Was anyone expecting a new entry? I sure wasn’t, but now that I’m here I might as well try to do this properly and pretend I’m writing educational content or something of the sort.
This is meant to introduce players who might be interested to Rush Duels, or people who want to find a starting point to bringing their Rush Duel gameplay to the next level, to a deck that has no doubt been the cornerstone of the format since its inception. Unsurprisingly, Ryuma (竜魔), also known as Dragoncasters as many call it, is not a very well-liked deck by all those that have played since the early days, given how overwhelming the deck turned out to be for so long. It remained at the top of the format for one entire year and some more, and even though there’s competence for it now in the form of WMax, One-Breath Aggro and Light Machine decks, Ryuma still remains a very strong meta contender, although adjustments are in order if it wishes to remain competitive.
Now that the format has evolved and the card pool has expanded, there’re more than a few variants to Ryuma, although the core cards remain largely the same across all variants.
General Wincondition
Slap 10sion Max onto Dragias and go nuts on any monster, be it a wall or whatever. Protect your big lizard with Dark Liberation, or recycle it with Phoenix Dragon to keep at the beatdown for as long as possible! Use your low-level monsters of high-utility to aid you in beating over stuff, and employ Sevens Road Magician to remove larger threats.
There’s no simple finisher, just a constant flow of pressure through your high-quality cards. You fight for advantage, inflicting big chunks of damage as you rampage through any boarstate.
10sion Ryuma
Ryuma is essentially the “good stuff” deck of this format. The best generic boss monster, Dragias the Striking Dragon, as well as Phoenix Dragon which can retrieve it from the graveyard on demand, form a strong package that sees play in many other decks. When you back it up with the always reliable Dark Liberation, you have a simple but effective tactic.
10sion Ryuma is the efficient variant meant to combat other Ryuma decks, and it is armed with every tool necessary for that purpose. Think of Goat format decks and how they’re full of outs to the most common goat-format boardstates.
Core
3x Dragias the Striking Dragon
3x Phoenix Dragon
2-3x Sevens Road Magician
12-15x Spellcaster low-level monster, including Sevens Road Mage, Mystic Dealer, and Whispering Fairy
3-6x Spell/Trap Removal
2-3x 10sion Max
3x Dark Liberation
That’s a very heavy core, and as you can tell, it doesn’t leave much space for tech cards. The reason being that every card serves a purpose in this core.
Sevens Road Magician can easily out a Dragias if uninterrupted. Dragias + Sevens Road Mage or 10sion Max outs other Dragias, and 10sion Max also doubles up as a way to punish turtling even further than just Dragias can. Dark Liberation is meant to stop Dragias, however, it can be interrupted by the many SpellTrap removals the format has, or be slowed down by Whispering Fairy.
As described above, 10sion Ryuma is the variant that evolved to have the most outs to the cards run in most Ryuma decks. It is solid, and can be improved upon by various tech cards, but the core of this version has remained solid enough that the deck has had an extremely long shelf life for the Japanese playerbase, needing close to no improvements.
It’s a deck core that has a decent number of outs against any Maximum deck not centered around Dynarmix, and it deals decently against Metallion Fusion decks. The Legend choice is Monster Reborn, as it currently is the most popular Legend card run in Japanese decklists. That being said, other choices such as Tribute to the Doomed also work, and even Blue-Eyes White Dragon is still a tremendously stong card, as it can still prove tricky for certain decks to reliably hit over it.
Lock Ryuma
A control-focused variant featuring Fiendish Commander Yameruler. This monster, on top of its intensely beefy statline that will not suffer against the likes of Siesta Torero or Battle Demolition, offers the chance to completely shut down an opposing turn by preventing any and all tribute summons from occurring. Although this variant has certainly fallen out of relevance in the land of the rising sun due to the high number of fusion and maximum centered decks, on top of popular removal cards such as Jum:P Set! and Eternal Freeze directly negating any impact the fiendish commander might have had in the field, its undoubtedly still a variant that can do really well depending on the environment.
This deck’s other feature would be Onmyou Warrior Sakakaze, meant to further disrupt the opposing graveyard with the advantage of not needing to pay any cost at all, unlike Whispering Fairy. This focus on GY control might give it some benefits in an environment where Fusion-based decks can make the most out of their GY setups due to cards such as Star Restart, although, it will have more going against it than in its favour.
This is a variant that could definitely run Tribute to the Doomed over Monster Reborn if you see it fit.
Fusion Ryuma
Now we’re getting to the spiciest new Ryuma variant. Fusion Ryuma is a deck that features Metallion Eraclestar as an additional boss monster, on top of the new and borderline broken Amazing Dealer for extra digging power. Although Amazing Dealer is a card that becomes worse in the late-game as your GY becomes filled with monsters, the quality of its early game digging power more than makes up for it.
Although Metallion Eraclestar himself is considered to be one of the worst Metallion fusions, given how little it impacts the board itself as opposed to the series’ other fusion monsters, this is undoubtedly the best one to combat other Ryuma variants, and, it is also the one that bends the best in a deck core that is already plenty strong on its own. Magic Juggler
Other tech choices
-Eternal Freeze, as a way to remove Dragias and other relevant bosses before they can rampage through your board.
-Siesta Torero, as one of the best low-level monsters in the game for its multipurpose recycle effect and aid in fighting threats with low defense values. It also works well with 10sion Max, allowing you to take advantage of its Piercing capabilities, and, more importantly perhaps, it denies your opponent the usage of certain battle traps that trigger only when face-up monsters are attacked.
-Defensive Dragon Mage is another means to combat Ryuma decks, as it can be used to protect Dragias or SRM. Run by preference, and if you’re playing online, then you can definitely place this on your side deck.
-Ancient Barrier. Serves the same purpose as above. Might be harder to use in an environment full of GY hate though.
-Shocklead Dragon. Popular Maximum out, easily retrievable with Phoenix Dragon just as Dragias. Can be included if you desire to have more variety to your plays.
-Wicked Shadow - Dark Rooker, serving as a powerful burn and spell/trap removal option. It is a strong wall that is hard to remove, and the 1000 burn it offers can provide necessary reach on tighter game states. Run 1 or 2.
Conclusion
Where does Ryuma stand in the current meta? Dark Liberation is still an infamously strong card and it will punish those who are unprepared for it or don’t respect the possibility of it being there. That being said, Ryuma right now is in an experimental stage. The deck is evenly matched for the most part against the new top dog, Light Machine decks, although the latter seems to be having a much better performance than Ryuma when it comes to topping representation. Given that both decks should be similarly represented, the results seem to imply that the match-up is slightly favoured towards machines.
Regardless, the deck is still performing well, and even though the control variant could be considered obsolete, there’s no denying that the deck still has plenty of strong points that have not been powercrept even after a year and half, and that it still serves as an easy entry point to the format both from an easy deckbuilding standpoint as well as an easy-to-pilot deck. Even if it is not the one and only tier 1 deck anymore, it’s still a deck that’s not easy to combat.
