Goat Format Championship 15 Deck Tech: Water Return

It's the final Goat Format Championship tournament before the World Championship next month! ninety-three players arrived to either earn their place in the event, or block others from obtaining their own coveted invites. Andres Rossi (AKA Andres94) decided to give it his all while piloting a spicy Water Return list that seems to borrow from Water Aggro, Monarchs, Chaos Return, and Chaos Turbo all at once! Let's check it out! 

Deck List

Overview

It's difficult to place Andres' list into one specific category. It's playing plenty of cards typical of a Water Aggro list, like Abyss Soldier and Aqua Spirit, but there's more to it than that. A full set of Thunder Dragons and Night Assailants support Raigeki Breaks and Card Destruction much like you would see in a Chaos Turbo list. What's more, Return from the Different Dimension adds a whole new and unexpected Chaos Return twist that allows for huge surprise attacks. 

While these Chaos variants have all seen success in one form or another, it's rare to see Water Aggro at the top tables. It's even more rare from someone to try and combine them all.

Player Insight

With such a strange amalgamation of cards and strategies, we're definitely going to need some insight from the pilot and creator himself. 

Because it was last chance qualify and I will retire from Yu-Gi-Oh! (as I'm now a financial professional and I won't have time to play anymore), I decided to bring this unique idea (that I kept secret until today) in order to leave something that would last forever in the format and would somehow remind me. I tested this deck a lot with my friend Luigi (he's very skilled but unknown player who has contributed to analyzing and building the deck with me), and it scored fantastic performance (at least 50% wins against any kind of deck).

I have always been thought that there were a lot of strong Aqua monsters in the format, but they didn't really have a lot of synergy like Chaos Turbo cards did, so they were slow. Then I thought, "if I can create the same kind of synergy, the deck could be even stronger than Chaos Turbo". At the end of the day, I found a way to create a Water deck with the same turbo engine.

The crucial step was to find something that could put everything together, and the answer was Penguin Soldier. Even if it's not really strong, it is still good against slow decks like TDCC, it is Water (so has synergy with Abyss Soldier and Aqua Spirit), and above all it is a FLIP monster. So, it has synergy with Night Assailant. I just needed one more flip monster and the best answer was Spy, as it gives a lot of safety and puts the Night Assilant engine all together.

Triple Mobius was a must, as I can summon it immediately by special summoning Aqua Spirit first. Or, even better, I can special Summon Aqua Spirit by removing Mobius from the graveyard. Sinister Serpent does not need explanation together with Tribe and Abyss. The last important thing was to add three Thunder Dragons so that I can play Raigeki Break, Card Destruction, and Black Luster Soldier.

The Star card here is Return From the Different Dimension. It's powerful to summon an Aqua Spirit by banishing Mobius to set up a very dangerous K.O. later on. These cards are all supported by Solemn Judgment.

That's some great creative thinking! Despite the advantage of playing something opponents might not be prepared for, it looks like luck has not been on Andres' side. 
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I've gotten very unlucky. I've played eight games overall, and in four of them I started with six monsters in hand, only to continue to draw monsters for a few turns. It was an extremely rare case if we calculate the probability of that happening with an hypergeometric distribution (mathematical function in probability theory). I never drew Card Destruction as well, which is a very important card in these situations. Also, my only Graceful Charity was Solemned. But, I don't care. It happens and even if I wanted to qualify for the World Championship my main goal was to be selected for this tech and be remembered as the inventor of this deck.

It works very well overall. I guarantee it's consistent and solid, as it has been tested a lot. I would personally put this at the same level of a Chaos Turbo. I Just hope to have changed something in the GOAT format so people can have fun with this new unique idea and not get bored of seeing always the same thing around.

​Thank you all!

We very much appreciate the innovation here, and even if the deck didn't do quite as well as you wanted today, there's always tomorrow! Goat format will never be boring as long as players continue to strive for innovation!