[KP04] ''Destined Power Destruction!!'' (Part 2): Beatdown Fish

On Part 2 of the overview for KP02, ‘’Destined Power Destruction’’ we find ourselves looking at a very interesting deck that went from unplayable joke into a fairly noticeable contender.

 

 Introducing the theme 

‘’Fish’’ is a rather water-centric deck based around… the abilities of the various water monsters…? If you notice I’m fairly confused about it it’s because I’d be reaching very hard to imply that this deck had something resembling a decent game plan that could be reasonably assembled in the heat of battle. 

These water-centered cards formed a deck that had a few decent cards. [Umi] and [Great Ocean] are fairly decent fields in that they allowed the few ocean creatures we had available to reach decent numbers, and Great Ocean, though harder to use, offers a considerable debuff that, while on the same ‘’level’’ of the debuff from [Beast Gear World], lacked any benefit for our own monsters. Though it has the benefit of being a more universal debuff.

The reason why these Field Spells are considered a part of Water decks is because of [Anchor Muray], a low level fish that allows us to retrieve a Level 3 or lower vanilla Fish from our GY back to our hand for no condition other than having one of the aforementioned Field Spells. This little guy was Fish’s best card up until now. The reason behind this is that Fish as a monster type is flooded, no pun intended, with low level vanillas that, while not terrible, are nothing more than that, and a selection of terrible boss monsters.

[Sea Dragon King Granganoth], [Warfish Sharkmegaloan] and [Hydrocannon Big Magurom] are this deck’s intended boss monsters, but simply put, they’re all terrible. It’s a selection of a miserable burn effect, a totally worse version of [Windcaster Torna] and a gimmicky combo that is only good if you’re already winning which is something you’re not going to do with your lackluster boss lineup.

However, Fish received an amazing card during KP04 under the name of ‘’Grand Extreme’’, an extremely versatile Spell that turns you terrible boss monsters into… equally terrible but more easily summonable beaters, however, it carries the benefit of allowing you to shuffle any 5 monsters in your opponent’s GY. This card is part of KP04’s ‘’Stop playing Dark Liberation pls’’ campaign by Konami. 

Although Ryuma (Dragoncasters) is still the best deck in the format (though now the gap between it and Pure Dragon decks is rather close) it’s undeniable that this card carries weight and allows FIsh to become a very reasonable meta pick.

 

Deck List 

Without further ado, let’s move into the deck build:

This is just like playing vanilla boss monsters, except you can’t use the cards that support normal monsters. In short, you could say Fish bosses are worse than vanillas!

 

That sounds pretty accurate, yes. Anyway, given that our boss monsters are nothing but beatsticks, we’re running a small dragon package consisting of [Phoenix Dragon] and my old favorite, [Shocklead Dragon]. Since our problem lies in getting over monsters that are bigger than us I considered it proper to run Shocklead over Dragears. Of course, you can run both. Additionally, we take advantage of Phoenix Dragon by also running [Clear Ice Dragon] to recycle our small fire lizard and also add a bit of extra GY hate.

Side Deck is just other options. Naturally we want “Piercing’’ cards to punish the opponent for stalling while using maximum decks, [Ancient Barrier] is just extra insurance against Spellcaster matchups, as well as Heatflash which will work as our Spell/Trap removal if we need it. We run enough dragons, so it shouldn’t be a problem to get it running. Clear Ice’s counterpart, [Burning Blaze Dragon] can help against decks that are dependant on their field spells, such as Wyrms or decks that run [Beastgear World].

Gameplan’s as simple as it gets. Hate on the GY, power up your beatsticks with Umi or debuff your opponent’s with Great Ocean and take advantage of the recursion offered by Phoenix Dragon to answer any attackers thanks to Shocklead Dragon, or keep the GY up with Clear Ice. If you’re lucky, you can recycle Blue-Eyes as well for a constant 3000 beatstick.

Matchup-wise this deck fares really well against caster variants, but on the contrary, loses very hard against Dragon centered strategies. The lack of battle traps can work in your favor since it means that many decks will have less use for their respective Spell/Trap removals, but Dragon decks in particular have all the tools required to keep you down if you can’t answer their aggression. 

 

Effectively, while returning high level monsters to the deck can cause the opponent to simply draw into them again, it also means that monsters such as the ones listed above are now as vanilla as your own boss monsters!

Conclussion

As said above, the best card that water-centric decks had access to was Anchor Moray. Although Fish and water-centric decks are infinitely more playable in the current meta environment right now, they’re very weak outside the caster matchup.

 

This deck performs in a similar manner to Monster Mash, where you're able to put out consistent pressure thanks to your high monster count, which results in the pilot being able to dish out a lot of boss monsters that overwhelm the board. For this build, you have a lot of GY control not present in Monster Mash, with the exchange of not having enough space for Dark Rooker and Heavymetal, center-pieces of that deck. Although Ryuma's position as the best deck is not yet threatened, this rogue pick can give you results in a setting where casters are well represented.