Continued from Part 1: I entered the earlier of the two weekly Goat Format Friday tournament time slots to give it a test run against people who were motivated to point out weaknesses in the theory, and that they did. A brutal 0-3 run with a few games won was instructive. But there was time for the second tournament as well, which meant time to adapt and try again, see if the changes made improved the odds. A few things stood out. Back To Square One was unsatisfying to use on powerful monsters and is pretty inflexible in practice because of it. Nobleman of Crossout was sorely missed; Sets need to be answered efficiently.​ The 55 for the second tournament:

Chaos monsters ran amok and since Tribute to the Doomed, along with Raigeki Break, puts things in grave, triple Kycoo seems wise and pushes our original ATK average up. Mirage Dragon has been moved to the sideboard and reinforced with Pitch-Black Warwolf in triplicate as battle traps are far more common in games 2 and 3 of any match. Equips were added to improve likelihood of combat success. Goal would be to counter their siding pattern more or less with a field of attackers that don’t die to battle traps and can’t be climbed over, and fast. Rope of Life, similarly, is simply much stronger after they side into beatsticks. BLS came in over Freed because getting clobbered with the card reminds one why it should be played, but also, with the crazy number of discard outlets we have, how hard can it be to summon? To answer that question, I didn’t summon him once, but he also never shut off my Thebans so…

The second tournament’s matches went a little better, as Turbo ground me out multiple times, but sideboarding into all the trap negators and equips does net wins if your opponent didn’t draw enough answers–Tsukuyomi remained a thorn in my side. Kycoos were solidly mid in this context. The Warrior toolbox could still benefit from classics like Exiled Force and MS LV2. The special summon economy is quite low, which means I may be looking at Card of Sanctity based Theban Nightmare builds just for the Dimension Fusion cycles, but Theban was surprisingly live. I actually managed to get an exact kill with probably one of the luckiest topdecks of my long “career”.

Now that’s what 3700 damage looks like. What did we learn? We need a faster build with even more removal, yes, but also, Theban Nightmare is surprisingly easy to play into and could be a tech choice in a similar deck focused on Rush Recklessly. Turbo gave us problems, but clearly surmountable ones, and that’s encouraging. Apophis continued to apply pressure and wall attacks nobly, and definitely warrants more exploration, but not having a payoff in the form of Zaborg/Mobius in the 55 left a noticeable absence (though having the ability to pump it up is cool). My assumptions about BTS1 were proven incorrect and remind me a bit of the debates concerning Phoenix Wing Wind Blast versus Raigeki Break.

More or less, Chaos Warrior: Weird Stuff Edition is where the deck landed. It is monster-heavy but we’re also discard-heavy and Rush Recklessly-heavy. Turns out it’s actually pretty easy to play into Theban Nightmare when built for it, so Rope of Life was less critical and went to the sideboard for aggro matchups where large attack position monsters are plentiful. The general side plan of "rush them if you can or overpower them” remains. Injection Fairy Lily was added to main because we’re not running Solemn and we are trying to take LP as quickly as possible, its absence was an oversight. IFL is a killer Sangan fetch and topdeck war-winner many times over, and we love topdecking! I could have stolen another match with her probably. Another card that plays nice with Apophis clearing the way for a direct hit. ​This experiment leaves me with more feeling, not less, that Goat Format’s spice rack still has plenty of potency left in it. As I played with the deck and had a chance to sleep on it a bit, I realized that courting discard cards so heavily, when one-for-one cards should be fine to get our hand size down, was likely a mistake. Monster count should be reduced per the splevin scale (see below).

​Alas, I was too much of a coward to cut further normal summons, so 13 +2 RotA is a risk we’re taking; I felt it would be bad form to not mention what might be the right way to go about it. Here's a link.

​Figured this deck might have more in common with other aggro decks despite being a Warrior variant and Rush Recklessly target necessity also gives reason to amplify monster count other than Apophis. Direct hits and carryover damage are maximized with the full playsets of Rush and Smashing. The math of our summons hitting face and theirs leaving board should keep LPs in decent standing but Embodiment can absorb an attack in a pinch if activated at the end of an opposing Main Phase 1, assuming they’re not packing a proactive answer. Compulsory Evacuation Device is an underrated aggression tool with backup defense as an alternative role: it does two things we’re aiming to do: go minus, and set the opponent back on tempo. Gumo deck uses three and so shall we.

Critics of Lightning Vortex say that it often is a minus in card advantage terms, less often neutral, and rarely plus. I would argue that with sheep tokens, Spies, and aggro monsters everywhere, people aren’t so scared of Torrential Tribute that they’re respecting it to the point that going neutral on the Spell at minimum would be unlikely. Sometimes old technology works. Theban is surprisingly live.

Mataza was avoided in main, by the way, due to not hitting 2100+ with Rush; if I have Rush in hand no Spy should stop me. Yet, I’m also looking at Marauding Captain as a hand-emptying piece of tech for Theban as well. This deck is certainly a pile of cards, but I think with the proper application of mortar more bricks are usable than you think. The danger of trying to be on the bleeding edge of deck development means that you don’t know whose blood is on the blade until it’s too late (spoiler: usually yours), but every tournament is its own leap of faith anyway.

Stay spicy!
-C.G.

As I was searching the goat questions channel on the Discord for things related to Embodiment of Apophis, I found that in 2024 someone had asked a very interesting question. Does Embodiment occupy a Spell or Trap card zone after it resolves and summons itself to a Monster card zone? The answer: no, but it does forbid the use of the Spell or Trap card zone it came from. Asked in the context of Theban Nightmare no less, the ruling revived my interest in this deck. This meant I now had the Theban Nightmare equivalent to Jar of Greed, kind of. Putting resources in hand would be no good, but moving them to a monster zone and turning them into extra damage or defenders, that has value.

The relatively obscure (within the format) Trap-Monster was released at the tail end of the format and thus a lot of historical data about it just isn’t there. The last time it made an appearance on the Goat Format competitive stage was as a tribute summon accelerator in Riksaah’s 2024 Worlds thunderclap build, which I’ve come to refer to as “snakeclap” if for no other reason than because Yu-Gi-Oh! players love goofy names and hair-splitting. So, the card seemed more trivia than triumph, mere tribute fodder. 

Then I played with it. Even within the context of a list in which it primarily exists to turn Trap cards into Zaborg the Thunder Monarchs, I found it to be an insane tempo addition. An extra 1600 ATK monster on your turn can make the difference in a lot of situations, and damage from it accumulates relatively quickly, assuming it taking out weaker opposing monsters to free up direct hits for larger compatriots isn’t happening.

Card disadvantage needs to be carefully managed. There are lots of great cards that put you behind in cards (less oxymoronic than it sounds, consider high-impact cards like Cold Wave), so when it came to card selection we are doing as much as we can during Main Phase 1 to make sure that our Blade Knights and Theban Nightmares are at maximum power, while keeping our slower-to-utilize but reactive-on-opposing-turn options either strong enough to warp the game or highly flexible. This biases us away from too many Trap cards as well, favoring Spells, and this is deck design that is compatible with Theban Nightmare (as is only using a pair of them, for now).

Raigeki Break is an excellent option for a variety of situations that can occur on your opponent’s turn (Snatch Steal comes to mind), while Back to Square One is an underrated removal Spell that doesn’t fuel opponents’ Graveyards and sets the opponent back on tempo in two facets. Harming your opponent’s summon economy by removing a monster is nice but any one for one card like Smashing Ground could work almost as well for that purpose. Chosen over Tribute to the Doomed, BTS1 collapses the unpredictability of their next draw into something known and sets them back a turn in terms of seeing cards. Seeing more cards than our opponent is pretty good for a deck that values speed. Of course, we won’t always have a Theban Nightmare or benefit most from it being at full power at all times, so discard outlet abundance means a lot of cards that pitch will be pitched in a game.

I think even if a deck wants card disadvantage as a premise, it should optimize the tools available for getting the most value out of dumping your hand, which leads sometimes to plusing; if you’re doing that by accident you’re on the right track. Rush Recklessly is an underrated way to trade a card for a monster, or deal more damage, but as a Quickplay Spell its best trait is that it can be played from hand during the Damage Step of your turn, potentially making your Blade Knights go to 2700 ATK (well able to negate face-down Spies or simply run over Mobius) or your Theban Nightmares to 3700! The ”should I use my battle trap on Theban Nightmare while my opponent has one card in hand?” mind game is real. A Sakuretsu activated due to knowledge of Rush Recklessly will still allow you to preserve the Rush Recklessly for another monster. We want our opponents to face difficult choices or we’re not doing our job.

Freed The Brave Wanderer lets us get some removal to make up for our missing Exiled Force (against all recommendations I find it here to be anti-tempo, I value the normal summon that much since we have so much other removal [this take, hilarious in retrospect]) and makes use of our LIGHT monster abundance, comboing with Rush Recklessly on opposing monsters at times to hit weaker monsters it normally couldn’t, like recruiters, D.D. Warrior Lady, or even Sasuke Samurai #4. Mirage Dragon is included as well to make up for the lack of steady Spell and Trap card removal that isn’t Raigeki Break, and because if there is any deck the 1600 ATK LIGHT monster could succeed in, it would be one with three copies of Rush Recklessly in it; Rope of Life takes the “mini” part of “mini-Jinzo” away, as well, giving us a 2400 ATK monster immune to battle Traps with a timely activation.

And so, inspired by “Gumo Sumo”, in which Theban Nightmare is our Jirai Gumo and Swift Gaia The Fierce Knight stand-in, I present “Nope Rope”, a deck that coincidentally just happens to have a lot of serpentine cards in it, and further reason for the name, the card Rope of Life is used as well:

​I ran some prototypes of this list past Alderoth at different times. He reminded me to use Don Zaloog if I’m going into Rush Recklessly in such high amounts with Reinforcement of the Army in mainboard and also that Sinister Serpent works excellently with Rope of Life and Theban since you can always meet hand minimums for cards like Rope or BTS1, but getting it out of your Graveyard at all is totally optional, so there’s no worry of turning off your Theban with monster clog. Rope of Life is also pretty sick for activating Theban. Normally you would ram Giant Rat to fetch Injection Fairy Lily or Pyramid Turtle to get a Ryu Kokki or something, but here we can get a 3800 ATK monster by ramming a 1500 into something. If somehow you had both Rush Recklessly and Rope of Life face-down the previous turn, you’re looking at a Level 4 monster with the strength of the Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon we don’t have.

The sideboard is pure theoryioh! A Zaborg pair completes the Apophis trio, giving you a blowout option against slower decks, which is theoretically most of them, but specifically ones where a lot of monsters are Set. A pair of Asura serve as sheep token-clearers and Swap targets for additional theft options for dealing with face down monsters. Mataza can also work to clear sheep tokens and can get under common floodgates while being a RotA target to boot! Trunade is at 3 to make sure we get our killshot turns, and it’s not a bad way to go minus with this deck. Funny trick though, to Swap an Apophis and then play Trunade. Big Bang Shot has more Trunade synergy as an extra source of removal while also punishing sheep tokens and bluff Sets. Asura + BBS OTK is rare these days but with Scapegoat stonks on the rise every day it might not be for long. Creature Swap is for the aforementioned shenanigans, otherwise just another form of removal that doesn’t care what the battle position of the opponent’s monster is. United We Stand is for Mataza, because if your 55 is basically a concept car with yata88 rims on it, you might as well lean into it.

Could Black Luster Soldier - Envoy of the Beginning fit in this deck over say, Freed,  if Pitch-Black Warwolf, Mirage Dragon’s DARK twin, was used instead? Yes, but would the extra brick factor be tolerable given the high number of discard outlets? Probably also yes. But I’m looking for maximum consistency, not a level 8 monster with a summoning condition to chill in my hand for x turns.

How does it operate? Well, it’s interesting to play and has some serious steamroll capability, and seemed to handle Zombies better than a normal Warrior deck would. Competition would be needed to find out, as beating a random player on duelingbook proves you beat a random player on duelingbook. We have a little more to prove than that, so, tournament time.

​To be concluded in Part 2.

-C.G.

Goat Grand Prix Osnabrück proved to be a huge success for the GGP circuit with 229 players competing for a chance at the world championship. Check out the deck lists below to see who was able to rise to the top of the packed event! 

The Goat Grand Prix at Retro Reborn Toledo was the largest in-person GGP in North American history! Check out the top 8 deck lists below to see who was able to rise to the top of this historic event!