Variety Comes Out

Sorry it took so long. A local tournament kept me busy. My Heroes haven't won, though, but it doesn't matter. It was good to see the damage and the benefits of September's banlist. A lot of Synchro decks that didn't stood a chance a couple of weeks before managed to beat their way to the top, as well as finding a way to bond XYZ monsters in their Extra Deck.

It turns out that the decks are making their way around the banlist as best as possible. Aside from Inzektors, pretty much every deck is able to become meta. Until one shows up, one thing is for sure: After DARK and LIGHT monsters lost most of their power, it's time for EARTH monsters to rise. And there are great XYZ contestants. Let's see some:

Darkness after the Chaos

After living for about with strong and nearly unbeatable decks (unless you'd use any counter-strategy or play extremely defensive) like Chaos Dragons, Inzektors and Wind-Ups, came a banlist that could have made it's job six months ago. Aside from practically destroying Chaos Dragons decks and balancing all the others decks, the list did something else: brought a dark past back.

TeleDAD decks (a.k.a.: Teleport Dark Armed Dragon) were a top deck in many tournaments before March 2009. It had a quite variety of DARK monsters almost ready to perform Synchro Summons with Psychic-Type Tuners and quite a knack to make the summon of Dark Armed Dragon possible. Now, their cards are far cheaper and September 2012 banlist made it possible a better comeback.

Aiming for the Stars

In the beginning of the game, the one an only thing that mattered was the attack point of the monsters. High points were pretty much everything back then. After that, monster effects mattered most. Low attack points could mean nothing if they had a huge effect. Then, what became most important was the creature itself: if one of them was a Tuner, it could mean a very powerful monster summoned from the Extra Deck.

Today, the main concern of almost every deck are the monster's levels. Equal levels and easy ways to bring them to the field means easier XYZ summons. Some decks focus in a certain range of level and try to gather monsters in that range. But it doesn't mean all the effort has to come from one single part of the game. Let's review a card that was mentioned before:

Hope for the Best

There are always those situations where you can't control the situation. Since most decks acts differently, the answer works the same way: Chaos Dragons summons more and more monsters on the field and the deck don't relies on luck. Inzketors and Wind-Ups need, some part of their strategy on the field working as a start, but still got some sort of speed themselves.

But what about decks that just explodes in their first hand and them only waits for the top deck help them? Luck doesn't work for everybody. So what these decks do is just try to control the field with what they got and hope for the next card be good.

There are ways to increase your chances, just as this one:

Countering the odds

It's always time to change to newer things. Except this time we're going to take a better look to the old cards.

Not a long time ago, effect monsters showed their importance in the strategy of the decks, being in a larger number than Spells and Trap cards combined in decks like Junk-Doppel and Agents. Today it's the other way around: in every meta deck we're starting to have fewer monsters, with Trap Cards being sometimes the dominating kind. It seems that having more monsters to ensure the strategy have become less important than disrupt your opponent's strategy.

At an different time, Spell Cards (maybe in the time when they were called Magic Cards) could change the entire duel, even if a few were played. Back then, not every card would have a free cost in order to be played, but even if they had, it was worthy in those days. Nowadays, things are sightly different. Spells with free cost are pretty much the only option, as every card in your deck counts and you can't afford risking your strategy just to disrupt your opponent's.

So, even if the times have changed, it doesn't means that these cards have lost their meaning:

Tricking with traps

We're back! And just like we promised, we're going to talk about some Traps that fit any deck.

It seems that traps these days aren't that surprising anymore, unless you're not playing against a regular Meta Deck. They just don't surprise you like they used to, as people are more aware of which Traps usually are or are not (if any) in each deck. The face-down cards aren't visualized anymore as "does he/she has something troublesome there?". Instead, they're often seen as "I don't care what he/she is going to do, I'm pretty much aware of what these Traps are, so I'm gonna get rid of those". And turns out that they can: we live in a time where Mystical Space Typhoon is unlimited, Heavy Storm is not forbidden and cards like Lyla and Gemini Spark are more popular than ever.

The most tricky face-down cards in the game are now just a game of odds, as they almost never changes from deck to deck, and since we got many ways to destroy them, most often people are forced to do fake sets. That's why we're offering a suggestion to act like Safe Zone does: Some underestimated Traps that do the trick whenever you want and annoys your opponent like hell:

Easy Traps

Greetings, friends.

Today we're going to talk about some not so popular Trap Cards that, most in commmon, has no requirements to meet or cost at all and even though they can give some headaches to your opponent, most people see no use for them. In these days, if you can't negate your opponent's cards nor you can't protect your own, every card of yours should be able to activate at any time.

Let's start with Compulsory Evacuation Device: