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.

Rekindling the FIRE

After the banlist previously posted here was confirmed official, people can expect less from handless decks like HERO and Infernity and a little more from any other deck not harmed with new limitations. But there is a deck that it hasn't shown much but it's still quite powerful, even by the fact that the banlist didn't affected it at all. We're talking about Lavals.

As many other archetypes, Laval's Synchros are well worth to take most space in the Extra Deck, rather than regular Synchros and XYZ. Their affinity to the Flamvell archetype is also useful as many Laval monsters are FIRE with 200 Defense points. Which makes them perfect for the massive summoning Spell Card ever existed:

Power Balance

At March 1st, Konami really surprised every single player by not conducting their usual and proper job of keeping the game level balanced by forbidding and limiting certain cards for the Advanced Format. Inzektors, Wind-Ups, Chaos Dragons and Dino-Rabbits continued unaffected since their release. That is, until September.

It was released after the World Championship the most likely confirmed banlist and it will pretty much fix whichever mistakes Konami did:

Just for the artwork

A Hero Lives with a Dark Destiny

After being away for a while, we're back. This time, we're going to talk about a variation of a deck that people are starting to be fond of: Elemental HERO, or, more precisely, A Hero Lives.

Most people haven't care much about their Life Points being used as a cost, so defending themselves with cards like Solemn Warning and Solemn Judgment didn't see much. Oddly enough, using Life Points to get offensive makes some people reluctant. That's why this kind of HERO deck never got popular. But with the release of Escuridão, things can be different.

Let's have a different view of that deck with this card:

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: