Goat Format Championship 21 Deck Tech: Shadowbee's Plants!

Shadowbee has been a commonly seen member of the community for years, but I don't think I can say the same for the deck they decided to play in today's Goat Format Championship event. It's definitely left me wondering if maybe his favorite Batman villain is Poison Ivy? Say hello to Plant Aggro in Goat Format! 

Deck List

Overview

The primary strategy of Plant Aggro decks is to use Lord Poison as an aggressive floater, replacing him with other plants when he dies. The best target in this case? Fairy King Truesdale.

Because Lord Poison is both Water, and has 1500 ATK, its common to play him in a water shell alongside Mother Grizzly. However, many plant players, including Shadowbee, will instead opt for Mystic Tomato as the deck's recruiter, since it's plant, and increases the deck's dark count for chaos monsters. In this case, Homunulus the Alchemic Being increases the light count.

Interestingly, despite not opting for Mother Grizzly, Shadowbee still chose to play Abyss Soldier and Sinister Serpent. With Trusdale being a water monster easily discarded to Abyss and resurrected Poison, to  it's easy to see why these choices were made. 

Player Insight

Many players in our events choose to play the best decks they can get their hands on, whether it be Chaos Turbo, Warriors, Panda Burn, or something else. Every so often, though, we get payers who just want to try something different. In these cases, its a good idea to browse our website's deck library, which is exactly what Shadowbee did! Of course, he put his own touches on the list presented on our site, which he explains below. 

I've been playing this format off and on since 2012ish and I've never really found the deck that I felt like "This is my deck". Some decks bore me, some decks require a lot of play time to learn lines and corner cases to the deck and unfortunately I don't have that time to dedicate. After playing Warriors in a GFC in early 2022, going 2-2 against some of the best Goat players in the world, I settled on Aggro but hated how stressful the deck felt to play. I was looking at GoatFormat.com's deck section one night, saw Plants, saw an idea for aggressive Plant decks, and the lightbulb went off. I've been working on the deck off and on ever since.

​I'm fully aware I'm playing a Tier 2.5/C or D Tier deck in a metagame that has coalesced around Chaos Turbo and to a lesser extent Warrior and a Panda-based Burn variants. So, my main deck is absolutely stacked to answer Turbo game 1 and then I try to side into the best chances to win games 2 and 3. I am also aware of Reasoning Gate Turbo-style decks and Chaos Control exist, but I didn't expect to see them outside of early rounds if I got that lucky to go that far. I was mostly correct, I just didn't expect a very old Goat Control build in Round 6.

​I'm sure people will look at this deck and only know what Homunculus does (thanks to gyomberman), so I need to explain some cards. Lord Poison is a recruiter for Plant monsters in the graveyard and importantly has Water attribute for Abyss Soldier. Fairy King Truesdale is a bad Monarch that boosts Plant ATK and DEF by 500, but only while it's in Defense position. This has some corner interactions with Homunculus trading with Chaos Sorcerer and Mystic Tomato getting over anything 1500-1800 ATK that it normally couldn't. Prickle Fairy is a Plant wall that is a big answer to Warrior if it triggers (old-school players may remember Chris Moosman making this card famous at SJC Seattle 2006). Homunculus is obviously a very respectable 1800 beatstick that trades with Kycoo and fuels the grave for either Lord Poison or Black Luster Soldier.

Basically what I'm looking to do is make favorable trades early on and either grind the game into a halt or explode in the mid-late game for lethal damage once I can whittle the opponent down enough to get in a range. Abyss Soldier is my favorite monster because it does such a wide variety of things - disrupts opponent plays, sets up my graveyard for future Lord Poison or revival lines, and is a handy 1800 beatstick. It may be my favorite card in the format and I'm sad it's semi-limited.

Despite describing his own deck as a "C or D" tier strategy, Shadowbee had a very respectable record, all things considered. He's definitely shown the world that the deck has potential, and I'm excited to see where he takes it from here! 

Honestly, despite the sting of losing relatively close to moving on to Day 2, I'm over the moon about how the deck played and how I played. Nobody is a slouch in these huge events and you have to be on it every single game, every single match. My wins were against Warrior, 2 Turbo decks, and Chaos Control. My losses were against Panda Lockdown and Detox Goat Control. I don't know if I would say anything was fascinating to the reader, but I'm sure opponents were caught off-guard and I've already had some people commenting on how well I did, so that honestly feels good in-and-of-itself.

​I don't know if this is consistently repeatable or if I just got really lucky, and I don't know if this is the best Plant deck out there when you compare it to Lekunga variants and the explosive plays that card has. But, I am glad that I did well enough to show off the deck I've been working on for almost 2 years and the fruits of my labor as a player getting better. I want to say thanks to my ETC teammates Skully and Irak for sticking with me and consistently helping me be a better player and make this deck what it was today.