Goat Format Championship 19 Deck Tech: Alephya2's Horus Dragons

Malte Löwecke (AKA Alephya2) is no stranger to deck techs and spicey strategies. So, it came as no surprise to us at Goatformat.com when we saw them enter with a sweet Horus Dragon list. Popular among casual circles, does the LV-themed dragon have what it takes to top a Goat Format Championship event?

Deck List

Horus dragon decks usually try to summon Horus LV6 or 8 as quickly as possible, relying on the monster's high stats and ability to negate spells to win the game. Often, a player will utilize recruiters to find the smaller LV3-4 version of their LV monsters, but such a thing is not possible with Horus. Instead, Horus players often opt to not run LV4 at all, like Alephya2 did here. Cyber Stein and Fusilier combined with Metamorphosis are also used, as they can cheat King Dragun into play, which can then special summon Horus LV6 from the hand. 

Horus is one of the more popular dragons in Goat Format thanks to its spell-stopping effect. Though the fierce trio of LV monsters has not seen much tournament success, many have attempted to push the strategy to its limit. Notably, community member TheNano even wrote an article for Goatformat.com in which they showcased their personal list and spoke to its strengths and strategy. 

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Player Insight

Löwecke's choice to play Horus was, in his own words, a last minute decision after a few test games the night before the event. Normally, these sorts moves tend to not result in high placements. The Dragon's strength felt right to him, though, noting a strong game against some meta strategies and alt-win decks.  

The Masked Dragons + Behemoth are honestly partly there to increase the dragon swag factor (but are also a decent free summons with Dragun's effect to close out games faster). I initially even wanted to maindeck a Tyrant Dragon, but found it more consistent to play the third Horus Lv6 instead. Otherwise, it's designed to reliably get out King Dragun while also having a 'normal' game mode besides that.

​The main line(s) of the deck are Cyber-Stein or Fusilier + Meta into King Dragun and ideally special summoning a Horus Lv6 with it (and turning that into Lv8 in the end phase). Decree is there to support the before-mentioned lock. Generally, the decks tries to play a 'normal' aggressive/controllish game and bait out resources before going into the combo. But even a single King Dragun without any further assistance is often game winning (there aren't many outs besides TT/Force/BLS/Tribe and sometimes cards like DDWL/DDA).

Despite a strong understanding of the deck and its position in the meta, Löwecke's  tournament run did not begin as well as he'd hoped. Still, it seems as though he's having fun with the deck, and still has some hope of finishing strong!

The first match was a sort of close 1-2 loss. It was one of those win or lose situations where my opp unfortunately had the Mirror Force against my Dragun + Horus board in one of the games. But that's just part of the game.

In my opinion it's fun to play and almost doesn't feel like a Goat Format deck. However for the opponent it often might not be too fun since a good hand doesn't allow much interaction.