I must say, it’s been a real struggle waiting for Force of the Breaker to become legal for premier events, and it’s clear that I’m not the only one who feels that way. There were plenty of people at Shonen Jump Championship Philadelphia who had initially written “3 Raiza the Storm Monarch” on their decklists only to have to scratch them out and replace them with something else before the start of the event. For the next SJC, however, there are no holds barred, and players will be able to unleash all the decks they’ve been putting together since the Sneak Preview for the first time in a major competition. More importantly, Minneapolis is the last SJC before U.S. Nationals, and that makes it and Canadian Nationals all the more important, since they will be the only windows that let us see into the development of the metagame heading into Columbus.
At the end of the last School of Duel, I posed the question of which Force of the Breaker card would make the biggest impact at Nationals. Out of the replies I received, there were only three distinct answers, and responses were split about evenly between them. First off, people are saying that Crystal Beast Sapphire Pegasus and the associated Crystal Beast monsters are going to swarm over the competition. I can certainly agree that they’re good enough to see serious play, and depending on the build, take some Day 2 spots. Second, people were citing Sky Scourge Norleras and its Chaos Emperor Dragon-style effect as too game-breaking to ignore. People like replacements for Forbidden cards, so Norleras will certainly see some play in at least two distinct styles as I’ll discuss later. Finally, there was the contingent of players who went with the obvious choice, Raiza the Storm Monarch. He’s a Monarch, and he’s really good. Not much needs to be said about why he’s going to be one of the most influential cards in the coming weeks, but a definite discussion of “how” is in order. In fact, I think I’ll start by talking about that.
Philadelphia has shown us that Monarchs are back in style, except that Monarch players are now using Destiny Hero cards to add extra speed, power, and drawing capabilities to the deck. In fact, it was this very type of deck that took the entire tournament. The most likely impact that Raiza will have is that he will completely replace Zaborg the Thunder Monarch in Monarch builds, and the Monarch counts will be restructured to make sure that Raiza is played in threes. After all, Raiza has the versatility of Granmarg the Rock Monarch and then some, in addition to being the most obnoxious Monarch in the game. Throwing a card back on top of a player’s deck is huge, but it’s also a rare effect to find in the game. Finding the ability in a Monarch is nothing short of spectacular, and it guarantees that we’re going to see a lot more in the way of chainable spells and traps that can make use of themselves and monsters to ensure that nothing gets bounced by Raiza. Being forced to redraw a card is brutal, especially when the card in question isn’t very useful to you in the first place.
Additionally, the existence of Raiza is going to lead more people to main both Pulling the Rug and Trap Dustshoot, as the combined power of these cards will help enormously against Monarchs (in addition to locking Demise OTK out of the game). In order to counter these “Perfect Circle” decks with Raiza, a large number of players will likely go back to main-decking Banisher of the Radiance and side decking D.D. Crow as well. Lazaro Bellido may have made a play error with his Crow during the final match at Philadelphia that caused him some serious harm, but if he had played it right, Jessy Samek wouldn’t have been able to go as crazy as he did. For the record, the best ways to rid Destiny Hero - Malicious from the graveyard with D.D. Crow are to chain the Crow’s ability to Destiny Draw or whatever other card pitches him to fulfill a discard cost. Crow also helps out against cards that seek to revive Destiny Hero - Disk Commander, so expect to see him in increased numbers during the month of June.
Moving on to the threat of Sky Scourge Norleras, there are two main builds of it that I’ve personally seen and/or built. The first one attempts to set up an OTK
situation in which you activate A Feather of the Phoenix to put
Dimension Fusion on top of your deck before summoning Norleras and activating its effect. Upon resolution, the field is clear and
Dimension Fusion is now in your hand. This strategy can go wrong if the opponent has out-of-play cards or you’re running low on life points, but it
does work to some degree. My favorite build involving Norleras, however, is one that combines elements of the Counter Fairy deck with a number of Dark/Fiend monsters that only uses Norleras as a reset button should things get out of hand. Norleras decks have great matchups against
Perfect Circle due to their ability to swing the duel in your favor any time it’s your turn and you have 1000 life points to spare. It doesn’t matter if your opponent has whittled you down to nothing as long as you can resolve the effect, and that’s going to be a major factor drawing people to this neo-Chaos monster. Once again,
Banisher of the Radiance is a huge thorn in this deck’s side, as are main-decked copies of
Trap Dustshoot.
Pulling the Rug, on the other hand, doesn’t do a thing against the deck and should likely be sided out should you encounter such a deck. For
SJC Minneapolis, we’re likely going to see everyone playing the Feather version of the deck rather than the Counter Fairy version, primarily because the Feather version has a distinct win condition in the form of
Dimension Fusion.
Finally, let’s talk about Crystal Beast Sapphire Pegasus and its brethren. I saw a lot of high-profile players testing out Crystal Beast decks on Day 2 of Philadelphia, and I even brought my own build to play once the event was finished. Looking at my build from last week as an example, I would say that the number one problem with it is that it needs more removal cards to help it get through Gravekeeper’s Spy, Monarchs, and the like. Removal is very important to the Crystal Beasts as they frequently play like decks based on Return from the Different Dimension. I’m of the opinion that the only thing stopping most people from giving Crystal Beasts a try is the scarcity of the requisite Crystal Beast Sapphire Pegasus and Rare Value cards.
We will definitely see Crystal Beasts in one form or another at Minneapolis, but whether we see straight beatdown, a deck based on Ancient City - Rainbow Ruins, or a Crystal Abundance combo deck is up in the air. Most players tend to lean towards Rainbow Ruins with Crystal Abundance backup, but I’m not a personal fan of splicing the various strategies together. When it comes to playing against Crystal Beasts, it should be noted that most of the really good Crystal Beast cards require two or more Crystal Beast monsters in your spell and trap zone to work. Rare Value is an excellent example of this kind of card, as is Crystal Beast Ruby Carbuncle since Carbuncle is only useful if you have a few Crystal Beasts in your back row to swarm with. That said, any way you can remove the Crystal Beasts from the game helps. Players have been shunning D.D. Warrior Lady and D. D. Assailant of late, but both of these cards can remove a Sapphire Pegasus from play—leaving the Crystal Beast player incapable of re-using the powerful monster. Ancient City - Rainbow Ruins is going to be the card to watch out for in your matches against Crystal Beasts, and it’s extremely problematic since it can protect itself as long as you have one Crystal Beast in the spell and trap zone.
Fortunately, you’re able to chain to the activation of City with something like Twister or Mystical Space Typhoon to destroy it before it successfully resolves and becomes immune to destruction. In addition, just because it can’t be destroyed doesn’t mean you can’t remove it from the field in other ways. Giant Trunade really wrecks Crystal Beasts in general, forcing your opponent to pick everything up and spend precious time getting his or her field set up again to regain control of the game. Raiza the Storm Monarch is another excellent way to put a cramp in the plans of the Crystal Beasts, as builds based on Rainbow Ruin aren’t likely to main-deck copies of Pulling the Rug, since they like to keep one spell and trap card zone open to play things like Rare Value. Rug forces them to commit one zone to the chance of you having a Monarch, and if you don’t, that slot becomes useless to them.
Between the three decks, I suspect that the one we’ll see the most of is the Perfect Circle deck, simply because of how good Raiza is (beyond the fact that it won the last SJC). If you take its recent success into account, I’d think that the only thing stopping people from playing that deck and ignoring the others is cost. Again, cost may prevent people from playing Crystal Beasts, but it won’t stop them from playing Norleras decks or Demise OTK should they feel that other duelists will stop being ready to beat the Ritual monster. With the Limitation on Magical Stone Excavation set to go into effect on June 1st, players will likely completely abandon Diamond Dude Turbo. Even if the Limitation doesn’t actually take away DDT’s competitive status, the fact that Demise will almost always beat it in game 1 will pull people away, leaving only a few stragglers who like the deck and/or are extremely proficient at playing it. Finally, anyone who manages to put together a functional form of a Crystal Beast deck by the time Minneapolis rolls around is likely to play it. The Crystal Beasts are extremely good, and there are a lot of players out there who dedicated their entire day at the Sneak Preview ensuring they had a playset of all the requisite cards. Side decks will likely remain the same as they have been for the past couple of Jumps—except with more Banishers—and Pulling the Rug will cement its spot in the main deck thanks to its ability to trump Sapphire Pegasus.
School is out, or going to be out, very shortly for students all over the country, so I’ll leave you to your finals without any distractions or questions to answer this time around. Since I’ve already talked about everything that I usually talk about during the pre-game report at Jumps, the pre-game at Minneapolis will consist of what the players think will happen at the Jump and the various things that they prepared for when testing for the event. It should be a very illuminating experience, so if you can’t make it to Minneapolis, be sure to check out the coverage of the event right here. Until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!
Jerome McHale
jcmchale@andrew.cmu.edu
HOMEWORK: Between your actual teachers and Vowler, I think I can give you this week off.