The Storm is Upon Us

The day we have feared is almost upon us. Soon, we will all be witnesses to the corruption of the very spirit of Yugioh.  We will be beset by evil forces that will forever hide the goodness of the game.  

… or we will all pick up some new cards and roll our eyes at the “next” broken archetype. 

Regardless of your enthusiasm for the Qliphoth invasion, this archetype will change the way decks are built. The most notable adjustment will be the reemergence of MST as a main deck card. For the past several years, MST has been sided more than it has been mained.  Doing so lowered the chances of drawing an MST when you really needed a MonSTer.  The pervasive use of Vanity’s Emptiness has led to a mini-resurgence in mained MST.  However, the Qliphoths will all but institutionalize the practice.  

The truth is that there are few cards that are as good as MST in fighting the Qliphoths. As a spell, it avoids trap negation.  As a quick play, it can be activated on your opponents turn.  Finally, it has no restrictions or costs.  The card is somewhat unique since it is really, really needed unless it isn’t.

Coming to a deck near you!

The ubiquitous use of MST will have many subtle effects on the game.  The most obvious will be the decreased effectiveness of continuous spells and traps.  While Emptiness will continue to be played, other cards may decline.  Most notably will be the use of Call of the Haunted, which will give Satellarknights another hit.  The practice of “main decking” side deck cards will probably stop as well.  Shadow-Imprisoning Mirror and Soul Drain should return to the side deck.  

A glut of MSTs changes the way players open.  Most players don’t want to run the risk of losing their single copy of Bottomless to a blind Typhoon.  As a result, they will set a lot more bait.  In fact, one of those bait cards is probably another MST.  

 

Trap heavy decks do thrive during formats that routinely use triple MST.  The strategy is to overcome an opponent’s MST by overwhelming the field with targets.  Of course, it is hard to imagine a format with more traps. The point is that the number of traps in the average deck is not a function of the number of anti-trap cards; it is a function of the speed of the format.  The Qlipoths, while impressive, are not the fastest killers in the Yugioh pantheon.   

The habitual use of MST does open the way for trapless decks.  Without targets, you opponent will be drawing into a dead card.  This is the equivalent of drawing twice.  Hopefully, the tactic will lure your opponent into siding out his MSTs, which is the perfect time to side in your continuous traps. 

Such a Bargain!

I may have a few readers that remember a mention of my time in finance.  These readers either have savant-like recall or are way too interested in my life.  For those of you who are not part of Creepy-Sect, I worked in mortgage-backed security arbitrage for a Savings and Loan in New York.  It was the 80’s; times were good.  Today, this admission is the equivalent of saying I worked in hull design while they were building the Titanic.  

Nevertheless, I did learn that prices in competitive markets are not arbitrary.  This price may not necessarily match value.  Securities could be worth more or less than their price.  While the difference in price and value opens up trading opportunities, one has to ask why the market is discounting (or inflating) the price of a commodity. Understanding these market forces is the difference between good and bad traders. 

Yugioh is no different than any other market, which is why I wondered about Castel’s falling price.  $10 to $12 seems like a great deal.  After all, the advantages of this card are fairly well known.  Our little musketeer returns cards to the deck and nullifies the ever-enlarging horde of graveyard effects. Furthermore that effect applies to any face-up card, which opens up Safe Zone plays.  Finally, it’s fodder for Diamond Dire Wolf and Icarus Attack.  

With all this going for the card, why is it equivalent to a movie admission?  Here are some possible answers to that question and the effect of that answer on the future value of the card:

My Extra Deck is full. Yugioh players have a large selection of OP cards to put in their extra-deck.  While Castel is good, he is not good enough to take up two slots.  A quick perusal of the OCG shows that few doolists are using more than one.  Less demand and more supply means a lower price.  Verdict: Remains between $10-15. 

(Fill in your favorite archetype) took my money.  Duelist Alliance had an unusual number of desirable archetypes.  Doolists found themselves dropping cash for Sattelarknights, Shaddolls, Dueling Abyss, and Yang Zing monsters.  Once you’ve paid $150 to play a deck, there is little appetite for more cards.  If this is the case, the demand for the card will pick up.  Verdict: Increases to $20-25. 

Ohhh … Exciton Knight. Just as we got done unwrapping our Duelist Alliance packs, Konami hits us with The Mega-Tins.  Finally, those OPOP cards are available to everyone.  Konami has essentially flooded the market and washed Castel away.  Verdict: Increases to $20-25.

Castel who? Local tournament play may be quite slow so that most doolists have not yet faced the archetypes released by Duelist Alliance.  As a result, they haven’t experienced the rather extreme graveyard recursion of these decks.  Once they do, they will be begging for Castel. Verdict: Increases to $25-30.

I do think that the card will rise in price since most cards do in the weeks following their release.  Tightness in the Extra Deck will keep the demand down somewhat, but it is a solid card.  I pulled one (yay) and will likely pick up 1 or 2 more because of my fondness for Harpies and Mist Valley monsters. 

The Good, The Bad, and The Trugly

Trugly [trǝ-glē] adjective ( truglier, turgliest): (in Yugioh) infuriating yet ineffectual; purposely unpleasant; intentionally disagreeable and unaesthetic.  Contraction of troll and ugly.  “Can you believe he played Self-Destruct Button? It’s trugly”.  

After only a handful of duels, I have come to one rather obvious conclusion: Destroying a card and sending it to the graveyard is a bad idea.  Remember when this was the object of the game?  Now when you run over a monster you go – 1.  The graveyard has gone from a source of occasional monsters (e.g. Zombies) to a second hand (e.g. Droolers) to the land of magical effects.  Any doubters should feel free to take on the Yang Zing, a name more befitting the Chinese mafia than mirthful European dragons.  

The best tech cards against these archetypes have been (surprise) limited.  It’s as if the haruspices at Konami prepared us for this revolution by reigning in D Fissure, M Cosmos, and Soul Drain.  Still, there are over 6,000 cards in the Yugiverse.  Maybe a few were overlooked.  So with my rage-against-the-machine mindset, I set out to find cards to shut these decks down.  

My search for the next great tech card began by looking at all the cards with “return” or “to the deck” in their description.  This strategy revealed 573 cards.  348 of these cards were monsters, which I set aside for another post.  That left 225 candidate spells and traps.  This list was further pared down by eliminating archetype specific cards such as Spellbook of Fate and anything to do with Glad Beasts. The card also had to include monsters as targets. 

I was left with seven spell cards, none of which are worth playing. The list includes four cards that are specific for Extra-Deck monsters (De-Synchro, De-Fusion, XYZ Encore, and Intercept Wave) and Quill Pen of Guildos.  I also came across Dracocension, which gives Wyrm-type monsters the ability to put opponent monsters back in the deck.  Mercifully, it requires a tribute of a dragon-type, which probably makes it too awkward to use.  Out of the Blue was the only truly trugly card.  This continuous spell card can return all of the graveyard cards back into the deck.  It’s a card that creates wonderful Yugi-fantasies against decks like the Satellarknights that are prone to abusing COTH.  However, it is too situational for competitive play. 

The trap selection was a bit more promising. 15 traps put cards either back in the deck or in the hand.  These break down as follows:

The Good:  Good cards are good, which is tautologically equivalent to saying good cards are played.  This list is well known to anyone who has opened a pack in the past six weeks.  It includes CED, Phoenix Wing Wind Blast, and Time Space Trap Hole.  However, there were a few hidden treasures.  

 Liberty at Last! is my favorite.  The card declares your freedom against the tyranny of graveyard effects!  Few cards allow you to put cards back into the deck; never mind two of them.  It is a battle trap but this card had real potential.

Battleguard Howling and Rage are designed to help warriors.  Of the two, I like Rage better since it is a continuous trap card that boosts a monster’s attack points. Imagine Absolute Zero with 3500 AP.  The monster that is being attacked is neither being targeted or destroyed by this card, which gets around a bucket full of monster effects. 

The Bad:  Most of the bad cards earn their spot on the list by making you lose card advantage.  If that’s not bad enough, they also tend to be situational.  Forced Back only applies to normal and flip summons; Spiritual Wind Art, Super Rush Recklessly, and A Major Upset all require specific tributes.  Mispolymerization has minor potential as a CED against Shaddolls.  I suspect it will lose to the faster De-Fusion, despite that card’s talent for bringing back materials.  Cash Back gets a few points for being a counter-trap but then loses them to its situational play.  How many monster effects require the controller to pay life points?  

The trugliest of them all

The Trugly: Face it – most troll cards are continuous.  Cards like Skill Drain, Macro Cosmos, and Dimensional Fissure all say “You can’t do anything until you deal with me”.  Unlike cards you can only activate once, these cards take little skill.  Draw it; play it; and laugh.  

The trugly return cards are also continuous traps.  This list includes Dice-nied, Ordeal of a Traveler, and Begone, Knave.   The first two are too strange even for me.  Begone, Knave, on the other hand, has always piqued my curiosity.  The card made a brief appearance with Mist Valley Falcon.  Declare an attack, put B Knave in your hand, attack, and then reset B Knave.  I would call the experience infuriating and ineffectual. 

Yugioh Tech Choices

Ahhh … the ever changing Yugioh landscape 

Just when you thought you had it down, it shifts, morphs, and renders obsolete handfuls of your hard earned cards.  Yesterday’s brokenness gives way to today’s brokenness and we are left with little more than shards of our former greed. 

Still, we play on. The season is not quite over and there are a few of us who are still looking for this year’s regional top.  With that in mind, let’s take a look at changes in the Yugioh Tech World.

Forbidden Lance is up and Mystical Space Typhoon is down: Lance and MST seem to be on opposite sides of the same seesaw.  In the fall, MST remained on the bench while Lance saw play.  During the winter, the trend reversed.  Now it’s spring and the young maiden with the illicit weapon is ready to play again.  

Seriously, the decks from YCS Philly were fairly trap-heavy.  The addition of traptrix monsters will make these cards seem ubiquitous.  If one adds the prospects of blowing up an Artifact, the allure of MST seems a bit darker.  I would put MST back in the side deck. 

Breakthrough Skill is up and Fiendish Chain is down:  The Yugioh world remains one that is richly dependent on effect monsters.  Fiendish Chain had the additional benefit of stopping beefy beaters.  As the DRoolers retreat, this distinction is less useful. On the other hand, stopping monsters that activate in the graveyard is a big plus in the Hands era. I should point out that BTS is a hand stop only when it is activated from the field; it doesn’t do so from the grave.  This is because the text for the first effect says “monster” while the text for the second effect says “target”. 

Target 1 face-up Effect Monster your opponent controls; negate the effects of that opponent's face-up monster, until the end of this turn. During your turn, except the turn this card was sent to the Graveyard: You can banish this card from your Graveyard, then target 1 face-up Effect Monster your opponent controls; negate that target's effects until the end of this turn.

Blackship and D Prison are back: I’ve always been a fan of these cards.  Removing without destroying is a neat way around a lot of problem monsters.  Now, BoC is ready to take any face-up hand and provide a little burn.  The burn damage is not trivial in the era of charged souls.  I should point out that Soul Charge was not played in many of the Handifacts.  

A special card for that special deck:  One of the advantages of playing Gears is the easy access to machines of any type.  Alley of Justice Cycle Reader is a card that I toyed with when Agents were popular.  However, it was not nearly as devastating as it is against Artifacts. … and it’s a tuner!  So with that in mind, I’m off to regionals with my Geargikuris.