A few weeks ago I took a look at Little City as played by Marco Cesario and the rest of Card Masters Gaming at Shonen Jump Championship Indianapolis. Little City is a great anti-meta deck with lots of potential, but little success. Being able to shut down the big three decks with Skill Drain and Royal Oppression is nothing to sneeze at, and Marco’s deck worked perfectly with those cards.
I was hoping that duelists who read the article would come to appreciate the importance of playing after you’ve set up the lockdown condition. It’s easy to make a decklist and pack it full of cards that will help you set up and achieve a certain game state. But what’s important is making sure you win the game after you’ve established your infrastructure. It’s lovely to be sitting on Skill Drain, Royal Oppression, Solemn Judgment, and two copies of Dark Bribe. You can probably guarantee the opponent won’t be special summoning monsters or using monster effects anytime soon. But you still need to win out from there.
Skill Drain-based decks always cause quite a stir at premier tournaments and players are always gathering around to see how the best player or best deck is doing. The results are always the same: someone reports back "they just lost because it turns out Skill Drain doesn’t stop direct attacks." The Gladiator Beast player always looks to be against the ropes. He or she used up any answers to Skill Drain and is reduced to plain old aggression, but as the duel presses on and the Skill Drain player starts drawing more and more cards devoted to making the setup, the beatdown actually becomes a winning strategy.
This is the reason Skill Drain decks haven’t seen much success outside of a Burn deck. Burn builds include stopping attacks in their setup, and fight back with just one Wave-Motion Cannon. Beatdown style Skill Drain needs more than just a setup—it needs to flow like a regular deck. You need the consistent cards that will function as defense against any threat.
At Worlds, the Korean Champion, Jung-Ho Ahn made waves with a Skill Drain build of his own. The differences between Marco’s Little City and his are significant, but the main idea (and the reason both were successful) remains the same. Let’s take a look:
What you see before you is one of the best versions of a battle-oriented Skill Drain deck ever made. Remember that a different Forbidden and Limited list was in use at Worlds. Test Tiger and Elemental Hero Stratos weren’t allowed. That meant that the strength of Gladiator Beasts was placed into question. The security of Cold Wave + Test Tiger is what makes the deck so dominant, and Elemental Hero Stratos adds the consistency. The metagame was going to be diverse and every player would be worried about Gladiator Beasts, Lightsworn, or Dark Armed Dragon.
Alarm bells should be going off in your head right now. "Hey, that sounds an awful lot like the current metagame." Although Gladiator Beasts haven’t been weakened, and one could hardly call the introduction of Gladiator Beast War Chariot or Gladiator Beast Equeste a burden, the rest of the field has been brought to a level where it can compete. The introduction of Synchros to Dark Armed builds and Charge of the Light Brigade to Lightsworn decks has changed the way the decks have to play, giving them a chance to knock Gladiator Beasts off the throne.
At times like these, the metagame is ripe for a deck like Jung-Ho Ahn’s to tear it up. Players have dropped a lot of standard choices, like Dimensional Prison or Snipe Hunter, which are usually able to lend a hand when taking on a deck like Ahn’s. Their strategy is to win contests in battle and use monster effects to dominate the battle phase. That’s not going to happen when they run into a field of bigger monsters with Skill Drain backing them up.
Much like Marco’s variant of Little City, Ahn’s build aims to impact the battle phase by putting up monsters that just can’t be destroyed in battle. Fusilier Dragon, the Dual-Mode Beast is a whopping 2800 ATK with Skill Drain up, beating all but the biggest trump cards in terms of raw ATK power. With Elemental Hero Neos Alius and Cyber Dragon on his side as well, Ahn can be pretty confident he’ll have the monster with the biggest ATK on the field most of the time. For those rare instances in which he doesn’t, Ahn plays three copies of Exiled Force. Not even Gladiator Beast Heraklinos can stop this simple one-for-one trade from going down.
The only other monster Ahn played was D.D. Survivor. Alongside Macro Cosmos the Survivor engine provides a monster that is essentially immune to destruction by battle. It’ll return every turn and is big enough to deal with most monsters out there. This is exactly the type of thing that will prevent Ahn from losing to a rush of lower ATK Gladiator Beasts. Survivor cards also offer a means to tribute for Cyber Dragon if need be, or more importantly, a way to bust out the 2800 ATK Fusilier Dragon, the Dual-Mode Beast when Skill Drain isn’t available.
Macro Cosmos is a very powerful card in the current metagame that doesn’t see play for one reason: Gladiator Beasts can take advantage of it. They don’t really need the graveyard and Gladiator Beast Bestiari is always at the ready, just begging for a reason to tag in. However, Cosmos stops the other top decks dead in their tracks. Dark Armed Dragon players base their entire deck around manipulating the graveyard and if Cosmos is on the field from start to finish a Lightsworn player simply can’t win. These two decks are dependant on the graveyard like no deck has ever been before, and Macro Cosmos can break them in half.
To add to the protection of these cards are three copies of Dark Bribe and main-decked copies of Mystical Space Typhoon and Dust Tornado. The latter two cards are very important. Chances are they’ll be used on face-down copies of Solemn Judgment, or during the end phase to take on opposing spell and trap removal. Either way, you’re stopping problem cards before they can be activated and helping to 
maintain the setup. The added bonus is that this opens up your Solemn Judgment cards to be used on the troublesome monster cards. Without Skill Drain, many monsters can be a problem and Solemn will be your best answer. With Skill Drain, Solemn’s going to be your response to monsters that could be trouble just because of their ATK strength. Judgment Dragon and Dark Armed Dragon don’t have to use their effects to destroy a Skill Drain deck. They just have to have twice the ATK of any other monster.
Ahn’s planned for this as well. Three copies of Dimensional Prison will take care of problem monsters if Skill Drain is up. The most important lesson from the article on Little City was that you must be able to compete in the condition you’ve set up for both players. Dimensional Prison is perfect for that. Your opponent’s only useful cards left are big monsters, and Dimensional Prison takes them neatly out of play.
Like the other traps in his deck, Ahn can use the Prison to maximum effect without Skill Drain as well. Removing attacking Gladiators puts a real damper on the deck’s flow. Opponents lose monsters that were supposed to become either Laquari or Bestiari, and now their graveyard doesn’t have a Gladiator Beast in it. Because the Gladiator Beast deck plays more spell and traps than it does summonable Gladiator Beasts, they’ve probably lost one of the two in-hand Gladiators. Stop the next one and the Gladiator player is going to be hard-pressed to make any moves.
The final card I want to touch on is Burden of the Mighty. What a card for this deck! Think of Burden as an equip card that will put all of your monsters above your opponent’s. The reason we don’t see equips these days is twofold. The first is that they only add to the on-field commitment, giving your opponent extra cards to destroy with Bestiari or Heavy Storm. The second is that destroying the equip and the monster together is usually as easy as just destroying one of them. The equip goes down when the monster is out, and when the equip is destroyed the monster usually isn’t far behind it.
Burden of the Mighty avoids the second problem simply by being a continuous spell card. Lose the monster and Burden sticks around to help your next monster. It can be used throughout the duel, making it worthwhile. The first problem is avoided because the cards Ahn wants to stop are all spell and trap destroyers anyway. Heavy Storm, Gladiator Beast Bestiari, and Lyla, Lightsworn Sorceress are problematic cards for the deck without Burden, and Ahn’s going to devote all his resources to make sure these cards don’t see play. Therefore he can safely play the Burden, knowing that using a Solemn Judgment on Heavy Storm just to stop it from destroying two Burden cards isn’t a waste because that Solemn probably would have had to be used on the Heavy regardless.
Ahn’s deck is amazing. The way all his cards support one another adds tremendously to the consistency of the deck and is the primary reason why he saw so much success at Worlds. If players are able to take note of why people like Ahn and Marco Cesario have been winning, I expect we’ll see more and more Skill Drain decks breaking into the spotlight.
—Matt Peddle