Goat Format World Championship 2021 Deck Tech: Last Turn

Despite being known for all things Panda, Claire Cohen-Kowan decided to mix things up with a crazy Last Turn brew! It's clear that she wanted to catch everyone (including her opponents) off guard. I think it's safe to say that she definitely achieved this goal! 

Deck List

Traditional Last Turn is a combo deck that wins during the opponent’s turn with the trap Last Turn. It uses a number of methods to get its life to 1000 or less, then uses  Jowgen, the Spiritualist with Last Turn’s effect to win the game.

Wall of Revealing Light is the most common life loss card, but here, Cohen-Kowan has eschewed all copes in the main deck, along with many other popular cards for the strategy, in order to add a personal twist to the rarely seen combo strategy.

Player Insight

There's a decent chunk of changes here compared to the normal Last Turn lists we see every so often. Who better to explain them than the one who made them! 

This was a last minute choice after expecting a field of all Warriors and Matt Uber's Steingate. This build of the deck is full of mainboard hate for both of these strategies while still playing my beloved Giant Trunade. The deck is versatile and also was guaranteed to surprise opponents.

The original build of this deck was made by don't copy. I CANNOT stress enough how good a deck builder and a player he is. I wanted to emphasize defense in the mainboard in accordance with expecting warriors and Uber. Then the side was built to try and speed things up a little bit.

Copy's initial deign did not play many Jowgens or Wall of revealing light. The way you lost life was through a combination of Stein, Solemn, Ring, and most importantly, through crashing. I opted to play Walls in the sideboard because I wanted to be able to FTK (also I expected Warrior teching Cliff the Trap Remover). Another great thing about this deck's design is just how many monsters interact well with Last Turn. There is of course Stein and Jowgen, but Thousand-Eyes Restrict and Spirit Reaper both can be used to tie up the game (a tactic I am quite familiar with). These same monsters also are great at stalling and crashing, and they're all searchable by Mystic Tomato.

It's one thing to bring an off-the-wall combo deck to the World Championship tournament. It's another thing entirely to try to innovate the strategy the night before! It's a high-risk high-reward choice. Sadly, it seems that in this specific case, the risk won out. ​Cohen-Kowan explained: 

My God did I have a terrible run. James Arc turned out to be on turbo, which I was not entirely unprepared for. I am playing out the game and things look like they are going my way. I summon Jowgen and set LT with low enough life and clear backrow, but he has Tribe Infecting Virus. I am forced to use LT in the standby phase and he topdecked EXACTLY Sinister Serpent to kill me. In another game against Michele.Cimmino I tried to do the combo but needed to use King Dragun since I couldn't clear backrow and knew he had ring. He had a second Spirit Reaper in deck and caused a tie against me! Then after what felt like an hour-long game 2 I almost got to activate Stein twice but he summons his OWN Jowgen just after I Dustshoot one away. A Duo/Tdrag/BLS steamroll ended my day short. 

​Playing this borderline-untested deck at the last minute was certainly an... interesting decision. The deck is incredibly powerful but its skill floor is quite high and its skill ceiling far higher. I hope to improve both this list and my play with this list in the future because I think it's totally sweet.