#spyral quik-fix

Guess who just got top 8 at a Regional with his SPYRALs~? Hoo boy you better believe it was me.

The deck list is up there for you all to look at, but I’ll go into my tournament report below. Also at some point I’ll probably make a deck profile with my friends which might be enjoyable to watch and I can explain all the card choices and stuff~

Round 1 vs Spirit/Kaiju OTK, 2-1 Win

Despite about 90 people being in this tournament, I somehow managed to get paired against three of my friends throughout the day, including in round one. My friend was playing a really silly deck that still had some nice potential. Essentially it relied on using Aratama and Nikitama to make rank 4s and Nikitama was really good for drawing cards (you could also send it with Brilliant Fusion) and then Pre-Preparation of Rites would get out Shinobaron Peacock which cleared all the monsters OR Kaiju Slumber would clear out all the monsters and then Peacock would bounce the monster you summoned to the opponent’s side and OTK with something you then normal summoned. Essentially he did this to me game 1 but games 2 and 3 he didn’t and a combination of Terrortop and Misty + Agent ended in victory for me.

Round 2 vs Synchron Quasar, 2-1 Win

I did get OTKed one of these games, despite using Ghost Ogre to hit Hyper Librarian, but the other games I held off with the Zoodiac engine keeping his plays in check one game and using Agent + a couple of Quik-Fixes to keep my Utility Wires coming to hold him off before drawing Ratpier and winning from there.

Round 3 vs 60 Card Infernoid/Zoodiac, 2-0 Win

Another round against my friend, this game was weird.He goes first and opens Ratpier which he does the combo with and he makes Bujintei Kagutsuchi with the two Rats he summons. The 5 cards he mills are allspells and the rest of the cards in his hand are either backrow or Infernoids he can’t summon because he literally has milled 0 Infernoids. I clear the board eventually, he stops me with Spiritual Swords of Concealing Light which I later get rid of with Tough and Agent. Then he has an empty field and 7000 life points while I have Drident with Whiptail attached, Agent and Misty on the field, Tough in my graveyard and Big Red and Speedroid Taketomborg in hand. I’m trying to figure out how to get 7000 damage on board, but Drident + Agent + Misty + Tough is only 6500, or 6900 if I make Misty and Agent into Gagaga Samurai, but then I realise that Tough is a Wind and I can special summon Taketomborg from hand for the extra 600 damage! But just before I go committing to any plays, I check his graveyard and see the Spiritual Swords and comment to myself “ah damn you can stop the OTK with this anyway”, which prompts my friend to look at the graveyard and go “oh I completely forgot about that”, so my reminder delayed my win by a turn :P

Then game 2 I opened Artifact Lancea, Maxx “C”, 2 Interrupted Kaiju Slumbers and Torrential Tribute and think “gee this is terrible”. My friend opens an equally awkward hand of Fairy Tail Snow, Zoodiac Whiptail, a couple of Infernoids he can’t summon and something else I can’t remember. I drop the Maxx “C” on the summon of Whiptail (which I probably shouldn’t have, I was planning on using Slumber anyway) and he passes where I then Slumber him after drawing something unhelpful. He’s forced, next turn, to use Infernoid Harmadik to get over my Kaiju and then summons Snow and starts beating me down with that. To which I then, next turn, respond with my OTHER Slumber and, weirdly enough, end up winning with Kaiju beatdown. He never even got enough cards into the graveyard to use Snow’s effect.

Round 4 vs Zoodiac, 2-1 Win

One of the great advantages about playing a rogue deck is taking advantage of the fact that your opponent has no idea what your deck and the individual cards do. He goes first and makes Drident with backrow and Emeral, but by using Assault, Resort, Tough and Agent, I’m able to break through his initial board and clear out his backrow, allow me to then go through the Zoodiac part of my deck and establish a board. He hits some wrong cards with Drident and I eventually overpower him and he scoops.

I forget how game 2 goes, but I think it went something along the lines of “he does Zoodiac things and I don’t get cards to out it hard enough”

Game 3 is great, we both fight through a bunch of each others’ resources, until I’m down to Quik-Fix, a set Starlight Road, a Drone that I searched and another Big Red in hand, while he has very little. He attacks over Quik-Fix with, I think, Whiptail that I stop from going into an Xyz with Dimensional Barrier. I get out something bigger than the Whiptail and also summon Drone which lets me see his top three cards, a Cosmic Cyclone, a Tenki and a Twin Twister. I know I want the Twin Twister on top, but I pretend to be thinking long and hard about the cards that I see to give my opponent the idea that I don’t want him to use them. I then Big Red to get back the Quik Fix and he drops the Maxx “C”, which I feign annoyance at, search a Big Red, attack him for a little bit of damage, set the Big Red as a bluff and pass my turn. He draws the Twin Twister off Maxx “C” and the Cyclone for turn, then goes to Twin Twister my two set cards which of course gets the biggest smile from me as I flip the Starlight Road. He tries to make a play next turn and attacks into my Drone, which I tribute for its effect to increase Quik-Fix’s atk in the damage step, meaning he can’t do any damage. We’re in time by this point, so he concedes.

Round 5 vs Artifact Zoodiac, 1-2 Loss

Another friend of mine, although not as close as my other three friends, I did know his deck beforehand and he went on to win the tournament, so I can’t be too upset I lost I guess? The slightly bothersome bit was that he got a game loss for a decklist error and I still lost despite having the lead anyway, haha.

So game 1 immediately went to me, game 2 I figured out a pretty troublesome fact about the Artifact variant that being it’s much harder for me to play through backrow with cards like Tough and Agent because they wantme to destroy Sanctums and Artifacts. Despite this, I do fight through a Drident and Emeral board and hit a correct backrow, but when I start my Zoodiac play with Barrage he flips Torrential Tribute on the summon of my Broadbull and I’m left with nothing, so he makes a big comeback afterwards and finishes me with Gagaga Samurai.

Game 2 I open really mediocre, with Agent, Taketomborg, Starlight Road, SPYRAL Resort and something else I can’t remember, might have been Big Red. I blind call Agent wrong so I can’t go into any rank 4 plays and have to pass just sitting on Starlight Road. He opens Terrortop and is able to go into the Zoodiac plays and also sets 4 backrow. My turn doesn’t get any better and he flips Sanctum in the end phase to summon his Beagalltach which then destroys his set Scythe. He makes Pleiades and, with his existing Zoodiac board, attacks me for game.

Round 6 vs Atlantean Mermail, 0-2 Loss

I can’t remember the last time I beat Water actually, something about the deck’s sheer explosive, OTK potential just makes it hard for SPYRALs to deal with. It’s like, the OTK power they output just overrides the defensive capabilities I can make with the deck.

It also probably didn’t help that I didn’t open any Zoodiac cards, so I couldn’t even get out a Drident, but oh well. I get OTKed game 1 and game 2 I open bleh and can’t break his board of Toad, Mizuchi and Megalo.

Round 7 vs Metalfoe/Zoodiac/Kozmo, 2-0 Win

Final round and I’m paired against my friend for the fourth time today, which kinda sucks. He goes first, opening pretty decently but I break through it and set up Misty, Agent, Invoker and Drident, which keeps his Pendulum scales from going up and nets me the win.

Game 2 is pretty ridiculous: I accidently sided wrong. So normally, if I expect to be going 2nd, I’ll side out my Zoodiac engine for the Kaiju engine. Over the course of the day though, I figured I only ever could get out Master/make proper use of Assault with the Zoodiac engine, so I decided to side that out to make room for more cards that would help in the matchup. In doing so, I accidentally left in 1 Ratpier, my Whiptail and 1 Barrage. So he goes first and made a first turn board of DOG Fighter, Tincan, a Metalfoes card, a set Counter and complete Pendulum scales. I open Kaiju Slumber, Radian, Terrortop and some other irrelevant cards and think “gee I can get over the board but he still has Pendulum scales so next turn he’ll just do everything all over again”. Regardless, I activate Kaiju Slumber to wipe the board (after first summoning Radian over the DOG Fighter) and then, as I’m going through my deck to get out the Kaijus, I see that I’ve left my Rat and Whiptail in the deck and have an internal moment of “holy crap I can make Drident I accidentally might have won this” and then normal summon the Terrortop, search the Taketomborg and do a liiiitttlleee bit of Zoodiac shenanigans to get out Drident. I hit one scale during my turn, force him to make suboptimal plays the next and then draw Resort which gives me the massive resources necessary to maintain my lead and bring the duel to a close.

I finished up in 8th place, thanks to excellent breakers and a solid win-loss ratio, earning me a fancy Zoodiac mat and my invite to WCQs!

So the first thing you can probably notice here is that I sure am siding a Zoodiac engine. My logic was that I wouldn’t win every die roll and there would be games where I’d go second, thus I built the deck to go second since the Kaijus and SPYRALs are both really good at playing through fields. Then, if I lost a game, I’d side the Kaijus out for the much stronger Zoodiac engine and opt to go first, meaning I’d have an engine that is much more synergistic with the SPYRALs and also a powerful engine in general that was guaranteed to get its plays off because I was going first (well, more likely, plenty of handtraps still exist.)

I felt this logic  was quite sound, however, my problem lay with the fact that I only own one Zoodiac Barrage (and I borrowed the second Barrage, Drident and Bull off a friend, although having tested I believe I only need 1 Bull anyway). Having only one Barrage meant that I only saw it once the whole day (I opened Rat a couple of times) but Barrage really makes the whole combo come together and having only two in the deck hindered the consistency a fair bit. The rest of my side deck I didn’t use that much, the Lancea’s I used once to good effect against ABC but otherwise didn’t come up against any Infernoids and the Twin Twisters and Ghost Ogres were very effective against Metalfoes and Metalfoe variants, as was Ghost Ogre, D.D. Crow and Veiler nice to use against D/D/Ds (although I only ever got to resolve a Ghost Ogre against D/D/Ds, the theory was good.) Solemn Warning was my choice for a replacement to Barrage because, while it couldn’t do what Barrage did, it did put an effective stop to a single play of the opponent’s turn. If I owned a third Dimensional Barrier, I’d have probably used that instead though. Thinking back on it I probably should’ve gone with Vanity’s Emptiness, but it ultimately didn’t really matter because what I’d reallywant would be a third Barrage.

The extra deck is solid, the only thing I’d change is the second Broadbull for something else, maybe an Abyss Dweller? There are heaps of good rank 4 options so I’m not too fussy and I’m sure I’ll come to the optimal decision soon enough. SPYRAL Resort is really exceptional in this variant for putting back your extra deck monsters or the Zoodiac monsters not shuffled back by Emeral, meaning that it can repeatedly make use of the Zoodiac engine, as well as Drident comboeing really nicely with SPYRAL MISSION - Assault and SPYRAL Master Plan.

As for the main deck, I was actually really impressed with the effectiveness of the Kaiju engine, however, I did struggle sometimes with heavy Kaiju hands, even going second. I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I might flip the two engines; main the Zoodiacs and side the Kaijus, with more main-decked protection cards like My Body as a Shield to counter cards like Zoodiac Drident. The SPYRAL cards, notably Misty, Tough and Super Agent, are all actually very effective at playing through fields themselves, meaning that I should be able to still play through fields provided I have some cards like the aforementioned Shield. I’m not 100% on what ratios I should have with the new build, since the Kaiju engine and the Zoodiac engine are both 7 cards. I may go over 40, but I don’t want to get any higher than 42 really, or I start to run into consistency issues (and this variant had a fairly large amount of consistency). Summoner Monk is really powerful in this deck, and so long as I run him I can’t afford to cut cards like Dark Magic Veil nor cut down on the Assaults, but perhaps I’ll do some experimenting.

My next regionals is on the 3rd of March, so I’ll be practicing until then! We’ll also have the Invoked cards by then, so maybe I’ll look into Invoked variants of SPYRAL as well~

What’s up Yugioh nerds, sorry I didn’t post much in the lead up nor during my YCS this past weekend. I’ll admit, I was a liiitttllee bummed out about my performance, but it could’ve been worse I suppose~

I’ll do a breakdown of the whole day below the cut, but, as you’ve likely noticed, I managed to get a feature match at this YCS! I was 3 wins and 1 loss at this stage of the day, so feeling pretty good but alas, things went downhill from here on. I hate to attribute my losses to bad luck, but you’ll see in the video that I definitely got dealt a sub-optimal hand twice in a row and, it’s worth noting also that, throughout the day, I OPENED Gem-Knight Lazuli ten times and DREW Brilliant Fusion twice. I unfortunately, didn’t get to showcase the potential of the SPYRAL deck on stream, but had a bunch of other good games throughout the day that did. Here’s hoping that RATE gives us some really excellent cards to work with that’ll mean I don’t have to run cards like Brilliant Fusion to supplement the deck and can finally be a meta contender. 

Until then, he’s how my deck went: I went 4 wins 3 losses, which is the worst I’ve done at a YCS so far, but the day before I had won 3-0 in a win a mat, which was fun. I think I made my deck the best I could, so I’m not disappointed in that respect and I have RATE to look forward to. Match breakdowns below!

Round 1 vs Paleozoic Frogs

Game 1: I went first and had a very grindy game. I believe my opening board was something decent, enough to ensure he couldn’t make a Toad. The duration of the game was sniping away resources with Agent and Drone while maintaining tempo with Resort until I summoned Trishula, had it returned to the deck with Drowning Mirror Force, then summoned Trishula AGAIN and wiped away all of his resources and took the game.

Game 2: He opens Toad and a bunch of backrow and I know my hand isn’t strong enough to challenge that let alone deal with it, so I go to game 3.

Game 3: Similar to the first game, I won when I summoned Trishula and blew away all their resources and also sniped away their other cards with Agent and PSY-Framelord Omega.

Round 2 vs Darklords

Game 1: My opponent had lost his deck last round and didn’t find it until five minutes into the round, meaning he got a game loss.

Game 2: He opens pretty meh with nothing but a lot of draw power and a Terrortop, when he finally goes to make a play I use D.D. Crow and stop his plays. On my turn, I make Omega + Drone and Agent and start looping Drone to ensure he doesn’t get any cards that can bring him out of the simplified gamestate and win.

Round 3 vs Atlantean/Mermails (played against a friend, never fun to do that)

Game 1: I bricked this game, and he OTKed with Diva and stuff.

Game 2: I think I open double Omega or something that good and then turn 2 resolve Trishula and the game’s over.

Game 3: A really intense game, my friend went first and opened Gaios and Toad and a couple other cards. I had the resources to get around the Gaios and Toad, but not without losing a bunch of my own resources. A combination of Book of Eclipse, Fairy Tail Snow, Brilliant Fusion and I think Raigeki managed to do it and also establish a rudimentary field that kept me in the game for a little longer, but because I had to use Eclipse on the board and couldn’t clear ALL of the monsters, my friend got out another two cards, including Dimensional Barrier. I had a Trishula play the next turn that would’ve probably won me the game, but the Dimensional Barrier sealed the game in a loss for me.

Round 4 vs ABC

Game 1: My opponent makes a mistake by setting a Union Hangar to his spell/trap zone instead of field zone before using Tsukuyomi which resulted in a judge having to fix the gamestate and alter a bunch of things, severely impeded my opponent’s focus for the remainder of the duel. I outed his board and made my own consisting of Omega, Hi-Speedroid Hagoita and used Omega to put a Fairy Tail Snow I’d banished off Desires into the graveyard. He had no way to out the board nor any resources left so went to game 2.

Game 2: My opponent opened Anti-Spell Fragrance, but I used D.D. Crow to stop a Buster Dragon. Despite Anti-Spell locking down a bunch of my plays, I was able to make some plays anyway and clear away some of the backrow. He start assembling some pieces of ABC but he made a disappointed face after using Pot of Desires, making me think he’d banished some of his pieces. I flipped a set System Down the next turn to clear out 2 Bs and 2 Cs he had in grave and one of his As I had hit with D.D. Crow earlier, so I was pretty confident he wouldn’t be able to make Buster this game. His Anti-Spell also started to work against him as he drew Hangar later in the duel but couldn’t play it. Eventually, I got out Omega and used Agent and Drone to clear out the rest of his field and stack his deck, which was when he then conceded.

Round 5 vs ABC

You can watch this in the video! Drawing Lazuli sucks, but I also drew virtually the same hand both games which was pretty frustrating, coupled with the fact that my opponent drew the stones both games.

Round 6 vs Paleozoics

Forgot to write this one down, but I went 1-2 a loss, I’m sure there was a Lazuli hand here somewhere that contributed to the loss.

Round 7 vs Odd-Eyes Magicians

Game 1: He lets me go first but, surprise surprise, I open Lazuli and it contributes to a bricky hand and I lose.

Game 2: I go first, open Omega and Dimensional Barrier with Resort on the field so winning is no problem.

Game 3: I Twin Twister his scales and use Drone and Agent so he has no plays for a quick win.

So after a difficult time trying to find Scrap Recyclers anywhere, I’ve finally finished my SPYRAL deck IRL! All that I think I want to add are Dimensional Barriers in place of the Solemns in the side deck, but otherwise it’s looking good to go! I’ll be taking it to locals on Saturday, so I’ll let’cha all know how it goes!