Despite his defeat just moments ago, Corey Scoggins still has a strong chance at making Day 2 this weekend. While some readers probably understood exactly what was happening in his round 5 feature match against John Jensen, there’s a good chance that a lot of you had no idea what was going on. Don’t feel bad—that’s how most of his opponents had no idea what was going on in their matches either.

Step 1 – Lose a lot of Life Points: This deck can’t win until its controller is really low on life points. Scoggins intends to eventually trade his life point total for his opponent’s, so the lower he can go, the better off he is in the long run. If the opponent plays passively, then Scoggins can just flip Wall of Revealing Light and pay thousands upon thousands of life points to get himself into the kill zone. That option of course has the added benefit of shutting down attacks as well, giving Scoggins control over the field and even time to draw into components of his win.

Step 2 – Set Delayed Damage Effects: Once Reversal Quiz is waiting in the wings, Scoggins needs to set cards that can deal damage when sent to the graveyard. His options are Black Pendant and Fuhma Shuriken, and he’s running three of each. At this point, the total damage generated by the Pendants and Shurikens he has set have to be equal to or greater than his own remaining life points.

Step 3 – Activate Reversal Quiz: Now the payoff! Scoggins will activate Reversal Quiz, and will resolve both of its effects in order. Its first effect will send all the cards in his hand and on the field to the graveyard, including the Pendants and Shurikens. The burn effect on each of those cards is a mandatory trigger effect, so while they can’t resolve until this chain has completely finished, they must resolve afterwards, and will for their own chain. After sending all of his cards to the graveyard, Scoggins will call a monster, trap, or spell, trying to predict which will be on the top of his deck.

Step 4 – Pass the Quiz: He’ll usually call “spell,” because he’s running 35 of them. The only situation in which he won’t do so, is if he activated Pigeonholing Book of Spell or Big Eye’s flip effect recently. In that case he’ll know what the top card of his deck is and won’t have to guess. Even if he’s taking a blind stab at it though, he’s running 35 spells to 2 monsters and 3 traps. The odds of him not hitting a spell are terrible, which is good news for him.

Step 5 – Resolve Effects: Assuming Reversal Quiz’s call was made correctly, Scoggins’s opponent is now forced to trade life point totals with him, which means he or she will be left with a very low life point count. Once Reversal Quiz’s second effect is over and life point totals have been traded, the current chain is finished resolving. At that point, the Pendant and Shuriken effects that were triggered by Reversal Quiz sending them to the graveyard still need to resolve, so they’ll form a chain in any order of Scoggins’s choosing. The order doesn’t matter: what counts is that at this point, the opponent has very few life points and is about to take enough burn damage to be defeated.

Pretty cool, huh?

In order to ensure that he gets to his Pendants, Shurikens, and Reversal Quizzes, Scoggins is running Magical Mallet, Reload, and Upstart Goblin. To shield his proverbial face and groin from harm while he draws into them, he’s got a HUGE amount of defensive effects and field control. Nightmare’s Steelcage, Messenger of Peace, Scapegoat, and a ton of other cards ward off attacks, while Fissure, Smashing Ground, and Ectoplasmer keep the opponent’s monsters in the graveyard where they belong. Ectoplasmer is especially cool, as it not only robs the opponent of a monster every turn to keep the field under control, but it actually forces them to burn Scoggins straight into his win condition.

Go ahead, think about that for a moment. Reflect on how amazingly brutal it is. Pretty sweet, huh?

How does it play? Well, at a panicked rate, hurtling towards its win condition. This deck rarely does anything differently based on matchup or an opposing player’s skill. Short of attempting to perhaps draw out spell or trap removal early on, or managing a Monarch deck’s copies of Mobius the Frost Monarch, it has a static aim to get to its equip spells and Reversal Quiz as fast as possible. Once it gets those cards in hand, it can worry about how it’s going to manage attacks or abuse Wall of Revealing Light in order to get low enough to win.

Like Vincent Tundo’s deck from US Nationals, this one happens to consist almost entirely of non-holo cards. Everything but Ectoplasmer is available as a rare or common, so if you’re looking for a highly competitive, very surprising deck to take to a 2007 Regional sometime soon, this might be the deck for you. I’ll be building one of these myself once I get home—it’s a blast to play, it’s incredibly different, and as of right now, Corey Scoggins is 6-1. Hope is still alive for a Top 8 appearance from Reversal Quiz!