Academy League Special Slifer: Top 4 Deck Lists

Here are the deck lists from the Academy  League Special Slifer Banlist Swap! 

​Academy  League is a tournament style where players  compete starting at Slifer rank to become Ra  rank, and finally become Obelisk to earn a  Worlds invite for first place! You can join the  server HERE. Click on the image of the deck  list to open the list on duelingbook, where  you can download the deck to test for  yourself!

Another Special Slifer has come and gone. While our last one featured the Modified Goat Format bandits, this event took the banlist in another direction: A ban-swap. The following banned and limited cards swapped places:
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Black Luster Soldier - Envoy of the Beginning -> Chaos Emperor Dragon - Envoy of the End
Graceful Charity -> Mirage of Nightmare
Morphing Jar -> Fiber Jar
Duo -> Confiscation
Sangan -> Witch
Premature Burial -> Monster Reborn
Snatch Steal -> Change of Heart
Tribe-Infecting Virus -> Dark Hole
Sinister Serpent -> Butterfly Dagger - Elma

As you can tell, most of these swaps lead to a much more devastating version of similar effects. In particular, the addition of Dark Hole and CED reduced to cost of simplifying the gamestate, while the loss of Sinister Serpent decreased capacity of recurring resources. As such, it’s no wonder that the winner was on Warriors. Longtime duelist (and my dear teammate) Splevin made great use of these board-simplifying cards along with three Jar of Greed to find them faster (and no Upstart Goblin to prolong the opponent’s clock). The banlist switch from Sangan to Witch (bars) also made the toolbox deck even more toolbox-y, as Witch can search most warriors and find a heater when destroyed by CED. Second place went to another Warrior player as well: Bubblebeam. Congratulations to both of these players on their finish!

Just behind them was one more warrior player: an_average_dood. Out of the three warrior lists in top 4, dood plays the least broken card and the least card draw. Turns out playing the broken cards early an often is a pretty good recipe for victory, but congratulations to an_average_dood nonetheless. Another deck best able to make use of these higher-impact cards is Reasoning Gate, so it’s no wonder that just behind the Warriors was Nessapouliatana on RGT. Who would thought that Dark Magician of Chaos being able to retrieve Change of Heart and Dark Hole would be so impactful? The answer everyone. Congratulations to Nessa as our one-non Warrior top. The deck looks like a blast!