whose primary goal was to negate the key part of any given strategy and then capitalize on the resulting hole in the opponent’s defenses to win the game. It was mildly successful at the time, but cards like Mobius the Frost Monarch and Zaborg the Thunder Monarch were still too much to handle with the likes of Horn of Heaven and not necessarily crucial enough to warrant paying half my life to Solemn Judgment.

That’s about the time when I got my preview cards for the Enemy of Justice set, and I couldn’t believe what I saw. Forced Back was an absolute godsend for my counter strategy, allowing me to block the summons of the Monarchs and Jinzo while creating an opening for counterattacks. It also let me break Tsukuyomi loops that aimed to abuse Magician of Faith or Dekoichi the Battlechanted Locomotive, and it did it all for free! I added three copies of Forced Back to my build, and my win rate immediately skyrocketed. There was only one problem left to solve: how to keep a constant stream of counters at the ready to shut down as many of my opponent’s moves as possible. Then I saw Bountiful Artemis, and a deck was born. After two and a half months of tweaking, this is the deck I played at SJC Philadelphia.

“Just Say No to Everything!”

Monsters: 18

3 Cyber Dragon

3 Bountiful Artemis

3 Skelengel

3 Freed the Brave Wanderer

2 Banisher of the Radiance

1 Sangan

1 Breaker the Magical Warrior

1 D. D. Warrior Lady

1 Morphing Jar

Spells: 8

1 Graceful Charity

1 Snatch Steal

1 Heavy Storm

1 Mystical Space Typhoon

1 Smashing Ground

1 Confiscation

2 Nobleman of Crossout

Traps: 15

3 Forced Back

3 Negate Attack

3 Magic Drain

3 Solemn Judgment

1 Mirror Force

1 Torrential Tribute

1 Return from the Different Dimension

The basic concept of the deck is quite simple: you get to choose which moves they make, and for each move you decide to deny, draw a card! Bountiful Artemis is the card that makes this deck tick, so you’ll want to summon it as quickly as possible and keep it on the field for as long as you can. For me, this meant learning to control my aggressive tendencies. One of the worst possible moves to make is attacking with Bountiful Artemis into a Sakuretsu Armor or Mirror Force when you don’t have a counter down, and it’s still the single greatest mistake I find myself making. Once you have Artemis on the field and a couple of counters face-down, your opponent has to hope you can’t stop him or her from whatever it is he or she wants to do. Fortunately for you, with more than 25% of the deck consisting of counters for every type of move that any deck can potentially make, it’s difficult for the opponent to succeed in his or her endeavors.

The best opening move for this deck is to summon Bountiful Artemis face up and then set Negate Attack and Magic Drain. The most common first move against an opponent who summons a monster on the first turn involves summoning Cyber Dragon and attacking before playing cards like Smashing Ground or Confiscation. With this setup, you’ll draw a card when you negate the opponent’s attack (yes, Negate Attack is a counter trap), and you’ll draw a card when he or she plays a spell regardless of whether or not he or she forces it through your Magic Drain. Let’s say he or she goes ahead and plays that Smashing Ground during main phase 2. You activate Magic Drain. Since you’ve activated a counter trap and its activation wasn’t negated, you draw a card. Then, if the opponent pitches a spell to force Smashing Ground through the Drain, you’ve drawn a card and he or she has discarded an additional spell that was probably being saved for later. Nobleman of Crossout is often pitched for this purpose. You may lose Artemis in this case, but you know one more spell that the opponent doesn’t have in hand, which lets you plan your next move accordingly. It also gives you a Light monster in the graveyard to remove later on for Freed the Brave Wanderer.

You may notice that there are no real tribute monsters in this deck. The only monster with 5 or more stars is Cyber Dragon, and it’s almost never tribute summoned. This is something that I decided on long ago back when I was testing Airknight Parshath and Zaborg the Thunder Monarch. Specifically, I wanted to make it so that every monster in my deck was immediately playable. One of the biggest drawbacks to this sort of deck is that if you get no monsters at all, your counter traps aren’t going to help you win the game. Drawing monsters you can’t play is at least as bad as not having any at all. In fact, it’s usually worse. Thus cards like Soul of Purity and Light, Airknight Parshath, and Zaborg the Thunder Monarch were cut for Cyber Dragon and extra copies of Freed the Brave Wanderer. Freed, in particular, is very important to this deck. There are generally two ways you can take out the opponent’s Monarch and Chaos Sorcerer cards. The first is to negate the summoning with either Forced Back or Solemn Judgment. The second is to destroy them with Freed. Freed is almost like your own little Chaos Sorcerer in that it can remove just about any problematic face-up monster from the field for “free.”  Each time you activate Freed, you need to remove two Light attribute monsters in your graveyard from the game to destroy a monster with higher ATK than Freed. This is great for fueling your Return from the Different Dimension without fueling your opponent’s as well. It’s also a good solution the opponent’s Treeborn Frog that he or she keeps using to bring out Zaborg. Finally, Freed lets you break through your opponent’s last-ditch attempts to stabilize with cards like Chaos Sorcerer. It’s handy in a variety of situations, and you’ll be happy just about every time you draw it.

Unfortunately, while the deck is very conceptually sound, there are a few complications that will probably arise at least once in any given event. First off, there’s going to be a game where you don’t draw any monsters at all. I hate it when this happens, but there isn’t really anything to be done about it unless you wish to up the monster count (which I don’t). The other problem comes when your opponent packs three copies of Royal Decree. In that case, it comes down to how fast he or she gets them and if you get any monsters to help you out. It’s entirely possible to win games with Decree on the field if you also have an Artemis out. Remember, you only need to activate a counter trap to draw a card with Artemis; it doesn’t necessarily need to do anything. Thus, you can cycle through your trap cards and try to get to the ones that you can use. Also, your side deck is handy for this matchup since it’s likely to include cards to help you oppose Decree-based decks. The so-called “Recruiter” Chaos decks aren’t really a problem thanks to Banisher of the Radiance, but if they manage to get your Artemis because of Creature Swap, you could be in trouble. It’s best to give them face-down monsters for Creature Swap if at all possible, because if you use Forced Back when they flip over your Skelengel (or whatever you gave them), you get the monster back to your hand. It’s a pretty handy trick, and it’s greatly aided me in matches against Swap-based decks.

My final word of advice for anyone who wants to give this deck a try is practice. This is a difficult deck to play, and it’s easy to get discouraged if you’re just picking it up expecting to do well. I’ve had a couple of players at my local store try it out, and they didn’t even make it through the day before they went back to Chaos Return. It’s tough, but I think it’s worth it. With this deck, you can win game one against any other deck strictly by virtue of it being a counter-trap-based deck. It’s an incredibly useful quality which I greatly miss when I play other decks. If you plan on giving this deck a shot, I recommend starting off by playing it as is with no modifications. There are about three months of testing that have gone into this build, so take the time to learn to play it properly in its current form before you go modifying things. It’ll be much easier on you that way. I find this deck to be a lot of fun to play, and many people I’ve met at events agree that it’s also a blast to watch. Our new Forbidden list is only a few weeks away from taking effect, and I can’t wait to see what the next format has in store for the counter Fairy deck. Until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!

Jerome McHale

jcmchale@andrew.cmu.edu

Next Week: Power of the Duelist has given the Vehicroids a fresh batch of excellent cards to work with. Next time, we’ll drill, submerge, and steamroll our way to victory!