Though there have been many changes in the new Forbidden and Limited lists, the most popular and controversial one has surely been the return of Graceful Charity to the game. Of all the card-drawing effects in the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG, Graceful Charity has always required the most precision and, well, grace to use properly. It’s interesting from a strategic standpoint, because when you play it, it forces you to make a choice on the spot: which two cards do I not need in order to play this game?
Obviously, players have found various ways to get around dealing with the consequences of this choice, but many of these lie in the power of various other limited cards, and therefore the smart player shouldn’t rely on them. This is why I often advise duelists to wait before throwing down Graceful Charity if they draw it in their opening hand. If you’re going first and have no idea what your opponent is holding, you have the highest capacity for misplaying it. You also give your opponent an advantage by revealing two cards that you aren’t holding as a result of your turn 1 Graceful Charity. Players found ways around this as well, often holding on to Graceful Charity until they had Sinister Serpent in hand to ensure that at least one of their discards didn’t matter in the slightest.
Fast forward to today. There is no Sinister Serpent anymore, but Elemental Energy has provided duelists with what many top players consider the next best things in terms of discard fodder: the Dark World monsters. The past three Shonen Jump Championships have shown an increasing trend towards splashing Goldd, Wu-Lord of Dark World into decks as an attempt to combat Spirit Reaper and Don Zaloog, and this trend shows no sign of stopping now that you can grab a random free monster or two off of Graceful Charity. The thing is, it seems a bit random to use extra high-level monsters that are practically vanilla if you tribute summon or revive them. I’d much rather have a deck where free monsters and extra draws are frequent, and where they come attached to other useful effects. In short, I’d much rather just play the Dark World deck.
“Heart of Darkness”
Monsters: 20
2 Goldd, Wu-Lord of Dark World
2 Sillva, Warlord of Dark World
3 Broww, Huntsman of Dark World
3 Brron, Mad King of Dark World
3 Giant Orc
2 Dark Necrofear
1 Sangan
1 Night Assailant
1 D. D. Warrior Lady
2 Magician of Faith
Spells: 11
1 Graceful Charity
1 Snatch Steal
1 Heavy Storm
1 Mystical Space Typhoon
2 Smashing Ground
1 Nobleman of Crossout
2 Dark World Lightning
2 Gateway to Dark World
Traps: 9
3 Sakuretsu Armor
1 Mirror Force
1 Torrential Tribute
1 Call of the Haunted
2 Deck Devastation Virus
1 Dark Deal
The primary focus of this deck is to lord over control-based decks and outrun aggressive decks by combining a huge removal package with plenty of beatdown power and a side of Fiend support. The most important cards in the deck are Brron and Dark World Lightning, because both have a built-in mechanism to help you dump the cards you need to dump in order to cycle through your deck and summon extra monsters. Remember, there is no Dark Hole anymore, so feel free to put as many monsters on to the field as you like. Just remember that your opponent might have both Mirror Force and Torrential Tribute waiting for you somewhere in his or her deck, so keep those two cards in mind if you haven’t seen them yet.
Now, there are a couple ways you can get around the threat of Torrential Tribute or Bottomless Trap Hole. Both are often seen as infallible ways to deal with massive special summoning of monsters, but as many players have begun to discover, they can’t always do the job if the opponent is clever enough.
Both of these cards have a couple of blind spots that you can use to your advantage. First off, neither can be activated during the damage step, so any Goldd or Sillva that you summon by discarding it to Brron’s effect can’t be hit with Bottomless Trap Hole and your field can’t be cleared by Torrential Tribute. The other way to get around these traps is through the punishment effects of your Dark World monsters. For example, if your opponent somehow discards Goldd from your hand, such as through Spirit Reaper or by a spell altered by Dark Deal, then its effect is activated and you choose targets to be destroyed. When the effect resolves, Goldd is summoned and then the targets are immediately destroyed. This all occurs during the resolution of a single link of the chain, and there is no point between the summoning and the destroying where your opponent can find the proper timing to activate any traps in response to a summon.
The next question, then, is how can we put any of this to good use? As I’ve already said, Graceful Charity is supposed to allow you to decide what cards you think you can do without during a given duel. All these discard effects make it much easier to use Graceful Charity without any real repercussions as long as you do one simple thing: never discard a spell or trap to Graceful Charity unless you absolutely have to do so in order to survive the turn or win the game immediately. Just let Dark World Lightning do its thing and ensure that the cards you discard to Graceful Charity and Dark World Lightning aren’t truly lost. Goldd and Sillva will pop right back to the field and Broww will let you draw an extra card. Any Fiend you discard is fuel for one of the two Dark Necrofears, and Night Assailant lets you pull back Magician of Faith as well, if you have one in the graveyard.
Dark World Lightning serves a dual purpose as slightly less functional copies of both Nobleman of Crossout and Mystical Space Typhoon, respectively. Generally, you’ll want to use it against face-down spells or traps, because I can say with absolute certainty that it’s worse to run headlong into a Mirror Force than it is to reveal a face-down Spirit Reaper or Dekoichi the Battlechanted Locomotive. Why? Because this deck takes advantage of both copies of Deck Devastation Virus that we are now allowed to use.
Deck Devastation Virus is the bane of Flip-Flop Control and other decks that like to rely on monsters with low ATK values and nasty effects. That includes burn decks, Cyber-Stein decks, Zach Austin’s deck, Warrior Toolbox variants, Tomato Control, Merchant Pot Turbo (which doesn’t quite exist anymore), and any other weenie-based strategies you can think of. This is one of the primary reasons that I’m running three copies of Giant Orc. They do their job and take out Cyber Dragon, then are tributed off to the Virus when Spirit Reaper or whatever tries to poke them with a pillow. You may take one or two hits from something like Blade Knight, but that’s a small price to pay to look at the opponent’s hand and every card that he or she draws for three to six turns, destroying any little effect monsters that he or she plans on using to win.
The one or two hits you take after activating Deck Devastation Virus are also fairly meaningless when you consider that Giant Orc is also a Fiend, and it puts you one step closer to dropping Dark Necrofear on the table. If you hadn’t noticed, Necrofear has an extremely large DEF value, making Smashing Ground seem like a less-than-ideal solution to the problem at hand. Even if your opponent gets rid of Necrofear, he or she can’t press the attack, because it’ll be right back at the end of the turn to steal that attacker and let you swing back next turn. Heck, you don’t even have to deal with Smashing Ground if you don’t want to . . . so long as you have Dark Deal down.
Dark Deal is easily the most underestimated of any of the Dark World support cards, and I honestly can’t figure out why. Sure, you pay 1000 life points and end up giving up a card from your hand, but when that investment comes back as a 2300 ATK monster that destroys two cards on the opponent’s field, puts two from his or her hand on the bottom of the deck, or lets you draw two cards, it kind of evens out. It’s almost like a trap-based Magical Scientist that always negates a spell and then can produce the effect of Delinquent Duo, Pot of Greed, or a double-Raigeki Break. The only real problems are the need to have a card in hand to activate it and the limitation that only lets it alter normal spells. You may not be able to stop Snatch Steal, Premature Burial, Mystical Space Typhoon, or Scapegoat, but pretty much everything else that sees major play is fair game.
Dark Deal is also an absolute necessity in Dark World mirror matches, since blocking Graceful Charity and opposing copies of Dark World Lightning is the key to winning the match. It’s an added bonus that your Dark World effects make your opponent lose more. Just watch out, because he or she will probably be trying to do it to you as well. Matches against Cyber Dragon-based Beatdown decks shouldn’t be particularly problematic, unless he or she is playing multiple copies of Kycoo the Ghost Destroyer in his or her main deck. Kycoo can mess you up a bit by stopping you from summoning Dark Necrofear and removing the cards that you would want to remove for it, which is always bad. It can also make your Gateway to Dark World a dead card if you don’t draw it soon enough.
Just remember—the number-one mistake made by players new to Dark World is that they drop their hand too early. Dark World is a test in managing your resources properly. If you succeed, you’re next to unstoppable, but if you fail, you’ll open the door for an opponent to play circles around you.
Shonen Jump Baltimore is almost here, and with it will come the first wave of decks to beat for the new format. Make sure you don’t miss a minute of Metagame.com’s exclusive coverage of the event. Until next time, play hard, play fair, and most importantly, have fun!
Jerome McHale
jcmchale@andrew.cmu.edu
NEXT WEEK: Anyone who I talked to at our last Pittsburgh Regional knows that I was frantically trying to grab Skelengels. Why? Find out next time.