Goat Format Championship 22 Deck Tech: AlephYa2's Dragon Turbo

Goat Format Championship began today with 145 players! One such player is Malte "Alephya2" Löwecke, someone who is no stranger to our events or our deck techs! Known for piloting some of the spiciest lists we've had the fortune of featuring here, he has continued this trend with an awesome dragon deck featuring Paladin of White Dragon! 

Deck List

Overview

​There are a few different kinds of Dragon decks, many of which don't even feature Blue Eyes. However, Alephya's list is focuses heavily on the iconic dragon and his ritual counterpart Paladin of White Dragon. With the continued success of Relinquished chaos decks, it only make sense that players would try out others ritual monsters as well. Manju of the 10,000 Hands is a staple in such decks, and does his job searching for the Paladin, which can be used as a beater himself, or can be tributed to special summon a Blue Eyes.  

Perhaps the most important card in the deck is Super Rejuvenation. Tributing dragons to ritual summon Paladin or tribute summon one of the decks large boss monsters can result in many cards drawn off of the unique spell. Discarding them to Graceful Charity or Card Destruction also works. 

Player Insight

As most deck brewers can tell you, sometimes you'll work on a deck for a long time, making many changes over and over, before you're comfortable bringing it to an event. Alephya2 spent months touching things up for this deck, and we're excited to hear about the process and choices! 

I have been messing around with the deck on and off for at least several months, but never found the 'right' build. In the last days I did play it a bit on the Dueling Book ladder again and thought it wasn't too bad.

It is for sure a combo deck and you do want to draw the Super Rejuvenations together with (or after) some power spells like Grace or Card Destruction. Therefore I do run a bit of deck thinning cards, but also not too many. Most difficult thing is finding the right balance between drawing and do-something-cards. Other key inclusions were Cyber-Jar and DMoC (can often be discarded or even be used as ritual fodder) to increase the decks ceiling. Decrees were also a late decision over Giant Trunade since I do run few traps myself and Decrees can sometimes lock the meta decks out for a few turns.

A core interaction is to summon a Manju/Senju, grab a Paladin and then ideally summon it by using another LV4+ dragon for the ritual spell. Then Paladin can attack or be directly tributed for a Blue-Eyes summon. At that point Super Rejuvenation already allows to draw 2 cards. It gets really out of control if there was Graceful play beforehand or multiple Rejuvenations are used (even those drawn in EP by an earlier copy can still be used).

Looking at how he's done so far, a 2-1 record is highly respectable for a deck featuring Blue Eyes White Dragon, Luster Dragon, and other rogue cards. We can only hope this success continues into the later rounds! 

I did start off 2-0 and was pretty close to making it 3-0. In the 3rd match I did however make some suboptimal plays and then in the end couldn't find the right cards to push it over the finishing line.

​I won't pretend that it's a top tier deck (or as good as its Edison Format counterpart), however I feel that it is still an ok rogue choice that can surely win some fancy games. And it makes Blue-Eyes borderline playable, which is good enough to me on its own.