Ninth's Engine Ramblings: Phoenix Dragon Toolbox

Welcome dear reader to the beginning of my inane ramblings about Rush Duels. Today I will be going over an engine that is centered around a favorite card of mine: Phoenix Dragon Toolbox.

The Phoenix Toolbox is an engine that consists of 3 [Phoenix Dragon] along with high-level dragons of the user's choice. This engine brings both a dragon that can be customized to the needs of the deck, such as [Rush Dragon Dragears] for its massive damage potential and board clearing, or [Shocklead Dragon] for its potentially massive attack debuff that can get even the behemoth [Yggdrago the Heavenly Emperor Dragon Tree] within killing range, along with a way to recycle that dragon directly back to the hand.

The potency of [Phoenix Dragon] cannot be underestimated, being able to recycle that cards in your GY at all is useful but returning them directly to your hand is an incredible consistency and recovery boost. Additionally, its power can only grow stronger with time. [Phoenix Dragon] can recycle any level 5 or higher dragon, meaning that any future high-level dragons can be used in this toolbox. Even this discard effect can come in handy, it can serve to get dead cards in your hand into the GY so you can draw more next turn.

A great example of the Toolbox growing strong with time is [Burning Blaze Dragon], released a bit ago in Fantastrike Mirage Impact!! Its ability to destroy a field spell by recycling a low-level dragon is already strong, only held back by the low relevance of field spells. But once fields become actually relevant, I think a copy of [Burning Blaze Dragon] will be a staple part of the Phoenix Dragon Toolbox. Or perhaps it could prompt the creation of a larger dragon package.

Due to the mess that is the current format, Spellcaster is of course the main abuser of this engine, using it to throw around [Rush Dragon Dragears]. But should the day ever come that Spellcaster falls from its throne, expect at least Monster Mash and (of course) Pure Dragons to make good use out of it.

Conclusion

All in all, this gets a 10/10 from me. 

Rambling

Being a toolbox means it can bring whatever a specific deck needs, whether it be a [Shocklead Dragon] for decks that struggle to get over the soon to release Maximum monsters, [Burning Blaze Dragon] for when field spells need popped, and of course [Rush Dragon Dragears] for sheer fucking damage potential and board clearing. BUT IT DOESNT STOP THERE! It can only grow stronger and stronger over time, and to anyone doubting this, this is Konami, we are getting more dragons whether its good for the game or not. If I had money to spare I would bet dragons will eventually get a card that is [Dark Liberation] levels of absurd. The day we get a Dragon Maximum could very well be the day Spellcaster gets kicked off of its throne, so far all the Maximums come with protection from destruction via traps (probably Konami's way of trying to deal with Dark Lib without having to release a banlist for rush duels) and so a Dragon Maximum may very well get either that, or some other way to protect from dark lib. and phoenix dragon will be doing a good job supporting it, -trons WISH they had recursion like this (inb4 a card gets revealed later today that gives them the ability to return all ygg parts to hand). along with return of dragon, dragons won't have to worry in the slightest about running out of maximum parts. Now shoo, Grampa Ninth needs his beauty sleep.

About the current Rush Duel enviroment and Deck Building

 Hello, this is Liri from Boku no Road again with another entry.

In which we cover a little talk about the infamous card that has ruled over the meta environment for the past 6 or so months. If you play Rush Duels you know it. [Dark Liberation]

Essentially a Mirror Force with a condition. This card debuted in the Yuga Starter Deck released on April of 2020 at 3 copies, and if you've played more than a few games it should go without saying that there's no need for introductions when it comes to the most fearsome card in the format.

Its power is locked behind a condition, ''Shuffle 4 Spellcaster monsters from your GY into your deck''. Everyone knows what this condition entails, but let's still go over its implications: this is not so much of a cost as it is a requirement that ensures that you'll have to run a decent number of spellcasters in your deck in order to successfully utilize this card when needed. However, this also means that any deck can use it as long as you have the room to utilize Spellcasters. 

The Road taken by Competitive Decks

On the topic of the ''Spellcaster'' type, it is second only to the ''Dragon'' type in terms of how many monsters have been introduced that feature its type. Naturally, as it is the class used by Ohdo Yuga in the Yu-Gi-Oh Sevens anime. It ought to be noted that, from the beginning of the format to this day, Spellcasters have been the only deck that's been featured in a competitive light. There's a few reasons behind this, and we can also extract the characteristics of what makes a successful deck for the Rush Format:

1.- A deck that's capable of utilizing enough cards from the Spellcaster-type in order to incorporate Dark Liberation. This card is, as you get now, beyond insane. There's no effective countermeasure besides a few select choices that we'll go over soon, and, in a format where there's no Main Phase 2 and most of the removal and board contesting is done through battle instead of effect removal, most of the time you have no choice but to run into this card. The result is an oppressive state in which any comebacks are denied and you're left wide open for your opponent to finish you off with massive ammouns of damage.

2.- A deck that can carry at least one of the type-specific Spell/Trap removal cards, such as [Magical Strream], [Psychic Divergence], [Fire Dragon's Heatflash], etc. besides [Hammer Crush]. This is the only reliable answer to Dark Liberation, and I'm stretching the meaning of ''Reliable'' a little bit here. Why? Because there's nothing reliable about trying to snipe Dark Liberation in most situations where your opponent has 3 face-downs. In those cases, either you're really lucky with your one shot, you have enough removal to wipe all 3 of them, or the situation was right to make an accurate read of where it is. This last part can come up and I'm sure there's gonna be a clown out there willing to debate that you can do mind games with that, but please, even if I sound a bit aggressive with what I'm saying here, keep those theories of ''huh he set this one first and then this one so clearly it's-'' to yourself because the read for a set Dark Liberation is either water-clear or pure luck, no in-between.

3.- A deck that either has super strong boss monsters of their own, or, has the space to include a Dragon Package (Phoenix Dragon + Dragears, Shocklead, Blue-Eyes, etc.) This is to say, bosses that can turn the tables on monsters that are stronger, or that can deal in massive amounts of damage through their buffing/debuffing effects or their offensive abilities. This is mostly in terms of cutting down boss monsters such as those featured in ''Beastgear'' and ''Aqua'' builds, to name a few, which, though they are supported by their deck's playstyle, lack any remarkable capabilities of their own.

If we take into consideration the above mentioned points and try to build a list to the best of our competitive capabilities, we probably end up with something similar to this:

This is an example of the most competitive decklist utilized in the land of the rising sun, made by カーナベル㈱様, or Kanaberu-sama. It's greatly unchanged from KP01, only seeing the introduction of [Seven Roads Mage] during KP02, and currently during KP03 [Sparkhearts Girl] is probably still being experimented with. This is the competitive Rush Duel deck that most people are familiar with, featuring both Spellcasters as well as a small Dragon Package just as mentioned above. It includes 3 of each [Magical Stream] and [Fire Dragon's Heatflash].

Now, this is not me saying that pure dragons don't have a space in the competitive enviroment. Sure, Pure Dragons have [Dragonic Slayer] and other advantages that this hybrid build might lack, but all of those pale in comparison to the sheer power of Dark Liberation. However, it is not an impossible matchup, or at least not as sweltering as it is for everyone else.

And the issue is?

Now that you get how majority of lists look like, you might wonder ''well, what's the problem? a meta environment being warped around a few types or cards is how yugioh is''. And you're right. Yugioh has always turned around a few powerful cards, and we've always considered a players skillful when they can use those powerful cards in very efficient ways while also playing around their opponent's power cards.

If I had to pinpoint a few problems, it'd be:

1.- Rush Dueling has been made around the battle interactions. Most (respectable) boss monsters have battle and stat related effects. The dynamic goes in that ''I hit over you, then you hit over me, until one falls''. And this is not the direction in which one or two decks were taken, it's literally the intended design of most cards in the format. [Dark Liberation] just ''doesn't care''. It denies any form of battling and board contesting and instead punishes it, when that's your one and only option in this game. There's no playing around it besides being lucky with your removal or running some ''outs'' and hoping they come up, talking about it:

2.- Outs to Dark Liberation? If they exist then you should play them! Well, the issue is: they are both Spellcasters. Yeah, another reason why there's no other playable option besides Spellcasters and maybe Dragons. [Whispering Fairy] and [Defensive Dragon Mage] are both cards that can allow you some breathing room against opposing Dark Liberations. 

 

The former one can disrupt them early in the game, but it becomes pretty much dead for that purpose into the late game. Defensive Dragon Mage only protects one of your monsters from Dark Liberation, but sometimes that can be all you need to close out a game, contest board, or perhaps, make your opponent not want to waste a Dark Liberation if he can't get full value out of it. But in either case, one of these outs is locked to Spellcasters/Dragons and the other needs to be drawn early or it becomes a dead draw. You can tell that none of these work well as universal outs. I guess one of the new dragons from KP03 works the same as Whispering Fairy, just for Dragons exclusively, so what I said about her applies to [Clear Ice Dragon] as well.

3.- No innovations. Spellcasters as a deck has remained roughly the same through the course of 3 main sets. After KP02 and CP01 some builds that included [Royal Demon's Heaymetal] and [Gargoyle of the Palace] instead of the Dragon Package popped up and had a lot of success. But besides this, no other deck has been able to join the fray of competition. Psychic, Fiend and Warrior decks all debuted on CP01, Aquas and Beastgears got further support on KP03 alongside a few other strategies, but none of them has managed to scratch the top of the format. Monster Mash is a concept that our fellow writer @Gift2 made a reality and had a lot of success with. However, it is not yet a very popular idea, specially in Japan, which is where we can gather most of the results data.

In other words. The format is stale. It's stale, luck-based in terms of outs and strategies to play around and fairly swingy. When a game remains roughly the same in the competitive aspect for half a year or more it tends to get boring, and, I suppose that's my main issue from a personal point of view. I wanted to be more objective, I'd say something like ''it's not healthy for this kind of format-wrapping card to be left unchecked and unchanged for so long''.

However!

Boku no Road pretends to be slightly educative (lol), and most of this post has felt mostly like me ranting. I've said that the outs are not yet reliable, but we can try to tinker around with what we have now. For now, the one thing we can do is to adapt. I didn't mention this, but the best answer to Dark Liberation is your own Dark Liberation. So, try to incorporate the following Spellcaster package in your new decks to try them out:

-Sevens Road Mage

-Mystic Dealer

-Light/Dark Sorcerer

-Defensive Dragon Mage

-Whispering Fairy

In whatever rations you desire. All of this will give you access to Dark Liberation and Magical Stream, and also, these are just overall really good cards that can fit in anything you want to build. Try to tinker around with them if you want to play something that has yet to be fully fleshed out in terms of support instead of trying to force it with whatever shambles of support you have.

Alternatively, if you're playing a deck that has a strong field spell like [Big Ocean] or [Beastgear Worlds], you could try to include cards like [Rear Misfire] or [Gust] in order to punish the 6 MSTs that the hybrid build runs.

Similar to this, you can try to tinker around with options to fight off Dark Liberation! It's better to try than to just sit there and keep losing to it.

I hope you found it insightful, or just a fun read. Boku no Road will keep bringing articles for as long as this format keeps us engaged. Until the next entry!

[CP01] Shocklead Psychics

 By this point I'm far behind releases, however, considering the recently released KP03 didn't change the outlook on Psychics, Fiends or Warriors, I'm probably going to finish these. Anyways, I'm Liri from Boku No Road and in this entry we'll delve into our take for Psychics.

 

Psychics is the deck used by Romin Kirishima in the Yu-Gi-Oh! Sevens anime. The type debuted on KP01, received a small bit of support during KP02, and received enough cards to build a complete deck on CP01. The playstyle of the deck centers around playing with their LP total by using it as a resource to pay for their effects ro to reach thresholds, and recovering it to compensate for its costs. It is very reminiscent of the initial Psychic playstyle when they debuted during 5D's.

As payoff for risking your own lifeline in order to make your plays, Psychics have some of the strongest, most explosive plays to be seen in this format thanks to certain particular cards that we'll soon go into detail.

Deck List & Strategy

This deck's plussing engine as well as its strongest combo piece, [Romance Pick] is the reason Psychics can stand a fighting chance and, also, is the reason why they're capable ot suddenly pulling insane amounts of damage during their strongest turns.

Pick's ability to salvage any Psychic from our GY is powerful because its considerably easy to pull. It doesn't have the same restriction as [Kuribott] or the Setupper/Upsetter combo of ''Not controlling any other monsters'', and it is immensely abuseable seeing as how you can retrieve one Pick with another Pick, and thus, keep generating resources.

In order to pull Pick's effect most of the time you'll have to run a high concentration of Psychic monsters. That goes without saying, but generally the question is ''how many?''. Magic numbers and probabilities tend to fluctuate too much depending on the gamestate, how many cards are in your deck and how many of those are Spells/Traps/Non-Psychics. Surely you can reach an average where you won't miss her effect, but for this list we offer a ratio of 28 valid triggers aganst 12 whiffs.

 

What's the purpose of this amazing engine though? Well, Psychics has very offensive bosses that all play around their LP payment dynamic. [Prima Guitarna of the Colorful Light] is their main one, and the featured ace of Romin in the anime. ''By burning her own life, Prima Guitarna can lift the spirits of the monsters on the board'' or something like that. Her effect's simple, beatdown focused and helps in getting over monsters.

[Esperaid of the Smashing Lights] and [Foldablitz of the Dream Strings] are the other bosses that this type relies on. Both of them feature Life thresholds as conditions instead of costs. Esperaid is a card with an unprecedented destruction effect in exchange for being on the brink of defeat, however, it is not merely a comeback card, but also, if you use your LP payments in a clever manner, you can push yourself to the point where you can use Esperaid's effect to clear the path for your monsters to inflict huge damage through direct attacks. 

Foldablitz, though, is a more unremarkable one, at least on paper, as it doesn't have any direct impact on the field. It is very common knowledge that just inflicting unsubstantial amounts of damage (specially if it comes with a requirement) is either FTK material or a terrible piece of cardboard. It, however, is a card competent enough to pull its own weight. During your explosive turns, this card allows you to close the Life gap and potentially put your opponent in lethal range. It's not too strong by itself, but if you clear board with Esperaid and then burn the opposing player for 1500, you're essentially pushing 6300 damage with just those 2 monsters. It is not 8000, but it is very close to being so! Not to mention, if the game drags out and you get to use Foldablitz's effect twice then it will surely sting to your opponent.

This deck in particular runs a spread of 2 [Shocklead Dragon] and 3 [Phoenix Dragon]. Shocklead Dragon is a tech that is very liked in Japanese decklists for Psychics. Shocklead works as another piece of your explosive turns where, for instance, you can use its ability after you've powered up your Prima Guitarna, essentially powering the strongest monster on your opponent's board down to 0. It works wonders, with the downside of Shocklead not being salvageable through our main playmaker, which is why we round up our monster line-up with 3 copies of Phoenix Dragon.

For Spells/Traps we merely run a 3-3 split of [Psychic Divergence] and [Psychic Great Wall]. Our simple S/T removal that also costs Life and helps us bring our Life Total down to easily utilize Romance Pick since turn 1, and just a simple, standard defensive trap to protect our, admittedly, very fragile boss monsters.

Matchups

1.- Spellcasters: Poor(-)

Spellcasters, as usual, have the tools to deal with everything. Dragears and Seven Roads trample over your fragile boss monsters, and Dark Liberation totally shields them over anything you can throw at it. This matchup is pretty self explanatory and doing poorly against it will reflect on the representation aspect of your deck

2.- Dragons: Neutral

It's pretty much a race to see who can inflict 8000 damage first. It's up to the one who can invade the opposing board the fastest. Your advantage as Psychics is the lack of desireable defensive options for pure Dragon decks beyond [Dragon's Tenacity]. Counteroffensive can hurt your turn and board though, so be careful if you can read around that little piece of cardboard.

3.- Fiends: Neutral

Same deal as dragons. Your main disadvantage is lowering your own LP too much and then falling into their lethal range. Other than that, there's no factor that tips the scales towards one player or the other. If nothing else, Fiend's traps prove problematic, as [Epic Demon's Rock] could potentially end the duel if you fail to read it.

4.- Warriors: Positive

Even though this list in particular has no outs to Yameruler, shielding yourself for one turn to prevent damage from bleeding in proves enough to hold off any Warrior player and then gives you a chance to turn the board and eventually the game around. In theory warriors might have an edge for having enough outs to your strongest threats, but in practice they fall apart just as easily.

5.- Monster Mash: Neutral (-)

Yeah, I decided to include this in the matchups. In theory its Dragons but on crack. There's threats coming at you every turn at an insane pace, but you generally have outs to things that prove problematic for other decks (e. a set Dark Rooker, and all the 2500 bases Monster Mash runs).

6.- Rogue: Positive (+)

What even qualifies as Rogue? Beastgear? Aquas? Fishes? Those decks lose to themselves more than they do to your cards.

Notes

1.- Royal Demon's Heavymetal is a super strong boss monster that goes well with your Berrycist. Instead of the small dragon package you can probably run some number of Fiend Support cards such as [Gargoyle of the Palace], [Royal Demon's Deathvoice] or [Royal Demon's Punk] in addition to Heavymetal himself.

2.- If you want to delve deeper into the dragon package, you can run some number of [Rush Dragon Dragears], the Setupper/Upsetter package, [Blue-Eyes White Dragon], etc.

3.- LP gain cards like [Electric Ampoule] can bring your lifeline up. They're not terrible, clunky as they are.

Ending Thoughts

You lose to not drawing enough Picks more than you will against any matchup(that is not Spellcasters, clearly). Psychics have enough power to deal 8000 damage in a single turn with their buffs, burn, and clearing effects, but in the end its still the absolute definition of a glass cannon that lacks in protection and power presence in its boss monsters. Not to mention, other than Guitarna, all your other bosses rely upon your LP engine going off.

We can close this by hoping more support comes our way, which will indeed come given how important Romin is for the Sevens series.

[CP01] Decks from Character Pack 01: [Piercing Warriors]

Character Pack 01: Gakuto/Roa/Romin was released on September 19, 2020, introducing support for the decks of the mentioned anime characters, focused around the Warriors(and fairies?), Psychic and Fiend types. CP01 is the third set to be released for the Rush Duel Format, and the first one of the Character Pack series.

 

Greetings, Liri here writing the first (now second) entry for our ''Boku no Road'' blog. Here I'll showcase our take on the decks that are buildable from the CP01 set, and also considering certain techs and side options that go well with the decks, or even different routes that can be taken while building said decks.

For starters, we blast off into the enviroment of CP01 by introducing ourselves to the Warrior deck used by Gakuto Sougetsu, probably the deck that has the most buildable routes available, given the somewhat schizophrenic nature of the support it received. What tie them all together is that none is particularly remarkable. The list I'm showcasing is the one that attempts to cover for Warrior's main weakness. Be introduced to ''Piercing Warriors'':

 

''Piercing Warrors''

We can start off by naming the main features of this deck type that will remain promiment no matter which version of it you end up playing.

 

This deck's face is [Fiendish Commander Yameruler]. A DARK warrior with an amazing statline of 2500/2500 and the ability to prevent high level summonings. Individually it is a very strong card that has found its place on some deck lists since its debut on KP01, and in terms of the support it received, its cohesive and it Yameruler to switch into the offfensive, and thus compensate for its downsides. 

Originally, the main downside of the card is having to giving up tempo and battling in exchange for its powerful ability. Said downside is compensated by the likes of ''Battle Commander, Nandes'' and ''Bandaged Bowing'', which allow Yameruler to use its ability and still be capable of making use of its solid 2500 ATK to contest board against your opponent's monsters.

Another card focused towards improving Yameruler is ''Forbidding Warrior''. A 1200 ATK, Level 4 Warrior that has the ability to prevent trap cards during the battle in which one of your Warriors attack by shuffling a 0 ATK monster from your GY into your deck. The most remarkable card of Rush Dueling is the nefarious Dark Liberation, which has dominated the enviroment for the 6 months that this format has existed. By using Forbidding Warrior, you can move around Dark Liberation and other similar battle traps and swing into the opposing board without fear of a counter.

Of course, Warriors have other ''okay'' tools, such as [Forbidding Immortal] and [Umekumi of the Fiendish Squad] which work with the intended playstyle of the deck. However, the essential weakness of the deck is the lack of offensive capabilities. Stat buffs and debuffs aren't plentiful, and even then, they're meant to aid in running over the biggest-statted monsters rather than in inflicting massive damage outputs like those of Spellcasters. As such, Warriors often run into the problem of not being able to make use of the tempo advantages they gain through Yameruler's control, and eventually lose the damage race to a single explosive turn. This is also present in the fact that they cannot quicly comeback from a beatdown, and in this build said problem is only accentuated by the fact that the Piercing Spells are very poor cards once you're behind in terms of tempo and board.

Generally speaking, Warriors are running smoothly when Yameruler is preventing your opponent's summons. The opposing answer to that comes down to setting 2 or 3 monsters in defense position to shield themselves from your attacks, and then counterattack with their own explosive comeback. Thus, ideally we should make use of that turn to push damage through their defenses. Between 2 copies of ''Piercing'' and 2 copies of ''Greater Piercing'' we have 4 cards that will allow us to inflict chip damage through the opposing defense, which should, more often than not, result in massive damage considering the lack of high DEF value among the low level monsters.

As for our own defense, we're running a 3-1 split of Essence of the Hermit and 1 Up. Essence of the Hermit works favorably to switch monsters to DEF, which will allow us to easily run over them next turn and potentially inflict substantial damage through a Piercing Spell, and also gives uf field presence in the form of a Lv1 vanilla monster, of which we run 6.

 Notes

1.- Use [Forbidding Immortal] to switch an opposing monster to DEF in order for Kimeruler to be able to jump defenders and swing directly. Alternatively, it allows you to make use of your Piercing Spells to inflict damage over the opposing board while also removing threats.

2.- [Bandaged Bowing] might look like it only works with Yameruler, and while it is true, it can also be an effective card cycling if you can use it on a [Fiendish Commander, Kimeruler] and then untap it with [Battle Commander, Nandes].

3.- [Shield&Sword], [Block Attack], and [Hilt the Noble Arms Bearer] are all cards that are no doubt worth running in this deck, however, they don't offer substantial improvements to the lacking archetype and are instead more options to easily run over monsters, but other than [Block Attack], which has the benefit of synergizing with [Kimeruler], none of the other 2 are reliable answers to the enviroment.

 

 Match-Ups

 1.- Spellcasters: Poor (-)

The top dog in the Rush Duel Enviroment, Spellcasters. It is the most formidabble foe, and for Warriors in particular, it is a high mountain to climb. This deck in particular struggles against Spellcasters given the lack of a type-specific Spell/Trap removal card, which prove essential in potentially removing opposing [Dark Liberation] cards. If we fail to do so, our only remaining out is [Forbidding Warrior], which only offers protection from the aforementioned trap during one of our attacks. As you can probably tell, it's nigh impossible to confront the Mirror Force-like card. Not to mention, Spellcaster lists are explosive given the inclussion of [Rush Dragon Dragears] and [Royal Demon's Heavymetal] in their lineups, which boils down to you losing complete control of the duel if those monsters get their effects off properly.

2.- Dragons: Okay (+)

Though some fellow might disagree, Dragons are infinitally more manageable than Spellcasters. Dragons generally struggle against 2500 bodies since, at best, their strongest Dragon monster, Dragears, ties with them. Though they do have the tools to handle these situations, namely, Blue-Eyes if they manage to draw it, [Shocklead Dragon], which requires an essential amount of setup, and [Counteroffensive Dragonstrike]. Still, it is a much better matchup than we give it credit for.

3.- Fiends: Okay (-)

One of the newer deck-types to debut out of CP01. Contrary to Dragons, which require a fair amount of setup to get rid of your stronger threats, Fiends have the easiest out to your -Ruler monsters in what's potentially the strongest Lv6 Monster in the game as of now, [Royal Demon's Death Voice]. This absolute unit can easily punch over anything as long as it gets it requirement fulfileld, which is not a problem in any deck that incorporates [Gargoyle of the Palace] and [Royal Demon's Punk]. It is the main factor as for why Fiends have a very considerable edge in this matchup. However, given how most of the Royal Demon's Series' DEF values are at 0, if you can manage to get ahead, either by a Yameruler turn your opponent didn't have an answer to, or through smart usage of your [Essence of the Hermits], you can push a lot of damage and overturn the tables.

4.- Psychics: Okay

Psychics are a deck that needs more experimentation, but also, its a deck that has very little in the way of options. Either you go full Psychic with it, or you go down the Royal Demon's route and build a Hybrid. However, it is impossible to rate this matchup as anything over a ''Neutral Okay'' given how, if its the Hybrid Build, you're going to face the same issues as you'll face in the Fiend matchup, that is, Death Voice and Heavymetal. Alternatively, the pure build tends to run copies of [Lullabind], a Spell that will turn your Yameruler into face-down position, effectively turning off its effect and allowing the Psychic player to rampage through their explosive plays, effectively making you lose control of the match in one go. Even then, its still manageable. All the Psychic Bosses have very low stats, usually 0 DEF, so, on a good day, you can easily change them to DEF through your effects, and pack a good punch of Piercing or just run over their stuff easily.

Conclusion

Warriors are probably the worst deck of the 3 that were featured on CP01. They rely on the inherently not-great cards that are ''Piercing'' and ''Greater Piercing'' to inflict any substantial amount of damage, as they have no chance to do it by themselves. They can hit over a lot of stuff, as long as said stuff isn't a face-down [Wicked Shadow - Dark Rooker], but they're uncapable of turning around games on which they're already at the losing end. All of this is reflected on their poor matchup compatibility, which basically boils down to their vulnerability to huge pushes, their terrible capabilities at turning games around, and how every deck seems to have an answer to your best plays that doesn't require them too much of a setup.

It's fairly hard to pinpoint the reasons as for why this deck performs so negatively. The sinergy is there, the beatdown is there, but nothing the deck does seems to stick. It's definetely because the deck is centered around a single card, and, its secondary boss not only doesn't benefit from the sinergies made through the rest of the support, but also, has a completely different direction that the first one, which results in a deck that lacks impact and control, which was supposed to be the aim of the deck. Regardless, it is not as poor of a deck as it sounds, and can most definetely scrap some wins.

The deck is also potentially getting further development as long as Sougetsuin Gakuto is featured in more duels. Perhaps the next cards to support Warrior will bring something new to the table, and make this deck able to compete.