When was the last time you looked at a new set of monsters and said, “Wow, someone is going to do some serious damage with these guys?” For some people, the answer might be the Cyberdark monsters from Cyberdark Impact, but for most people, I’d bet the answer is Dark World from Elemental Energy. Most of the time, it takes a while for players to figure out the ins and outs of a new group of monsters.
Every once in a while, however, a new group of monsters comes along that doesn’t require any extra time or support to grab your eye. You’ll look them over and think to yourself, “Gee, these would be really good if they had a—oh wait, they do?! Awesome!” Grandmaster of the Six Samurai and the rest of the Six Samurai monsters from Strike of Neos fall very heavily into this category. The sum total of their powers is nothing short of total field domination, and that’s before you add in the fact that they have their own ATK pump, search effect, and a recursion card. That’s also before you add in the fact that they’re all Warriors and benefit from everything that all other Warriors benefit from. After I got home from the sneak preview, I opened up all my packs and built a deck out of the new Six Samurai cards. I didn’t even do my “pace around the room and mumble incoherently” routine that I usually do when I’m building decks. No special tweaks or metagame considerations—just the Samurai I thought were the best and the best supporting cards I had on me at the time. When I had finished sleeving up the deck, I went to bed, woke up the next morning, went to a local tournament that was trying out the new Forbidden list, and went undefeated on the day. How good are the Six Samurai? Really good.
Monsters: 20
2 Great Shogun Shien
3 Grandmaster of the Six Samurai
2 The Six Samurai - Kamon
3 The Six Samurai - Irou
3 The Six Samurai - Yaichi
3 The Six Samurai - Zanji
2 Exiled Force
2 D. D. Assailant
Spells: 14
1 Heavy Storm
1 Mystical Space Typhoon
1 Confiscation
1 Snatch Steal
1 Premature Burial
2 The Warrior Returning Alive
2 Reinforcement of the Army
2 My Body as a Shield
3 Enemy Controller
Traps: 6
3 Sakuretsu Armor
1 Mirror Force
1 Ring of Destruction
1 Call of the Haunted
People seem to be treating their monsters as totally expendable commodities of late. This is certainly the case in a Gadget deck where you always have another in hand, but against Gadgets and in nearly every other deck, monsters are both valuable and limited in supply. Search effects are few in number (as are generic recursion abilities) so it makes a lot of sense to keep your monsters alive and well. Now, when I say alive and well, I don’t just mean safe from attack. I’m also talking about keeping them safe from the huge number of removal effects that most decks pack these days. Sure, we all play Heavy Storm, but that’s just one card in 40 that only takes care of non-chainable trap threats. Fortunately, the Six Samurai have a bit of a built-in “get out of the way of Smashing Ground free” card. Well, sort of free anyway. Each Samurai (and Shien!) has a special ability that lets you substitute the destruction of another Six Samurai in place of itself. This is incredibly handy when it comes to keeping a particular Samurai in play, and the applications are a lot deeper than they first seem. Remember, Samurai can substitute each other for any sort of destruction—not just opposing card effects, but your own as well, in addition to destruction by battle. I’ll get back to some of the neat tricks you can pull with this later on.
The basic idea of the Six Samurai deck is to encourage a teamwork-based toolbox style of play, something that Warriors never really had to deal with in the past. While cards like Mystic Swordsman LV2 could get the job done on their own, their stats were generally weak, and most of the time they wouldn’t live past the turn they were summoned. Each of the Six Samurai monsters has a unique toolbox effect paired with generally excellent statistics and only one weakness: you need another Six Samurai with a different name in order to claim any of the effects. Of course, thanks to Upper Deck Entertainment, we’ve got a very special Six Samurai that can easily take care of this requirement. Grandmaster of the Six Samurai is just as good as I had expected him to be, if not better. The Warrior analogue of Cyber Dragon is the extra boost that the Samurai needed to move from sometimes dominating some matchups to usually dominating many. He’s the thing that makes the first turn triple summon feasible. Grandmaster also allows you to execute a toolbox strategy on your very first turn. I find that dropping Yaichi and Grandmaster is quite effective and usually leaves the opponent’s field bare. An Irou/Grandmaster combination frequently has a similar field-clearing effect.
The sheer power of the strategy is only surpassed by the speed at which it can be accomplished. If you get nailed by a Samurai and Grandmaster on the first turn, it’s a lot worse than Cyber Dragon and Mystic Swordsman LV2. You can’t use removal on Grandmaster because he’ll just pop right back. You could attack the other Samurai, but the opponent might substitute Grandmaster for destruction. Sure, the opponent won’t get Grandmaster back if he or she does that, but the above deck is also running both Call of the Haunted and Premature Burial in addition to a pair of The Warrior Returning Alive cards. Do you really think you can keep the Samurai off the field by taking them out one at a time? (Here’s a spoiler: no, you can’t.) In order to mount a successful assault against a Samurai player, you need to have some mass removal on your side. You’re allowed three copies of Lightning Vortex. Consider them. Also, consider Needle Ceiling. It was once good against fields full of Sheep tokens, and it’s good again here. Torrential Tribute and Mirror Force are already in nearly every deck, and they work out fine as well. Of course, there is a pair of My Body as a Shield cards in this Samurai deck, but the Samurai player isn’t always going to have one at the ready. Most other builds I’ve seen of the deck don’t even run the card. Even if you do suspect that your opponent has a My Body down, there are still some tricks you can do to get around a wall of Samurai. Grandmaster cannot shunt destruction away from himself, so destroying him in battle is the first step towards winning. Rush Recklessly is really useful for that purpose, especially when combined with Asura Priest. In fact, regular combat is the thing that the Six Samurai fear the most. All of the special abilities of these cards (aside from Great Shogun Shien and the destruction shunting power) are only active on their controller’s turn. As a Samurai player, you want to minimize the impact that this vulnerability has on your game. You can do it through standard defensive traps and Enemy Controller. This can also be accomplished by playing plenty of cards to bring back your Warriors should they happen to fall in combat.
You’re probably interested in knowing how the Samurai match up against other popular decks. While the new Limited list severely hurt the Destiny Hero combo decks that ruled Shonen Jump Championship St. Louis, the deck type is by no means dead. Newer versions compliant for the March 1st list simply win in two to five turns instead of one to three. Fortunately for the Samurai, if they can pull out an early Great Shogun Shien with a My Body as a Shield set, the game is essentially over. Like all combo decks, the Destiny Hero deck has to play a ton of spells in one turn in order to win. Chimeratech doesn’t fair much better. The “Rusty Bucket o’ Bolts” strategy is the only build of the deck that can get to its Future Fusion and Overload Fusion cards consistently, but even that deck needs to play more than one spell in a single turn in order to win.
Samurai mirror matches are, in a word, awful—like most mirror matches really, though this one comes down to who gets a better Samurai/Grandmaster pairing first (or alternatively, who can triple summon first). This was the match I had to play in the finals of that tournament, and it went to game 5 thanks to arbitrarily explosive turns and Ring of Destruction. Phoenix-based decks actually have a decent shot against the Samurai in game 1 if they can drop a Phoenix or two fast enough, but in my experience, this deck is too fast for the likes of Phoenix or Zombie to handle. After side-decking, there’s a good chance that Dimensional Fissure and D.D. Survivor are involved, and that just makes Phoenix lose. Monarchs never get off the ground and Gadgets get sick of Grandmaster really fast. All in all, it takes some cleverness in deck construction to beat the Samurai. This is, unfortunately, being written before SJC Houston, so I don’t know how this or any other deck is faring post-March 1st yet. Judging from my brief experience, however, the Six Samurai are going to be a serious contender in any event you play in. Dusting off those Kinetic Soldier cards is suddenly starting to look like a good idea.
School of Duel is back this week, so make sure you go check it out! Until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!
Jerome McHale
jcmchale@andrew.cmu.edu
NEXT WEEK: In anticipation of Shrink’s mass release in Strike of Neos Special Edition, we’ll show you a deck that contains three of them.