Previously we’ve seen Nicolas Nunez make valiant efforts at tournaments like Shonen Jump Championship Columbus and Shonen Jump Baltimore, pounding away with innovative builds of Gadgets. He’s never quite made it to Day 2 yet, but persistence and a major paradigm shift here today may change all that. Few competitors are playing Spellcasters this weekend, but Nicolas Nunez is certainly one of the most promising! A control deck has never been so aggressive. Here’s what he’s running . . .

Monsters: 15

3 Gemini Elf

3 Skilled Dark Magician

3 Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer

3 Thunder King Rai-Oh

1 Breaker the Magical Warrior

1 Familiar-Possessed – Hiita

1 Familiar-Possessed – Eria

Spells: 7

3 Secret Village of the Spellcasters

2 Terraforming

2 Lightning Vortex

Traps: 18

3 Solemn Judgment

3 Dark Bribe

3 Skill Drain

3 Royal Oppression

3 Dimensional Prison

2 Phoenix Wing Wind Blast 

1 Mirror Force

No Night’s End Sorcerers or Tempest Magicians here; Nunez is all about beatsticks. This deck doesn’t run a single monster with fewer than 1800 ATK points, and the two key cards to his strategy are Secret Village of the Spellcasters and Skill Drain.

Together, those two cards shut down TeleDAD’s ability to play spell-driven combos, and slash its chances of resolving important monster effects like those of Elemental Hero Stratos, Krebons, and Dark Grepher. Should a Synchro hit the field, Skill Drain will turn it into a vanilla beatstick that can then be dealt with by Nunez’s considerable lineup of defensive traps. 

Those two cards have also guided all of Nunez’s monster choices. He’s keeping every one of his Spellcaster monsters big in order to make sure that Secret Village of the Spellcasters is never shutting down his own spells (what few of them he uses). Skill Drain rules out the use of smaller effect-based Spellcasters, but Nunez is still running the handful of bigger Spellcasters that are just too good to give up: Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer and Breaker the Magical Warrior. Sheer ATK value is so important to the deck that Nunez has even gone so far as to run one copy each of Familiar-Possessed – Hiita and Familiar-Possessed – Eria, two more Spellcasters with 1850 ATK. Gemini Elf and Skilled Dark Magician are naturally included as well, bringing six 1900 ATK monsters to the table.

The only monster seeing play here that isn’t a Spellcaster is Thunder King Rai-Oh. Nunez is packing three copies of it, giving him three more big attackers as well as high-utility tech against special summons. They complement his three copies of Royal Oppression perfectly, making this deck extremely difficult to special summon against.

The cool part is how Nunez’s defensive infrastructure ties everything together. Solemn Judgment is frequently seen in decks that need to protect Royal Oppression, Skill Drain, or both, and it definitely makes sense as a protective measure for Secret Village as well. But you don’t normally see all three of those cards in the same deck, and because Nunez is running them all together he can afford to play three copies of Dark Bribe in addition to Solemn. That makes it very hard to disrupt any of his continuous or field cards. Granted, that many defensive cards along with so many potentially redundant continuous cards can create problems of utility, but since every single one of Nunez’s monsters is easy to play, he compensates for that. Just drawing two of his fifteen beatsticks could be enough to win a duel in today’s environment, so the math on Nunez’s deck is a lot better than it may look.

Just to make sure that’s the case, the rest of the deck is focused entirely on removal. Two copies of Lightning Vortex, three Dimensional Prison, two Phoenix Wing Wind Blast, and Mirror Force make for a deck that’s difficult to approach. The synergy here is phenomenal; Nunez has done a great job of identifying what his key cards accomplish on a strategic level, and he’s done an even better job of capitalizing on their full range of capabilities.

The one thing that might make this deck better than other Spellcaster builds that have recently been proposed is simplicity. This deck does a limited number of things, but together they comprise an extremely robust strategy: gee, where have we seen that philosophy before? That’s right: Nunez’s knowledge of efficient redundancy, lifted from his extensive record playing Gadgets, brings a unique element to this deck that may just take him to Day 2.